Ratchet Up

Shopping With Your CamPhone. Literally.

You're in the store. Walking around in a kind of zoned out daze. When something catches your eye.

Snap a picture of it—be sure to include the tag—with your camphone. [For now, just Nokia.]

Then wait while the camera's TagIt image recognitiion technology decodes the image tag.

Then, just like that your camphone browser takes you to a special site for that product.

With more info. Some goodie, of course. And a chance to buy with one click.

In one minute you're pretty in pink.

[Via Picturephoning]

Million Dollar Homepage

So this guy divides a screen of 10,000 squares into 100 pixels each. Then he sells them off in blocks of 100 pixels, at $1 a pixel. Once those little pixels are yours, you can put up your own mini-billboard.

Now 21 years old, he has made over $623,000 to far.

[Million Dollar Homepage]

Of 3,500 Daily Messages, 99% Have No Impact

In one 45-minute journey, the average London commuter is exposed to more than 130 adverts, featuring more than 80 different products. Only half of that information makes any impact, while unprompted we can remember none of the blur of adverts. In an entire day, we're likely to see 3,500 marketing messages. We know these facts thanks to new technology tested by the Guardian this week. To be specific: a pair of Joe 90-style spectacles attached to an unflattering bumbag. [...] It is called the Eye Contact, and it's capable of capturing on film everything that you see during a typical day. The Guardian wore the goggles for four hours, recording a bus and tube journey to Oxford Circus and a shopping trip up Bond Street.

The experiment, analysed with the help of ID Magasin, the company which developed the device, highlighted both the extent to which individuals are bombarded by commercial images and how adept most have become at screening out advertising messages. The results of our experiment showed that 99% of adverts make little or no impact.

ID Magasin, which has been testing the technique for the past year and is about to start using it in the field for its first UK client, claims big brands are facing an increasingly difficult job to reach consumers with advertising messages. [...]

...showed the extent to which most advertising has become little more than a blur of urban wallpaper. Flicking through a pile of newspapers and magazines on the tube...the eyes habitually flitted away from the adverts...couldn't recall what any of them were for...none registered without prompting. [...]

Later analysis showed that during a 45-minute journey, I had been exposed to more than 130 different advertising “elements” showcasing more than 80 brands. I was “looking” at adverts for 29 minutes but couldn't recall a single brand without prompting. When prompted, it emerged that just over half of the adverts had actually made an impression, typically those for products I was interested in and to which I was exposed for more than 10 seconds, as against fewer than five seconds for others.

Over a later 90-minute period, I was exposed to 250 different advertising messages, featuring more than 100 different brands in 70 different formats. While an advert on a bus for the new Harry Potter film made an impression when prompted, not a single advert on taxis registered. [...]

The message is one that the advertising industry is not keen to hear but is slowly waking up to, he said. “Ad agencies are very good at television but know very little about instore advertising for example,” he said. “I've always had a bit of a cynicism about advertising and how impactful it really is. Nine in 10 new products fail, which suggests that the whole model for developing products is flawed.”

[Guardian]

Prototype Camera Allows You To Refocus Post-Snap

“A prototype camera made by a Stanford University graduate student could herald the end of fuzzy, poorly lit photos. [...]

Ng calls his creation the ”light field camera“ because of its ability to capture the quantity of light moving in all directions in an open space. It stems from early-20th-century work on integral photography, which experimented with using lens arrays in front of film, and an early-1990s plenoptic camera developed at MIT and used for range finding. By building upon these ideas, Ng hopes to improve commercial cameras' focusing abilities.

Traditionally, light rays filter through a camera's lens and converge at one point on film or a digital sensor, then the camera summarizes incoming light without capturing much information about where it came from. Ng's camera pits about 90,000 micro lenses between the main lens and sensor. The mini lenses measure all the rays of incoming light and their directions of origin. The software later adds up the rays, according to how the picture is being refocused.

The technology could help snap-happy amateurs and professional photographers, as well as aid security cameras in capturing sharper information.” [Wired]

Info and sample pictures from Ng's site can be found here, and more here.

Internet of Things

e “are heading towards what can be termed a ”ubiquitous network society“, one in which networks and networked devices are omnipresent. Early forms of ubiquitous information and communication networks are already visible in the widespread use of mobile phones today: there were over 1.8 billion mobile phones in circulation by the end of 2004, and the number is set to surpass 2 billion by the end of 2005. Mobile data applications such as SMS, i-mode and Vodafone Live! have brought Internet-like services to the pockets of many mobile phone users. But what if much more was connected to a network: a fridge, a car, a cup of tea?

At the dawn of the internet revolution, users were amazed at the possibility of contacting people and information across oceans and time zones, through a few clicks of their mouse. In order to do so, however, they typically had to sit in front of a computer device (PC) connected to a global network. Today, they can also use mobile phones and portable laptops. The next logical step in this technological revolution (connecting people anytime, anywhere) is to connect inanimate objects a communication network. This is the vision underlying the Internet of things. The use of electronic tags (e.g. RFID) and sensors will serve to extend the communication and monitoring potential of the network of networks, as will the introduction of computing power in everyday items such as razors, shoes and packaging. Advances in nanotechnology (i.e. manipulation of matter at the molecular level) will serve to further accelerate these developments.

The late Mark Weiser (at the time chief scientist at the XEROX Palo Alto Research Center) is quoted to have said: ”The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.“ This well-known citation refers to the increasing ”availability“ and decreasing ”visibility“ of processing power. In other words, computing through dedicated devices will slowly disappear, while information processing capabilities will emerge throughout our surrounding environment. With the benefit of integrated information processing capacity, industrial products will take on smart capabilities. They may also take on electronic identities that can be queried remotely, or be equipped with sensors for detecting physical changes around them. Such developments will make the merely static objects of today dynamic ones - embedding intelligence in our environment and stimulating the creation of innovative products and new business opportunities. The Internet of Things will enable forms of collaboration and communication between people and things, and between things themselves, hitherto unknown and unimagined.

It seems that we are standing on the brink of a new computing and communication era, one that will radically transform our corporate, community, and personal spheres. With continuing developments in miniaturization and declining costs, it is becoming not only technologically possible but also economically feasible to make everyday objects smarter, and to connect the world of people with the world of things.”

Or so will say the forthcoming report from the International Telecommunications Union.

Cassette Jam

Film and audio producer Ben Shapiro sends along this homage to the analogue, Cassette Jam '05.

Snap-Together Camera

The Plamodel camera will set you back about $9 and can be snapped together in a flash.

It's Japanese: “The instruction manual with quite polite complete diagram, is assembled securely anyone. [...] As for the adhesive being unnecessary, using the clock driver which belongs lastly combining the part of the plastic which consists of 33 points, just sets the screw, the camera completes. The Japanese explanation book has belonged, it just assembles in sort of illustration. If direction above elementary school high grade being single, it is possible to make, probably is.”

[Go for it.]

You May Never Have Seen A Videogame Space Like This

If you have never really gotten a sense of the incredible level of realism that game space offers, you owe it to yourself to check out these Quicktime VR stills from the game Quake 4. [Via Metafilter]

$100k To Party With Your Mouse: Gamer Buys Space Station In A Virtual World

I have kind of given up on following the huge world of videogame criticism. It tracks back to the simple fact of never really having become a gamer, apart from a wild fever a couple of decades ago with Dark Castle. [On finally winning it, I though, “This is the greatest thing I have ever done in my life.”] But I do love stories about the way that life [and a real-world economy] migrate into game spaces:

Jon Jacobs, aka Neverdie, won the space station, currently being built within the online role-playing game Project Entropia, in an auction. He wants to call it Club Neverdie and sees it as the perfect vehicle to bridge reality and virtual reality.

Gamers in Entropia regularly buy and sell virtual items using real cash. Last year, a gamer bought an island for $26,500 (£13,700). “I’m already in talks with some of the worlds biggest DJs about spinning live sets inside the nightclub,” he told the BBC News website. Gamers everywhere are realising that our virtual worlds can compete with reality on an economic level Jon Jacobs, aka Neverdie In pictures: Online gamers unmasked “Gamers want to be entertained while they play, hunt, socialize and craft, and because of the real cash economy aspects of Project Entropia, they can afford to pay for their entertainment.”

Traditionally, a club, theatre or a stadium have been the only live venues where one could have a social experience while listening to and watching top performers, said Neverdie. But now, he says, virtual worlds can be an alternative live venue. “I truly think that this will be the decade that gaming and virtual reality changes the face of popular culture” [...]

When the space station was put up for auction, it was described as a “monumental project” in the “treacherous, but mineral rich” Paradise V Asteroid Belt. It came with mining and hunting taxation rights, mall shopping booth and market stall owner deeds, a land management system, and a billboard marketing system. The game’s currency lets players, or members, invest in personal development and growth by buying up goods, buildings, and land in the Entropia universe. “The real estate market inside the Project Entropia universe is on fire, because there is so much money to be made,” said Neverdie. “Gamers everywhere are realising that our virtual worlds can compete with reality on an economic level.” [BBC]