Boston Dynamics Petman ●

Human Beings’ greatest technological leaps seem to always stem from military applications, and Boston Dynamics humanoid robot ‘Petman’ is no different in that respect. I look forward to the day then technology like this is developed to make our lives better, not to make war. It makes Honda’s Asimo – a corporate marketing tool – look like Robbie the Robot.

Apple iCloud ●

Apple products once had names like Macintosh and Newton. While the iMac revolutionised PC design, it’s the anticedant of dreary names like ‘iCloud’.

As technology companies compete with each other, drive manufacturing costs down and put their marketing machines on full power, it’s amazing how they can steer us away from technologies that are clearly better for specific tasks than others.

When Apple launched the iPad, it made a big deal about the new iBook store and the iPad’s use as an electronic reading device. Here’s the marketing blurb on Apple’s site…

Reading on iPad is just like reading a book. You hold your iPad like a book. You flip the pages like a book. And you do it all with your hands — just like a book. The high-resolution, LED-backlit screen displays each page beautifully.

The iPad is an astounding piece of technology in many ways, but a good device for spending hours reading electronic books does not count among them, because of the backlit LCD display is uses.

A few weeks ago, Samsung announced that it’s backing out of the electronic ink panel production, instead to concentrate on LCD displays for their dedicated reading devices. Also, there are rumours of a smaller, cheaper iPad which no doubt will be designed to take a take some of Amazon Kindle’s share of the eReader market. So, given the marketing power of Apple, and the likes of Samsung turning their back on the technology, the odds seem stacked against a bright future for electronic paper.

Electronic paper displays mimic the high resolution and reflective quality of ink on paper. Compared to LCD technology:

• it is more energy efficient; battery life is on a scale of weeks rather hours, which surely preferable on a device meant to be read for hours on end
• it is much less bulky allowing comparably thinner and lighter devices
• it is more comfortable to read, not only because of its higher resolution, but because it reflects light like paper; the more light hitting the device, the more legible it becomes. The opposite is true for LCD displays like the iPad’s (not helped by its glossy screen). After all, it’s much easier to control light on a device when it needs illuminating in a darkened room. When the situation is reversed, the light from that big fiery thing in the sky is not as easily controlled, and the brighter it is in relation to the LCD backlight, the harder it is to read.

Of course, electronic ink displays aren’t with out their issues. They are restricted to monochrome for a start. Then there’s the glacially slow display refresh when interacting the device. For some people I’ve spoken to this is a barrier to buying a device; for that brief second, the device looks broken, and in our Jobsian world of user experience perfection, that will never do.

There’s the thorny issue of Digital Rights Management which seems to hang over the e-reader market like a grey cloud. I have issues with this but as this piece is about the merits of the display technology only, I’ll leave that for a future post.

There’s no argument that the iPad is a revolutionary device for consuming digital media, and its LCD display is ideal the multi-purpose nature of the device.

No doubt the next iteration of the iPad (and its rumoured smaller sibling) will have the much hyped ‘Retina Display’ but no matter much Jobs talks about pixel density, the reading experience will be inferior to that of  electronic paper simply because of the necessity for a backlight.

This footage of NASA’s prototype Mars rover looks like something from a Ray Harryhausen film.

Update: I originally posted this on a computer without sound and was unaware of the annoying music. Apologies for that.

I recently bought a Busch & Muller E-Werk hub dynamo powered supply unit to power and charge up devices while I’m cycling (I haven’t actually built the bike I’m going to attach it to yet, but that’s a different story!).

It’s a small device that plugs into a dynamo hub (in my case a Schmidt SON) and converts the AC output to DC at adjustable voltages. It comes with a large number of cables, including a variety of standard USB plugs and DC charger plugs that allow you to power your phone or charge up a dSLR battery while on the move.

At £140, it’s not cheap. But then, being made in Germany, this is not a device made by under-paid, over-worked employees in a far-east electronics factory, and for the time saved while not hanging around wall sockets waiting for things to charge, it’s very much worth it.

I’ll write more about it once I’ve got it up and running!

When Apple introduced the iPhone, it was like Steve Jobs reached through a mysterious wormhole and pulled from within it an object from five years into the future; its design and user interface were like nothing seen before.

With the iPad, it’s like Jobs picked up a five year old magazine article about what Apple might have in store for the future, and based their new product on that. It’s even called iPad.

Many of us who are underwhelmed, however, may remember that the iPod was met with similar disappointment (and derision for its name) when it was first released.

Or maybe we’re all just Apple obssessed idiots.

Despite the falling price of decent digital cameras, analog photography on the web is still going strong. The sharpness and colour accuracy of transparency film is unbeatable [by current consumer digital cameras], especially if you take pictures with a medium format camera like Joshua Dunford [if you’re lucky, you can pick up a second-hand one of these pretty cheaply – my C330 was 75 Pounds Sterling]. This, coupled with the falling price of quality flatbed transparency scanners means that you can make images for the web which blow digital images away.

Proof that all the folk at Apple are on something.

On Ebay, you can usually pick up a Playstation 2 original box and receipt for only $425… of course, the Playstation 2 itself costs extra. More here.

More A.I. [The Movie] related stuff:
http://redrival.com/movieventure/santini.jpg
http://www.anghus.bizland.com/AI.htm

OK… lets make it ‘official artificial intelligence day’ [all but one of the links have been shamelessly stolen from the site of Matthew Yee-King, so in return, I thought I’d plug his stuff on the Rephlex label]:

BBC News | SCI/TECH | Time for real intelligence

learning by imitation

HONDA “HUMAN” ROBOT movie

Neural Networks Source Code

MIT AI Lab: The Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT

Robot Books.com – Robot Kits, Robotics, and Toy Robots

Robot Information Central

Shape Changing Robot Applications

Robot Battle

Internet Robotics Sources

Evolutionary Robotics Chapter 3

Kazuo HOSOKAWA

A Behavior-Based Multiple Robot System with Host for Object Manipulation

CSCI 599 - Mobile Robots and Multi-Robot Systems

Swarm Release

Multi-Agent Approaches in Robotics and Learning in Multi-Agent Systems

ICMAS 1995 Proceedings Contents

Mobile Robot Laboratory On-line Publications

Self-Organization in Large Populations of Mobile Robots: Review of Litterature

Linux AI & Alife Mini-Howto

Lynne Parker’s Publications List

Directory of /ai-publications/1000-1499/AITR-1465

Graduate students who is who in robotics

RoboCup Official Site

Beth and Alessio homepage

Meet AIBO

Microsoft Cement

Create your very own Star Wars style light sabre effect! – requires a DV camera and Adobe Premiere.

It / Ginger is finally revealed.

Read an opinion on the whole phenomenon at v-2.org.

An interesting article about the seti@home project, detailing how the system works and how successful it has been. [via SlashDot]

Today, one my students told me that her parents are about to buy her a Mac, but she’s not sure which one to get. She didn’t know about the G4 Powerbook until I told her about it, so guess what she is going to ask Mummy and Daddy for now? Makes you sick, no?

The product code-named ‘Ginger’ will be an alternative to products that “are dirty, expensive, sometimes dangerous and often frustrating, especially for people in the cities.” Maybe it’s an ultra-sleek titanium Sinclair C5 with an ‘in-car’ 15.2 inch flatscreen LCD monitor, Internet access and slot loading DVD burner.

Apparently, it is possible to create a hyperlink straight into a Napster search (if you have Napster installed that is). I don’t know how cross platform/browser compatible it is though. So far, I’ve only got it working on IE5 for the Mac. [cheers Phil]

a href=”nap:search?artist=name&title=name”

I’m currently trying to get hold of replacement parts for an old turntable I bought from the classified ads a few years ago. I found this website for the tonearm manufacturer – SME Ltd – and couldn’t help noticing the way in which the website itself looks as if it pre-dates the Internet by about 30 years. Check out the V-Dub vans outside the factory. Classic.

Kevin Warwick, this years ‘Christmas Lecturer’ at the Royal Institute gets a good slating at ntk.net.

There are some interesting articles about the current decline of Apple sales at salon.com

None other than Jonathan Ive [lead designer at Apple and the person responsible for the iMac and the Cube etc] was here in the office the other day. He was picking up an honourary degree from Northumbria Uni where he studied Industrial Design 10 years ago [the course I do a bit of teaching on]. He had an ‘entourage’ of university VIP types around him and I’m sure he really couldn’t be arsed with it all. Even though he’s probably worth a few million and he’s helped Apple out of the doldrums [for a while anyway] he seems quite a modest chap who hates the formality of these occasions. The current 3rd Year of the Industrial Design course are collaborating with Ive/Apple on a project – lucky so and so’s.

Fresh content over at v-2.

the freedom to be bad: design elitism, the web, and evolution – new content over at v-2