Masters of The Universe!

I have been offered a work placement at ITV Future Technologies in Camden. Great! I’m not writing about that now but I’m sure I will post about what I can while I’m working there. It has got me thinking about my future though. What do I want to do? Who do I want to do it for? Will it make me any money?

I am talking about employability of course, and not just getting a job after my BA Honours but ‘being all that I can be’. I am concerned that my BA may not be enough let me reach the heights that I want to in my career. Fate could deal me some great cards in terms of working for the right people and being in the right place at the right time but if there is something I can do now to give me the edge over my competitors then I owe it to my future to do it. I have learnt from my father’s experience when he reached a point from which he could not ascend because of a piece of paper (or lack thereof) regardless of experience and being the best in his field. I don’t want this to happen to me, so any qualifications I can get now, I won’t have to struggle without later and may open doors for me sooner than would have otherwise opened.

What this is all leading to is me doing a masters. To this end I have begun looking at MA and MSc courses starting September 2009 and thought I would share a few with you. I will NOT be doing a masters at Ravensbourne as I feel in order to get the best out of it, I need resources. Something that Ravensbourne’s head faculty seem reluctant to provide (for whatever reason) to the interaction department.

Here are a few of the courses I am considering:

MSc Multimedia Design and Virtual Reality Technologies

MA Interaction Design

MA Design for Interactive Media

MSc Human Computer Interaction with Ergonomics

MSc Digital Media

MSc Human-Computer Interaction

I am hoping to talk to someone at Ravensbourne soon about how to go about applying as even if I decide not to do a masters, there is no harm in applying. Oh and it’s going to cost about £5,000.

On The Surface It’s All About Sex

After searching YouTube for a while today looking for new and interesting things and stuff, I came across an advert for Microsoft Surface technology. The Rio in Las Vegas has recently installed Surface and the ad demonstrates a few ways in which the technology can be used. The usual things appear such as seeing what is on at the Rio, what there is to do in Vegas and ordering drinks from the table. The main focus of the ad however is flirting.

The video shows girls using Surface to control ceiling mounted cameras above other tables to ogle men, then it allows them to send a message to that person or table. The guy then orders a drink and has it delivered to the girls’ table, all without leaving his seat. I like the integration of an instant messaging system and the new slant on the technology but I feel that the sexual undertones the voice-over suggests are far too optimistic. Now you don’t actually have to stand up to order a drink you don’t have worry about staggering over to the bar, falling flat on your face and embarrassing yourself.

No more is Surface simply resizing and moving around images and video (which is what you normally see in touch screen demos) and the premise of social interaction seems to be a good one, especially in an environment where everything is to excess.

I am going to be in Las Vegas in August so I will definitely be checking this out first hand and let you know what it is actually like to interact with.

As they say, sex sells. So why not use it to sell Microsoft Surface technology? Now it seems like there may be a use for it after all.

Facebroke?

So who broke Facebook? Come on, own up.

I’ve noticed recently that Facebook is having a whole bunch of problems that are quite serious isues with regard to users.

These include:

• Photo tag requests are not displayed correctly - when you click to view the tag request it appears people have tagged the search button, go home and then click the request again and all is ok.
• Videos that are uploaded run far faster than they should but keep the audio running normally. Makes for some interesting viewing.
• People tag you in some photos or video and Facebook notifies you, you click to view the photo and it takes you to a random photo - it appears the album does not exist.

I think it is possible that Facebook has become too big, with so many people adding hundreds of pointless applications it seems likely that it has put unexpected stress on their services. Imaging how much storage and processing power they need when you consider how many photos you upload and how much you pay for that. Its free, exactly.

I read recently that Facebook was broke and running out of storage space so were approaching a series of venture capitalists for funding to buy more servers.

So could all this mean the end for Facebook? Only about a quarter of my friends lists actually update it now compared to pretty much all of them 6 months ago.

Google… are you interested? They are building their own social networking applcation to run on 3rd party websites as a means of seeing what your friends are up to and collaboratively reading web pages. I can’t remember off-hand what that was called or exactly what it does but I am keeping my ears close to the ground to find out more. Would Facebook be a nice addition to this? After all Google did buy YouTube, why not Facebook?

Microsoft Surface… “Its a Big Ass Table”

I was browsing around YouTube to find some videos about Microsoft surface to post about the actual point of it all as I was discussing today that the only thing you can do with most touch screens is look at photos, resize them and have a really cluttered desktop. Anyway, I came across the promotional video here which I recommend you watch but then I came across the video below which is a parody of the ad.

…and so you don’t think I just hate Macs, I also hate Microsoft… I am doomed.

Touch Screen DJ

This is a really cool use of touch screens and interactive visuals in a DJ music environment. This would have been great for Rave On Air and it seems to show great use of new digital media taking over again from the ‘analogue world’.

Scribbles Will Survive The Paperless Revolution

It seems everyone is getting on this paperless band wagon these days. Only yesterday I wrote about the new A4 sized E-paper developed by Epson.

Well today folks its Wacom (made famous by their drawing tablets) in partnership with E Ink announcing they have made a pen input e-paper.

They are describing it as “the ultimate version of an interactive piece of paper” and I agree, its all very well to be able to read books or newspapers on e-paper but its the scribbles that make paper what it is. The ability to take a pen and paper and create anything you like is why we love it so much. Paper is one of the most versatile piece of kit that we have and so can’t be easily replaced.

I can’t help feeling that while we have the illusion of moving forward with this technology we are in fact taking two steps back. Is it not the goal of technology to make improvements on the past, to make more things do… well more things? At the moment it seems that when we finally hit the paperless society, instead of having one piece of e-paper that can do everything actual paper can do, we’ll have a huge range of e-papers for specific tasks.

Future Appliance is Recycling Dishes?

I came across this video that shows what plain old-fashion ingenuity can do. The guy from MIT (surprise) thought of everything that a person might need and tried to make a machine that could do it all. This is obviously a prototype but the concept is sound.

The principle is to ‘make’ the pates on-demand to any shape with a maximum depth of five inches. By using plastics with a memory they can then be returned to they’re original shape and stored easily.

This device is space-saving too as cupboards full of plates are now stored as flat discs within the unit itself.

He also states that there is no reason you couldn’t make any shape with it and it may be possible to download designs from the internet and make a new plate, for a special occasion perhaps.

Paperless Paper

I was reading through my RSS feeds as I so often do and I came across this article which made me realise just how far we have come and how little we need to go to become a completely paperless society.

Epson have been developing electronic paper for a while now, previously producing a 7″ display, and have now shown off their A4 size piece of paperless paper at SID 2008. If just oogling the papery goodness of this isn’t enough for you then the specs are as follows: Resolution is 3104 × 4128 and has a contrast ratio of 10:1 which is supposed to replicate the look of actual paper. “The…electronic paper was developed by combining electrophoretic electronic ink of E Ink Corp and a low-temperature polycrystal Si-TFT of Seiko Epson”.

The company say they are in their “final stages” of developing the technology and are getting ready to start user-testing to develop the product for commercial use.

I can’t help wondering how long it will be before we see a Minority Report style newspaper which updates with breaking newsand display animations while still having the consistency of actual paper.

My best guess to make that work in a practicle sense would be to buy only one paper and pay a subscription to update it each day. That way you only buy one paper and people won’t litter they’re cool, new, high-tech e-paper.

It does beg the question though… with paperless paper… who needs an Epson printer anymore?

Judgement Day Is Near…!?

But the war is not between man and machine but between moths with machines… and other moths with other machines…?

Believe it or not there are companies experimenting with robots and moths that are very reminiscent of two very famous films.

Terminator-Moth

The idea of an internal robot occupying the space of the moths ‘entrails’ used for ‘bugging’ purposes in a military field capacity. The hopes are tobe able to camouflage surveillance equipment within the body of an insect. Remote control pet or Skynet in insect form?

Robocop-Moth

Scientists hoping to use people’s minds to control robots, have been using electrical impulses of Moths’ brains to move a small robot around. Similar to the exoskeleton in Robocop.

TED Talks and God Speaks

I was browsing TED Talks and came across this video.

The guy is basically designing new forms of life, at the level of bacteria but still he managed to transfer a chromosome from one to another and get the new chromosome to overwrite the existing one by making it think the existing one was foreign. He’s also written his own chromosome and is hoping to implant that and ‘boot it up’ in the same way. In case you wondered, its over 500,000 letters long. Thats 140 pages at size 10 type.

The first half of the video is amazing. The implications are far reaching. He even said the scientists working on the project ‘watermarked’ the genetic code (made of G A T C) by arranging different inert groupings of letters to sign their names in the chromosome. Biological Meta-data!

The second half is an interview style scenario and at the end, about 31 mins in, the interviewer asks “Aren’t you playing God?” to which he replies “We’re not playing”.

Theres also a question about security and new forms of bio-weaponry.

Amazing stuff I think you’ll agree.