Layar, worlds first mobile Augmented Reality browser

The first mobile Augmented Reality browser premiers in the Netherlands

www.layar.eu

Five Dutch content providers to participate in the worlds first AR browser

AMSTERDAM, Tuesday June 16th, 2009. Mobile innovation company SPRXmobile launches Layar, worlds first mobile Augmented Reality browser, which displays real time digital information on top of reality (of) in the camera screen of the mobile phone. While looking through the phones camera lens, a user can see houses for sale, popular bars and shops, jobs, healthcare providers and ATMs. The first country to launch Layar is The Netherlands. Launching partners are local market leaders ING (bank), funda (realty website), Hyves (social network), Tempo-team (temp agency) and Zekur.nl (healthcare provider).

How it works
Layar is derived from location based services and works on mobile phones that include a camera, GPS and a compass. Layar is first avaliable for handsets with the Android operating system (the G1 and HTC Magic). It works as follows: Starting up the Layar application automatically activates the camera. The embedded GPS automatically knows the location of the phone and the compass determines in which direction the phone is facing. Each partner provides a set of location coordinates with relevant information which forms a digital layer. By tapping the side of the screen the user easily switches between layers. This makes Layar a new type of browser which combines digital and reality, which offers an augmented view of the world.

Dutch launch
The premier launch is for the Dutch market. Launching content partners are ING (ATMs), Funda (houses for sale), Hyves (social network hot spots) Tempo-team (jobs) and Zekur.nl (healthcare providers). Layar will be launched per country with local content partners in order to guarantee relevent results for the end user. SPRXmobile is planning further roll-outs, together with local partners, in Germany, the UK and the United States this year. SPRXmobile wil continue with regular releases of new layers after each local launch. The Layar application will be available via the Android Market. Other handsets and operating systems are in development with a prime focus on the iPhone 3G S.

SPRXmobile

Layar is developed by SPRXmobile, a mobile innovation company.

Eventually, the physical and the virtual worlds will become one. Many visions on Augmented Reality have already been developed, but we are proud to be able to bring this one step closer to reality, says Raimo van der Klein, co-founder of SPRXmobile.

More information:
http://layar.eu, http://www.sprxmobile.com.

The Living Robot

Researchers have developed a robot capable of learning and interacting with the world using a biological brain.

Kevin Warwick’s new robot behaves like a child. “Sometimes it does what you want it to, and sometimes it doesn’t,” he says. And while it may seem strange for a professor of cybernetics to be concerning himself with such an unreliable machine, Warwick’s creation has something that even today’s most sophisticated robots lack: a living brain.

Life for Warwick’s robot began when his team at the University of Reading spread rat neurons onto an array of electrodes. After about 20 minutes, the neurons began to form connections with one another. “It’s an innate response of the neurons,” says Warwick, “they try to link up and start communicating.”

For the next week the team fed the developing brain a liquid containing nutrients and minerals. And once the neurons established a network sufficiently capable of responding to electrical inputs from the electrode array, they connected the newly formed brain to a simple robot body consisting of two wheels and a sonar sensor. 

Credit: Kevin Warkwick

A relay of signals between the sensor, motors, and brain dictate the robot’s behavior. When it approaches an object, the number of electrical pulses sent from the sonar device to the brain increases. This heightened electrical stimulation causes certain neurons in the robot’s brain to fire. When the electrodes on which the firing neurons rest detect this activity, they signal the robot’s wheels to change direction. The end result is a robot that can avoid obstacles in its path. 

At first, the young robot spent a lot of time crashing into things. But after a few weeks of practice, its performance began to improve as the connections between the active neurons in its brain strengthened. “This is a specific type of learning, called Hebbian learning,” says Warwick, “where, by doing something habitually, you get better at doing it.”

The robot now gets around well enough. “But it has a biological brain, and not a computer,” says Warwick, and so it must navigate based solely on the very limited amount of information it receives from a single sensory device. If the number of sensory devices connected to its brain increases, it will gain a better understanding of its surroundings. “I have another student now who has started to work on an audio input, so in some way we can start communicating with it,” he says.

But it would be a bit shortsighted to say that adding sensory input devices to the robot would make it more human, as theoretically there is no limit to how many sensory devices a robot equipped with a biological brain could have. “We are looking to increase the range of sensory input potentially with infrared and other signals,” says Warwick.

A robot that experiences its environment through devices like sonar detectors and infrared sensors would perceive the world quite differently from a person. Imagine having a Geiger counter plugged into your brain — or perhaps better yet, an X-ray detector. For future generations of Warwick’s robot, this isn’t just a thought experiment. 

But Warwick isn’t interested only in building a robot with a wide range of sensory inputs. “It’s fun just looking at it as a robot life form, but I think it may also contribute to a better understanding of how our brain works,” he says. Studying the ways in which his robot learns and stores memories in its brain may provide new insights into neurological disorders like Alzheimer’s disease.

Warwick’s robot is dependent upon biological cells, so it won’t live forever. After a few months, the neurons in its brain will grow sluggish and less responsive as learning becomes more difficult and the robot’s mortal coil begins to take hold. A sad thought perhaps — but such is life.

From: seedmagazine.com  New Ideas / by Joe Kloc / March 26, 2009

Opera Unite: Reinventing the web, and liberating the tenants of the Internet

by Robin Wauters on June 16, 2009 From: techcrunch.com

We told you last week that browser maker Opera was generating quite some buzz by being secretive about their plans to ‘reinvent the web’. Well, the company this morning unveiled what it was referring to: technology that essentially turns every computer running the Opera browser into a full-fledged Web server. Behold Opera Unite.

You can use Opera Unite to share documents, music, photos, videos, or use it to run websites or even chat rooms without third-party requirements. The company extended the collaborative technology to a platform that comes with a set of APIs, encouraging developers to create their own applications (known as Opera Unite services) on top of it, directly linking people’s personal computers together, no matter which OS they are running and without the need to download additional software. The company recognizes that the current services are fairly basic, but says this is just the tip of the iceberg.

We’ll take a deeper dive in Opera Unite real soon, but I’m impressed with what it looks like on the surface. This is a really good idea at its core, and I encourage you to read Opera product analyst Lawrence Eng’s blog post on the subject for more background and an idea of where Opera is heading with the concept. A small excerpt:

“Currently, most of us contribute content to the Web (for example by putting our personal information on social networking sites, uploading photos to Flickr, or maybe publishing blog posts), but we don’t contribute to its fabric — the underlying infrastructure that defines the online landscape that we inhabit.

Our computers are only dumb terminals connected to other computers (meaning servers) owned by other people — such as large corporations — who we depend upon to host our words, thoughts, and images. We depend on them to do it well and with our best interests at heart. We place our trust in these third parties, and we hope for the best, but as long as our own computers are not first class citizens on the Web, we are merely tenants, and hosting companies are the landlords of the Internet.”

Immortal Information

A new nanoscale storage device could preserve all the digital information you want, for as long as you want—and longer.

New Technology / by Lee Billings / June 15, 2009
From seedmagazine.com

A new nanoscale storage device could preserve all the digital information you want, for as long as you want—and long
For centuries, archivists have noted a curious relationship between “quantity” and “quality” of items in their collections. That is, typically a storage medium’s durability is inversely proportional to the amount of information it can hold. For instance, Sumerian scribes could perhaps only fit a dozen lines of cuneiform onto a typical clay slab, but some of their inscriptions can still be read on surviving tablets six millennia later. Even something as fragile as printed words on paper can endure for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years if properly preserved.

Modern electronic storage media like CDs, DVDs, and computer hard drives can store vastly greater amounts of information, but typically don’t last more than decades at best. Environmental disturbances like fluctuating electromagnetic fields or changing temperature and humidity can corrupt and destroy digitally stored data very quickly. Furthermore, the fast pace of technological progress quickly renders electronic media formats obsolete, leaving users with few options to retrieve data stored on defunct media types.

Perversely, our culture’s explosive production of information may in time wipe out almost all records of our accumulated knowledge and achievements.

To solve that problem, a team led by Alex Zettl, a physics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, has devised a robust nanoscale system that could store massive amounts of digital information for very long periods of time. Any products that eventually emerge from this work could conceivably be the last archival storage devices we would ever need.

The system consists of a minuscule particle of iron encased in a carbon nanotube and represents information in binary notation—the zeroes and ones of “bits.” Using an electric current, information can be written into the system by shuttling the iron particle back and forth inside the nanotube like a bead on an abacus—the left half of the nanotube corresponds to zero, the right half corresponds to one. The encoded information can then be read by measuring the nanotube’s electrical resistance, which changes according to the iron particle’s position.

Because of their very small size, a square-inch array of these nanotube memory systems could store at least one terabit—a trillion bits—of information, approximately five times more than can be packed into a square inch of a state-of-the-art magnetic hard drive. But Zettl believes the technology could be pushed to much higher information densities.

“We can manipulate this particle and read out its position so accurately, we could divide the nanotube’s length into 10 or even 100 units instead of just two,” Zettl says. “Whether this is worthwhile to implement right away, I’m not sure, because it adds complexity, but it could immediately give us 10 or 100 times the information density with the same device.”

As promising as the technology is, much work remains to be done before it could result in a product competitive with other established storage options.

“What you’d want to do is make arrays of these things to get very high capacity, high density storage. Right now we only have high density since we’ve only made a few of these systems,” Zettl says. “You need something that can be scaled up, that’s easy to manufacture, with a low price and high reliability.”

The system certainly seems reliable—Zettl and his team have estimated that information stored within it would be essentially impervious to degradation.

The key is to make sure that the particle doesn’t slide too easily by itself at room temperature because if it did, you’d eventually lose the memory.” Zettl says. Other memory-degrading processes include the random kinetic jiggling of atoms and the rusting, or oxidization, of a device’s components. But since the chemical bonds between a nanotube’s carbon atoms are so strong, Zettl says, it forms a hermetically sealed system that protects the iron particle from a wide range of environmental contamination.

The team determined the lifetime of a bit stored in their system by finding the threshold energy required to jostle the iron particle so that its information was lost, then modeling the particle’s motion and stability at room temperature. Their result showed that the iron particle—and thus the bit—should be stable within the nanotube for more than a billion years.

Zettl hastens to point out that this system is only the core element of a potential commercial storage device, and that additional necessary components could have shorter lifetimes, lowering the total longevity. But, he says, “Whether it’s stable for 1 million years or 1 billion years, this very small, very high-density component still has an excellent archival timescale associated with it.” Indeed, if the system does store information for a billion years, it seems unlikely we will be present to confirm it: Scientists estimate complex plant and animal life on Earth may only persist for another 500 million years or so. After that, an aging Sun and plummeting levels of atmospheric CO2 should transform our blue-green planet into a dismal brown orb—though that’s probably cold comfort for anyone whose every Facebook and Flickr foible could be immortalized within some descendant of Zettl’s system.

Life sucks and then you die…

by Mike Treder


Ethical Technology

Posted: Jun 12, 2009 on IEET

...but it doesn’t have to be that way!



As an existentialist, I am committed to the recognition that most of life is suffering. To be born is to die, and to live is to experience pain and agony.

Only the tiniest fragment of humanity has ever been so fortunate as to “enjoy” life, even briefly. The vast majority of humans who have ever lived have perished in anonymity, their hopes, dreams, joys, passions, laughter, tears, toils, fears, and even names lost forever, abandoned to oblivion.

Where is the redemption in a world like that? Where is the logic? There is none, and mankind’s long quest to find extrinsic meaning in life is a fool’s errand.

However, as Pee-wee Herman once said, everyone has a big BUT. In this case, the big but is that we don’t have to accept things as they are. Indeed, the whole history of humankind is that we take arms against a sea of troubles: we resist the inevitable, defy the obvious, and take solace in the belief that we can make things better.

First, we tame fire. Then, we stop chasing food and corral it. We create writing, build cities, enact laws. We invent printing, devise the scientific method, shun superstition, and practice medicine. We recognize human rights, outlaw slavery, enfranchise everyone, and promote tolerance.

But that’s not all. After subduing nature and trampling so much of her beauty, we gain a dawning awareness that having dominion over the Earth is maybe not such a good idea after all. Playing nice with Gaia might in the long run turn out better.

So, we renounce our profligate ways, look toward renewable sources of energy and sustainable lifestyles, and seek to make amends for the great damage we have done. We are growing, maturing, taking responsibility for our actions and attitudes.

All this is good and commendable. We may yet deserve our self-claimed label of homo sapiens—“wise man”—although we have a long way to go.


There’s only one big problem, namely that “life sucks and then you die.” It still sucks for most of us, and we still all die!

But, aha, it doesn’t have to be that way.

If we have proven anything in the last 10,000 years of advancing civilization, and especially in the last 300 years of the scientific era, we have shown an ability—indeed a compulsion—to kick against the pricks, no matter how painful that might be, until we break free from whatever bonds held us down. We will not be satisfied with the status quo. Life can be better, and we can make it so.

We can have more freedom, more equality, more solidarity. We can do more to reduce suffering, increase education, and provide abundant opportunities for all. We can use our intelligence, our creativity, our learning, and our technology to improve on things as they are. We can, we must, and we will.

Today we are finally approaching the very real potential of overcoming the greatest limitations that existence has placed upon us. We are beginning to see the glimmers of significant life extension, of healthspans that could cover centuries, if not eons. Our rapidly accelerating technological prowess may soon enable substantial reengineering of the human condition and such radical augmentation of our bodies and ourselves that we may no longer be recognizably human, but will have attained a state of transhumanity or even posthumanity.

This is the technoprogressive ideal: that we take responsibility and make ourselves better than we are, the best that we can be, not only for ourselves but for all our human sisters and brothers and for all our earthly flora and fauna relatives. E pluribus optimus, if you will.

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Mike Treder is the Managing Director of the IEET, and former Executive Director of the non-profit Center for Responsible Nanotechnology.