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Jean-Louis Etienne and Dominique Piotet -
Philippe Starck at TED2010 -
N. Kosciusko-Morizet and O. Dulac, Chairman of Atelier BNP Paribas -
Press Conference on Green technologies -
Angelika Blendstrup, Alexandre Scialom, Pascale Diaine Evangelist -
Jean-Michel Billaut, Founder of Atelier -
Anne-Marie Idrac, French Minister of Trade -
Nathalie Koscuisco-Morizet, French Minister of the e-economy -
Bill Gates, Founder of Microsoft
// Rebellion Lab Blog //
PROTIP: A Logan’s Run Aesthetic Makes Emerging Tech Even Cooler
Mark Alvarez, 9/7/2011
If all goes according to plan, in five or ten years we won’t be carrying these bulky devices around. We’re getting closer, with smartphones and tablets, but there’s still a long way to go.
The way research is trending, one day we will no longer make the distinction between connected devices and physical space. On the environmental side of things, the internet of things ensures that one day everything in the physical world will be linked to the digital, whether as a data point or something more interfacable. This is where you get into the “information as the fourth dimension” thing.
It’s almost an inverse analogue of two-point perspective in the Renaissance, an extension of space. With all the ways we still believe Renaissance propaganda today, we still tend to believe that the shift to 2D perspective in painting signifies some sort of cognitive/technological advance in humanity. It wasn’t — it was all about style, and imitating the ancients and what was apparently their overarching goal in art, to make things paintings life-like enough to play practical jokes on birds.
Poor birds. Birdemic (That was my try-out for Das Racist).
So we’re growing layers of information on the physical world. In the cloud, which by the way is named like the quaintest cosmography.
And that’s fascinating. But what fascinates me more, as a content-creator — as a content creator who loves working while wandering around cities — is what will become of computing devices.
There’s a movement to merge devices and the environment/the body, and I can’t wait until this becomes mainstream (meaning “becomes affordable”). Some of the more well-known projects are those that seek to make the skin the computing surface — Skinput, for example.
The other idea is to make surfaces the screen. Surfaces, not big-ass tables. One of the cool projects is Visualplanet’s Touchfoil.
Outside of everything else that’s cool about foil that turns any surface into a tablet, there is no bevel with touchfoil, so in effect it blends right into what ever surface it’s on.
Marat Kudryavtsev’s Communicate Gadget concept is even cooler.
First, because it totally recalls neon-modernist fantasy like Deus Ex:Human Revolution:
But aesthetics aren’t the only important thing about technology, despite what Steve Jobs might lead us to believe. And yeah, lifestyle is aesthetics.
The first think that I, as a professional writer-about-technology person, ask when I see a device is: will this thing fit in my pocket? (I might have mentioned that carrying heavy backpacks around the city is a vertical I’d like to see disrupted.) The answer to that question is: it’s on the large side, but yes.
Basically, the Communicate Gadget is a riff on projected touchscreens. It’s sort of a riff on what people are doing with Pico projectors right now. Kudryavtsev’s project is awesome for so many reasons, mainly because yeah, that’s the near future.
While I do think we’ll eventually come up with something more elegant than having to carry a device around everywhere we go, that’s kinda a ways off — and despite the fact that I’m playing the hell out of Deus Ex:HR right now, I’m not getting Transhumanist up in this joint. Maybe something embedded into clothing, or maybe something like Skinput, that you wear like a fashion accessory. Even though you’re still carrying around an external device with Skinput, at least it frees up both hands in situations where you don’t have anything to put your computer on.
But now that I’ve think further about the Communicate Gadget, what really attracts me to this concept is 100% percent aesthetic. It’s not doing anything super original, but I love the retro-future look of it. It’s like Princess Leia’s ship mixed with a Commodore Vic 20. It’s like computing out of a PVC pipe.
But my point remains.
RebLab Visits … Zappos HQ
Jourdain Vannier, 9/16/2011
A lot has already been written about Zappos culture… and Zappos’s website remains the largest online shoe store. In the course of my first visit in this company, I made out what Zappos’ concrete and visible culture was inside the company.
Everyone knows about its message of delivering happiness: Tony Hsieh, the founder of Zappos, conveyed the ideal of happiness into the sphere of the company. Zappos’s core values could seem pretty weird compared to European ones: having fun, being passionate and humble… and being offered 3000 dollars when willing to quit the company. That is fulfillment.
Humourously customized desks in the office, nice café with tasty cookies to gather employees, politeness and smiles everywhere can’t lie.
But employees are not the only ones to feel happy. Customers benefit from an amazing after-sales service (a “wow through service”), and from an upscale hotline where the average waiting time is evaluated to be 20 seconds or less. Peak months of reactivity are written over the walls as well as daily sales records.
It’s not auto-complacency, it’s inspiration. Determination, family spirit and a positive team-building while hiring allow a coherency felt by the customer when buying, calling or re-shipping.
Satisfaction of the customer fits the confidence of investors. Culture for itself is not nothing: the added value of a dream service is the whole spirit of the company. That is what makes Zappos one of the best companies to work for in the USA: it has the magic formula to make employees, customers and ultimately investors much happier than in any other company. Delivering shoes only would be so prosaic.
Jourdain Vannier is a 20-year-old Sciences Po student.
Based in San Francisco, he is an analyst intern at RebellionLab
What Will It Look Like When Fashion is Truly Disrupted?
Fitted Fashion's Body Imaging
Mark Alvarez, 12-5-2011
Outside of other cultural forces, like the elitism concretized in Anna Wintour, one of the main barriers to the disruption of the fashion industry is the medium’s physicality.
While digital technology can radically reconfigure cultural mediums like film, music, and anything text, as long as fashion retains the means of production and distribution, the relationship between consumers and clothes will remain largely unchanged.
On the macro scale, subtle things are changing the industry. Social media is closing the gap between industry and consumers, even if only symbolically. Burberry, the fashion brand that seems to get tech the best, made news at this year’s London Fashion Week by making looks available to Twitter followers before the designs hit the runway.
Burberry also uses holograms on the runway. Which is awesome.
The success of Etsy has driven the creation of similar d.i.y. sites for indie apparel designers, and the last two years has seen the launch of scores of sites dedicated to promoting up-and-coming designers.
This is to say that, while there is innovation going on in fashion tech right now, the large majority of it is applying ideas from other areas into fashion – crowdsourcing, social sharing, location-based shopping, visual search, etc.
These are epiphenomena that are changing fashion, but the major disruption will come from more industry-specific initiatives.
Several trends lead me to believe that this will happen, sometime in the next decade or two. Fundamentally, what I’m dreaming of: anyone, with any level of knowledge in materials and design, can create their own clothes. Disrupting production. Secondly, and this is science-fictiony: changing how consumers acquire their apparel. Disrupting distribution. Down the line, this will change brick and mortar apparel locations, and this is also exciting.
Now
Nearly every week, it seems like another company is launching a new virtual fitting room. We’re at the point where the market is actually sort of flooded with the product; it’s a matter now of which retailers will use it, which AR will approximate the best fit, and when and if consumers will embrace it. All that said, retailers are at least using it right now for interesting promotions.
Location is boring. AR fitting rooms are boring. But the two together are sexy as hell.
Even though we’re in wait-and-see mode with this tech, the company that can popularize the AR fitting room will bring us one step closer to a world where online and offline shopping more closely resemble each other.
What’s more exciting than virtual fitting rooms is advances in body-measuring measuring technology.
While there haven’t been a ton of great fashion tech stories in the last few months, the acceleration of brands using measurement technology is exciting – and is definitely something that could change the future of clothing design and buying.
The latest thing in measurement (that I’ve seen) is Acustom (formerly Fitted Fashion), which uses 3D measurements to create custom fitted jeans – and plans on branching into other areas of apparel.
The company uses scanning technology from TC2, which uses white light to capture more than 400 measurements on the human body. Nothing radically different from what more established companies like Bodymetrics are doing, but what differentiates Fitted Fashion is the thinking behind it.
Early next year, Fitted Fashion is launching a design studio in NYC’s SoHo district. While Fitted Fashion is looking to partner with brands and retailers down the line, its primary intent with the jeans and design studio are to familiarize consumers with body-measurement technology.
Next
Imagine if this takes off – walk into a retailer, get measured once, and the company keeps your measurements stored for everything you order. (Obviously, body measurements change, so what would be awesome would be a way for consumers to do the measurements themselves … something like this, for instance.)
Down the line, on the more d.i.y. side, having these measurements available could help non-professionals design clothes. Plug the numbers into a 3D design program, and print that shirt out.
Yeah, print it out.
Earlier this year, Continuum Fashion released the N12 bikini, what the company describes as “the world’s first ready-to-wear, completely 3D-printed article of clothing.” The bikini owes its name to the material it’s made out of, Nylon 12, an ultra-thin, ultra-flexible used for making springs.
Etymologically, the bikini is the perfect symbolic choice for the future of clothes.
Consumer uptake of 3D printing technology has been slow but growing. The machines are still priced too high for mass adoption, but are falling steadily. With low prices right now hovering at $700, it’s not impossible to imagine a scenario in 3-4 years mirroring the e-reader market in 2010 (and what is happening right now with tablets), when a series of competing models finally drove the technology to an affordable price point.
And while it will be interesting to see what people will make when 3D printers become affordable, the implication for fashion, and other design industries, could be huge.
There’s so much experimentation going on in textiles these days, but printable textiles could have the biggest implication down the line — like we’ve seen with film, music and now books, nothing disrupts an industry faster than one whose product can be downloaded.
Downloading your clothes might still be a bit of sci-fi fancy, but we’ll soon have all the technology we need to make this feasible. Technically, down the line, we should have the ability to see an outfit we like, download it, and print it out ourselves. It sounds unreal, but the technological pieces that would allow it are right now being put into place.
Building a SF Fashion+Tech Community
Mark Alvarez, 11/15/2011
San Francisco has a large fashion scene, and of course a huge tech scene. But if you follow the two, you know that the intersect is rather limited.
SF Fashion+Tech hopes to change this.
“This is an opportunity to bring together fashion and tech,” said Fashion+Tech co-producer, Charles Belle at the organization’s inaugural event last week. “Our goal is to understand, collaborate, and bring together new ideas.”
The overarching theme of the (shortened) night: Fashion, as an industry and institution, is ripe for disruption.
“As far as industries go, fashion is particularly entrenched,” said moderator Lorraine Sanders, who covers fashion tech for the SF Chronicle. “Traditional players are not making the right moves.”
As someone who writes about fashion and retail tech for a living, I totally agree with what Sanders said. The fact that Burberry – who does use holograms, which is cool – is lauded for following a pretty standard social-media PR list during Fashion Week, is pretty damning.
The brands that succeed in the near-future will be the ones who are experiential.
“What people went nuts for on our site,” said Chris Lindland, Founder and CEO, Betabrand, “is what we call Model Citizen.” Model Citizen is built on the popularity of photo-sharing sites like Instagram. The idea is simple: turn fans into models.
“Anyone who sends a photo can become a star of the website,” Lindland said. But this is not the only way Betabrand uses media savvy to engage customers.
“We kill ourselves to make our site to be as entertaining as possible, so people can inject themselves into it,” Lindland said. “Like an episode of Saturday Night Live.”
This reflects the growing trend of brands becoming media outlets. Macy’s recently launched Wendy, a webshow produced by the people behind Vampire Chronicles. (And the opposite is happening, too, with TV shows turning into retail outlets — see Sons of Anarchy’s shopping app to see where transmedia retail is headed.)
“Brands are finally realizing that people want brands to have personalities,” said Sinead Norenius, Co-Founder of iFabbo (International Fashion and Beauty Bloggers’ Organization). “On the other hand, some brands are dinosaurs.”
There is a bit of a gap between the Wintour world and new media.
Bloggers are now recognizing their own value, Norenius said. Some make a lucrative career writing about products but the real strength of bloggers is that consumers identify with them. In the current environment, one of the big misconceptions that brands have is that blogger outreach is just “getting bloggers to blog about a product.”
Unfortunately, the event was cut short by a gas leak (the event was held across the street from where this is being built), but I was really impressed by the turnout. This is community that needs to be built out.
Fashion is still a quasi-aristocratic institution. Which makes it increasingly out of step with the times.
Groups like SF Fashion+Tech will help change it.
(Photo credit: Christophe Tomatis, Tomatis Photo)
MCM Prepares Fashionistas for Armageddon
Jourdain Vannier, 10/28/2011
The Mayan Calendar says the end of the world will occur in 2012. The prophecy has numerous detractors among scientists, but the scenario isn’t so grim for fashion addicts. Because desire meets fear pretty often. As often as fashion meets ingenuity.
The predicted end of our civilization means the beginning of an era of specific consumption. Fashion consumers are not worried: they now have a the opportunity to buy useful and fancy luxury goods to protect themselves from death. Or to die in good taste.
How to survive ? The future of fashion is worth the future of humanity.
The South Korea and Switzerland-based luxury brand Mode Creation Munic (MCM) has designed several prototypes of intelligent leather bags that could soon help you. These handbags can become a gas mask or merely contain a life jacket or a comprehensive safety box (depending on the model). Leather is combined with electronics to ensure discreet assistance, even if the convertibility is not always that invisible, which could be problematic if military-chic is not your favorite style.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that handbags are women’s favorite seduction weapon — that’s why MCM is meeting a demand. Pharaohs used to be buried with their servants, cowboys with their boots; why wouldn’t some women want to go to the world above — and defend themselves against catastrophies beforehand– with a chic handbag, especially if it has been a good companion in time of emergency?
The Mayas certainly never augured such a thing.
The Digitalization of Physical Space: Touchscreen Silly Putty Could Help
Mark Alvarez, 10/24/2011
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about digital technologies and urban design; more specifically, how architects and urban designers can integrate tech into public space.
You can put a touchscreen almost anywhere these days, but what is lacking is a surface that can conform to architecture’s needs. (It’s easier, sure, with this return to modernism, than it is with curvilinear forms like Frank Gheary’s).
Research at Stanford might provide the first step, building what is essentially an elastic skin that acts as a touch srface. The transparent material is stretchable to twice its normal size – kinda like a digital Silly Putty – is made from nanotube-filled silicon.
“This sensor can register pressure ranging from a firm pinch between your thumb and forefinger to twice the pressure exerted by an elephant standing on one foot,” said Darren Lipomi, a postdoctoral researcher on the research team.
The researchers envision using the material for making touch-sensitive prosthetic limbs or robots, for various medical applications such as pressure-sensitive bandages or in touch screens on computers.
It could also be good for covering surfaces, providing a new way of reacting to a digital object.
But back to the digitalization of space. Ultimately, the question is: what role will the integration of digital technologies into public space play? Right now it’s ludic, and info. There will come a day when designers and pundits tire of big data, the day when it’s so fully integrated into our lives so we don’t even notice it. Give it a few years. Cisco predicts that that 50 billion objects will be connected to the internet in 2020. By that time, we’ll have found uses far more interesting than just collecting data points.
Digital technology is changing the way we use the city. Box-stores and banks have to rethink their building strategy to compete with a medium that can do many things they do, without the massive overhead that building entails. On-line work creates a new class of mobile professionals – office-less, fluid (I’m writing this on a pier, watching seatulls in the Bay). The internet helps create movements that occupy public space (Occupy San Francisco is about 1000 feet behind me).
But digital technologies are rarely used as a building material, or at least a surface material. It’s interesting to think about how it will be use. Many urban theorists say that the primary function of public space is about creating surprise encounters. One of the things that well-built cities (San Francisco, Rome, Barcelona, Paris) do is to create a sense of surprise – that small thrill when noticing St-Etienne-du-Mont’s joyful asymmetry abutting the Place du Pantheon’s predictable Cartesianism, for example.
Digital technologies will help create a new sense of urban surprise, and is already leading to to surprise encounters in real physical space.
Despite the ubiquity of mobile computing, there is still a disconnect between space and technology. Space is public, technology is private and at the same time public. Space is slow to change, while in technology, iteration is the desired rule.
New technologies end up radically changing space. Look at the post-WWII cities like Los Angeles, and post-WWII ideas like the suburbs, designed with two new technologies in mind: mass-produced automobiles and mass-produced housing. Add to that the big post-WWII technology — the television, which replaced pubic space in the flight to the suburbs. What is new now, with today’s media technologies, is that they create new forms of public space — social networks, forums, etc.
The online world replicates the offline, and the efforts we see in today’s architecture and urban design are mainly replicating the online world in the physical world. Touchscreens on walls are sexy, but it’s really just a big-ass computer. Projecting Tweets on a well is cool, but, again, big-ass computer.
An augmented-reality architecture is cool, but it’s really just turning a building into a big-ass computer.
When the use of technology in architecture and urban design (and, by this declension, in retail and other non-office environments) is when digital technology is freed from the personal-computing paradigm. When the post-PC era really starts, not just when the PC morphs into something we carry in our pockets.
Now that digital technology is ubiquitous, it is time to stop thinking of it with the communications and information paradigm and expand its uses in wonderful ways.
How Digital Technology Transforms How We Experience Urban Space
Anyone who thinks that digital technologies have not radically altered our experience of space need only to walk down any city street.
How many people actively ignore the space around them, walking around glued to their smartphone?
Creators of the public space are going to have to deal with the fact that the urban experience is one in which many of us are simultaneously in at least 2 places. Bilocation, yeah, the 21st century version. What others call co-presence.
The big question is, as Gregory Wessner puts it in the introduction to Sentient City: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future Space, is: “At a time when digital technologies seem to be dematerializing more and more of the world around us (think books, CDs, photographs), what impact can they possibly have on the inevitable materiality of buildings and cities?”
Some, like danah boyd, argue that a vital part of the built world — public space — has already been dematerialized, in the form of Facebook and Twitter. That’s true to an extent. The two become blurred: our private space, our home, becomes increasingly public, while the physical public space becomes more private. iPods, iPhones and iPads become tools “for organizing space, time and the boundaries around the body in public space (Wessner 25).
As Sheri Turkle, director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, asks: ““What is a place if those who are physically present have their attention on the absent?””
What happens the public becomes the private and vice versa? First of all a lot of confusion.
One answer is to apply to the city on of Silicon Valley’s biggest cliches: “add a social layer to it.”
This is exactly what Andrew Blum proposes — less in the article than in the quote its end. His article’s money quote, through Blum from The Living’s David Benjamin — who, you have to admit, has the best name in the world for writing about urbanism.
“Public spaces are always going to be sites of negotiation. They are not places, like your laptop screen, where you can do whatever you want,” David Benjamin, of The Living, told me. But what if our screens engaged in that conversation? If our building facades didn’t just communicate information to us (à la the Jumbotron), but we communicated back, communally? After all, what makes cities vital are their color and diversity, the wild mix of scales, even the noise and confusion. This has been the defining sensation of modernity, from the Parisian boulevard to the contemporary aerotropolis. Social media has the potential to amplify this quality, making people feel disoriented and overwhelmed—but also focused and inspired. Great cities have always done both, and architecture’s role has always been to help make sense of it all. It took Mies to show how the lowly industrial I-beam could be transmuted into something as grand and symbolically profound as the columns of a Greek temple. What architect will turn the networked screen into a chapel?
How will the social-network city work? I don’t know. AR, obviously. Geo-location.
Last night on Market Street, I came across scores of “serendipity” created in public spaces: some modern dance thing in front of the Museum of Contemporary Jewish Art, a large demonstration that I guess was SF’s version of Occupy Wall Street, countless street musicians.
But among those typical experiences, there was one that was still relatively new: a group of people standing outside the empty space that used to be Comp USA. A car company had put up a surface computer with a riff on Dance Dance Revolution. And people were playing it, and a small crowd gathered.
Besides all the functions a city must have, it remains an aesthetic experience. This small crowd gathered around a a digital display is part of the battle against people closing in on themselves completely — lost in their smartphones, lost in their iPods, lost in their iPads.
It was such a simple thing, but for a moment digital technology offered a group of people an entirely new way of experiencing urban space. Ludic City, indeed.
The Future of Brick and Mortar Space
Mark Alvarez, 9/30/11
For a long time, I was going to do a PhD in architectural theory, so the interaction between people and physical space is a subject that I find infinitely fascination. (Managing a high-traffic movie theater with a tragedy of a lobby helped create this fascination, too, now that I think about it.)
I just finished a project on how digital technologies will transform the future of brick-and-mortar retail, and I wanted to share some of the main currents that I saw.
While many people seem to think the death of brick-and-mortar is to be desired — especially a lot of people in tech, who not only don’t see the forest for the trees, but have a hard time seeing the trees for all the pretty patterns on the bark — the truth is that stores are an integral part of the urban fabric and the ways human beings circulate.
I’m not an expert in stores by any stretch of the imagination, but I have a feeling that a lot of retail is still tied to traditions of the first big department stores in the 19th century. This sector has been slow to adjust, but I see a lot of changes coming. And changes that go far beyond just putting QR codes on everything and calling it the future.
A lot has been written about the pop-up trend and the idea of experiential stores, or stores that add something new to the mix, like the Spanish publisher who opened a bookstore that also sells pizza — which is an awesome idea, especially for those who love to read while eating. The underlying idea was not to sell pizza, but to create to support the publishing industry, which is going to continue to get hit hard as mainstream e-reader adoption accelerates.
The only downside to this idea that pizza is the absolute WORST food to eat while reading — which actually leads to my next startup: the restaurant that only serves food that is convenient to eat while you’re reading. Only forks, everything comes pre-cut. Are you an investor?
But — perhaps sadly — restaurants for people who read while eating are probably not the future of commerce, however delicious and edifying they might be. Here’s where I see technology changing the store in the next 15-20 years.
1. The cash register will cease to be an organizing principle. You’ll be able to pay from anywhere in the store. Right now, the current is working in both directions — tablet apps that allow salespeople to complete sales from anywhere in the store, and phone-based apps that let the customer scan a bar code and buy.
2. Corporate stores will resemble local venues. They’ll all have your data, tablet-equipped salespeople will have access to your entire history with the store. Yeah, a lot of us don’t like talking to salespeople, but they could come in handy if they know our purchase history.
3. Stores will be able to better predict and control traffic flow. Everyone by now knows about geo-fencing and location-based services. But stores will soon have geo-fencing within them, making any area that a customer is in more interactive but also, more interestingly, giving more control over where people circulate and when. Got a bunch of grumpy customers in a customer-service line? Flash sale, aisle five.
Other technologies will allow retailers to better predict traffic flow. Space is at a premium, so retailers will need to maximize its effectiveness.
4. New sales spaces. Right now, brands that are using smart-display tech are mainly doing so for marketing. Nordstrom set up a Kinect-powered virtual window that allows customers to “write” on store windows. That’s fascinating — and the possibilities are infinite. But the big idea is to use digital technology to create a store in previously inaccessible space. Tesco’s subway virtual store is the most well-known example of this, and it’s brilliant — you’re basically setting up another retail location, without any of the overhead.
5. 24 hour access. The other thing that surface-display technology will lead to is the 24-hour store. Smart windows will allow passersby to look at and purchase store inventory from smart posters attached to their windows or walls. Yes, this is already done, and yes, even more people are designing for it. Especially in areas with high levels of night-life traffic, allowing passers-by to immediately purchase that coat displayed in the window. The ultimate impulse buy.
6. And that will make holiday displays awesome. Not that anything can really beat toy trains or a window full of kittens, though.
Keep in mind that not all of this is 100% tech dependent, so it’s going to take architects and designers getting into the act — and from what I’m seeing, they’re coming up with some huge ideas in integrating physical and internet architectures. But, like in fashion, this is a new generation, and a lot of these people are still in school.
How Digital Changes the Physical World: Emotive Environments
Mark Alvarez, 9/23/2011
It’s easy to miss with all the hoopla surrounding Facebook, TechCrunch, Yahoo! and Google+ (it’s not a tech bubble, it’s a tech journalism bubble), but we’re stepping into the future.
There’s a lot of things in the R&D pipeline that are just starting to see the light of day in the real world. One of those is emotive environments fueled by new technologies.
Emotive environments are nothing new — I’d say they’re old as the wind, but no one really knows how old wind is — Muzak maybe the best example of augmenting the sensual experience of place. While Muzak has been a self-told joke for years, its origins are actually in the musical avant-garde, Erik Satie’s “musique d’ameublement,” what we call in English furniture or wallpaper music. What’s the point of that? Much like wallpaper music, tomorrow’s emotive environments are still today’s avant-garde.
This project by IAD Interaction Design defines broadly what to expect:
“Emotive Environments” is an approach to enrich the predominantly static characteristics of architecture with responsive, adaptive and smart elements and thereby create a space that exhibits some of the dynamics that can be found in nature. The project aims to realize a prototypical architecture that dynamically responds to the presence and behavior of its inhabitants. These immediate responses, including kinetic movements, visual, acoustic and vibrational feedback, are based on algorithms that model the behavior of self-organized natural systems. Accordingly, the interaction is initiated locally and subsequently spreads across the architectural space. The inhabitants can augment and alter the movements and sounds that are already present in the space generating an enhanced and novel spatial and behavioral experience. Due to a symbiotic relationship among the inhabitants and the “Emotive Environments”, the design is strongly informed by the human experience.”
Novel spatial and behavioral experiences are becoming increasingly common, at least as a marketing experiment. Nordstrom’s Kinect-powered light-writing window is a good example of how technology leads to new interactions with space, and Gomus I’ve already written about.
As with fashion/tech, a lot of the ideas for emotive — and augmented — environments, are coming from the next generation of architects. The most fascinating idea I’ve seen so far is by Harvard School of Design student Greg Tran. Tran’s idea is for a fully augmented architectural environment:
Yeah, we’re still far away from Tran’s vision being a possibility, but it’s getting closer. There are so many augmented reality platforms hitting the market that some day soon someone will figure it out. I think Aurasma is getting close with its augmented objects that you can interact with by touch. But for reality to truly become augmented, you’re going to have to take it out of the frame. What’s the answer? AR glasses? Not until you can put the tech on everyone’s eyes.
There’s a ton of effort being put into projection technology and holograms, so maybe that will be a mid-term solution. Smart surfaces will play a huge role too, obviously. Whatever it is, our relationship to physical space is going to change radically in the next 20 years.
Researchers Teaching Computers Football to Advance AI
Mark Alvarez, 8/19/2011
This has been a big week for machine learning. Yesterday, IBM released details of its “neurosynaptic computing chips” — chips modeled after the human brain. Today brings another attempt to model machine learning on the human world. But this time, it’s not biology, it’s sociology that’s being modeled.
And that sociology is football (NB – American football).
Researchers at Oregon State University are teaching machines to read and learn football plays, in order to create a computer capable of carrying out complex tasks.
“This is one of the first attempts to put several systems together and let a computer see something in the visual world, study it and then learn how to control it,” said Alan Fern, an associate professor of computer science at OSU.
Any given play in football has myriad moving parts — eleven players on each side, each performing a scripted event layered with tons of chance at every movement. I’ve been watching football my entire life and I catch maybe .01% of everything happening during any given play.
Yeah, it’s complex.
This complexity leads the researchers to think this could be the perfect thing for training computers to function in complex situations from factory efficiency to airport operation or nursing care.
“Football actually makes a pretty good test bed, because it’s much more complicated that [sic] you might think both visually and strategically, but also takes place in a structured setting,” Fern said. “This makes it quite analogous to other potential applications.”
“Using football, we created learning algorithms that allow the computer to see the plays, analyze them and learn from them,” Fern said. “Ultimately these systems should be able to see what is happening, understand it and maybe even improve upon it.”
So this week we’ve had news of two more attempts to model the computer after the human. What is fascinating is that they’re coming at the operation from opposite sides — one, trying to recreate biological structures, the other trying to recreate a symbolic structure (sports are symbolic structures, just more fun than most).
The OSU project could feed back into sports, too. Fern promises to perhaps make the system available to his school’s team in order to scout upcoming teams; who knows, it could be better at predicting offensive and defensive tendencies better than coaches and players are. It couldn’t be any worse than Dave Wannesdedt (dated joke, but Dolphins fans have a long memory).
Of course, it’s about that time of the year, so we could only hope that this technology will one day be incorporated into Madden Football’s play-calling algorithms, making the CPU do complex human things like NOT PASSING ON EVERY DOWN.
Related: Clear Eyes, Full Hearts. Can’t Lose
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