The products they could make from herds of spidergoats and fields of webfalfa sounds amazing, and this article over at the MIT Tech Review site discusses some of them. But how bad do we really want this stuff?
Category Archives: reTransmit
Live In Your Demo World
Saying someone was living in their own world used to be a metaphor. More and more it’s coming to mean something else. For some reason there’s been a resurgence of online discussion about Augmented Reality and the MIT Technology Review site has a new article on it. I don’t know about AR graveyards though. I was really hoping for something more along the lines of “ARQuake” (maybe a multiplayer version with tasers….).
This all goes hand-in-hand with the big tech news for the past few days: Demo. Yahoo News has a short article (probably temporary too [Edit: it was, so I removed the link]) on a few of the hyped technologies at the Demo conference that maybe makes this augmented reality stuff more relevant: Intellifit body scanning, Novint Falcon haptics, MDA 3D modeling. This is all sounding very cyberspace-y. But instead of re-reading Snow Crash, go rent Videodrome. Confusion may be the order of the day but long live the new flesh, eh?
I See Robots Everywhere
They’re everywhere. New movies. New military programs. Even the slug community is talking about them. But some of the most fun and inspiring are still those designed for distant planets. And here are a couple of articles that might be interesting for the design community.
New Scientist has been carrying this article on a “Spherical Robot”. Looks like a millipede (rolly-polly) to me. I expect it to unwrap and skitter away. Maybe I should watch the video to see if it does.
Nature.com is carrying a different article on the “Scorpian Robot”. This one looks more like a spider, but at least they’re in the same family (I think). Unlike the cute round one, this one reminds me of something from a low-budget sci-fi/horror flick. Cool. I can hardly wait to see these two fighting on tv.
We need a kidney, not a liver! Where’s the Print Cancel button?!?
Popular Science online reminds everyone of the versatility of the humble technology used in the ubiquitous inkjet printer in this short article. And of course there have been recent mentions of mad scientist/ Chicago chef, Homaru Cantu, using a Canon i560 to print food (and edible menus), and more than a few news reports of a University of Manchester research team printing skin and bones in similar fashion. Somehow Star Trek’s “replicator” doesn’t sound so crazy anymore. Now if people can make anything, what will they really make? Shudder to think.