Ratchet Up

Fab Lab

he “fab lab.” as Dr Gershenfeld has nicknamed his invention, is a collection of commercially available machines that, while not yet able to put things together from their component atoms, can, according to its inventor, be used to make just about anything with features bigger than those of a computer chip. Among other tools it includes a laser cutter that makes two-dimensional and three-dimensional structures, a device that uses a computer-controlled knife to carve antennas and flexible electrical connections, a miniature milling machine that manoeuvres a cutting tool in three dimensions to make circuit boards and other precision parts, a set of software for programming cheap computer chips known as microcontrollers, and a jigsaw (a narrow-bladed cutting device, not a picture puzzle). Together, these can machine objects with a precision of a millionth of a metre. The fab lab's purpose is to endow inventors—particularly those in poor countries who lack a formal education and the resources to implement their ideas—with a set of tools that can translate back-of-the-envelope designs into working prototypes.

And it works. In Pabal, an Indian village with a population of 5,000, a dairy farmer's income is tied to the fat content of his cow's milk. Students at the nearby Vigyan Ashram science school are using a fab lab to build a sensor that will give Pabal's farmers a precise measure of that fat content. In Takoradi, Ghana, people have used the labs to produce a cassava grinder, jewellery, car parts, agricultural tools and communication equipment such as radio antennas. Solar-powered items to harness the relentless local sunlight are in the works. In Norway, Sami animal herders—who are among Europe's last nomads—are using fab labs to make radio collars and wireless networks to track their charges. And in Boston (admittedly not part of the developing world, but conveniently near MIT), the residents of a mixed-income housing complex are using one of Dr Gershenfeld's labs to create a wireless communication network.

The idea for the fab lab sprang from a popular MIT course titled “How To Make (Almost) Anything”, which provides a hands-on introduction to multimillion-dollar machines such as supersonic waterjets, powerful lasers and microscopic atom beams. In addition to engineering regulars, the class attracts scores of artists and architects who use the technology as a means of personal expression. These outsiders have designed a web browser for parrots, an alarm clock that has to be wrestled off just to make sure you really are awake and other such useful items.

But it was not so much the utility of the artists' inventions that Dr Gershenfeld noticed, as the fact that they were built by people with original ideas but a negligible background in technology. He realised that if he could put together an affordable, portable, tabletop version of the course, that concept could be taken to the masses. He identified the essential hardware and software, wrote a special program to translate designs into machine instructions, and then packaged the whole lot together.

Dr Gershenfeld believes the world is poised for a personal-fabrication revolution. Fab lab will, he hopes, be part of it. Just as computing power moved from million-dollar mainframes to hundred-dollar PCs, industrial-scale machinery is, in his opinion, beginning a transition to the desktop. While personal fabricators will not replace mass production, he believes that within the next few years they will allow individuals and small businesses to customise products to their needs. At $20,000 each—not a trivial amount of money in a poor country, but not outrageous either—the fab lab may indeed release an outpouring of frustrated talent.“

[Economist]

It's Spring...and Time for a Better Pogo Stick

“The BOWGO is a new kind of pogo stick that bounces higher, farther and more efficiently than conventional devices. The BOWGO is a product of the Toy Robots Initiative and is a scaled-up, human-sized version of the Bow Leg. The Bow Leg is a highly resilient leg being developed for running robots at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute. The key technology is the fiber-reinforced composite (FRC) spring that bends like a bow to store elastic energy. Compared to the steel coil spring used in a conventional pogo stick, the bow spring stores 2-5 times as much energy per unit mass, and precludes the sliding friction that results when long coil springs buckle sideways. The BOWGO also uses rollers to guide the plunger, in place of the usual plastic guide bushings, providing smooth, almost frictionless motion. The force/deflection characteristic of the bow spring is tailored to provide high-energy storage with minimal shock at ground contact. A large, rubber-padded foot allows the BOWGO to be used on relatively soft surfaces such as grass, sand and gravel.” [Via Eyebeam]

Let Me Touch You A Picture

rom the bottom of an interview with Nokia's big ideas guy Matt Jones in The Feature: “In five years, I think we will look back at the anachronisms of ”connecting things“ and shake our heads a little bit. The sharing of personal content — contacts, pictures, etc. — will get a lot more fluid. That will encourage some interesting patterns of use.”

And the other good stuff:

“We're trying to come up with ways to rethink and remap the idioms of computing and communications that have traditionally been tied to the desktop and laptop so that they work better in the contexts in which people use smart phones. Embodied interaction through tangible interfaces is one way to do that. [...] We're looking at how touch can be used to execute a number of tasks or interactions so you don't have to switch contexts from the real world to the world inside the screen. For instance, one person could touch his device to someone else's and give them a ”digital gift,“ to borrow a phrase from our old boss Marko Ahtisaari. That digital gift might be something as simple as a URL or a photo that I've taken of a moment we just shared. [...]

To set up a swap over Bluetooth might take twenty or thirty clicks. This completes the interaction with one touch. Although, for security purposes, we also have a confirm button. There's something very human about giving someone a gift while looking them in the eye and touching the devices together instead of both people squirreling away in the interfaces trying to do the data exchange. [...]

One thing that ethnographers have observed is that people with cameraphones love to take a picture and immediately show it to the person they're with. It's a moment of weird verification. I take a picture of a place where we just were together and I show it to you straight away. This kind of digital gift giving will become very commonplace—photos but also other content like recommendations they’ve made around a local area. There could also be interesting overlaps between location-based data and touch technology where your device interacts with the environment. You might touch a bus stop or a museum exhibit and receive a very useful bit of digital feedback from a physical thing. [...]

We try to look at technology as being in our world instead of us being in its world. Technology should support better real world interactions in tandem with the digital interactions, rather than instead of them.”

“Target Practice”

Gathering up bits of net history, I searched out the webpage and video made by Jeff Wiese, the young Native American man who shot 9 people in northern Minnesota before shooting himself. He was a flash animator whose film “Target Practice” is an erie precursor to the shooting. If you're curious, here's the link to his page, and here's the link to his movie [click “watch this movie”].

The Structure of Boredom

Stroke black to get a grip on boredom.

[Thomas C. Oden, The Structure of Awareness, 1969]

Leamon Sound Device: 24-Channel Audio

“The Leamon Sound Device (LSD) is currently a 24-channel audio system in Austin, Texas. It resembles a small recording studio, but instead of two channels (stereo) or a few more (surround sound), it produces 24 discrete channels of CD-quality sound. With 24 channels you can do things that you simply cannot do with only two channels. The LSD produces an audio experience like you’ve never heard before — and might have trouble even imagining.

- The location of a given sound can start from or change to any of 24 different points.

- A sound can emanate from more than one speaker and grow larger or smaller over time by increasing or decreasing the number of speakers it plays from.

- A single sound can happen at slightly different points in time on a number of different speakers, producing strange echo-location effects.

- A piece of music can contain 24 different instruments, each with its own speaker to play on — no more having to share a channel or speaker with other sounds. (Put another way, music does not have to necessarily be mixed down to fit into a smaller number of channels.) This characteristic opens up the sounds of individual instruments tremendously.”

[Leamon Sound Device :: Via Metafilter.com]

Reflections on the Paparazzi

Reading through some material on Fellini's La Dolce Vita I discovered that the term “paparazzi” comes from the photographer Paparazzo [meaning “buzzing insect” in Italian] in the film. Anyway, Peter Howe is soon to publish a new book on entitled Paparazzi, and some of the good bits have just been published in Vanity Fair.

“To be a paparazzo you have to be thick-skinned. You are despised by your subjects, your peers, and the public, who are the ultimate consumers of your work. You run afoul of security guards and publicists, lawyers and the police. You are punched, spat upon, and have any number of foreign objects thrown at you. The only people whose respect you will earn are the editors who appreciate the value of your work and will reward you handsomely for your efforts. The bottom line is that if you have enough nerve, determination, and inventiveness you will make a lot of money, and you will rarely be bored. (That said, if you're at a cocktail party in L.A. and a fellow guest asks you what you do for a living, it's probably best just to say you're a photographer and leave it at that. A glass of red wine in the face can leave nasty stains.)

In the grand scheme of things, few of the photographs taken by the paparazzi will endure as great examples of the medium. They exist purely for their content. Unlike many other types of editorial photography, they are not intended to last as historical documents, but conform to the old adage that today's news is tomorrow's fish wrapping. When questioned about the quality of their work, leading paparazzi agree that such concerns are of little consequence.

The imagination and creativity that other photographers put into composing a picture, the paparazzi put into getting the picture—knowing who's hot, finding and tracking them, then commandeering the right position for a shot. By the time their fingers hit the shutter release, it's only a matter of making sure the image is as clear and clean as the circumstances will allow. [...]

”The basis of press photography is money, sex, and blood. You mix that together and you have a magazine. It's always been that way; it's not that there's more interest in it today than before. Paparazzi photography is gossip in pictures but the pictures are true … John Bryan did suck Sarah Ferguson's toe. I've done things in Italy just for the fun of it, like taking a parking ticket and putting it on the windshield of [a] film star to see what he or she does with it. That you could do, but you would never fake a picture.“ —Jean Paul Dousset”

[Vanity Fair]

From The Annals Of Personal Media, Chapter 2

This personal media disc was “playable without any thing else except its own apparatus. This unit required the use of a pencil to provide the spin and a small cardboard horn with which an elastic band helped keep its shape. This provided the amplification through the needle that was attached to it and rode in the groove as the pencil (and hand) of the operator provided the spin. Its a crude sound and I wonder how this was thought to be the proper medium for the Skippy Peanut Butter company to send their message.”

[Internet Museum of Records]

Actroid

Features

1. ACTROID understands naturally spoken words. In addition, it can carry on a conversation with a guest, ansering in a natural voice.

2. ACTROID can communicate in Chinese, Korean, English and Japanese.

3. When communicating with a guest, ACTROID responds with natural gestures such eye movement and smiling.

“The humanoid can put on facial expressions suitable for the more than 2,000 types of answers it can give, but it may refuse to answer to some questions for ”privacy reasons,“ making an X with her arms and bowing. She also has a sense of irony. When asked if she is a robot, she says, ”Y.e.s, I. a.m. a. r.o.b.o.t“ in a disconnected voice and moves about clumsily. A moment later, she says ”Just kidding“ and starts a natural flow of movements.”

[Nedo, Japan]

Robot Camera

So you've got one of the new Sony Ericsson phones outfitted with a little joystick. And you're wondering what's happening at home. Simply use the phone to fire up your Sony ROB-1 robot camera, and guide it around the house with the phone's joystick. The robo-camera is fitted out with Bluetooth, and is ready to suss out dust-bunnies, couch-potatoes and other miscreants. Teenagers, consider life as you knew over. And don't be surprised if your parents give you a good piece of their mind using the robo-speaker. Coming soon. So shake your bootie to MTV while you can. Because that, Young Lady, is going to end soon enough.

[Via Gismodo]