Hello! It’s Friday, we’ve just done our usual Friday demos. I’m sitting at my desk with a can of polish lager and Matt Jones is playing Huey Lewis and the News. It’s probably time for a roundup of the things floating around the studio mailing list on week 334.
Nick sent around this link of an old experiment looking into male / female walking patterns.
We liked this site advertising a workspace in NYC. Simple but very nice.
Nick also sent around this research project from Microsoft, working on scaling up 8-bit pixel art for modern displays. I don’t think Denise agreed with it.
Denise sent around lumibots – “small, autonomous robots that react to light”.
Jones sent around a nice post on Chevrolet speedometer design over the ages (I’m a sucker for anything design – car related):
And then Andy sent around this picture of the dashboard of a Citroen CX dashboard, with cylinders that rotate to display dashboard info. I’m a massive fan of Citroen’s design from this era. Brilliant. Look at the steering wheel!
Finally, Matt Webb sent around some an email entitled ‘First words’, so I’ll end with the first words spoken on the telephone, from Bell to Watson in 1876:
“Mr. Watson — come here — I want to see you.”
I’ll leave you with a studio staple track as it’s been a slightly music themed weeknotes. I think we have BERG alumni Matt Brown to thank originally for introducing us to this. Have a good weekend.
It’s Friday, just after 4pm; It must be time for links!
First up –
Eindhoven’s Bart Hess, explores and applies a number of video techniques from time slicing to the utterly captivating, if not slightly nauseating, motion stabilisation.
Jerry’s Map, has been steadily gathering views on Vimeo after 2 years, brought to our attention by @infovore it sensitively tells a story of an extraordinary endeavour which sits between collage and world building.
There was a little unpacking of Laptops and Looms of which Denise and I attended all, and some respectively last week. It was a 3 day experiment/conference summed up by Paul Miller and decompressed by Rachel Coldicutt. In addition to the talks it was also an amazing chance to visit some parts of the BritishIndustrialPast while discussing it’s potential future.
Last weekend we were looking at a pioneering ’50s Synthesizer that was unearthed in a French barn. The photo above reminded us of Norman McLaren’s early experimental films where he not only scratched the animation directly onto celluloid, but created the soundtrack by scratching the optical track too.
In order to create music on the Oram, a composer painted waveforms directly onto 35mm film strips which were fed into the machine. Inside, photo-electronic cells read the light pattern and interpreted it as sound.
Lovely! It was built by Daphne Oram in 1957, a year before she co-founded the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
Alice Bartlett unearthed this uncanny movie of ‘Swarmanoid’ modular robots that specialise in ‘manipulating objects and climbing, some in moving on the ground and transporting objects, and some in flying and observing the environment from above‘. Amazing to watch these little beings adapt around our human environments. In similar territory, we’re monitoring the development in drone technology, including the ‘Raven‘, a military drone that is somewhat like a model airplane that fits in a backpack. “At its simplest, a Raven acts as a flying pair of binoculars that can look over the next hill”. Fast, cheap and out of control.
Many in the studio have been experimenting with (and like Chris Heathcote giving up on) Tiny Tower with its tiny, AI-driven version of Facebook. James Darling has been experimenting with other forms of software-generated social avatars with Weavrs, discovering that his mutant creation is a bit of an arse. The studio is very much enjoying the astutely-observed impersonation that is Peter Molyneux 2, especially his comments on the rumours of pico-projectors in next-gen consoles.
We’re enjoying Charlie Stross on the next 50 years of security, which is actually a brilliant bit of general near-futurism on the security implications of Shannon’s limit, energy, lifelogging, DIY genomics and democracy:
From being an afterthought or a luxury – relevant only to the tiny fraction of people with accounts on time-sharing systems in the 1970s – security is pushed down the pyramid of needs until it’s important to all of us. Because it’s no longer about our property, physical or intellectual, or about authentication: it’s about our actual identity as physical human beings.
From Matt Jones, news that IBM is creating chips based on the human brain, battling the Von Neumann Bottleneck with neurosynaptic chips, where ‘the integrated memory is represented by synapses, computation by neurons and communication by axons‘. This apparently is aimed towards our sensor heavy future:
“If today’s computers are left brained, rational and sequential then cognitive computing is intuitive and right-brained and slow, but the two together can become the future of our civilization’s computing stack.”
Matt Jones also discovered this visual essay about the design of displays in Star Wars films. Dan O’Bannon and Bob Greenberg created realistic computer simulations and displays with traditional rostrum animation methods inspired by Douglas Trumbull, and went on to collaborate with Larry Cuba on vector-based computer graphics.
The highly credible look of these displays went on to influence other simulated computer systems and displays in films like Alien and Blade Runner. These tropes are still clearly visible in cinema today, over 40 years later. An incredible legacy that Dan O’Bannon should be proud of.
We’re still not sure if we agree with the analysis, but the Meat to Math Ratio is an interesting provocation:
“In a data-driven world, the true measure of any organization, from a regional government to a global conglomerate, is its meat-to-math ratio. This sounds like a cold statement, saying machines are better than people. That’s not the point here: machines are better with people, and companies that can’t augment their employees with data and tools, that cling to antiquated ideas like broadcast, and that can’t turn their data exhaust into insight and innovation, are doomed.”
A cinema-furniture hybrid, this Inception Chair by Vivian Chiu has ‘hand-cut grooves that notch inside each other, securely connecting them together but making it easy to disassemble‘.
Alex Jarvis found this Gorgeous furniture by Rupert Blanchard (via @LukeScheybeler) who only uses “broken, discarded and odd drawers that no longer have a carcass” and sets himself a rule “to only use objects that no longer fulfil the purpose for which they were originally created.”
Last time I wrote Friday Links, a few weeks ago, I was suffering from a serious fish finger sandwich lethargy. This memory, which maybe now permenantly entwined with my Friday Links experience, is making me really want a fish finger sandwich again. Luckily, its Friday, and I have a can of Lech Premium. Almost as good.
The first link I’m sharing is a website dedicated to robot art. This came from Timo. When I first saw this, I thought it was going to be a site of art created by robots. Some people think that art cannot be created by robots, that art requires some deeper intellectual thought that can’t (yet) be recreated artificially. I think these people might consider that in this context the robot is just an extension of it’s creator (who is not a robot) and so any art the robot creates is actually the product of the creator.
Anyway, this site isn’t robots doing art, it’s art doing robots:
Nice!
Alex supplies our next link, this very lovely project from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.
This table has a little “mole” living in it, which moves around and can be hooked up to a depth sensor to interact with people. The video explores the possibility of playing games using the mole to move objects around, and interacting with the mole itself.
Matt Jones sent round the astonishing KinectFusion project, which uses a Kinect to map a room. As well as mapping the room in time with the user moving the Kinect around it, the video also shows what happens when you throw a little particle system into the mix, at round 4.00 there is a really impressive augmented reality ‘explosion’.
Created by environmental design group Eness, MÖBIUS is a sculpture comissioned by the city of Melbourne that was photographed and animated over two weeks in May 2011. The piece consists of 21 green triangles that can be configured into several cyclical patterns creating the optical illusion of motion. This is a really fantastic example of public artwork, as the individuals who interact with the space inevitably become part of the art itself.
We start this week’s links sent to our studio mailing list with one from Jack, that combines three subjects close to our heart – robotics, short-run manufacture by small companies, and small companies talking about trying to do new things so others can learn from it. This blog from Modular Robotics is a wonderful insight into all three.
More British Transport ephemera from Matt Webb, on how cars and cities chat to each other using magnets:
In Southampton when I was growing up, we had one of the world’s first adaptive traffic routing systems, where the traffic light delays would alter dynamically depending on traffic. At night they would switch to an “on demand” model: the main route at a crossroads would remain green, while the minor route would only go green 15 seconds after a car had approached it.
Since this was detected by the induction loop, and since an induction loop only has magnetic flux through it when a material is *moving* over it, if you sat in a static car waiting for the traffic light to turn from green to red again, it would never reactivate. (I sat for 15 minutes one, still at a red light on a minor route, to make sure it didn’t come on by accident. It turned green as soon as I moved the car just a little bit.)
Here’s a nice hack:
Ambulances had *moving* parts underneath them, to trigger a stronger signal in the induction loop. In Southampton, this was used to identify emergency vehicles moving up to the lights, and preferentially change traffic lights green a hop or two ahead of them on likely routes.
Some people build these into their cars to get better treatment by these routing systems.
Finally, all that remains is Alice’s recommendation of a Chrome experimental video by the band OK Go & Pilobolus, which allows us to put their best feet forward in order to say happy Friday from all of us in the studio…
Just discussing the fact we’re a Mattless office for the day (they’re both in NY). It’s not something that happens often, and so to soothe this slight unease, it feels fitting that we start Friday links with a BBC archive of the Moon landings, from Matt Webb. It has “lots of telly clips from the past 42 years”, including interviews, episodes of Panorama and a very young looking Patrick Moore, hosting The Sky at Night.
You might well have seen this by now, as it’s been quite widely discussed online, but Andy sent around this post on fake Chinese Apple stores earlier this week, titled ‘Are you listening, Steve Jobs?’ It’s quite extraordinary – and a little bit ‘uncanny valley’, if it’s possible to use that in this context. It’s almost right, but you can sense something’s up.
We had a bit of discussion about the Window to the World concept, from Toyota, a link discovered via @antimega. In the end we got slightly sidetracked by the comments. The fury at the child’s parents for not buckling her into a seatbelt, and the wrath of others for bringing that up. Feel free to dream about the future, but make sure you sweat the details.
James and Nick discussed Tubetap, an app that enables you to apply for a refund from Transport for London at the tap of a button – or several buttons. And on that note, Fix My Transport from MySociety is in beta testing at the moment – but for commuters like me, on multiple forms of public transport – looks like it could be great. (Also, it has the best tagline ever.)
Nick also found a bunch of Little Fellas over on Craftzine. You can’t always spot them in the wild, so why not make one?. I’d like to see them applied to the LittleDog Robot mentioned last week.
