Positive Technology Journal

Via 3Dpoint.com 

BBC Newsnight’s Geek Week 2.0 examines the nature of the self in cyberspace. The 11-minute segment (click the virtual death link) provides a description of what it means to inhabit a metaversal presence.

Re-blogged from Textually.org (via Yanko Design)

A wearable mobile device for enhanced chatting, by Designer Sunman Kwo.

"A new wearable device that anyone can communicate with that is easier and lighter in mobile circumstances corresponding to the 3.5G, 4G communication standard. Human hand is the most basic communication method.

For easier and simpler controls, it uses the instinctive input method "finger joint". Excluding the thumb, each finger joint makes up twelve buttons, with "the knuckle button", using the cell phone's 3X4 keypad, likely being the most popular input method."

breathtaking :-@

Engadget Gizmodo

From Pasta and Vinegar 

Rogers, Y. (2006) Moving on from Weiser’s vision of of calm computing: engaging UbiComp experiences. In: P. Dourish and A. Friday (Eds.) Ubicomp 2006 Proceedings, LNCS 4206, pp. 404-421, Springer-Verlag.

In this paper, the author starts from the classical ubicomp description by Mark Weisre about a potential era of “calm computing” and explains how research in that domain did not match these expectations. The most important stance of Yvonne Rogers lays in this idea that “An alternative agenda is outlined that focuses on engaging rather than calming people” so that academics can have a new research agenda:

There is an enormous gap between the dream of comfortable, informed and effortless living and the accomplishments of UbiComp research. As pointed out by Greenfield [20] “we simply don’t do ‘smart’ very well yet” because it involves solving very hard artificial intelligence problems that in many ways are more challenging than creating an artificial human.
(…)
To this end, I propose one such alternative agenda which focuses on designing UbiComp technologies for engaging user experiences. It argues for a significant shift from proactive computing to proactive people; where UbiComp technologies are designed not to do things for people but to engage them more actively in what they currently do.

Re-blogged from Infoaesthetics

a wirelessly controlled tactile display, consisting of a 4 × 4 array of vibrating motors that is mounted on a waist band or on the forearm. this tactile display can be used as a navigation aid outdoors, as experiments have proved that 8 different vibrotactile patterns can be interpreted as directional (e.g. stop, look left, run, proceed faster or proceed slower) or instructional cues (e.g. "raise arm horizontally", "raise arm vertically", "hop") with almost perfect accuracy.

[link: newscientisttech.com & ieee.org (pdf) springerlink.com|via boingboing.net]

Via KurzweilAI.net

Using Wikipedia, Technion researchers have developed a way to give computers knowledge of the world to help them "think smarter," making common sense and broad-based connections between topics just as the human mind does.

Link