Thursday, May 14. 2009
Fiddle with an invisibility cloak, and it can make any object look like another, say researchers.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Just when you thought invisibility cloaks couldn't get any weirder, researchers come up with this: a way to make one object look like any other.
Invisibility cloaks work by steering light around a region of space, making any object inside that region invisible. In effect, an invisibility cloak creates the illusion of free space. This is possible because of a new generation of artificial materials called metamaterials that can, in principle at least, steer light in any way imaginable. Indeed, various teams have built real invisibility cloaks that hide objects from view in both the microwave and optical bands.
Now Che Chan and pals from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology say that metamaterials could be used for an even more exotic effect: for cloaks that create the illusion that a different object is present.
The illusion is a two-step process, and to see how it works, imagine making a mouse look like an elephant. The first step involves an idea that these guys came up with about six months ago in which they described a way of cloaking objects at a distance.
The trick is to create a material in which the permittivity and permeability are complementary to the values in a nearby region of space containing the mouse we want to hide. "Complementary" means that the material cancels out the effect that the mouse has on a plane lightwave passing through. So a plane wave would be bent by the mouse but then bent back into a plane as it passes through the complementary material, making the mouse disappear.
The second step is to then distort this plane wave in the way that an elephant would. This means creating transformational material that distorts a plane lightwave in the same way as an elephant. So anybody looking at this mouse would instead see an elephant.
An invisibility cloak is just a special case of this, when the mouse is simply replaced by the illusion of free space, say Chan and co.
The researchers have even found a mind-boggling application. Their idea is to create the illusion that a wall has a hole in it, and then use the hole to look through the wall.
That's not quite as bonkers as it sounds. The wall has to be pretty thin, and what the new device does is allow light to tunnel through the wall in a way that would not ordinarily be possible. Amazing, if it works.
There's no telling where this kind of thinking will lead. But surely metamaterials can't do anything weirder than this?
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0905.1484: Illusion optics: The optical transformation of an object into another object1
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Via MIT Technology Review
Personal comment:
Créer un faux trou dans un mur qui n'en a pas et pouvoir malgré tout regarder à travers... Hmmmm, ça commence à aller loin! Très "interférenciel"!
“Quickly emerging from the fast-paced growth of mobile communications and wireless technologies, pervasive games provide a worldwide network of potential play spaces. Now games can be designed to be played in public spaces like streets, conferences, museums and other non-traditional game venues – and game designers need to understand the world as a medium—both its challenges and its advantages.“
This book shows how to change the face of play—who plays, when and where they play and what that play means to all involved. The authors explore aspects of pervasive games that concern game designers: what makes these games compelling, what makes them possible today, how they are made and by whom. For theorists, it provides a solidtheoretical, philosophical and aesthetic grounding of their designs.
Pervasive Games covers everything from theory and design to history and marketing. Designers will find 13 detailed game descriptions, a wealth of design theory, examples from dozens of games and a thorough discussion of past inspirations—directly from the game designers themselves.
Why do I blog this? just saw this on, need to get it and peruse this interesting compendium of case-studies (Killer, Insectopia, Botfighters, Uncle Roy, etc.). People interested can also listen to the podcast by the editors.
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Via Pasta & Vinegar
Personal comment:
Un livre en rapport à l'émergence des jeux "omniprésents" (pervasive) destinés à être joués dans des lieux "réels" et ayant des rapports avec ce lieu.
The best way to see if something works or not is to try it out for yourself. FOXTEL Australia has sent us an email about their new website, called I Am Unique, which lets users create personalized 3D portraits that incorporate text, videos and images from social sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Sounds vague; luckily, they’ve also created one for us, and I have to admit, it’s pretty neat.
The portraits are really in 3D, and you can pan, zoom and rotate them as you like; the entire experience and the interface is somewhat similar to Microsoft’s Photosynth. Each portrait consists of several “fragments”; click on one, and it’ll flip over, revealing content - a tweet or an image, perhaps - drawn from one social network or another.
You can do all sorts of cool things with the fragments; for example, you can browse through them with the arrow keys, or separate them all with the spacebar (hit “controls” on the right side of the screen to see all the options). You can create your own portrait for free, or contribute to other portraits by adding photos, text, stories, videos or blog entries that are relevant to the portrayed entity.
Now, while the entire site is primarily a visual gimmick and a showcase of FOXTEL’s technology, used in their iQ2 set-top unit, it’s done very well and I can actually see people using it; it’s free, simple, easy, and the results are undeniably cool.
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Via Mashable
Personal comment:
Le retour de l'Avatar... Ici, un avatar construit à partir de fragment trouvé sur les réseaux sociaux. Quelque chose qui serait à la fois dynamique et plus représentatif de son identité en ligne. Cela me rappelle évidemment deux projets que nous avons fait (il y a longtemps): les reconstruction de personnages pour Parisienne en 2000 (fragments d'images de visages capturées à différents moments dans le temps) et Knowscape_mobile (cf lien) entre 2003 et 2005 où l'avatar, construit en temps réel, montrait les sites web par lequel la personne était passée (clickable sur son avatar).
What are you doing on Friday night? If you don’t have other plans, you can tune in to a live broadcast of the public launch of Wolfram Alpha, the much-hyped search engine that we reviewed last week. The company will be live broadcasting its launch starting at 8pm ET using video streaming service Justin.tv.
Although we’re not yet convinced that Wolfram Alpha is going to be the search company to finally challenge Google, this launch strategy is a smart one – if all goes well. With Justin.tv’s integration of Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace into the chat window that accompanies each video, the launch stands to gain a tremendous amount of buzz across social media sites.
The Wolfram Alpha team tries to manage expectations in a blog post about the event, writing, “We can’t guarantee that everything will go smoothly. Indeed, we fully expect to encounter unanticipated situations along the way. We hope that you’ll find it interesting to join us as we work through these in real time. Perhaps you’ll even have some advice to share.” Once the webcast is completed, the company expects to push what it calls a computation knowledge engine out to everyone “within an hour or two.”
While Wolfram Alpha is patting their own back a bit for their very public launch (“we’ve been rather surprised that we haven’t been able to find even a single publicly available record of the commissioning of any large website at all,” they write), other companies hoping to duplicate this strategy should note that the search engine is one of the most hyped new products this year, so attracting tons of viewers to your own webcast launch might not be so easy (assuming Wolfram Alpha’s assumption is right and people will watch a website launch on a Friday night).
In any event, Wolfram Alpha is near, and the reaction from real users will be exciting to watch given all the pre-launch hype.
Personal comment:
Et toujours à propos de Wolfram Alpha, leur stratégie communication pour créer du buzz... A noter que c'est le deuxième projet où le "making of" (ici le lancement du système au niveau public) sert de stratégie de communication (cf. le projet de Peter Saville pour Wallpaper blogué récemment). Dans les deux cas, les systèmes de communication des réseaux sociaux --Twitter pour un flux d'informations, Facebook, etc.-- sont exploités.
There’s always an urge to declare a major new player in search as a “Google killer” because of its unique approach to the space, its celebrated founding team, or copious amounts of industry hype.
Wolfram Alpha has a bit of all of these elements working for it, though it’s significantly different than other recent attempts to dethrone Google, such as Cuil, which fell flat on its face on launch day, or Powerset, which was acquired by Microsoft before ever really getting a chance to prove itself as a commercially viable product.
The first key thing to be aware of with Wolfram Alpha – the project of Stephen Wolfram, a noted physicist and mathematician – is that it’s not a search engine in the traditional sense. Its goal isn’t to index the Web and direct you to Web pages quickly, but rather, to make computations based on a rich database of historical knowledge.
What It Does
In checking out the private preview this week (the site is expected to launch later this month), the first question to come to mind was when exactly would I use this as opposed to Google? Most of my searches are navigational – I’m either looking for a specific type of website (travel, tickets, etc.), or researching a story that I’m working on for Mashable.
To answer this question, Wolfram Alpha has an “examples” section with about two dozen different sample uses of its technology. Some of these examples are really heady, academic stuff – like the calculus you probably don’t remember from college.
Others are more practical, like entering in “San Francisco to Tokyo” and getting data on how many miles apart they are, the projected flight path, and current local times. Meanwhile, if you ever wanted to know what time the sun rose and set on the day you were born, type in your birthday and Wolfram Alpha will tell you (and also let me know that I’m approaching my 10,000th day on earth!).
What It Doesn’t Do
While that is pretty cool, it’s not exactly something I’d need to use every day, nor something I could easily explain to typical Web users. Additionally, when trying more Google-like searches, like trying to find a Las Vegas hotel room, there doesn’t seem to be much that Wolfram Alpha can do to help. But, that also doesn’t really seem to be the point of Wolfram Alpha – at least for now.
Where It Fits
The real strength and power of Wolfram Alpha does seem to be for the academic and research community, where the company’s founder has been innovating for more than two decades. How well it works will ultimately come down to its ability to interpret user inputs (i.e. - the examples are impressive, but how well will it respond to the queries of real users?), and its ability to grow its database to perform more everyday tasks.
Ultimately, it’s hard to see how Wolfram Alpha could be called either the next Google or the next Cuil. Rather, it seems to have the ambition of making accessible a whole different type of information, that could be quite useful to a significant subset of Internet users. And eventually, that might make it a good compliment, but not a replacement, for today’s leading search engines.
Personal comment:
Un nouveau moteur de recherche autour duquel beaucoup de "hype" se développe. Et l'"adverstising" est fait pour que de la hype se développe.
En dehors de ça, le nouveau site semble promettre d'autres types de recherches, ou le moteur "calcule des résultats" basé sur une vaste db de "connaissances". L'objectif ne semble donc pas d'entrer en compétition avec Google... éventuellement coimplémentaire et ça paraît être une approche assez intéressante.
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