February 20, 2005
A couple of demonstration videos, overlaying computer graphics on the real world.
February 04, 2005
A searchable database of early 1990s predictions about the future of the Internet. Fascinating stuff.
A post from Noise Between Stations on the current and impending disruptive technologies that may affect home audio systems.
November 13, 2004
Transmaterial is a book about (mostly) new materials and techniques, and a flick through the free downloadable PDF version sends you into a new world of science fiction phrases: Biosteel, light-transmitting concrete, pervious concrete, Superblack, corrugated glass, rubber pavements/sidewalks, strawboard,...
November 12, 2004
I'm often sceptical about art using technology, having seen scarred by one too many ICA net.art exhibitions in the mid-nineties, but some folk do interesting stuff with electronics. Josh Rubin's ever fascinating Cool Hunting points out a nifty device created...
August 06, 2004
Trendwatching identifies "life caching" as a trend - the ever-growing quantity of personal media (photos, writing, music, etc.) that people are sharing. Fair enough, but they ignore the consequences of this which are much, much more interesting than bigger iPods.
December 22, 2003
A Chinese court has told the developers of an online game to return virtual goods to their rightful owner.
October 21, 2003
How the business world is slowly catching up with the once sci-fi world of nanotech.
September 16, 2003
Matt Jones has written has written some mini scenarios for the BBC about technology in 2013 and put four of them online. They're nicely done, but within a disappointingly constrained brief - technology alone just isn't that interesting.
August 21, 2003
Economist Edward Castronova continues his investigations into the expansive economies of multi-player online games.
August 08, 2003
A graph showing the growth over time of various multi-player online games, via Clay's commentary.
July 08, 2003
Kevin Kelly on the two ways to create custom maps of parts of America, and how people are amending and sharing them.
June 27, 2003
I finally got round to reading the June issue of Wired, a large chunk of which is edited by architect Rem Koolhaas. There are some interesting, but extremely short, articles about global trends, all shoehorned into the vague theme of...
June 18, 2003
This Mercury News article describes a mafia-like organisation emerging in one of the The Sims Online cities. Apparently, an attempt to create some order in the shape of a shadow government got out of hand and resulted in a rather...
June 07, 2003
A paper on how Chinese DJs and other music-lovers are getting hold of foreign music via the net, and how Jacques Attali sees music as an indicator of social change.
May 26, 2003
How people cheat at online multi-player games and how to stop them. And Julian Dibbell's diary of making real money in Ultima Online.
May 08, 2003
A strangely US-only list of the ten most influential people in the world of nanotechnology.
April 30, 2003
A Business 2.0 article lists six technologies in development that could have big impacts.
April 29, 2003
An article outlining the current state of display technology, including Organic LEDs, LEPs, flexible roll-up-able displays and 3D displays....
February 25, 2003
Techdirt links to a Reuters report about the proliferation of techniques for avoiding advertising online, on TV and over the phone. It's interesting as a counterpoint to Minority Report's forecast of a world filled with personalised advertising....
January 30, 2003
Technology Review has an article entitled '10 Emerging Technologies That Will Change the World'. And they are: wireless sensor networks, injectable tissue engineering, nano solar cells, mechatronics, grid computing, molecular imaging, nanoimprint lithography, software assurance, glycomics and quantum cryptography. They...
January 18, 2003
The growing boom in location-based technology. Turning real-world locations into data that can let us do and discover new things.
January 10, 2003
A couple of years back I posted about Napster Fabbing, the fabrication of 3D objects and transmitting the instructions for doing so across the Internet (the page I linked to is broken, but the Way Back Machine has a copy)....
November 19, 2002
Kevin Werbach thinks that email spam will get so bad most people will resort to whitelists because spam filters won't be good enough. (A whitelist only accepts email from known parties and anyone else must perform some action that lets...
October 30, 2002
Red Herring has an article that briefly talks about the different studies electronics companies are doing to see how people use homes that are crammed with all the latest interconnected technological gizmos. One day, in a far-off future, project names...
October 24, 2002
The Telegraph has a story about how "an American team has used a pioneering genetic method to help convict an American doctor of deliberately infecting his former girlfriend with Aids." The story grabs one's attention by suggesting people could be...
October 20, 2002
I'm not doing very well at keeping this updated. Too much time writing code. However, here's a lovely article from yesterday's Guardian in which Jon Ronson visits a guy who's building an AI robot at home near Weston-Super-Mare, UK. I'm...
September 24, 2002
A California, USA, company has developed a flying car with vertical take-off. It's obviously still being tested but it looks like fun. Even if such vehicles are never used for commuting I could well imagine them being raced around aerial...
September 20, 2002
The computer game The Sims is in the news because the upcoming online version of the game is going to contain very interactive product placement. Users will be able to use Intel computers and work in a McDonald's outlet; "Eating...
July 30, 2002
A New York Times article reinforces what the complacent WFS old-timer in yesterday's post was saying: reality is struggling to keep ahead of science fiction ideas such as cloning, teleportation, miniaturisation, etc. Worth it if only for this ludicrous quote...
July 20, 2002
This is the name of a report that suggests we should get the domains of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science working together to make the most of their possibilities and thus transform the human race's capabilities in the...
July 14, 2002
David Pogue has decided there is no point extrapolating future trends from present technology. His examples project progress to the point of ludicrousness: "Palmtops can't get much smaller without having smaller screens. ... How big would screens be by 2010...
July 12, 2002
Business 2.0 has a brief roundup of where nanotechnology stands now and in the immediate future. Nanotubes ("Mitsui alone says it will soon begin producing 120 tons of them a year"), drugs using nanoparticles and nanocapsules in clinical trials, computer...
July 07, 2002
In this Business Week interview Greg Blonder, ex AT&T Bell Labs boss turned venture capitalist sees a crisis of short-term thinking approaching in the world of American technological research. The dot com boom, he says, encouraged people to forget long...
Last week Clay Shirky produced an interesting essay on the well-used phrase "Half the world has never made a phone call." He reminds us that the rate at which increasing numbers are making their first phone call is the statistic...
July 06, 2002
The Economist's recent 'Technology Quarterly' contains a useful round-up of wireless computer networking technologies that may threaten the coming 3G cellphone networks. Four technologies are discussed: smart antennas that effectively increase the capacity of an antenna site; "mesh networks" of...
July 03, 2002
I didn't realise how far holograms had come. Business 2.0 describes how Ford used holograms to create a prototype car that viewers could walk around. As the article and the Slashot thread say, the easiest way to imagine it is...
According to this article a robot component manufacturer has announced that "the robot would emerge as the driving force of electronics this century, akin to computers and automobiles in the last century." Of course, they would say that, but it...
June 28, 2002
Battelle, a US technology development company, has a collection of technology forecasts such as "Top Ten Breakthroughs for Household Products by 2007" and "Strategic Technologies by 2020." Nothing particularly earth-shattering, but a nice set of self-contained lists that could come...
June 27, 2002
A while ago I mentioned how it's becoming easier to re-program robots designed for consumer entertainment. Matt Jones went to see Natalie Jeremienko talking about her Feral Robotic Dogs project which is all about finding new uses for "toys" like...
June 24, 2002
We hear a lot about how the networked society will bring political decision making closer to individuals, but finding concrete examples of this trend in action is tough. However, a week ago, the British government backed down over a proposal...
June 20, 2002
Subtitled "Bio/Nano/Materials Trends and Their Synergies with Information Technology by 2015" this report contains two main chapters: first, a detailed look at the current state of the technologies and where they might progress to by 2015. Second, a discussion of...
Plustech have developed a large vehicle designed to walk through forest terrain with an operator in the cockpit controlling the attached tools. Watching the two videos of the robot-like machine in action it's hard to believe it's not a Star...
June 06, 2002
An article about Robot SDKs (Software Development Kits which allow developers to write code that controls robots) that are available for commercially available robots such as Lego Mindstorms and Sony's AIBO. The latter is most interesting given that in the...
May 24, 2002
A team at the University of South Australia's Wearable Computing Laboratory is working on integrating the Quake computer game with the real world. The ARQuake Project allows the user to walk around the campus wearing goggles and see computer-generated monsters...
May 20, 2002
Last week's conference in Santa Clara, California, USA, is now over and the geeks are back in their pens. It focussed on all the bits of networking technology that enable individuals (and organisations) to do interesting things and to share...
May 10, 2002
Three Australian artists are experimenting with xenotransplantation, the transplanting of non-human biological materials on/into humans. It's interesting to see people toying with this kind of thing for reasons that aren't purely medicinal. Wings made from pig tissue powered by rat...
February 25, 2002
The state government in South Carolina, USA, have been keeping DNA records of all babies since 1995 without the consent of parents. Some of this data has now been passed on to a genetics laboratory and the State Law Enforcement...
February 09, 2002
I love this, whether its statistics are meaningful or not. Players of Sony's online game EverQuest spend a lot of real world money on transactions such as selling game assets via eBay. Edward Castronova at Cal State Fullerton University, USA,...
November 13, 2001
Sounds a bit cranky ("visionary" always reads like a polite synonym for "crank"), but Greg Nemitz wants to create a mining colony on 433 Eros, an asteroid, in order to get at a potential US$325 quadrillion worth of platinum....
September 17, 2001
A brief discussion of the potential effects on how building and city design might change following the destruction of the World Trade Center by terrorists. It would be interesting to read something more in depth on this (jump to the...
April 30, 2001
New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program runs a class on scenario building and they put the resulting scenarios online. The site has material dating back to 1993. (via Haddock)...
March 23, 2001
An interesting look at the future fusion of "fabbing" (using a machine to create an 3D object using digital instructions) and peer-to-peer concepts as popularised by Napster. (via Haddock)...
March 05, 2001
A RAND report on the Net twenty years out, and particularly America's place within it: "American ideals, with modest refinements, would write the constitution of a global civil society, even as the American state itself would lose its primacy." (via...
January 14, 2001
Everyone whose fingers have been near a keyboard this week seems to have asked this question, so I post this merely for the sake of completeness. IT is a mystery new invention that will apparently change the world, although no...
At Comdex, Dimensional Media demonstrate a system that projects a 3D image of an object into mid-air. Viewers do not need to wear any special equipment to view the image which they can walk around. (via Haddock)...
Some are claiming that the concentration of gays in a city (or, more broadly perhaps, the level of acceptance of alternative cultures) could be a leading indicator of future economic booms. Cities with the highest concentrations of gays are currently...
October 11, 2000
A series on BBC Radio 4 in the UK, hosted by Douglas Adams, looking at the futures of music, broadcasting, publishing and the effects of technology on society. (via Gorjuss)...
A good roundup of current technologies, their uses and prototypes for future mainstream models. (via Slashdot)...
October 03, 2000
A report on Frog Design's system based around a golf-cart-sized electric car. Talks about neighbourhood hubs for delivery and collection of goods ordered online and links to a number of international car-sharing schemes....
September 03, 2000
The Institute for Applied Autonomy develops robots for use in various forms of protest that may cause human protagonists to be arrested. For example, the GraffitiWriter and Little Brother, an automated pamphleteer. (via Nettime)...
September 01, 2000
A good discussion about different techniques of growing plastic in plants. The benefit is less of the traditional petrochemical processes. The downside that it can take more energy to extract this new biodegradable plastic from the plants than it does...
A team at the University of Manchester, UK, has boosted the lifespan of "microscopic worms" by 50% by using drugs. It's the first time any animal's life has been extended by the use of drugs....
August 23, 2000
Forbes ASAP teams up with frogdesign to look at how a computer might function and look in ten years. (via Slashdot)...
August 22, 2000
Nexia Biotechnologies say they are on the verge of producing the protein that forms spiders' webs from the milk of specially bred goats. Spider silk is the strongest fibre known to man....
August 19, 2000
One of five robots funded by the Thailand Research Fund "is armed with a pistol that can be programmed to shoot automatically or wait for a fire order delivered with a password from anywhere through the Internet." If it didn't...
August 15, 2000
Wearable tech is slowly going mainstream. We've already had clothes designed to incorporate gadgets, and watches incorporating more and more functions unrelated to their original function. Now Levi's and Philips plan to jointly sell jackets containing mobile phones and MP3...
August 02, 2000
Demand for power has risen dramatically throughout the USA, leading some firms to source their own supplies. New electronic systems use a surprising amount of power, and according to this Risks List posting the costs of power are rising dramatically....
Progressive Insurance is offering drivers in Texas, USA, lower insurance costs if they allow their driving habits to be monitored by GPS. If the car is used less often, and at quieter times of the day, the monthly insurance bill...
July 06, 2000
A report from a Next Twenty Years discussion, with Paul Saffo and others imagining what technology will be like in 2020 and how society will cope. (via Matt Jones)...
June 12, 2000
The New York Times has a large section on different technologies we can expect in the future: 'The Blind Date Who Is Your Destiny,' 'The Genetic Report Card That Will Tell You If Your Embryo Will Get Prostate Cancer,' 'The...
June 06, 2000
A series of Technology Review articles about the possibilities for the future: molecular, quantum, biological and DNA computing and more. (via Slashdot)...
May 19, 2000
Thoughts about the kinds of vehicles we might see in the future, and how usage patterns could change....
April 20, 2000
The Uniform Code Council (overseers of bar codes) is working out details of a new Electronic Product Code to replace the 25 year old technology. "while today's bar code can say only that it's affixed to a bar of Dial...
International Paper Co. and Motorola Inc. agreed to a groundbreaking deal to put microchips in the packaging concern's boxes, a big step toward eliminating bar codes and ultimately bringing the entire manufacturing supply chain online....
April 02, 2000
The US' Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is requesting proposals for the development of "Exoskeletons for Human Performance Augmentation." (via Haddock)...
March 08, 2000
The Japanese government is planning to ban research into human cloning, with offenders possibly facing jail time. A spokesman for its science and technology agency said "Human cloning may pose a threat to the maintenance of social order, the foundation...
March 01, 2000
The design firm Ideo have come up with their vision of consumer technologies in ten years' time. Lots of good mock-ups and visualisations of what phones, watches, displays, chairs and more might look like. (via Haddock)...
February 09, 2000
1999 saw a large increase in the use of industrial robots around the world. The increase is attributed to the decreased cost of robots (40 per cent cheaper than 1990), and higher labour costs and labour shortages in the developed...
IBM have developed a method of transporting information around an integrated circuit using the wave nature of electrons rather than wires. This will allow smaller chips than conventional methods. (via Haddock)...
February 02, 2000
There are rumours China may launch men into space very soon, despite "western experts'" speculation that it would be years before the nation was ready....
Perhaps an oversimplistic comparison of the state of the Internet in the world's largest countries, but interesting nonetheless. The Chinese government has closed 127 Internet cafes in Shanghai, in the same week the Delhi government launches its first cybercafe, undercutting...
January 31, 2000
Report on a talk by Eric Lander about four areas to be tackled in the near future. I think it's mainly focussing on projects his group at The Whitehead Institute are working on, but it's still a look beyond the...
January 29, 2000
Tim Sweeney, co-founder of Epic Games, on the development of computer programming languages, current trends, and the field's future, parametric polymorphism. (via Linkwatcher)...
January 28, 2000
Raymond Kurzweil discusses the future of the brain and AI over the next century. By 2050 a $1,000 computer will equal the processing power of the world's human brains; nanobots in our brains will enable us to cut off real...
MotionWare is a device which alters the user's sense of balance. It's been used in the medical world for some time, but Virtual Motion plan to produce devices for home entertainment, syncing it with, for example, games so the user...
January 27, 2000
Nearly one third of 20-35 year old males in the UK are living with their parents, up from 25% in 1977/8. The later age of marriage and difficulties in entering the housing market are possible reasons. The article, citing a...
January 19, 2000
A study at Boston University, USA, have developed a technique for switching genes from one state to another. The next step is to create sensors which switch state once a certain threshold is reached. It could be used to alert...
NuvoMedia (makers of the RocketBook) and SoftBook Press have been acquired by Gemstar, the maker of Video Plus and electronic TV guides, and the owner of TV Guide magazine. A massive ad campaign is planned for later in 2000, using...
The total number of Internet users in China has grown from 2.1 million in December 1998 to 8.9 million in December 1999. On average they spend 17 hours a week online and 20 million are expected to be online by...
Solotrek hopes to demonstrate its personal Vertical Take Off and Landing device. The user straps himself into its exo-skeleton style device and its two large fans allow him to fly around up to 80mph. (via Memepool)...
January 17, 2000
A bit of a yawn, as it's been predicted for so long. But PA New Media plan to launch their female CGI newsreader later this year....
January 16, 2000
A 62 year old blind man can see 100 specks of light thanks to a device wired into his skull - enough vision to allow him to walk around and identify simple objects. He had the device implanted in 1978...
January 12, 2000
Article about a development in using DNA as a computing tool although it's still "a long ways from challenging chip technology." One gram of DNA could hold more data than a trillion CDs....
A report on warships the US Navy hopes to have operational by 2010 which will require crews of half the current size. Automated features include the ability to switch electricty supplies around the ship to where they're most needed. (via...
January 07, 2000
Describing uses for nanotechnology in medicine, particularly in gene therapy where it could help avoid fatal immune system responses. (via Slashdot)...
Much of the article is just about the man himself, but he answers some questions about the possibilities for computers and human brain power in the future, and space travel. (via Slashdot)...
January 06, 2000
Scientists at the University of Connecticut, USA, have cloned four calves from cells taken from a bull's ear and then frozen for several months. Previously it was thought that cells were only useful for a short time after cultivation....
December 22, 1999
Lengthy article about people working on nanotech projects which are producing results. (via EurekAlert)...
December 14, 1999
Lifeshirt plan on selling a shirt in September 2000 which monitors the wearer's vital signs and sends the data to a secure website. This can then be sent to the wearer's doctor. $250 for the shirt, $30 per day for...
November 29, 1999
The companies displayed a prototype that uses a head-mounted monocle to project a 10 inch display. The PC is controlled by a joystick-like device, no keyboard. They will decide next year when to launch it....
Dr. Phillip Kennedy has developed a device which, once wired into the brain, lets a patient control a computer using thought alone....
November 27, 1999
Two physicists at Cornell University have used a modified scanning tunneling microscope to pick up single carbon monoxide molecules and graft them onto iron atoms....
November 22, 1999
A team at the University of California, Berkeley, have developed a transistor ten times shorter than those currently in use. 400 times more of them can be fit on a chip. (via Slashdot)...
Its first unmanned rocket, Shenzhou, was launched successfully, a test for future manned space travel....
November 20, 1999
Microsoft, the National Computational Science Alliance, the University of Washington and Sony demonstrated more than 2 Gbps througput on a wide area network....
November 19, 1999
Teams at Rice and Yale Universities have developed a molecular computer switch using chemical processes rather than photolithography. "'It really looks like we're going to have hybrid molecular- and silicon-based computers within five to 10 years,' Tour said."...
The homeless are taking advantage of Net connections in libraries and special cybercafes set up for them. Free email, classifieds, resum...
A group at Bell Labs have developed a 50-nanometer transistor. It should overcome limits faced by conventaionl transistors....
November 18, 1999
In 1995 Rodrigo Baggio started a computer school in a Rio de Janeiro favela with computers donated from C&A. Now his Committee to Democratise Information Technology has set up 107 schools in 13 states. A school was set up in...
A team at the European Institute of Oncology in Milan have found that mice live up to a third longer if they're missing a certain gene. "It's really the first time that anybody has intervened to extend the lifespan of...
November 17, 1999
The creators of the UK's Legoland are working on a project to build a hotel in space and expect to have it running by 2017. It will be built mostly of scavenged orbiting rubbish, will offer spacewalking excursions to the...
November 16, 1999
If the Human Genome Project and Celera join forces the genome could be complete as early as next year....
A group at the Ruhr University, Bochum, Germany have used the two halves of DNA spirals like velcro to stick together tiny objects....
Stephen Chou at Princeton University has a concept for high density storage using electrons to cut the tiny pits on his penny-sized CDs rather than light (whose wavelength is too long). These CDs can store about 180 GB....
November 15, 1999
A look at how robots will become more common outside factories over the next 10+ years, in industries like meat packing (second highest accident rate after construction), shops, households....
US atronomers have the first visual confirmation after watching a planet pass in front of a distant star. It confirms that calculations about such planets are correct....
More from Nicholas Negroponte (and others). Electronic paper, consumable computers for health checks, computers with common sense, and other more down to earth stuff. Apparently the world's biggest producer of tyres is now Lego....
So says Nicholas Negroponte, who's described as an "internet guru" so it must be true. "Even more products than people will be connected to the web ... 'Think of Barbie dolls. There are likely to be more Barbie dolls connected...
November 09, 1999
Three Dutch scientists are developing a method of mass producing meat without animal suffering. Samples of animal cells are cultivated on a matrix of collagen....
In December the US Air Force will launch a fleet of small experimental satellites. Clusters of tiny satellites weighing as little as one pound are envisioned over the next twenty years....
November 04, 1999
A team from Yale and Rice Universities have demonstrated computer memory with elements the size of single molecules....
Kevin Warwick at the University of Reading, UK, will have a chip implanted in his arm in 2001. It will radio nerve impulses to a computer which will then be able to play them back, causing his arm to replay...
November 03, 1999
University of California at Berkeley researchers are building a fly-sized robot for surveillance. Made of stainless steel with Mylar wings its $2.5 million cost is being funded by the Office of Naval Research....
According to the GartnerGroup. Also that over 95 percent of mobile phones shipped in 2004 will be WAP-enabled and 75 per cent will have Bluetooth....
Of European households with computers only 9 per cent are online (I think it's 25 per cent in the US?). In 1998 the average American user spent 32 hours per week online compared to 22 in Europe....
The Intelligent Autonomous Systems group at the University of the West of England, Bristol, UK, have developed a robot which kills slugs. It can identify the slugs and captures them at the rate of ten a minute. When it's full,...
General Motors' OnStar system will let you check stocks, weather, email by speaking to it. And hoot the horn when you say "horn"....
November 01, 1999
Sweden's largest electric utility, Vattenfall AB, is going to install servers in over 400,000 homes over the next two years. The servers will be able to connect kitchen appliances, security systems, heating control systems and utility meters over phone lines...
Iowa is testing voting over the Internet alongside its conventional election. Voters receive a unique ID number to enter, and their vote is encrypted and "read anonymously" at a computer clearinghouse. Washington and Virginia have already conducted successful and secure...
October 31, 1999
A new estate in Hertfordshire, UK, will be "smart homes", with operations like adjusting heating, lights, alarm from any Net connection. Webcams point outside the house and videoconferencing facilities are built in. Being able to switch on the coffee machine...
October 21, 1999
On the third page of this good report on the arrival of the next wave of games consoles it notes "Square, the publisher of the Final Fantasy game series, says it expects to spend $40 million on the next installment...
October 11, 1999
The World Wide Fund for Nature says 116 GM tree trials have taken place since 1988 and these trees can cross pollinate with native trees over a distance of 400 miles. "Other GM modifications under trial raise the prospect of...
October 07, 1999
UN report says there are almost 400 million mobiles in use with 250,000 being added each day. Some countries already have more mobiles than land lines, like Finland (51% of the market), Cambodia (58%) and Rwanda (72%). Pre-paid phones are...
A group at University of California, Berkeley, have reconstructed what a cat sees by connecting electrodes to 177 cells in its brain directly to a computer....
The two companies have set up a joint venture which intends to sell Net-connectable household appliances within a year. Ericsson already have a head start with their Screenfridge....
October 05, 1999
Report on a survey by UN Economic Commission for Europe (co-authored by the International Federation of Robotics) which expects domestic robots to be taken up by the wealthy, to be integrated into their fully wired homes....
October 04, 1999
US firm C3D has a working prototype of 140 GB CD-sized disk and 10 GB card (both read only). They're planning to start pilot production with the disks going by the un-catchy name of FMD-ROM disk (for Fluorescent Multi-layer Disk)....
September 15, 1999
NASA is starting a $600,000 project to turn astronaut waste into a power source using pyrolysis - breaking matter down by heating it without oxygen. Pyrolysis can result in liquids or gases, depending on the temperature of burning and these...
Researchers at University of California, San Diego managed to revive cells in monkey brains which had previously been thought dead due to age, using gene therapy. Although the cells appeared to be physically back to almost normal, they haven't tested...
September 11, 1999
Jeremy Rifkin on how we should approach the use of biotech. "It needs to be stressed that it's not a matter of saying yes or no to the use of technology itself and never has been ... Rather, the question...
