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One in four Germans wants microchip under skin

March 8, 2010 /

RFID Implant

Above: Amal Graafstra‘s self-administered RFID implant.

It sounds like something from a sci-fi film, but one in four Germans would be happy to have a microchip implanted in their body if they derived concrete benefits from it, a poll Monday showed. […]

In all, 23 percent of around 1,000 respondents in the survey said they would be prepared to have a chip inserted under their skin “for certain benefits”.

Around one in six (16 percent) said they would wear an implant to allow emergency services to rescue them more quickly in the event of a fire or accident.

And five percent of people said they would be prepared to have an implant to make their shopping go more smoothly.

PhysOrg: One in four Germans wants microchip under skin: poll

(via Chris S.)

See also:

Scrapheap Transhumanism

Lepht Anonym’s blog

Amal Graafstra’s blog

Create your own augmented reality maps – Layar tutorial

March 7, 2010 /

Layar

Do you want to make your own layer? This tutorial tells you how to do it! These are the requirements to create your own layer:

Webserver with PHP and JSON support
MySQL database with phpMyAdmin
For testing: Layar installation on your iPhone 3GS or Android based phone (with GPS and compass)

Stedelijk Museum: Creating a Layar layer: a step by step tutorial

(via Bruce Sterling)

AttractiveCity – an interactive City generator

March 7, 2010 /

AttractiveCity – an interactive City generator from steffiX_stefanieSixt on Vimeo.

(via Bruce Sterling)

Cyberwar Hype Intended to Destroy the Open Internet

March 4, 2010 /

Michael McConnell on the right

Above: that’s McConnell on the right.

The biggest threat to the open internet is not Chinese government hackers or greedy anti-net-neutrality ISPs, it’s Michael McConnell, the former director of national intelligence.

McConnell’s not dangerous because he knows anything about SQL injection hacks, but because he knows about social engineering. He’s the nice-seeming guy who’s willing and able to use fear-mongering to manipulate the federal bureaucracy for his own ends, while coming off like a straight shooter to those who are not in the know. […]

He’s talking about changing the internet to make everything anyone does on the net traceable and geo-located so the National Security Agency can pinpoint users and their computers for retaliation if the U.S. government doesn’t like what’s written in an e-mail, what search terms were used, what movies were downloaded. Or the tech could be useful if a computer got hijacked without your knowledge and used as part of a botnet.

Threat Level: Cyberwar Hype Intended to Destroy the Open Internet

Skinput turns your arm into a touchscreen

March 2, 2010 /

Skinput

In Skinput, a keyboard, menu, or other graphics are beamed onto a user’s palm and forearm from a pico projector embedded in an armband. An acoustic detector in the armband then determines which part of the display is activated by the user’s touch. As the researchers explain, variations in bone density, size, and mass, as well as filtering effects from soft tissues and joints, mean different skin locations are acoustically distinct. Their software matches sound frequencies to specific skin locations, allowing the system to determine which “skin button” the user pressed.

Read More –PhysOrg: Skinput turns your arm into a touchscreen

(via Edge of Tomorrow)

HP Invents a Central Nervous System for the Earth

February 19, 2010 /

hp nervous system

Just days after Cisco signaled it will horn into IBM’s turf by rewiring an aging city in Massachusetts, Hewlett Packard announced this morning the first commercial application of its own holistic blueprint–the torturously acronymed “CeNSE” (short for Central Nervous System for the Earth). Much like IBM’s “Smarter Planet” campaign, HP proposes sticking billions of sensors on everything in sight and boiling down the resulting flood of data into insights for making the world a better, greener place. But what sets HP apart from its rivals is its determination to create a smarter planet almost entirely within house, from sensors of its own design and manufacture to servers to software to the consultants who will tie it all together. And its first customer could not be less green: Shell Oil.

Fast Company: HP Invents a “Central Nervous System for Earth” and Joins the Smarter Planet Sweepstakes

(via Grinding)

Recognizr: face recognition software for mobile phones

February 17, 2010 /

Last July TAT (“The Astonishing Tribe“) posted a concept video of their augmented social face-card system (okay, I made that term up, what else should we call it?). The video tickled the imagination with over 400,000 views.

TAT has since teamed up with Polar Rose, a leading computer vision services company, to turn that concept into a reality. The TAT Cascades system combined with Polar Rose’s FaceLib gives us this prototype called Recognizr.

Read More – Games Alfresco: Your Face Is A Social Business Card

(via Bruce Sterling)

Augmented reality tattoos

February 16, 2010 /

augmented reality tattoo

Not much info about this:

This ThinkAnApp augmented reality tattoo looks like a plain black box, but when placed in front of a webcam, a winged dragon emerges.

Video and more pictures as TrendHunter

(via Chris Arkenberg)

Organic crystals promise low-power green computing

February 12, 2010 /

croconic acid

A saffron-coloured crystal could provide a step towards greener electronics.

Some types of low-power computer memory store information using metals that are ferroelectric, meaning they form positive and negative poles when placed in an electric field. However, many of the more common metals used are either rare or toxic.

Now Sachio Horiuchi at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Ibaraki, Japan, and colleagues have discovered ferroelectric behaviour in crystalline croconic acid, which contains just carbon, oxygen and hydrogen.

New Scientist: Organic crystals promise low-power green computing

(via Atom Jack)

A 50-Watt Cellular Network

February 10, 2010 /

solar powered cell tower

An Indian telecom company is deploying simple cell phone base stations that need as little as 50 watts of solar-provided power. It will soon announce plans to sell the equipment in Africa, expanding cell phone access to new ranks of rural villagers who live far from electricity supplies.

Technology Review: A 50-Watt Cellular Network

(via Edge of Tomorrow)

Who’s going to start settings these sorts of things up in American cities to power decentralized wireless networks?

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