Simone Jones, Dean of Faculty of Art at the Ontario College of Art & Design, mentioned her colleague Julian Oliver‘s neat creation during an interview we did for DiscoveryChannel.ca. I love the idea.
It plays into ideas of Augmented Architecture and Augmented Reality – concepts that deal with altering your reality, rather than providing you with a completely simulated one.
Yesterday I chanced on an amazing show on Discovery called Next World: Future Life on Earth (think Beyond 2000, from a beyond-2000 perspective) and caught a segment about Transported Presence.
The idea is that our video and audio projections will be so high in quality, we wouldn’t physically need to travel anywhere; the mere projection of our presence will do.
The concept is not new – but how soon we’ll be able to reap the benefits is; Cisco’s Emerging Technologies division is already there, coordinating with its employees through their Virtual Video Office programme. Just check out Virtual Margaret.
There’s already an annual conference entitled “Telepresence World”.
Such advances are not only a matter of convenience – but of life and death for some.
Similar technologies are yielding medical alternatives to many patients living in remote communities, where seeing a specialist is not as easy as driving over to a doctor’s clinic. In many cases there isn’t one. This extends to surgeries as well. (Daily Planet did a piece on this called Virtual Surgery.)
And that’s not all. A 3D, high-def colour version of you is on its way.
Similarly, while telepresence will allow you to project yourself anywhere in the world, 3D mapping will inevitably bring any place in the world to you, via your computer.
Here, Google’s advanced mapping technology is paving the way – virtually at least.
You’ll be able to walk down a street, check out various restaurants, and confirm waterfront views – all from thousands of kilometres away, and all from a first-person POV.
Anyway, I find the topic fascinating.
Working on broadband, we occasionally get to work from home and I can think of worse things than missing rush-hour or not having to dig my way out of a snow bank to get to work. And think of the savings in fuel costs alone – dollar and otherwise.
Looks like this bad boy will be out of comission until April 2009 at least – methinks likely more…
To help pass the time, watch this:
I never thought cicades would feel so personal.
At least as it relates to our planet’s size…Enjoy!
Welders working on interconnections of magnets in the last sector of the LHC (April 2007).
Seems things have gotten off to a rough start at CERN headquarters. In the lead-up to so-called God-particle maker, several things have gone awry; most recently, it was hijacked by hackers (see below) and now overheated magnets have delayed the groundbreaking experiments for at least two months.
The culprit: “Electrical interconnection between two magnets,” according to CERN spokesperson James Gillies.
The glitch led to helium leaking into the tunnel, bringing in the nuclear research organization’s in-house fire brigade (yeh…they have one).
However, considering the magnitude of the project, I’d be worried if there were no reported problems.
“It will take a couple of months to fix it because we operate at a very low temperature and we will have to warm the magnets up to room temperature, fix the fault, then cool them back down again,” added Gillies.
To steer the particles, the collider needs temperatures barely above absolute zero (-273º Celsius or -459º Fahrenheit).
My guess is we can wait on this one…
Advancements in robotics are taking us ever-closer to what roboticist Masahiro Mori termed the “Uncanny Valley” in 1970; the idea’s that you don’t want your robot to be an unconvincing, awkward imitation-human, but you don’t want it to be too convincing either.
The theory states that the more a robot becomes humanlike in its appearance and motion, the more positive feelings it’ll evoke – but only to a certain point. Past this point, your reaction to this human-like non-human will turn very suddenly to that of repulsion.
Consider what your gut reaction was to the first few seconds of the vid.
The latest rendition of the Disco Boom De Ah Dah vid is striking a chord locally…DiscoveryChannel.ca was first flooded with requests to put the vid up, and now it’s flooded with people looking to download it…
I don’t think I’ve ever seen such an enthusiastic response to a promo…One of the viewsers mentions (and I agree) that the vid evokes the innocence and sincerity of childhood – a warm and fuzzy place when the world was your backyard, and you were left alone for hours with a shovel. It’s very William Blake circa “To see the World in a grain of sand / And Heaven in a wildflower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour”.
Part of the reason I got into Discovery is because it still resonates with that part of me. That said, I’m sure there’ll be a backlash by contrarians and deconstructionists the world over.
In the meantime, enjoy:
Feeling edgy that CERN’s Large Hadron Collider might swallow your precious world whole? The good news is your fear’s likely unfounded.
The bad news? The operative word here is likely.
Oh, and that less than an hour into the £4.4bn-project, hackers exposed its security vulnerabilities.
The group – calling themselves “GST: Greek SecurityTeam” – broke into an LHC computer, creating havoc and posting a rogue page on CERN’s website.
Before signing off with an eerie “We are 2600 – dont mess with us. (sic)”, the team damaged a single file, apparently to prove a point.
“There seems to be no harm done. From what they can tell, it was someone making the point that CMS was hackable,” said James Gillies, a spokesman for CERN. “It was quickly detected.”
All things considered, it could have gone a lot worse; the hackers were “one step away” from the computer control system in charge of one of the huge detectors of the machine – a giant magnet designed to track the fallout of the smashing “big bang” particles (one of LHC’s objectives).
Having access to the right files would have enabled them to turn parts of the detector off (the group apparently confined their efforts to the Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment).
CERN responded by removing public access to the site in question – cmsmon.cern.ch.
Spotty security?
“We have several levels of network, a general access network and a much tighter network for sensitive things that operate the LHC,” said Gillies.
“We think that someone from Fermilab’s Tevatron (the competing atom smasher in America) had their access details compromised,” said one of the scientists working on the machine. “What happened wasn’t a big deal, just goes to show people are out there always on the prowl.”
CERN’s security strategy comprises of separating control networks, using firewalls and complex passwords. There are more than 110 different control systems at CERN, responsible for everything from running the experiments to radiation protection and safety.
Mounting an attack on the world’s biggest science project is surely no easy feat, but USBs, remote wireless access and laptops provide additional access points.
About the LHC
CERN’s reps, and physicists the world over have already spent countless interviews assuring the public that the LHC will not trigger a black hole, create earthquake and tsunamis.
Among other things, the LHC is supposed to recreate the impact of the Big Bang, shedding light on the origins of the universe. It is also supposed to tell us why and how some particles gain mass while others don’t, and reveal whether there are other dimensions we have yet to discover.
Don’t know much about the project? This following vid will bring you up to speed:
