Float like a robot butterfly - tech - 11 April 2007 - New Scientist Tech
Great article (with video links) on state-of-the-art with mechanical flying insects.
A futurists Wiki - hurrah!
Head pose estimation and control of attention of wearable robot - Google Video
All it needs is a parrot costume!
Quite a nice application that lets you assign images and sounds to a map and then wlk around the real location and have the media triggered manually or by GPS.
A List Apart: Articles: Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing
Cracking essay on ubiquitous computing. And it looks like a lot of people are using SL as a test-bed for the UC/AC model.
Sounds like they should just of hacked The Sims.
Ever danced the future?
This weekend BBC Radio 1 held a version of the Big Weekend festival in the Second LIfe virtual world. The BBC has bought an island in the world to use for this and future events. The festival was held in a large white hall, parked outside were the usual mix of buggies, sports cars and attack helicopters, although most people came by teleport. Inside you could pick up and pair of headphones which streamed Radio 1, or watch aqnd listen to the live broadcast of the festival on the big screen. A dispenser handily loaded you up with a set of dance scripts so that you could set your avatar dancing the night away. It also let you use a couple of light sticks, and hey after holding them in your hand for a while you could start attaching them to your feet - or anywhere else.
There were probably 40+ Second Lifers at the festival on each day. Mostly a pretty normal looking bunch, although quite a few furries, a guy who was surrounded by flames, and a demonic leather-clad honcho who filled the room with smoke - but switched it off when people comlpained it was hitting their bandwidth.
Everybody was full of praise for the BBC for doing this - the first time everybody thought that a big corporate had done somethign like it in SL, or any VR world. It must have taken sone doing as well, sorting out all those dance scripts just for a start, and the video feed. The American's just couldn't get over the fact that a broadcaster would do something like this, that it wasn't for profit but just because, hey it would be fun to try it.
Hopefully the BBC will be encouraged to do more events in SL. And when you statr joining up all the current BBC new media activity, SL, Backstage, the new VideoPlayer, the BBC Catalogue, TVAnytime, podcasting, the new Year Zero Web 2.0 home page, just where might the BBC take us all...
