It’s not quite Iron Man just yet, but CNN.com recently posted a link outlining how exoskeletons developed by the US army could give their wearers superhuman abilities.
Google Glass: la visión del futuro
DeCiMaL lab member, Isabel Pedersen (UOIT) quoted in Semana magazine article on Google Glass
TECNOLOGÍAEl lanzamiento de Google Glass, que podría darse a finales de 2013, marcará el inicio de una revolución tecnológica. Sin embargo, quienes han usado su versión de prueba son escépticos sobre el éxito que pueda alcanzarhttp://www.semana.com/vida-moderna/articulo/google-glass-vision-del-futuro/342919-3
Mindscapes: The woman who can’t recognise her face
02 May 2013 by Helen Thomson
Name: Heather Sellers
Condition: Prosopagnosia
“I’ve been in a crowded elevator with mirrors all around, and a woman will move and I’ll go to get out the way and then realise: ‘oh that woman is me’.”
Heather Sellers has prosopagnosia, more commonly known as face blindness. “I can’t remember any image of the human face. It’s simply not special to me,” she says. “I don’t process them like I do a car or a dog. It’s not a visual problem, it’s a perception problem.”
Heather knew from a young age that something was different about the way she navigated her world, but her condition wasn’t diagnosed until she was in her 30s. “I always knew something was wrong – it was impossible for me to trust my perceptions of the world. I was diagnosed as anxious. My parents thought I was crazy.”
The condition is estimated to affect around 2.5 per cent of the population, and it’s common for those who have it not to realise that anything is wrong. “In many ways it’s a subtle disorder,” says Heather. “It’s easy for your brain to compensate because there are so many other things you can use to identify a person: hair colour, gait or certain clothes. But meet that person out of context and it’s socially devastating.”
As a child, she was once separated from her mum at a grocery store. Store staff reunited the pair, but it was confusing for Heather, since she didn’t initially recognise her mother. “But I didn’t know that I wasn’t recognising her.”
Introducing Muse - InteraXon’s brain-sensing headband.
It’s a comfortable, sleek, four-sensor headband that allows you to control games, reduce stress, improve memory and concentration, and eventually to control devices directly with your mind.
Muse measures your brainwaves in real-time. It sends those brainwaves to your smart phone or tablet showing you how well your brain is performing; and also translates your brainwaves into instructions to interact with content on your iOS or Android device.
Muse lets you do more with your mind.
Click on the photo to order your own from InteraXon’s website.
DeCiMaL Lab member Isabel Pedersen publishes | Ready to Wear: A Rhetoric of Wearable Computers and Reality-Shifting Media | 2013
Ready to Wear is a book about the future but geared to the present. More and more, we are asked to adopt new or future technologies before we ever see, touch, or experience them. This rhetoric of innovation and adoption goes beyond commercial advertising. Emergent or disruptive technologies are circulated and explored in social media, inventors’ blogs, news sources, popular culture, films, YouTube clips, TED talks, Kickstarter, and countless other media venues, often long before we get our hands on them. Ready to Wear explores how and to what ends wearable inventions and technologies augment or remix reality, as well as the claims used to promote them. As computer components shrink and our mobile culture normalizes, we wear computers on the body to create immersive experiences. Isabel Pedersen asks and answers questions that animate everyone: How is this augmented digital life construed and contextualized, and in what ways does it define our identity? What’s at stake in the arguments for wearable computers? What posthuman world does this rhetoric envision? Her answers to these questions are provocative and timely. - “Ready to Wear: A Rhetoric of Reality-Shifting Media surveys an immense range of emerging technologies, most of which have not even been mentioned in existing scholarship on rhetoric and new media. Pedersen performs a much-needed expansion of the field’s radar in an era of rapid innovation, planned obsolescence, and mind-blowing prototypes.” -John Tinnell
Isabel Pedersen is a Canada Research Chair in Digital Life, Media, and Culture and an Associate Professor at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology. She has been interested in human-computer interaction ever since she spent her youth playing Pac-Man in the Yonge Street arcades of downtown Toronto
http://www.amazon.ca/Ready-Wear-Rhetoric-Computers-Reality-Shifting/dp/1602354006
Check out these images from “Technosapien,” an annual exhibition put on by the Social Body Lab at OCADU, featuring wearable technology created by students and lab members.
Hey All! Dan here.
Last weekend I attended a workshop on this really cool technology called MaKey MaKey, a little circuit board that can turn any conductive material (your hand, a banana, a glass of water) into a game control input. The workshop was put on by a group called Dames Making Games at Bento Miso in downtown Toronto.
The clear intent for this device is to be used with games, but I imagine it could be used for a whole lot more, as it can turn any conductive object into a computer input. The workshop came with MaKey MaKey kits as well as alligator clips, a pressure sensor and two tilt sensors. I chose to use the tilt sensors and simply attach them to the shoulders of an old shirt that I brought in order to input left and right. I racked my brains trying to come up with a good game for this input to control, and then it came to me: there’s a little game called Not Pac Man, where the Pac Man board twists left and right, and the pieces fall towards whatever is at the bottom. It’s a free download for Mac or PC, so I quickly downloaded it to my computer and got to work figuring out how to place these sensors in the shirt. The total time it took to come up with the idea was about 20 minutes. Figuring out exactly what to do, with the help of the workshop’s amazing instructors, took about five minutes. I would sew the sensors into two pieces of felt, and put one in each shoulder of the shirt. Then, using a handily provided spool of conductive thread, I would thread the sensors to alligator clips that hooked into the MaKey MaKey pad. The sewing took about 2 hours. Finally, the shirt was up and running. Take a look!
JC Penney is adopting Apple’s paradigm of not using traditional cash registers in its brick and mortar stores, but is instead replacing them with handheld devices carried by clerks. Will this lead to increased sales along with increased pressure on customers to purchase?
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Students at the University of Illinois at Chicago have built a suit mimicking Spider-Man’s “Spider Sense” by using sensory receptors to “feel” their environment.
The potential for this type of technology in multiple industries is almost limitless, including the idea that it could help a visually-impaired person navigate the world.
A new ad with race car driver Jeff Gordon on an unsuspecting (or acting) used car salesman is making the rounds. But what’s key to Reality Shifting is the use of wearable technology: cameras mounted on Jeff’s glasses give the audience a first-person perspective.
