photosynth demo

Photosynth has come a long way since I saw it about a year ago. This demo will make your jaw drop open in amazement. You know how when watching a sci-fi movie like Blade Runner they zoom in on an image and enlarge tiny portions of the screen? Well this demo shows this capability. Ok so we're not there quite yet in terms of being able to do that to any image because at the end of the day the resolution of an image is always a factor. If you take a picture on a mobile phone you will never be able to do much with it. But what photosynth does is postulate that of any given landmark there are enough images taken by people that are online to be able to create an interactive map of that place. So given the meta-data of images stored, say on Flickr, this application can build up a representation of that place. You can zoom in on any feature and can even fly around a virtual 3D representation of that environment.

The demo also showcased Seadragon which is a way of displaying 'vast amounts of visual data' onscreen. A really nice touch was the ability to show every page of a magazine on screen and then really quickly zoom in to a page you'd like to see with absolute clarity. Stored within corners of a page could be advertisements say of a car which again you can zoom into. But these ads can contain tiny extra images of further details so that if the person is interested they can zoom in to read that information. It's kind of like those micro dot things we used to see in old spy movies. It's a great idea and again done by Microsoft. When did Microsoft become the innovator again? Are they now the underdogs?

TED

When I was kid I used to wonder how it would be possible to live in heaven without getting really bored. This is the opening preamble to TED which is a conference where the best minds in Technology Entertainment and Design converge and share ideas. Now I wanted to share this guy because he is just SO inspiringly pretentious (go on click on the link above). So bad it's good. I have to disagree with him though that most of the interesting people will be in hell and we'll all be having a whale of a time. But that is hardly inspirational now is it. And how could he sit on his pedestal and look down on the rest of us from hell :) Anyway TED looks like a blast and I would love to go one day. Some of the best minds in the world are there and all talking about the future. Super cool ;)

the future is nigh

So with all the media attention being firmly on Apple and the imminent release of the iPhone we should really look at why this technology is important. It is not because the product looks pretty (which inevitably it does) and certainly there is nothing ground-breaking about what this device is capable of. What is revolutionary is the interface that has been developed and with it an era of 'multi-touch' technology. What Apple is doing here is actually taking existing ideas and creating a viable product with an intuitive user-interface (the iPod and Newton are past examples of this). This MT system has been around for a quite a while though, with the likes of Jeff Han working on some incredible interfaces (check out his work in the video below). The product was created after the inventor studied the effect of his finger pads on the outside of a glass of water noticing where his fingers actually made contact. You have to wonder as to the influence of science-fiction in many of these new technologies with Minority Report being an obvious example. Or is this just an evolution of the way in which we interact with our devices? Are we tired of using a mouse and keyboard and is this the next step? Of course there are new things to learn. Gone are terms like 'point and click': enter terms like 'pinch-zoom'. Are we bringing in a new energetic way to interact? Certainly it is much easier to interact with the physical world and actually being able to move objects around a screen using our fingers seems like a great (if a little tiring) way to interact.



So what is the future going to hold for us in this field? Will there ever come a time when we can simply look at an object and will it to move around a screen? Sounds far fetched? Well believe it or not scientists have developed a system whereby a person's actions can be represented as brain activity in a computer. This computer can then be trained to respond to that same activity even if it is only a thought and not the actual action: hence the ability to move objects with the power of your mind. Check out this crazy monkey brain control video here (thanks to blunt for this one). But this is not the stuff of small research labs, this technology was showcased this week at a gaming conference in San Fransisco. A device that scans the brain can interpret brain activity as intended action and move objects about onscreen. This is cutting edge stuff and we are a long way off having home computers with the computing power to read our minds in an effective way. But the work has begun and the technology is there. Science fiction becomes science fact.

Everything you can imagine is real.
Picasso