"You can have children reading about Alice in Wonderland ... and Alice can pop out of the page, and have a tea party on the page."
Every amazing new technology needs to be wrapped in an equally elegant high-demand application if it is to diffuse past just the military on through the human masses. Often the first killer app is targeted at youth (ie, Facebook, Club Penguin, MMORPGs), then gradually spreads upward to older generations that require more convincing and immediately useful applications.
When it comes to augmented reality, it's possible that a company called Mixed Reality Lab (MXR), a spin-off owned by the National University of Singapore, is on the verge of creating such a cross-over app: Virtual 3D Pop-ups for Children's Books.
Coming on the heels of MXR's real-time augmented battlefield displays, the new Magic Books product aims to generate revenue from mommies and daddies who feeled compelled to get their kids interfacing with the most advanced new media.
VHS, tape decks, wood paneling, oh my! The past conjures up warm memories that are greatly associated with chocolate-chip cookies and watching Saturday morning cartoons. These gadgets should be able to bring up a memory cloud a la Wile E. Coyote. So whoever thought that VHS tapes would just disappear into the night, they were sadly mistaken.
1. M21 Flat Panel TV: With the mixture of old-school flair and modern technology, this Brady Bunch-esque flat screen TV will be a highly coveted tech toy among the retro and TV fans alike. You could watch your favorite Brady Bunch episode, hint – the episode where Greg and Marcia were both running for class president, on a TV that highly resembles said time period.
2. Touch Screen Boom-box PC: Do you remember hanging out after school? All of your friends sitting around the boom-box after basketball or volleyball practice listening to the four at four. It was just the thing to do. The boom-box revolutionized a generation and now it has been integrated into the digital-age. This 80’s staple features an LCD screen and runs a Linux/Windows dual boot.
3. NES TV Remote Control: Growing up, the Nintendo system was the must-have system for every video-game enthusiast. This NES controller turned TV remote is a retro-gamers’ dream. It combined their two true loves, old-school video game systems and tech toys.
With web and interface technology advancing rapidly, the television medium is quickly approaching a new age in which sitting on the couch facing a screen will no longer be the most popular way to consume broadcast content.
Long gone are the days when everyone would crowd around the television at 9:00pm every Thursday night to catch the latest Seinfeld episode.
According to the Nielsen ratings, it appears the annual new season blitz that once drew in more than 20 million viewers is on the decline. Among the top ten shows of the first week of premieres were Dancing with the Stars and Grey’s Anatomy. Each received respective numbers of about 20 million and 18 million viewers as compared to over 25 million just 5 years ago.
So what’s the reason for this sharp drop? Some have speculated that last year’s writers’ strike had pushed people to the cable networks. Other contributing factors include the increasing abundance of cable channels and time-shifted viewing.
What if we are being too cynical about China’s eco-future in the transportation sector?
Imagine a future in which China is the secret to moving the world’s auto fleet beyond liquid fuels and the combustion engine.
If they can master electron storage systems of advanced batteries, fuel cells and capacitors- they might surprise the world!
Warren Buffet thinks so. The Oracle of Omaha recently invested $233 into Chinese battery and electric vehicle maker BYD.
Now, we are hearing a similar message from other electrical storage system giants who are needed to transform our global auto fleet. A recent Economic Times article China seen as potential electric car hub describes a vision of Johnson Controls where China changes its course to accelerate adoption of electric vehicles powered by batteries, fuel cells and capacitors.
Buffet and Johnson Controls see China’s natural advantages:
-Fewer ‘legacy’ issues of existing infrastructure and embedded interests
-Top down policy control to accelerate changes around infrastructure
-Chinese leaders see cleantech as a growth industry, especially around energy storage and electric motor propulsion systems
-Small cars & scooters are the most likely candidates for electric propulsion systems. China (and India) are prime candidates
- A geopolitical desire to avoid issues of oil’s biggest problem. Lack of substitutability. Oil is the perfect fuel, but you can’t put coal or solar or nuclear into a liquid gas tank*. Electricity and hydrogen can be produced by any energy resource.
Of course, electric vehicles are not entirely ‘clean’ and certainly lead to suburban expansion and loss of rural lands. But the trade offs and consequences of doing nothing are hard to challenge. China’s urban areas would benefit from the removal of millions of uncontrolled polluting vehicles.
Even if electricity production came from coal, it is easier to control carbon emissions at a single point power plant rather than individual cars. And China’s industrial strength is powerful enough to change the direction of electric storage companies as well as automakers.
Hydrogen fuel cells, which produce electricity, are an evolution to modern day batteries. If we can store hydrogen efficiently as a solid, we can expand the use of energy from intermittent solar and wind power. We can also lower the costs and improve performance of electric vehicles. Two recent research announcements hint that cost effective storage could be much closer to reality.
Nanoscale science & surface area
One of the key enablers of storing hydrogen as a solid is high surface area. How much? Can you imagine holding a gram of material with surface area equal to several football fields for storing hydrogen molecules?
Nanoscale (billionth of a meter) material design means high surface area ratio to volume. We can also tap nanotechnology to create storage materials able to bind and release hydrogen molecules at low pressure and low temperature.
Carbon scaffolding for storage
There are a number of ways to store hydrogen as a solid, and also as a liquid. Earlier we featured a look at metal-organic frameworks or MOFs as a viable long term storage material. Today we’ll look at two other carbon-based hydrogen storage systems.
Carbon is a controversial storage medium since it is ‘sticky’ and can often bind hydrogen too tightly. But mixing (or ‘doping’) carbon with other elements can leverage the benefits of carbon’s high surface area and its Lego-like structural design.
‘Doping corn cobs?’
The Department of Energy has awarded $1.9 million to researchers at the University of Missouri and Midwest Research Institute (MRI)
The Missouri team has found that carbon briquettes (derived from corn cobs) then “doped” (or mixed and layered) with boron, have a unique ability to store natural gas with high capacity at low pressure.
While corn cobs hydrogen storage sounds a bit far fetched, one gram of this carbon material has a surface area comparable to a football field. The boron additive to carbon creates binding energies with H2 molecules that might make this a viable storage medium.
Carbon Graphene Layers
Another carbon based solution was announced last week from researchers in Greece using stacked thin sheets of carbon doped with lithium.
You’ve just closed a huge deal, beat a seemingly impossible team, or finally got a date with that girl you’ve been staring at in the coffee shop for the last few months. You’re excited. You feel like you can take on the world. To help make the moment more magical, you whip out your MP3 player and frantically scroll through your thousands of songs, looking for either “Eye of the Tiger” or “Final Countdown.”
Your fumbling has taken the edge off of your excitement and now you just feel silly.
I have to admit, I wish my own life had a soundtrack for moments like these. Metallica for when I’m driving, Portishead for when I’m depressed, Korn for when I feel like smashing things with my forehead. In fact, I have been wishing for my own personal soundtrack since I first started imagining John Williams songs playing as I trudged through forests (I swear, it felt like Endor).
And now someone has gone and done just that.
MUSINAUT, a company based out of Paris, France, has developed a brain scanner (the brainwave) that monitors your moods in order to play appropriate music. So whether you’re feeling stressed, sad, happy or angry, the appropriate music will begin to play over the headphones.
The era of Zero Energy Home (ZEH) construction has taken another step forward with the announcement of a new US Department of Energy project in Tennessee.
The vision of ‘zero energy homes’ is to transform the residential built environment from a major consumer of energy, to a neutral, or net zero energy environment where the annual amount of energy produced and consumed is equal.
More forward looking architects and energy system designers envision homes that are (annually) net producers of energy and able to push energy back into the grid, or fuel vehicles. To arrive at both futures, we must first understand the fundamentals of zero energy home design, on site energy storage and power generation, and home power management systems.
Home Energy Use
While energy consumption patterns in homes vary greatly depending on geography the US DOEestimates that nearly half of the average home’s energy consumption is used for heating, 25 percent for lighting and appliances, 17 percent is used for water heating, 6 percent for cooling rooms, and 5 percent for refrigeration.
A Step Forward – Commercial Construction
The key to making zero energy homes a reality is reducing costs around new construction materials and building processes. Last week the U.S. Department of Energy announced a collaborative proejct between the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee Valley Authority and Schaad Construction to construct and monitor four commercially affordable ‘smart’ homes.
The homes will be designed to maximize energy cooling/heating, apply home power management systems, and tap on site renewable energy generation using passive and photovoltaic solar energy to power high efficiency appliances.
The video below is very boring, but you should watch it anyway. Its subject is a totally unspectacular mid-grade projection on a dark wall with big implications for the near-term future of human communication and entertainment. The hook is that this image is generated by a Toshiba Pico Prototype the size of a large cell-phone (at right). Capable of spitting out a 60” wide image at 10 lumens, the micro-projector is due to hit store shelves sometime early next year and will also be licensed to a wide variety of other companies.
Take a look for yourself:
As such projectors shrink in size, increase their resolution and require less and less power, it’s clear that they’ll be incorporated into mobile and other devices. I’d be completely shocked if Steve Jobs, the folks at Apple and all their competitors aren’t right now scrambling to develop the appropriate apps and incorporate the Pico technology into their next-gen products.
Prediction: Alternate Reality Gaming and Reality Television will converge in a big way by 2013.
Alternate Reality Gaming is a new “interactive narrative structure that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants’ ideas or actions”, as defined on Wikipedia. Basically, that means a fictitious scenario played out atop the real world.
To date, most of the massively popular ARGs such as The Lost Experience and I Love Bees have been largely organized through the web while serving a broader marketing purpose. But as the genre 1) continues to gain in popularity and 2) the cost of high quality video production continues to decline, it is likely they will gradually develop into a self-sustaining industry capable of generating programs that equal or exceed contemporary broadcast television quality.
This will be made possible by the proliferation of ultra-cheap and capable DV cams, easy and broad wi-fi transfer of footage, smart footage databses, and robust computers/editing programs that can effortlessly manage more video feeds and increase prduction quality in numerous other ways.
For example, it will soon become possible to organize a theme party (i.e., Presidential Campaign Trail), set some basic game rules (i.e. Everyone Must Dress Accordingly, Deliver Stump Speeches, then Vote for the Party President), record the entire experience, and then quickly edit it into a final product good enough to air on, say, a channel like VH1. My guess is amateurs will be capable of producing such programming inside of 5 years time – though by then the primary audience will likely be web-based.
That being the hypothesis, here’s a list of 10 other ARG/Reality Show concepts that I think could be produced over the next 5 years:
1.THE SENATE: This active political reality show pits 100 Americans against one another as they seek re-election by effectively role-playing a live Senate situation. Political parties are formed and dissolved, legislation is proposed and voted on, current events and wild-card situations add spice and flavor. Ultimately, the show serves to mirror and parody real-life politics.
2. FANTASY WILDERNESS ADVENTURE: Small fun-to-watch groups role play a harrowing Robin-Hood-style journey through the wilderness. They proceed from elegant or hilarious sketch-to-sketch and interact with B-actors and extras playing various medieval roles. The final product is an edited story that can be inter-cut with other groups on parallel or complementary adventures.
3. HISTORY: Participants are placed into unique historical and fictional scenarios and must use their role-playing skills to turn the situation to their advantage, often creating alternate versions of past events. The best role-players proceed to the finals where they interact with one another in a grand scenario. Expert judges (historians, psychologists, acting coaches) eliminate the worst player-actors until just one is left standing.
4. HACK ATTACK: America’s best hackers all try to crack a multi-layered and formidable website. They film their efforts via web-cam and provide interview commentary via Skype. The best footage, of both the game leaders and the most interesting personalities, is cut into regular episodes.
5. SECRET AGENT: Ordinary Americans are placed in extraordinary spy situations and must react and solve their assignment. They must unravel clues, decide which characters to trust, and ultimately survive the adventure. The winners are the ones who score the most points by achieving goals in the shortest time span.
You’re fifteen. You’ve managed to group together a drummer, a guitarist and a bassist (oh yeah, and Tim your little brother on the cowbell) and you intend to walk the path of the rock gods of lore. Images of tour buses, late night parties and thousands of screaming fans fill your head even before the first lyric has been written down. Already you can imagine swimming in hundred dollar bills or wrapping your Ferrari around a telephone pole, only to walk away and buy another.
When you get together with your buddies, you all brainstorm riffs you think could be big hits. You hum the tunes in your head which are recorded in note form on your portable computer. You listen to the notes played through your headphones to ensure the playback is what you imagined, tweaking a few notes here and there. Individual music pieces are cross-checked with the Library of Congress to make sure that the tune you had in your head didn’t come from another band or radio jingle.
The finished product is then melded together to form an entire song which tells each player the difficulty level of their own part (Tim on cowbell has to be cut, sorry Tim) and prints out the individual sheets for practice at home. You’re auto-assigned the task of coming up with the song title, writing the lyrics, and recording them to be combined later with the rest of the song.
When all is said and done, you have a song you think sounds amazing. You sell it for fifty cents a copy online and send it to all your friends, hoping the word will get out. Within a few weeks you’ve sold over 50,000 copies and are a small hit. People want more. A local venue wants you to open for Weezer Friday night and of course you accept. You’ve made it big.
Now all you have to do is actually learn how to play the song for real.
The most amazing thing about some of the movies hitting theaters nowadays is their uncanny ability to map human movement for special effects. Case in point are creatures such as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, the great ape in King Kong, and of course the infamous movie Beowulf which mapped out the actors bodies so accurately that in some of the shots you’d have sworn they weren’t computerized images. It only makes sense that this kind of technology would gradually find its way into the broader consumer market.
Already people are spending hundreds on golf clubs that measure swing speed and trajectory, or gloves that tell you if you’re gripping the handles too hard. In fact there are even devices out there already that can tell you where your swing is wrong, if your feet are too far apart, or if your posture is poor. You can buy equipment and software that can work for just about any sport. Tennis, bowling, baseball or track and field to name a few. Heck, even curling, the greatest Olympic sport in the world, could benefit from video analysis.
Down the road we could see the technology get so advanced that instead of having to carry around 30 pounds of equipment costing over a thousand dollars, all we’ll need is an add-on to our digital cameras. Coupled with expert analysis instead of self-analysis, this product could change the importance and role of coaches worldwide.
Sports are perfect for this technology, but what other applications could this be used for?
Imagine taking tango lessons in your home with a world-class dancer telling you where you’re going wrong and what you’re doing right. A culinary program showing you the proper way to clean a fish or prepare cherries jubilee. If we really expand our minds, how about a mobile program on a sailboat speaking into your ear piece whether you’re on the port side instead of starboard, or telling you how to tie a knot step by step. What would you think about taking karate lessons from Jet Li?
If you enjoy Wii Fit, imagine playing a video game that depends on your every move. When attacking an entrenched bunker you have to lay lay flat on the ground, then jump up quickly to sprint across a mine field. Or maybe you have to dodge a lineman to dive and score the winning touchdown.
The possibilities are almost endless and not all that far from feasible.
But would there be a downside to this kind of technology?
As the 21st century unfolds, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and robotics will change our lives in many ways. We will enjoy better health, a longer lifespan, and new conveniences. But these developments pale in comparison to simulated reality systems projected for future entertainment.
Psychologists list our most enjoyable recreation activities as: visiting family and friends, watching TV, browsing the Internet, playing video games, making phone calls, shopping, eating out, and catching a flick.
U.S. Census reports 98% of American families own 2.4 TV sets per home and watch 32 hours of TV each week. 75% access the Internet from home, and nearly everyone uses the telephone.
Sales drive this multi-billion dollar entertainment industry. Consumer Electronics Association projects more than 18 million TV sets will be sold this year. New models are larger and thinner; some with fancy features such as live-show pause and smart program selection.
Experts believe future entertainment systems will satisfy much more of our recreational needs. In his web article, “Views of the Future,” British Telecom futurologist Ian Pearson predicts by:
2015 – TV, computer, and phone converge into a wall-size, interactive, 3D screen, delivering entertainment and information tailored to our wishes. When idle, it displays beach, forest, or other scenes so real, we think we are there.
2020 – Nano-size electronics inside “active contact lenses” receives TV, video games, Internet, and phone calls; and displays images directly onto the retina. Tune program with pocket keyboard initially; later with thought control. Watch TV; browse the web, or video-phone a friend; all with eyes open or closed.
What if we are being too cynical about China’s eco-future in the transportation sector?
More forward looking architects and energy system designers envision homes that are (annually) net producers of energy and able to push energy back into the grid, or fuel vehicles. To arrive at both futures, we must first understand the fundamentals of zero energy home design, on site energy storage and power generation, and home power management systems.
When you get together with your buddies, you all brainstorm riffs you think could be big hits. You hum the tunes in your head which are recorded in note form on your portable computer. You listen to the notes played through your headphones to ensure the playback is what you imagined, tweaking a few notes here and there. Individual music pieces are cross-checked with the Library of Congress to make sure that the tune you had in your head didn’t come from another band or radio jingle.
