Sony’s AIBO may be defunct, but the little robotic dogs still have a loyal fanbase. On February 7th in Japan, a bunch of AIBO owners (37 of them) got together and put on a show, conducted by what else but a Sony Rolly. It looks like the Rolly was set up to play an audio command, which the AIBOs would all respond in unison… Have a look:
Retina scanning, face recognition and fingerprint reading are common biometric systems for physical security accesses or computer logon systems, and in recent years the latter has become more widespread in consumer products such as laptops or handheld devices. Fingerprint readers, despite being nearly ubiquitous on notebooks these days, aren’t exactly popular mainly due to the concerns of public hygiene. Fujitsu’s approach, palm vein scanning, on the other hand, is non-invasive and contactless scanning: PalmSecure advanced biometric authentication technology comes in the form of a standard PC mouse and offers highly secure and reliable personal identity verification. SlashGear caught up with Dan Miller, business development manager at Fujitsu, to find out more.
The PalmSecure biometric sensor does not register age-lines or anything like fingerprints, in fact it reads and records the unique vein pattern inside your hand. A near-infrared beam goes sub-layer into the palm of your hand, recording the unique patterns into a digitally encrypted file. Data is stored and secured with an in-house two-way encryption algorithm of up to 256 bits, or alternatively Fujitsu will let you apply the encryption method of your choice.
Its accuracy, according to Miller, far exceeds fingerprint scanning and is in fact up near iris and DNA levels, with just 0.00008 percent false acceptance and 0.01 false rejection. “It’s a very highly accurate device which you can’t forge” Miller explained, “and you’re getting it at the fraction of the cost compared to an iris.” The technology has been successfully implemented in various industries worldwide including banks, big-name corporations, healthcare organizations and, now, is expanding into the PC industry with the sensor built into the body of a standard USB mouse.
The PalmSecure’s LogonDirector is designed to work with Windows based desktops and laptops, integrating with the Windows sign-on screen and replacing the standard username and password boxes with a palm-scan prompt. No password entering or card swiping is needed: with spread fingers, you just raise you palm a couple of inches above the mouse, then slowly bring it down. Within the space of an inch, the reader should be able to scan the veins and automatically log you right in. Miller says a single user authentication happens almost instantly, while large multiuser organizations, requiring database access, may require at least a second or more.
The hardware is a standard USB 2.0 PC mouse, and since it’s bus-powered it doesn’t require any sort of battery. When asked about an alternate wireless version, Miller said it’s not currently on the roadmap.
In Fujitsu’s defense, due to low demand in Vista deployment, large enterprises are still using XP thus the device currently only supports Windows 2000 and XP. Nonetheless, Miller assured us that Vista is definitely on the roadmap and, in fact, a new version supporting the OS should be released this quarter. Unfortunately he couldn’t promise anything for Apple or Linux users. “Right now it’s supporting XP; Vista is going to be out very shortly, this quarter. Apple and Linux are not on the target list yet” he continued, “down the road it is, but we don’t have any dates yet.”
The Fujitsu PalmSecure LogonDirector has a suggested retail price of $427 for the hardware and an additional $40 for the app. Standalone versions can be purchased with groups of 1, 10 or 25 user licences; meanwhile volume licenses are available for the Enterprise version, with similar pricing from 1 to 100 users. The Enterprise version includes additional management software, that requires installation on an existing server. That allows for centralized administrative and management control, letting large organizations manage palm vein patterns to an authentication server for more robust security and fine-tuned user privileges.
Right now, Fujitsu seem to be aiming resolutely at business and enterprise users - and with the hardware alone costing as much as an entry-level notebook, we’re not surprised. However we’d expect the PalmSecure technology to filter down to consumer products relatively soon, given the benefits of palm-vein authentication over fingerprint technology.
Funny how i am always reluctant to spend one hour and a half in a train to check out some exhibitions in Milan but would not think twice about taking the plane to Barcelona or Valencia and have a short(-ish) train ride on top of that just to go to Castellon. I've never really toured Castellon. I have no idea whether there is a castle, i never visited the Gothic Concatedral de Santa Maria, i was told the beach is pretty neat but never saw it, not even from afar. All i come to see is EACC. Opened ten years ago, the Espai d'art contemporani de Castelló / Castellon's Contemporary Art Space initially focused its mission on the debate and the diffusion of recent artistic practices through a program of thematic exhibitions and activities that include music, cinema and workshops. EACC doesn't take its location in a city most of us had never heard of as an excuse to explore only the hackneyed and revel in safe names. Its programme is edgy, inspired and adventurous. Recently they had a retrospective of John Cage's work. The next show will be dedicated to the one of the few artists who saved the last edition of Documenta for me: Saâdane Afif.
Photographer credit: Pascual Mercé
A few weeks ago, EACC opened Are You Experienced?, a series of three installations by Ann Veronica Janssens. Sometimes described as 'sensorial environments', 'immaterial sculptures' and 'spatial abstractions', her installations are the result of a carefully-studied transformation of the space. Each of them uses different strategies to play with visitors' perception.
The night of the opening, people were queuing in front of a big translucid box installed on the esplanade in front of the EACC. Vapour was escaping from the door each time someone would get in or out of the container. It's the Blue, Red and Yellow pavilion, a proposal consisting of a volume built with metal whose polycarbonate walls form cells covered by transparent films in blue, red and yellow. But no one tells you that. You get inside the tank and wonder what is happening around you. Bodies get lost in the mist, voices are lowered, you walk carefully through a dense coloured mist that changes hue according to your position. You can hardly distinguish your own hand, let alone the shadowy outlines of other people. They simply vanish. The only things that seem to be tangible are light and colours.
Photographer credit: Pascual Mercé
Inside EACC, Janssens designed two side-specific and apparently minimalist interventions: one based on sound and the other on light. Colours, visual light and sound effects, are combined to both re-purpose the architecture of the space and appeal to visitors' senses.
Photographer credit: Pascual Mercé
As the artist herself has said, the situations she creates are not reducible to (more or less spectacular) formal effects "but must be perceived in a context that could be considered political. They occur, for the most part, in a public space without imposing a fixed form or being directly prehensile. They are ephemeral sculptures whose action consists of being dispersed in a given space, infiltrating this space rather than imposing upon it. In effect, I investigate the permeability of contexts (architectural/social/cultural/political) even as I propose a form of deconstruction that fragments our perception of these contexts".
Using only intangible means - humidity, sound and light, fleshed out with colour or softened by mist - the artist manages to shape the spectacular, to give borders and boundaries to the awe-inspiring.
Photographer credit: Pascual Mercé
Ann Veronica Janssens interviewed by Michel François.
More than 82 million people in the US created content online during 2008, a number expected to grow to nearly 115 million by 2013 according to numbers released by eMarketer.
Looking inside of those numbers, it’s not surprising that the bulk of content creators are simply social networking users that do things like post photos or links, but there’s also a quickly-growing number of people participating in more involved activities like blogging or uploading their own videos.
As you can see in the above chart, 71 million people created content on social networks last year, while 21 million posted blogs, 15 million uploaded videos, and more than 11 million participated in virtual worlds. Overall, eMarketer arrives at the 82 million number – which counts everyone who generated content at least monthly - by accounting for the overlap within the respective categories measured.
Beyond the current numbers, the growth forecast makes us happy, as it means there will be a lot more to write about in the years to come Hopefully it’s encouraging for you as well, as in the big picture, even if you’re new to the party, you’re still well ahead of the curve.
A new exhibition called Forest, curated by Cécile Martin, opens up tomorrow night in Montreal. For the show, "artists and architects have joined forces to propose a new vision of the forest."
There are three pavilions in all: "three installations that invite one to penetrate and explore the movements and dangers of the canopy, soil and hidden dangers of the forest." They include the poetically named "From Chernobyl to Montreal, the Incandescent Zen Garden," whose creators note that "the natural phenomena of radioactivity and sound waves are amplified," with part of the installation "illuminated night and day by a red light, the same one that made the forest – the Red Forest – adjacent to the Chernobyl nuclear reactor vibrate."
This slightly unclear image nonetheless leaves me wondering what the biological effects might be if you could cause a several-acre test-forest to vibrate constantly: what strange roots and branches would grow? Would constant vibration cause radically new tree structures to grow – or just make for some very happy plants?
It'd be like the sound farm, only more tactile – and far stranger.
A perpetual earthquake as a lab for cultivating the unnatural.
The other two pavilions, meanwhile, are "The Macrocosm of Fiber or the Filtering Pavilion" and "The Mobile Branch, A Forest of Hypnosis and Vertigo." The latter project, a collaboration between architect Philip Beesley – whose work was explored here a few years ago – and artist Patrick Beaulieu, is described a kind of animatronic thicket: "A raised three-dimensional flooring and a cover propelled at 300 rotations per minute form a vibrating dance of branches and twigs, constituting a human-sized space of the in-between from which humans are nevertheless excluded."
You wander into a forest – only to realize that it's not a forest at all, but a vast machine...
There are a series of workshops on Friday and Saturday, as well – so if you're anywhere near Montreal, check it out! Tell them you heard about it on BLDGBLOG.
Implant Matrix, we read, is "an interactive geotextile that could be used for reinforcing landscapes and buildings of the future." It is a responsive latticework that, installed beneath soil, would act as a kind of a terrestrial prosthesis, a local replacement for the earth's surface. An earth surface machine.
The Implant can also be used, however, as a way to treat "an architectural building skin as a responsive textile," facilitating "active exchanges with building occupants." In the process, the machine would exhibit "mechanical empathy."
Which means what, exactly?
"Mechanical empathy" is described by the project's designers – Philip Beesley Architect of Toronto – as a kind of architectural eroticism. So if you're lonely... reach out and touch your house: "The components of this system are mechanisms that react to human occupants as erotic prey. The elements respond with subtle grasping and sucking motions. Arrays of ‘whisker’ capacitance sensors and shape-memory alloy actuators are used to achieve sensitive reflexive functions. The interactive elements operate in chained, rolling swells, producing a billowing motion. This motion creates a diffuse peristaltic pumping that pulls air and organic matter through the occupied space."
The assembly, in other words, with its micro-mechanical nerve endings, seems to mimic orgasm... Perhaps giving new meaning to earthquakes. (Read more in this PDF).
Two more, decidely cinematic, views of the Implant Matrix:
Of course, there is a bewildering array of other such projects by Philip Beesley Architect featured on their website, including Cybele, a kind of rubberized terrain-machine on stilts –
– which, seen from above in this next image, offers its own miniature landscape, another earth surface machine.
Then there's the hypnotically delicate Orpheus Filter, with its shivering infrastructure of virus-like bladders arranged in hanging constellations and blurred carousels (below).
(Abstractly related: Strandbeestmovie. With huge thanks to Eric Bury for the tip! And... I just saw that Tropolism also featured the Implant Matrix, so check out their coverage for a bit more).
This blog is the survey website of fabric | ch - studio for architecture, interaction and research.
We curate and reblog articles, researches, writings, exhibitions and projects that we notice and find interesting during our everyday practice and readings.
Most articles concern the intertwined fields of architecture, territory, art, interaction design, thinking and science. From time to time, we also publish documentation about our own work and research, immersed among these related resources and inspirations.
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