The World’s Largest Multi-Touch Wall

ring°wall from SENSORY-MINDS on Vimeo.

Source PSFK

Scent of a cinema

As usual SAWA performed great show selebrating the mystery of cinema. They try to proof anonced statement that cinema is the only medium that ignites all our senses. And they did it!

We saw it in 3D.
We heard it in surround. We participated in it.

And... we tasted it!

Data visualization art

Aaron Koblin at PICNIC08: The Sheep Market from PICNICCrossmediaweek on Vimeo.

M83 - We Own the Sky from David Altobelli on Vimeo.

Please, welcome to post your favorites :)

Trend One: THE FUTURE MICRO-TRENDS IN MEDIA, MARKETING AND TECHNOLOGY

Source Nick Sohnemann, TrendONE Hamburg

Future by Microsoft

At the Wharton Business Technology Conference, Microsoft’s Business Division president Stephen Elop presented a video that predicted the uses of technology in the year 2019. The video shows future technologies that Microsoft Labs are considering including a wall that connects two classrooms in different parts of the world, lots of old school tech that connects with other stuff, touch displays, electronic newspapers and there’s a bit we love where someone photos someone’s presentation with their laptop and then takes their shot and starts interacting with the ’smart’ items in it.<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-GB&amp;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:8d7a2ef7-84cf-4daf-9a4d-2531c273f756&amp;showPlaylist=true&amp;from=shared" target="_new" title="Retail Future Vision">Video: Retail Future Vision</a>
Source MSN, PSFK

Open Source Urban Planning

Mark Gorton, creator of the Lime Wire file sharing software is now using his talents to improve urban transportation design. Using an open source software program he’s created along with data gathered from the collective population, Gorton aims to make urban transportation safer, more efficient and sustainable.

Wired reports:

The top-down culture of public planning stands to benefit by employing methods he’s lifting from the world of open-source software: crowdsourced development, freely-accessible data libraries, and web forums, as well as actual open-source software with which city planners can map transportation designs to people’s needs. Such modeling software and data existed in the past, but it was closed to citizens.

Gorton’s open-source model would have a positive impact on urban planning by opening up the process to a wider audience, says Thomas K. Wright, executive director of the Regional Plan Association, an organization that deals with urban planning issues in the New York metropolitan area.

“99 percent of planning in the United States is volunteer citizens on Tuesday nights in a high school gym,” Wright says. “Creating a software that can reach into that dynamic would be very profound, and open it up, and shine light on the decision-making. Right now, it becomes competing experts trying to out-credential each other in front of these citizen and volunteer boards… [Gorton] could actually change the whole playing field.”

Source WIRED

Talks Success Through Failure

Honda is premiering three new short documentaries online as part of their relaunched “Power of Dreams” website. Director Derek Cianfrance filmed unscripted conversations with Honda associates talking about their approach to solving problems and finding solutions. The debut includes three films with more to follow every few months. The series can be viewed at the “Power of Dreams” website or on the company’s YouTube channel.

Worth a view is “Failure: The Secret to Success” which depicts Honda’s belief in the importance of never being afraid to try something new. The film feature Honda designers, engineers, and members of the race team talking about failures and risks taken that helped lead to new innovations.

More on "Dreaming impossible" from The Cat Empire band:

Discover The Cat Empire!

Source PSFK

Kevin Kelly On Technology As The 7th Kingdom Of Life

There’s a video from the O’Reilly group where Joshua-Michele Ross interviews Kevin Kelly. Kelly discusses the rise of large scale co-operation and the similarity between technology and biology. A couple of quotes:

Socialism 2.0. We don’t have very good terms for what we’re seeing. Collectivism, communism, socialism which have negative connotations in American politics but in fact that’s what a lot of this is: Cooperation on a large scale. Elevating the common collective good and the individual at the same time. That’s the difference with communism which was about bring everyone down to a level.

…What does technology want? It wants us to be happy, it wants our co-operation. Right ow we’re the sexual organs of technology. It wants increasing diversity, increasing complexity, increasing energy density (efficiency), increasing specialization… The patterns that we see technology follows are the same patterns biology and evolution follows. In biology there is extinction, in technology we find that ideas and technologies remain and they are very hard to extinguish… There is almost no extinct technologies.

Source Radar O’Reilly & PSFK

SearchWiki: Users to Edit Google Search Results

Google unveiled SearchWiki, a feature which lets users improve the site’s effectiveness by editing search algorithms. SearchWiki allows users to re-rank, delete, add, and comment on search results.  You can move search results up in relevance by selecting the arrow-up icon next to the result title.  The ‘X’ button deletes links that are irrelevant to the user.  Edits will not effect Google’s website ranking results, but instead allow users to tailor their personal own search results.  Users will have to log in to use the search-editing feature, with changes stored in your Google account and made effective in following Google searches.  Users can also access the community’s search edits and comments by selecting the ‘See all notes for this SearchWiki’ feature.  Google explains:

This new feature is an example of how search is becoming increasingly dynamic, giving people tools that make search even more useful to them in their daily lives. We have been testing bits and pieces of SearchWiki for some time through live experiments, and we incorporated much of our learnings into this release.

SeachWiki: make search your own

Source Sydney Morning Herald

G-Speak: Gesture Based Computing

Oblong Industries are the creators of the mind-blowing g-speak spatial operating system (think Minority Report). Using a sleek set of gloves as the interface control, users can use gestures to manipulate objects and data with ease. Check out the astounding video below.

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

Source Gizmodo

From Cave Paintings to the Interneе

Kottke points us to an eye-opening interactive timeline of developments in information and media through the years. “From Cave Paintings to the Internet” is an on-going project that recounts the major advances in areas ranging from computing to book publishing to imaging, from 70,000 BCE to today. The tool was borne from the creator’s 2005 book, From Gutenberg to the Internet, a run-through the history of computing, networking and telecommunications.

From Cave Paintings to the Internet

Source historyofscience.com, PSFK 

Multi-Touch Without a Touch Screen vs. Apple

Microsoft has stepped up with a challenge to the Apple iPhone’s lauded multi-touch interface. The PC maker released their innovative SideSight system last week at the User Interface in Software and Technology Symposium. The technology allows users to control actions on a cell phone screen by moving their fingers along side the device. Infrared sensors pick up motions up to 10 centimeters away and translate them into movement on the screen.

Source PSFK

Wake at Your Perfect Time

The Key to Waking Up Refreshed

Why is it so hard to wake up to a normal alarm clock? Because a normal alarm clock can't detect where you are in your sleep cycle - a continuous cycle from deep sleep, to brief almost-awake moments, and back to deep sleep again. Occasionally, your alarm may catch you at an optimal, almost-awake moment and you wake up feeling refreshed, but usually you grope for the snooze button waking up tired and groggy.

Source sleeptracker.com