Augmented Architecture

Application of Augmented Reality in Architecture and Urban Space - Architecture thesis project in Ecole Spéciale d'Architecture Paris Oct 2005 by Quck Zhong Yi, with help from Alexandre Pachiaudi (Pico), Anny Galanou, Gaetan Kohler, Nicolas Trouillard, and Leila.

Shootball::New Sports in Ubiquitous Computing

HP's Home of the Future

Eco-Feedback Can Change Our Consuming Ways

Original website

Technological innovations have impacted society, forging changes in our culture and how people view the world.  The telephone, radio, and automobile were innovations with the strongest impact in the early 20th century. 

     During the 1990s, the computer and internet impacted our culture by enabling individuals and companies to send much information to others within seconds.  The recent convergence of telephones, computers, and internet in small handheld devices or smart phones promises instant communication of audio, text, and video communication just about anywhere at anytime.

     As with all technologies, these innovations have had both positive and negative consequences.  The positives relate to a shared sense of community that people felt by watching the same broadcast programs. People can learn about news events simultaneously and then share that information with others via phone or internet. 

     Automobiles enabled families to visit relatives or see this country’s magnificent landscape. In addition, workers could move out to the country and commute to the cities to work, creating the suburbs, essentially redesigning the American landscape, for better or worse.  

    While the negarives of these innovations are several, the enviromental effects are the most relevant to this essay.  Overpopulation around the world is fueling massive consumption of nonrenewable resources.  Unfortunatley,  technological innovation has not helped so far to alleviate the environmental strain.  Automobiles add to the global warming problems by promoting long commutes.   Increased electrical power needed for electronics is also warming the planet by spewing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

     Technology can be the solution to this dilemma, delivering an ecological balance between earth’s resources and human consumption. Many innovations including solar, wind, geothermal, hybrids, bio-fuels and other technologies have been developed but not adopted by Americans for the most part.   

     Widespread adoption of green technologies requires a major change in American culture.  People must want to engage in a green lifestyle, decreasing their carbon footprint, not because it is fashionable but because they have a strong desire to do what is right for the planet.   And, it must be economical to do so.

     So, the question becomes: What innovation can promote a fundamental change in our consuming culture?   The innovation might be as simple aseco-feedback devices so that people know instantly their impact on the environment and more importantly, how much it is costing them. 

     For example, whenever someone turns on an oven, a panel in the kitchen could display how many watts are being used in real time and then show the environmental and monetary costs.   Where I live in Appalachia, it might show mountains being blasted off to get at the coal used for generating electricity.  These panels could also list a more energy-efficient alternative, such as using a toaster oven or microwave. 

   To illustrate further, sensors in a sink drain could detect polluting chemicals.   A voice with a visual display might show malformed frogs that are occuring in our nation's waterways as a result.    

   At the end of the year, carbon footprint maps based on energy consumption would be displayed on these eco-feedback devices for homeowners.   A comparison to the average footprint in the locality and suggestions for improvement should help people engage in a green lifestyle. 

    Hybrid cars already have a type of eco-feedback device by showing instant fuel economy in a display panel.  Many hybrid car owners  change their driving habits to save on gas because they get immediate feedback on what works.    Manufacturers could add more features to the panel, such as carbon emissions.    Maybe they could be combined with the GPS smart phone to tell drivers how they could combine errands or suggest alternatives.  

    Of course, eco-feedback devices will not have a strong impact on our consumer culture if it is cheap to consume nonrenewable resources. Government intervention is required so that the price of nonrenewable energy sources and pollution reflect their true environmental costs. Then,eco-feedback devices can have a strong impact on consumer culture.

Small Design Firm

Link
Small Design Firm was selected to help design and implement four large interactive installations for the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo, Norway. The Nobel Field, honoring each Laureate, is an illuminated garden of LCD displays, LED grass, and sound that responds to your movements through the space. To honor the life of Alfred Nobel, we designed the Nobel Chamber, housing an interactive book in the spirit of our Illuminated Manuscript. The third installation, the Wallpapers, is a continuous display surface of 68 million pixels, designed to allow visitors to further explore the life, work, and legacy of the Nobel Laureates. Finally, we designed the ambient sound and light for the Register, an abstract map of the world that serves as a gateway to the Center.

These interactives were a collaboration between Small Design Firm, Timon Botez and the London architects Adjaye/Associates.

Spark Lamp sparks energy consciousness

Conservation of energy and switching to alternative sources are two separate things. Or are they? Spark Lamp by Beverly Ng combines both and thus is a clear winner on the sustainability front. It is a lamp that runs on solar energy and thus teaches sustainability. Replete with symbolism, it seems to have been modeled on a plant. And like a plant, it collects sun's rays during the day to emit light at night. This simplistic design is actually quite a high-tech product. It has 1 RGB LED, and also comes equipped with Wi-Fi and tilt switch with biopolymers casing for protection against breakage. The Wi-Fi bit is actually a response to Swedish initiative to endow homes with smart meters that provide real-time info about energy consumption to the users over the internet. Spark Lamp encourages the initiative by incorporating the feedback on the lamp itself. Users feed their energy targets onto a computer
and as soon as the lamp is switched on, it extracts the current status from the system
. Thereafter it displays user's performance as red-below target, yellow - on target, green - above target. This happens for a mere 3 seconds, before the Spark Lamp starts emitting the normal white light. Spark Lamp seems just the right concept to egg on the green movement. More images after jump.

Cellphone Disco

an installation made out of flashing cells that is capable of visually revealing the electromagnetic waves of mobile phones. the lights are triggered by sensors that detect electromagnetic radiation of active mobile phones in a range of approximately 1 meter. this way, a sort of shadow or aura appears around the phone conversations, revealing a part of it's invisible body. other, less sensitive, sensors act as an inkless marker. the LEDs get activated only by an extreme proximity of the electromagnetic source. moving the phone close to the cells therefore leaves a trace of light, an electromagnetic drawing.
see also skyear & ambient blushing light & matrixx & memory wall & cellspace & biowall.

[informationlab.org|via we-make-money-not-art.com]

vision energy sculpture

a dynamic ecological sculpture designed as an "artistic barometer for resource efficiency". the concept proposes to place data-driven dynamic artifacts in public & private space that continuously represent the consumption of water, electricity & organic fuels. according to the designers, by representing such normally invisible processes, an emotional connection is made that leads to a higher awareness of the energy issue in society.

this project was selected as 1 of the very few finalists at the prestigious 2007 BrainPrize competition.

[link: braunprize.com & hfg-gmuend.de]

Hippie: A Nomadic Information System

Hippie is a WWW-based nomadic information system that supports users before, during, and after a visit to exhibitions. The system models the visitor's knowledge, preferences, and interests and tracks his/her position while moving in the physical space with Infrared, electronic compass and DGPS technologies. Therefore the user-modeling component of Hippie enables the system to adapt presentations, recommend tours, or alert the visitor when he/she passes hotspots in the exhibition. The underlying metaphor of connecting information space and physical space is applicable in many fields and arouses new challenges for user modeling and user adaptive systems.

Energy Orb - Hacking Your Perception

The energy orb is a simple globular light that changes color depending on how much energy you are using, or how much energy is available.

On NPR Bob Garfield had an interview with Clive Thompson of Wired Magazine.

Here is a transcript of On the Media:

BOB GARFIELD: Environmental responsibility is an issue on everybody's radar these days, and this month in Wired Magazine, Clive Thompson describes a new way for energy consumers to be aware of their consumption. It is an orb. It is awesome. Clive [LAUGHS], welcome back.

CLIVE THOMPSON: Good to be here.

BOB GARFIELD: Now, this is about ambient technology. Tell me what that means.

CLIVE THOMPSON: Well, ambient technology is a way of delivering information in a more calming way. The idea arose about 10 years ago in response to the fact that computers, particularly computers, were becoming much more stressful because they had so many sources of information that they're forcing you to stare at. There's email and there's browsers, and now there's YouTube and all this stuff. And so people were getting sort of drowned in all the information that they had to stare at.

And the idea was, well, maybe we should try and take some information and just sort of put it in the periphery of your eye span, as it were, you know, so that something you sort of glance at every once in a while, you don't have to stare at it.

BOB GARFIELD: Like a wall clock or a thermometer?

CLIVE THOMPSON: Precisely. A wall clock is a classic piece of ambient information, because even though you're not really aware of ever looking at it, you always generally know what time it is. And so it's a non-stressful source of information.

And it turns out that when they do studies, they find that ambient information, people actually retain it, sometimes even better than they do the stuff that they're staring at.

BOB GARFIELD: Now comes the orb, which is a new medium. Tell me about the history of the orb and then we can talk about this current application.

CLIVE THOMPSON: Well, the orb is the invention of a guy named David Rose. He's got a company called Ambient Devices. And his idea was okay, let's try taking the important information off the computer screen and into the periphery of your attention. And he wanted a little, beautiful thing that would be sort of pleasant to have sitting in the corner of your desk. And so he thought of a glowing orb.

And his first application, and everyone loved this, was that you would set it to monitor [LAUGHING] your stock portfolio so that it would glow green or whatever if – and you could pick the color - it would glow green if things were going well and sort of it would slowly darken to purple or whatever if your stock portfolio was going down, and so the idea being that you would sort of generally know whether or not your financial health was being taken care of without having to go to E*Trade, you know, five times a day or whatever and look at your portfolio.

And it really worked. It turned out when they did studies they found that people were about - like I'm sketchy on the exact amount - but it was around like 30 or 40 percent more likely to do active trading, you know, once every month or so, if they had an orb because they could see, wait a minute, something's wrong with my portfolio.

BOB GARFIELD: It's a way to synthesize a lot of information just with a color spectrum.

CLIVE THOMPSON: Yeah, exactly.

BOB GARFIELD: So how did the orb come to be embraced for energy consumption?

CLIVE THOMPSON: What happened was that an engineer at a Californian energy firm decided to see if he could hack people's perceptions to make them a little more aware of their energy usage by using orbs. And what he did was he basically bought about a thousand of these orbs and put them in people's houses and configured them so that they would glow different colors based on whether or not the grid was being really stressed.

If it was really being overused, at total capacity, you know, it would glow red or whatever, and if the grid was actually not being used, it would glow green or whatever, and the idea being that people would sort of have a sense of what the energy environment around them is like and they would react accordingly. They would turn things off when energy was getting overstressed and too expensive, and they would save themselves money, and they would save, you know, their energy usage for when it was, you know, glowing green and things were less stressed.

And sure enough, the same thing happened. People actually very effortlessly started changing their energy usage habits and they actually, they conserved a lot more energy because they had - suddenly they had information on what was going on around them.

BOB GARFIELD: Now, in your piece in Wired, you actually wrote about a second stage of awareness, and that is when your awareness isn't a closely-held secret but your own energy consumption is made available to a larger audience. Tell me how that works.

CLIVE THOMPSON: It's called the sentinel effect. If you let other people know what you're doing, their scrutiny will sort of freak out you out and you'll try and do better, as it were.

So if everyone were able to - imagine like a word where, like, I've got my energy orb or whatever, and it broadcasts, you know, through my blog or my website to all my friends, Clive's energy usage over the last week was, you know, up 20 percent or down 10 percent. You can sort of imagine this would very quickly take on, like, almost like a social virus type of effect where people would be almost actively reducing even more of their energy usage so they won't look like a complete energy glutton in front of their friends. You know, it would have a really wonderful social effect.

There's already a little experiment like this happening. Over in Britain there's this cool company that have created this thing called the Watson, and it's sort of like a little glowing brick. It does the same thing as the orb. It glows different colors based on your energy usage.

But the really cool thing is it's networked to the Internet, so it feeds that information online, if you want it to, and you can go online and you can see, you can compare yourself with other Watson users and see who's reduced the most energy.

And the other cool thing is you can see sort of how much in total all the Watson users have saved. That to me is really interesting, because one of the problems with personal conservation is that it feels like it's just a drop in the bucket. Like why am I bothering to turn off this light? It's not going to do anything.

Whereas, if you could go online and see that a million people had all turned off a light and you just saved [LAUGHING] 100 megawatts or the equivalent of 24 hours functioning of one coal-fired plant, that would really start to feel much more exciting and you'd be more likely to turn off that light.

BOB GARFIELD: Way cool. Clive, thank you so much for joining us.

CLIVE THOMPSON: Glad to be here.
Original site

rgby led desktop offers chameleon-like surface

This amazing LED tabletop surface can sense the color of objects placed on top of it, then automatically change its own colors to match.

meggy jr rgb handheld: build your own pixel games

Meggy Jr RGB is a new kit that we designed as a platform to develop handheld pixel games. It's based around a fully addressable 8x8 RGB LED matrix display, and features six big fat buttons for comfy game play. The kit is driven by an ATmega168 microcontroller, and you can write your own games or otherwise control it through the Arduino development environment. Meggy Jr is fast, programmable, open source and hackable. And fun.
To read more

SmartSkin: An Infrastructure for Freehand Manipulations on Interactive Surfaces

This project investigates a new sensor architecture for making interactive surfaces that are sensitive to human hand and finger gestures. This sensor recognizes multiple hand positions and their shapes as well as calculates the distances between the hands and the surface by using capacitive sensing and a mesh-shaped antenna. In contrast to camera-based gesture recognition systems, all sensing elements can be integrated within the surface, and this method does not suffer from lighting and occlusion problems.

Research partners
Takaaki Ishizawa, Kentarou Fukuchi, Asako Toda

Reference website

ARS Electronica 2006 Thermoesthesia

material supplied by http://versatilemedia.blogspot.com

Got fascinated by this one. imagine this would be a floor in a minimalistic glass house. See what I mean?

Thermoesthesia
Kumiko Kushiyama

TED: MIT Students Turn Internet Into a Sixth Human Sense -- Video

LONG BEACH, California -- Students at the MIT Media Lab have developed a wearable computing system that turns any surface into an interactive display screen. The wearer can summon virtual gadgets and internet data at will, then dispel them like smoke when they're done.

Pattie Maes of the lab's Fluid Interfaces group said the research is aimed at creating a new digital "sixth sense" for humans.

In the tactile world, we use our five senses to take in information about our environment and respond to it, Maes explained. But a lot of the information that helps us understand and respond to the world doesn't come from these senses. Instead, it comes from computers and the internet. Maes' goal is to harness computers to feed us information in an organic fashion, like our existing senses.

The prototype was built from an ordinary webcam and a battery-powered 3M projector, with an attached mirror -- all connected to an internet-enabled mobile phone. The setup, which costs less than $350, allows the user to project information from the phone onto any surface -- walls, the body of another person or even your hand.

Maes showed a video of her student Pranav Mistry who she describes as the brains behind the project. Mistry wore the device on a lanyard around his neck, and colored Magic Marker caps on four fingers (red, blue, green and yellow) helped the camera distinguish the four fingers and recognize his hand gestures with software that Mistry created.

The gestures can be as simple as using his fingers and thumbs to create a picture frame that tells the camera to snap a photo, which is saved to his mobile phone. When he gets back to an office, he projects the images onto a wall and begins to size them.



When he encounters someone at a party, the system projects a cloud of words on the person's body to provide more information about him -- his blog URL, the name of his company, his likes and interests. "This is a more controversial [feature]," Maes said over the audience's laughter.

In another frame, Mistry picks up a boarding pass while he's sitting in a car. He projects the current status of his flight and gate number he's retrieved from the flight-status page of the airline onto the card.

"If you need to know what time it is, it's as simple as drawing a watch on your arm," Maes said, while Mistry used his right finger to draw a circle on his left wrist. The face of a watch popped up on his hand, which the audience liked.

When Mistry folds his hands in "namaste" fashion, the system opens a menu to allow him to choose an application. If he wants to read e-mail on his phone, he draws an @ symbol in the air with his finger. He can project a phone pad onto his palm and dial a number without removing the phone from his pocket. As he reads the newspaper on the subway he can project a video onto the page that provides more information about the topic he's reading.

Maes and Mistry told Wired they've been working on the project for four months, day and night, and have filed a patent for it.

Maes' MIT group, which includes seven graduate students, were thinking about how a person could be more integrated into the world around them and access information without having to do something like take out a phone. They initially produced a wristband that would read an RFID tag to know, for example, which book a user is holding in a store.



They also had a ring that used infrared to communicate by beacon to supermarket smart shelves to give you information about products. As you grab a package of macaroni, the ring would glow red or green to tell you if the product was organic or free of peanut traces -- whatever criteria you program into the system.

"We wanted to make information more useful to people in real time with minimal effort in a way that doesn't require any behavior changes," Maes said. "The wristband was getting close, but you still had to take out your cell phone to look at the information."

That's when they struck on the idea of accessing information from the internet and projecting it. So someone wearing the wristband could pick up a paperback in the bookstore and immediately call up reviews about the book, projecting them onto a surface in the store or doing a keyword search through the book by accessing digitized pages on Amazon or Google books.

They started with a larger projector that was mounted on a helmet. But that proved cumbersome if someone was projecting data onto a wall then turned to speak to friend -- the data would project on the friend's face. Last month, they switched to a smaller projector and created the pendant prototype to be worn around the neck.

The TED demo was the first time they've shown it in public, though they're far from making a commercial product or forming a company around their invention. "But we're really excited about the potential," Maes said.

They learned recently that cellphone makers soon plan to release cellphones with projectors integrated in them, which will simplify their system even more.

Location-Based Computing: Letting Computers Know Where Things Are

Business computing today works largely on a flawed vision of reality. For example, consider an inventory-management application. The system holds a list of items in a database, such that:

• When items arrive at the store, the item counts are incremented with the number of items that get stocked.
• When an item gets sold, the system decrements the count for that item.
• When an item count falls to a specific pre-set level, the system marks that item for ordering, or possibly even orders more stock automatically.

But the system doesn't really know how many items the store has. It can't, because the items themselves have no connection to the computer. For example, the system can't—by itself—account for misplaced items or stolen items. The system is forced to rely on a human to give it that type of information.

All that's going to change, because one of the next big advances in computing is location-based computing, which uses one or more methods to let the computer know and track the exact location of objects or people.

Location-based computing, so far, has been primarily concerned with GPS information: geographic locations—positions—of roads, buildings, trucks, and, in some cases, people. Trucking companies, for example can attach a GPS system to their trucks, which can then wirelessly send their location back to company headquarters every second or so, letting the company track the actual position of the truck. If it stops, the company will know. If it gets lost, the company will know. If the driver speeds, or drives too slowly, or takes a detour to visit his family, the company will know.

Similar applications let you track individuals via their GPS-enabled cell phones, or indeed, any cell phone, because software can triangulate the position of a cell phone by the relative speed with which it responds to various cell phone tower signals. That's how the 911 emergency service can locate a cell phone caller.

GPS tracking is fine for large objects that move large distances outdoors, but it's not cheap. A GPS receiver is relatively large, and it's not well-suited for tracking objects that are indoors, where they don't have clear access to satellite signals or objects that move only small distances, such as items in a store, books in a library, or children in a school. Another technology, called Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), is better suited for tracking small objects. Several years ago, Walmart, in a rare lucid action that might actually benefit employees, customers, and the corporation, announced it would require all its Sam's Club suppliers to tag shipping pallets with RFID tags by 2010. At that time, RFID technology was in its infancy, tags were battery-powered, relatively large, and expensive.

Tagging pallets to trackmerchandise uses RFID at the macro level, but still doesn't help computers track individual objects—the goods after they're removed from the pallet. But we're about to see an explosion in location-based computing at the micro level. Newer generations of RFID tags are far smaller, have (mostly) dropped the battery and draw power from the tag reader's electrical signal, can hold more data, and are more reliable. You can easily buy tags today that are about the size of a grain of rice—but much smaller tags are in development; some are the size of a dust particle, almost invisible to the naked eye.
RFID tags do cost money, but the price is coming down rapidly. Costs vary depending on the type of tag (powered or unpowered), how close a reader must be to read the tag, the amount of information the tag will hold, the tag's frequency, the tag's size, and of course, volume. Common unpowered tags currently cost between 7 and 15 cents per tag. They're already being used on some big-ticket items, particularly those that are small and easy to misplace or steal. Readers cost money as well, running from $100 to $750 or so, with the average reader probably running around $300. At these prices, the tags obviously aren't ready to be used to track inexpensive items. However, they're already reaching the price point where they're useful for tracking more expensive items, where keeping the item's location in sync with software is critical.

If you're already working with location-based computing technologies, let me know. If you're not, but you have ideas about how you plan to use location-based computing in your business or your applications, let me know that as well.

reference

Designing Calm Technology

Introduction

Bits flowing through the wires of a computer network are ordinarily invisible. But a radically new tool shows those bits through motion, sound, and even touch. It communicates both light and heavy network traffic. Its output is so beautifully integrated with human information processing that one does not even need to be looking at it or near it to take advantage of its peripheral clues. It takes no space on your existing computer screen, and in fact does not use or contain a computer at all. It uses no software, only a few dollars in hardware, and can be shared by many people at the same time. It is called the "Dangling String".
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THE COMING AGE OF CALM TECHNOLOGY[1]

The important waves of technological change are those that fundamentally alter the place of technology in our lives. What matters is not technology itself, but its relationship to us.

In the past fifty years of computation there have been two great trends in this relationship: the mainframe relationship, and the PC relationship. Today the Internet is carrying us through an era of widespread distributed computing towards the relationship of ubiquitous computing, characterized by deeply imbedding computation in the world. Ubiquitous computing will require a new approach to fitting technology to our lives, an approach we call "calm technology".

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Interactive UI in Mimority report (G-speak?)

G-speak- spatial interaction

Oblong Industries is the developer of the g-speak spatial operating environment.

The SOE's combination of gestural i/o, recombinant networking, and real-world pixels brings the first major step in computer interface since 1984; starting today, g-speak will fundamentally change the way people use machines at work, in the living room, in conference rooms, in vehicles. The g-speak platform is a complete application development and execution environment that redresses the dire constriction of human intent imposed by traditional GUIs. Its idiom of spatial immediacy and information responsive to real-world geometry enables a necessary new kind of work: data-intensive, embodied, real-time, predicated on universal human expertise.

Some of the SOE's core ideas are already familiar from the film Minority Report, whose characters performed forensic analysis using massive, gesturally driven displays. The similarity is no coincidence: one of Oblong's founders served as science advisor to Minority Report and based the design of those scenes directly on his earlier work at MIT. Other foundational components are less directly visible but as crucially transformative. The g-speak platform braids development arcs begun in the early 1990s at MIT's Media Laboratory, where Oblong's principals produced radical user interface advances, distributed and networked language designs, and media manipulation technologies.

From academia; into popular cinema; and out broadly into the world as commercial product: it's an unordinary path for technical thought and effort, but one -- leading to g-speak -- that seems now logical and even necessary. The people who work in Oblong's Los Angeles and Barcelona laboratory offices are as concerned with design as with programming, with humanist principles as with running a company. Synthesizing these concerns is the only way to insure that the metamorphosis of human-computer interaction we offer the world will be one of beauty and durable worth.