Blog posts from July 2010

One emerging trend on the internal mailing list has been a steadily growing number of threads about robots – covering both big mechanical things, and also more domestic models, and even (as in the case of Barbie below), barely-bots. Time to start gathering those up!

Gadgetwise point out the Barbie Video Girl Doll. It’s a Barbie doll, with a video camera embedded in it, so you can make movies pointed from her point of view, and a slightly immersion-breaking screen in her back. You can also transfer videos off the doll via a USB connector. And, as the Gadgetwise article point out, “because the doll can be posed, she doubles as a pretty good tripod.”

It’s more than just a doll because it’s a sensing object, albeit not a very smart one. Still make it walk and you’d have something not unlike a telepresence robot for kids.

The Wall Street Journal last week covered Autom – a robotic weight-loss coach. Weight-loss programs could be just be software applications, but the vaguely anthropomorphic robot perhaps adds a layer of reassurement and engagement:

Autom also uses social cues to seem more lifelike, a big psychological difference from working with a static computer screen. She blinks her eyes, turns to look at who she’s talking to, and ends conversations by saying, “I hope we can talk again about your progress,” in a female voice.

From the end of 2008, it’s a map of the top 10 countries of the world by Robot Population Density, as part of this IEEE Spectrum article. Of course, it’s very specifically talking about industrial robots, but it’s an eye-opening set of figures nontheless.

And finally, some fictional robots – namely, this gorgeous set of illustrations for a Russian children’s book from 1979, entitled Your Name? Robot.

The July release for Schooloscope is now out. The release includes all manner of bugfixes, thousands of new OFSTED inspections, and easy output to Facebook and Twitter… and also these beautiful papercraft schools that you can download for any school on the site.

Find out much more, over at the Schooloscope blog.

Tom is hammering away at Schooloscope. He’s off at a conference about play and invention next week, so hoping to get this month’s feature release cooked before then.

Nick and Matt B are in the other room, working together on new product development. They’re aiming to take a tech proof of concept to minimum viable product.

Two other products – one near term, the other medium – are also taking shape.

Campbell, Timo, Jack and Matt J are working on a film called Future Magic.

There’s been a lot of business development this week. Lots of exciting conversations. And accounts: it was financial year end recently, and that’s a good chance to revisit processes with Kari. I like that company administration runs so smoothly, like a machine. I’ve been making higher level metrics, attempting to attach meaningful numbers to the budgets of cash, attention and risk.

Last week I was in California with Matt J, recharging, hiking, and attending Foo Camp. There was a lot about robotics there – everything from articulation to low-cost development to fractional A.I. – and it has influenced my thinking considerably. Most of my thinking happens in conversations, or while writing, or while drawing.

The week before that we handed over Mag+, the end of a 9 month journey. It went from R&D design concept to iPad app, and from there to a constellation of systems and processes (production tools and help-desks), which were finally divided up and stitched back into a broader corporation to run as “business as usual.” That’s how R&D should happen. I’m pleased.

On our last night in San Francisco, walking back to the hotel from hosting drinks for our West coast friends, we passed the Apple Store, and just as we went past the giant iPad in the window started playing this. A great sign-off to Mag+.

It’s odd to be back in the studio, able to pay attention once again to health, growth and direction. It’s wonderful. This is a self-sustaining spaceship now. A culture garden full of my favourite people.

I can see the mountain-tops. I can see the stars. And I am impatient for them.

I liked this take on what a Digital Holga might look like (the Holga, if you’re not aware, is a little toy camera). It’s well presented and has some lovely illustrations, but the two things I liked most were: the rotatable control panel, making it simple to convert for left-handed use; and the idea that, whenever it might exist, it should always use a previous generation of sensor technology. Built-in nostalgia.

A couple of links from Matt J: first, Greg Allen linking to Alvy Ray Smith on displays, and pixels: His point turns out to be, not that pixels aren’t squares, but that square pixels suck.

And secondly, for the materials science folder: new research that makes the ability to print lasers much closer to reality – which, of course, points to several interesting futures.

Nick found this NPR website designed specifically for the iPad as an interesting example of what websites designed for touch look like.

Giles Turnbull coined a nice neologism in his write-up of Economist direct – “impulscriptions“; not a true subscription, but one-click issue purchasing when the current edition takes your fancy. Lovely service.

And finally, I really enjoyed this paragraph from Robin Sloan’s link to Matt J’s previous post (on Hopeful Monsters and the Trough of Disillusionment):

“Hybrids are smooth and neat. Interdisciplinary thinking is diplomatic; it thrives in a bucolic university setting. Chimeras, though? Man, chimeras are weird. They’re just a bunch of different things bolted together. They’re abrupt. They’re discontinuous. They’re impolitic. They’re not plausible; you look at a chimera and you go, “yeah right.” And I like that! Chimeras are on the very edge of the recombinatory possible. Actually — they’re over the edge.”

Last Saturday, Matt Webb and I hosted a short session at O’Reilly FooCamp 2010, in Sebastopol, California.

The title was “Mining the Trough of Disillusionment”, referring to the place in the Gartner “Hype Cycle” that we find inspiration in – where technologies languish that have become recently mundane, cheap and widely-available but are no longer seen as exciting ‘bullet-points’ on the side of products.

For instance, RFID was down in the trough when Jack and Timo did their ‘Nearness’ and ‘Immaterials’ work, and many of the components of Availabot are trough-dwellers, enabling them to be cheap and widely-available for both experimentation and production.

While not presenting the Gartner reports as ‘science’ – they do offer an interesting perspective of the socio-technical ‘weather’ that surrounds us and condenses into the products and services we use.

In the session we examined the last five years of the hype cycle reports they have published – it’s kind of fascinating – there are some very strange decisions as to what is included, excluded and how buzzwords morph over time.

After that we brainstormed with the group which technologies they thought had fallen, perhaps irrevocably, into the trough. It was fun to get so many ‘alpha geeks’ thinking about gamma things…

Having done so – we had a discussion about how they might breed or be re-contextualised in order to create interesting new products.

These “hopeful monsters” often sound ridiculous on first hearing, but when you pick at them they illustrate ways in which a forgotten or unfashionable technology can serve a need or create desire.

Or they can expose a previously unexploited affordance or feature of the technology – that was not brought to the fore by the original manufacturers or hype that surrounded it. By creating a chimera, you can indulge in some material exploration.

The list we generated is below, if you’d like to join in…

It was a really fun session, that threw up some promising avenues – and some new products ideas for us… Thanks to all who attended and participated!

• Mobsploitation (a.k.a. Crowdsourcing…)
• Artificial Intelligence
• <512mb thumbdrives
• Blinking Lights (esp. in shoes)
• Singing Chips (esp. in greetings cards)
• Desktop Web Apps
• Cameras
• Accelerometers
• MS Office Apps
• Physical Keyboards
• Mice
• Cords & Wires in general
• Non-Smart Phones
• RSS
• Semantic Web
• Offline…
• Compact Discs
• Landline Phones
• Command Lines & Text UIs
• Privacy
• P2P
• MUDs & MOOs
• Robot Webcams & Sousveillance
• Google Wave
• Adobe Flash
• Kiosks
• Municipal Wifi
• QR Codes
• Pager/Cellphone Vibrator motors
• Temporary Autonomous Zones