The Astonishing Tribe (TAT), using software from Polar Rose, has created a mobile application that uses facial recognition to perform social search. Users submit photos of their faces to the Recognizr website, along with what web links they want associated with them (e.g. blogs, Flickr, or YouTube). Then by downloading an app to their mobile phone, they can take a photo of a stranger, submit it to the website, and if that stranger is a Recognizr user, find out all about him/her.
This work reminds me of Bradley Rhodes‘s old wearable/AR emacs plugin, the Remembrance Agent. The idea behind that application was that, while wearing a PC-104 based Lizzy wearable computer, you’d type in names into emacs, and then bring up whatever notes you had about them. I don’t remember if it integrated with the Insidious Big Brother Database or not.
Its amazing how stuff that was "weird looking stuff coming out of research labs" when I was an undergrad is now "stuff you can buy at radio shack" (or at least at your corner t-mobile store)
I realized a few weeks ago, that we are indeed living in the future. Albeit one without atomic powered flying cars, jetpacks, and direct Pan Am flights to orbiting Hiltons and beyond.
I think a space boom is on its way……and we might have only one real oil crisis sitting between us and an atomic age. (although : we might simply have a "dirty coal gas byproducts" age instead)
I still hold by Bruce Sterling's comment on space colonization:“I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people settling the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live. It's ugly, it's inhospitable and there's no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it's so hard to reach.''Since high school or so, I've decided that astroid mining and all the other rationales for manned space exploration are kind of dumb. Asteroid are mostly nickel and iron, not exactly rare minerals. Show me a solid gold asteroid, and then I'll reconsider.
Terraforming? I don't know. Reflexively I'm against it, because it's destroying the untouched. But then again there's no real reason not to do it. I guess that make me a Red Mars sympathizer.
You missed this week's jetpack news? http://www.technewsdaily.com/hi-tech-jetpack-available-this-fall-0312/
The smartass in me really wants to retort with, "Yeah, but I also missed out the breaking unicorn news too."I will admit that with a 30 minute flight time and a range of 30 miles, this is *much* better than the laughable 20 second flight time of the rocket belt though. This is actually "practical."
Did somebody say "breaking unicorn news"?http://mashable.com/2009/12/13/younicornme-iphone/
The last unicorn news I got was a couple weeks ago from Sarah. http://www.facebook.com/sktyler?v=feed&story_fbid=352136659405http://games.adultswim.com/robot-unicorn-attack-twitchy-online-game.htmlComplete with an soundtrack by Erasure.
Cool! You remember the Remembrance Agent! (I know Brad quite well, although I met him after his doctorate, and I always thought it was a really cool project that just needed a few more technological leaps to be genuinely useful, but everyone seems to have forgotten about it.)