Off Course-On Target

Snowflake Eyes?

Back in 2000 I had the honor of writing a vision paper for ASTD and the National Governor's Association called "Into the Future".  I included some of my thoughts and excitement at the time about the notion of augmenting our eyes by having additional layers of information overlaid on top of what we are "really" seeing.  I described things like being able to walk around the ruins of an ancient city and be able to see drawings, photos and video of what it would have looked like hundreds of years before.  In the years since my excitement has continued to grow and I’ve written more and more articles on this and all other forms of augmenting our “cognitive capacities” and there have been more and more advances on transforming this vision into reality.

 

Google has just released an update on their work on “Project Glass” and some new prototypes they are testing with wider audiences now.  One of their new examples can be seen in these photos for a pair of frames that sit above your eyes and provide information by looking up or another pair of more traditional glasses where the information is projected onto the clear glass lenses.

 

 

Nick Bolton provides a more comprehensive overview of this type of augmented reality in his NYT “Bits” article “Google begins testing its Augmented Reality glasses”.  Personally I’m more excited and interested in future models Nick also notes of wearable and imbedded technology such as the contact lenses pictured here.  I’ve posted previous articles with more of my thoughts on these such as this one on “Augmented Reality in Contact Lenses”.

 

Personally I will also welcome and be first in line for things like embedded ear buds that would give me additional sound and control to augment what I am hearing and a similar form of embedded microphones to augment my speech and vocal output.  Begin to imagine having a camera, earphones and microphone literally “on you” or “in you” at all times?!

I’m pretty confident that groups of bright people all over the world will continue to develop every better augmented reality technology at an exponential rate and in all cases I think the greater challenge befalls the rest of us to begin figuring out how to use these well and how to deal with the inevitable pitfalls and more negative consequences all great innovations and inventions bring with them. 

For example how will we deal with this significant additional increase in the information at our avail?  In some of the more negative initial reactions to Google’s update some have already begun to worry about the likelihood that our eyes will be “augmented” with even more marketing images and this is a legitimate and inevitable concern. 

However these new forms of information delivery and consumption are inevitable IMHO and so let’s just get over it and get on with it!  WE get to chose how to use these new tools and information influx.  As Clay Shirky put it so well; “There’s no such thing as information overload, just filter failure”.  While there is no question we have lots of progress to make in overcoming “filter failure”, we ARE making progress and it seems to me that failure is the root of most learning so it is all good. 

So let’s continue to develop better ways of filtering information in the Snowflake Effect tradition of getting just the right information for just the right person at just the right time in just the right context, and so on.  We certainly have as much more more learning and creative thinking to do in coming up with new habits, conventions and techniques that will ensure that exponential innovation also leads to exponentially better living and learning!

Let’s start thinking about what an incredible way of augmenting our learning these kinds of “glasses” can be by enabling us to add additional information to what we are seeing before us.  And note how Google’s Project Glass also includes a wearable camera.  This makes taking pictures and video more instantly available anywhere, anytime and more transparently for us in that we would always have a camera available to capture serendipitous moments and memories by simply blinking our eyes or some other simple gesture.  While there is always the “scary” part of how this can and will be used, this capability will also let us continue to live more IN life’s moments, enabling us to learn and live life more fully in the process.

It will take us many years to develop new conventions for all these kinds of new technology as well such as how do we best ‘interface” with them for things like gesture based control with our eyes.  How do we learn to use these to improve our connections with others and not interfere?  Gee, if you think people’s behavior with the use of cell phones and texting in the middle of a conversation are a problem just imagine what it will be like when we don’t even have to look away or down to see that new call coming in!! 

As usual, it all comes back to and down to each of us snowflakes.  WE are the ones who are responsible for our own behaviors and need to learn how to use and control the tools and technology we are surrounded by such that they increase our connections and conversations with the other special snowflakes around us. 

I for one could not be more excited by both the new technology arriving daily and the new challenges and learning that lies before us and in many ways is already here.  The best way I know of to counter FUD (Fear, Uncertainty & Doubt) is to run TOWARDS it rather than away from it by increasing our curiosity and learning of things we don’t know.

Seeing Around the Corner of the Future of Photography

I continue to believe that we are hitting the tipping point of the exponential curve of the evolution of what we currently call photography.  I think photography and camera are becoming as ill fitting as terms like calling and phone.  Don't you find it interesting that one of the things you do the least with your "phone" these days is actually call someone?  Or at least your smartphone now does so much more than just act as a telephone that it seems quaint to call it a phone.

Capturing our world via sounds and images is being revolutionized as we see exponential increases in things like resolution, combining still and video capture with sounds, location and more and now being able to photograph things we can't even see such as with this recent development from MIT of cameras that can see around corners. 

With the note that all of these are all technologies which now several years old, as are my posts about them, consider some of the following examples of how rapidly and fundamentally things are changing in these areas:

Adobe and others have also developed cameras and what they call “computational photography” that can gather such complete information on a scene that focus becomes infinite and something we can adjust after the photo is taken. 

Or how about things like Photosynth which can align and stitch together thousands of photos and videos to create a “model” of the whole building or space which you can then walk through.

Add to this the ability to take photos with your “phone” and convert them into 3D models such as with apps like the Autodesk 123D series and how we are starting to see 2D printers replaced by 3D versions capable of "printing" full working 3D assemblies so you can “print” those models you’ve captured and snowflaked them to make them “just right” for you.

Add to the mix things like the Sixth Sense technology

and notions such as The Quantified Self 

and you will start to see how we need to completely rethink and reimagine what “photography” means and consider what we need to learn in order to make smart choices and use the power of these innovations for positive good and gain.

For now start to notice how the use of video is becoming more and more pervasive and consider that as the resolution of video cameras in our “phones” goes up and up, won’t still and video merge into one when you can grab just the perfect “frame” for a video anytime you want a “still photo”.  A little further out what if you don’t need to remember to take a photo or a video of an event before it happens because it you are capturing everything all the time. 

Scary?  You bet!  Exciting?  Absolutely!  Inevitable?  I think so.

Color eReader uses less power than B&W eInk?!

Definately my WITII? (What if the impossible isn’t”) example of the day!

Color e-reader uses butterfly-based technology to save power

CrunchGear by by Devin Coldewey on February 15, 2010

Oh, biomimetic desigin. Is there anything you can’t do? Well, at any rate, you’re doing this, which is cool enough for now. Qualcomm is putting out a new display technology they call “Mirasol,” which uses reflective bits of color to display an image, much like the way the iridescent scales on butterfly wings do. They claim it draws even less power than e-ink, which is really saying something.

 

Rethinking maps, photos and search

MS Adds much more than Bling to Bing Maps

I continue to be impressed by all the great work coming out of Microsoft Research the past year or more and this presentation by Blaise Aguera y Arcas shows some of the most recent examples.  They are certainly providing great answers to my constant asking of “What if the Impossible Isn’t?”

I picked up on Blaise and the work he and his crew were doing over a year ago, initially with their creation of the Seadragon technology which they brought with them when they joined MS research and used it to create Photosynth which continues to amaze and impress me as well.

It seems like much of their research is centered around visual computing and interfaces and in my post a few days ago “Seeing is Believing 2.0?” I mentioned two other MS Research projects in this area, Pivot and SecondLight.  Today this presentation by Blaise is online from the TED 2010 conference where he shows how they are integrating a lot of technology including Flickr, Seadragon and Photosynth along with some Augmented Reality into Bing maps to enable some amazing new capabilities and possibilities.

Watch the video and I think you too will be impressed not only at the technology but with the new level of functionality and value these mashups are driving into maps.  It is really the whole area of using location as the grounding context for a huge array of other information and uses.

The New Frontier?  Going Inside

In one of my original postings on Photosynth I suggested/hoped that what we would see next was an ability a bit like a “cosmic zoom” * where we could zoom either up or down almost infinitely.  Up into the cosmos of space and down onto not only the street but inside of buildings and then below into the sea. 

* If you’ve never seen Cosmic Zoom, or it has been a while since you watched this 1968 video/animation from the National Film Board of Canada, I’ve embedded it at the bottom so you can treat yourself.

As usual change is occurring exponentially so it looks like Microsoft already has my wish!  As you’ve hopefully just seen in the video above Bing maps now provide an inside view capability where we can go from the outside street views into the inside of buildings.  They gain this in part by having dedicated “backpack cams” which can be taken inside public buildings and places to provide detailed inside views.  But my real excitement is about the ability to “go inside” via all the geo tagged photos from “the rest of us” that are posted to Flickr.  This is where the power of Photosynth really shows some promise to me as it stitches together any number of photos by aligning them in 3D space such that we end up with a highly integrated patchwork of all these interrelated photos.  This scales extremely well when you think of how many photos there are in Flickr (5,384 posted in the last MINUTE, 2.2 million geotagged the past month) and the Seadragon technology allows this to all happen extremely fast and with no apparent slowdown no matter how images are involved.  You’ll also see in the demo how they are able to add in video including a live feed that is similarly aligned within the maps and photos.  Imagine when (surely not if) there is the ability to similarly include all the videos up on the web and not “just” photos.

Look Up!

As if this wasn’t all more than enough to continue my fascination, it looks like they are also addressing my cosmic zoom up wish as well.  At the very end of the video Blaise was out of time but managed to demo an upcoming integration of Worldwide Telescope into Bing maps.  I what i thought was a very intuitive implementation you can simply look up into the sky to start seeing the imagery and data of the night sky from wherever you are standing (on the map). 

Location as Context

As I mentioned at the beginning I think we need to start thinking less about these as “maps” or at least redefine what maps are as we evolve more ways to use location as a central form of context within which we work with an view data, especially visual data.  Time is another bit of context and while it is not shown in the video above, because all the photos and imagery is time stamped you can go back and forth in time as well to see what things looked like in the past and then by adding layers on top, Augmented Reality, we can also see future scenarios such as buildings and reconstruction for example.  Blaise mentioned in the early part of his demo that they have found examples where Photosynth has included some very old photos and by setting the time back they are able to see the streets of Seatlle with horses and carriages. 

Rethinking & Redefining

So as you are thinking about all these new capabilities start to think how this is all part of fundamentally redefining or notion of maps and more so of search, (think spatial) and how we are quickly transfoming from consumer to creators.  These and other changes are also tranforming how we find, discover and learn just the right people, things, locations at just the right time.

PS.  FWIW, keep your eyes on both what’s coming out of MS Research as well as what lies ahead for the increased amount of collaboration between Microsoft, Yahoo, Flickr and Facebook.

Related articles by Zemanta

• TED2010: Spatial Search - Bing, Flickr, Videos, Maps and the Stars (blogs.technet.com)
• Is Bing Maps quickly getting cooler than Google Maps? (seattlepi.com)
• Seeing is believing 2.0? (waynehodgins.typepad.com)

Seeing is believing 2.0?

Microsoft stock and business may be rather cold but their research work is HOT from what I’ve been seeing the past year. Let me bring but two recent examples to your attention and see if you don’t agree.  These are also more examples for my ongoing quest around “What if the impossible isn’t?” or WITII?

PIVOT

The first is one called MS Pivot which tries to enable us to see the web almost literally as a web rather than just a set of pages.  It works primarily with photos right now and I originally came across the underlying technology over a year ago when they were working on Photosynth, which is also equally worth checking out BTW, here is my previous post with my thoughts of how I see Photosynth technology being used.

As you watch, start to rethink your understanding of what search and filtering are really about and see some of the new possibilities Pivot enables.

SecondLight

The other bit of MS research to bring to your attention today is called SecondLight and for a metadata guy like me, this really catches my attention as a way to enable some truly powerful ways of visualizing underlying data, meta or not.  This one is really a case of where it is much easier to learn by watching rather than reading so check out the video below and you’ll quickly see what this is all about.  The first half of the video will show you what it does and the second half will show you how it works.  I’m pretty sure by the end you too will be excited as you start to imagine the possibilities for use and especially for learning.

Whatever you may think of Microsoft, this is a great pair of examples of the kind of research which major corporations can contribute to and which bode well for our future innovations and discoveries.  I hope that by bringing these capabilities to your attention we can collectively get better at “readiness for the unexpected” an the premature arrival of the future.

Related articles by Zemanta

• An In-Depth Look At Pivot, Microsoft's Newest Data Visualization Tool (techcrunch.com)
• http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2332945,00.asp

10 Profoundly Personal Future Innovations

Here’s a list of innovations that really caught my attention as this list takes a refreshingly human and personal look at the future and also manages to live up to this headline of being both profound and innovative.  Well worth your time to read though I’ll warn you in advance that there are lots of links and each one is worth following and using up even more of your valuable time and attention.

Notice how many of the innovations featured in this list are already happening and add to my What if the impossible isn’t? list.  As you reflect upon what you read here I think you will see how this adds to my conviction around The Snowflake Effect and that our future is a giant snowstorm of extreme mass customization for every person every day by making everything deeply personal and unique.  Read on and see what you think?

10 Profound Innovations Ahead

By Jeremy Hsu TechNewsDaily
29 January 2010 1:11 PM ET

Today's world looks increasingly like the future. Robots work factory assembly lines and fight alongside human warriors on the battlefield, while tiny computers assist in everything from driving cars to flying airplanes. Surgeons use the latest technological tools to accomplish incredible feats, and researchers push the frontiers of medicine with bioengineering. Science fiction stories about cloning and resurrecting extinct animals look increasingly like relevant cautionary tales.

Triggerfish Monitors Your Eyes | h+ Magazine WITII

If you haven't been following along with all the advances in contact lenses, you are missing out. Efficiency is a top priority in our modern lives and doctors and patients are no exception, particularly when it comes to diagnosing and treating illness. When Grandma, Grandpa, or Billy the kid down the street has glaucoma, they want to have their vision treated as quickly and accurately as possible. And if all this can be packaged with a hint of coolness, that wouldn‘t hurt.

SENSIMED has found a way to make glaucoma treatment and monitoring quicker, better, and most importantly, more accurate. The Triggerfish allows ophthalmologists to do something that was previously cumbersome or impossible. Patients with glaucoma wear the slightly futuristic Triggerfish contraption which monitors the eye without hindering eyesight. It transmits the data to a recorder and then to the doctor‘s computer, allowing the doctor to see exactly what went on with the patient‘s eye throughout the day. With this constant monitoring, the doctor is better equipped to treat the patient and their individual needs

via www.hplusmagazine.com

Today's addition to my What if the Impossible Isn't (WITII) list and another great example of how the Snowflake Effect of mass personalzation continues to expand.  This recent development in contact lenses enables ophthalmologists to accurately monitor how an individual the eyes of a patient with glaucoma are working and personalize their treatment.

Augmented Reality in a Contact Lens: IEEE Spectrum WITII

Augmented Reality in a Contact Lens

A new generation of contact lenses built with very small circuits and LEDs promises bionic eyesight

Image: Raygun Studio

BY Babak A. Parviz // September 2009

The human eye is a perceptual powerhouse. It can see millions of colors, adjust easily to shifting light conditions, and transmit information to the brain at a rate exceeding that of a high-speed Internet connection.

But why stop there?

 

via IEEE Spectrum

Here is today's addition to the WITII list (What if the Impossible Isn't?)  I've been writing more about AR lately (who hasn't) and expect to continue as both research such as this and infant applications increasingly merge into the mainstream.  Glasses and goggles make sense too and may be possible sooner.  Implants have additional benefits and applications.

This is a longish article, at least by today's online reading standards, but it is well worth the read to get a glimpse at what is currently possible and what is about to be. 

What It’s All About

Want to see what it is all about? Want to see a real live humanitarian and all around great person?

Check out this video of my dear friend Linda English, a founder and Director of Membership Development, Learning for International NGOs LINGOs, www.lingos.org

This is from the Microsoft Alumni Foundation, Honors 2009 Integral Fellows ceremony on Wednesday (Nov.18, 2009).

You GO girl!

CNN “The Moment”: 2nd time’s the charm with MS Photosynth?

Since I received a lot of responses and follow up (thanks!) to the posting Photosynth: Mashups of Our Collective Intelligence via Photos, I thought you would be quite interested to know the most recent use of  Microsoft Photosynth, which creates 3D spaces from a mass of 2D photos. 

CNN is using Photosynth to create a 3D space they are calling “The Moment”, when Barack Obama raised his hand to officially accept the position of President of the USA.  To do so, CNN is asking everyone to send in at least one photo they took of this defining moment in history, and CNN will then use these to create a 3D environment with Microsoft Photosynth. 

CNN recently experienced a very different kind of “CNN moment” when their systems were unable to cope with the spike in demand for their live streaming of the event.  So here’s hoping that this new “moment” that they are proposing is a much better experience! 

It's worth checking out.  Since I wasn’t in the country or near any TV coverage (other than in airports),  I missed seeing the inauguration, so I'll be interested to see “the moment” myself.  And I’ll be curious to learn what your experience with this new capability is like. Looking forward to reading your responses.