La firme Hollandaise SPRXmobile devrait sortir sous peu une application pour Android qu’elle désigne comme “le premier navigateur à réalité augmenté”. Appelé Layar, l’application est une plateforme qui rend accessible des contenus et des données en surimpression de la vue offerte par la caméra vidéo du téléphone. Des commerces, banques, sociétés spécialisés dans la recherche de restaurant et services d’immobiliers ont deja créé des couches d’informations disponibles sur la plateforme, qui pour l’instant se limite à la Hollande. La démonstration est tout simplement bluffante.
Le blog, NotJustReality cite Raimo van der Klein, cofondateur de SPRXmobile qui affirme : “A terme, le monde physique et virtuel ne feront plus qu’un”. C’est une vision quelque peu dérangeante, mais l’application Layar n’en est pas moins cool pour autant.
L’idée terrifiante d’avoir une couche d’information commerciale superposée au monde réel n’est pas à prendre à la légère, mais on peut également envisager une multitude d’autres informations, en provenance d’encyclopédies telles que Wikipedia ou de son réseau social, qui permettront d’appréhender la réalité de façon différente.
Le blog Talk Android de Google stipule que l’application sera disponible sous peu dans l’Android Store, mais ne mentionne aucune date de sortie pour d’autre pays que la Hollande. SPRXmobile, de son coté, affirme travailler à la sortie de Layar pour iPhone.
Data gleaned from Internet service providers hints at how the government is controlling Web traffic.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
By Erica Naone
Iran's government might not have completely cut off Internet access within its borders, as have other governments suffering from political unrest. However, new evidence shows that the Data Communication Company of Iran (DCI) has been manipulating the overall flow of traffic to the country, according to Craig Labovitz, chief scientist for Arbor Networks, a company based in Chelmsford, MA, that provides network security and analysis for many Internet service providers and large businesses.
Although Labovitz has no information directly from Iran, he has based his conclusions about Iranian traffic on data collected from more than 100 Internet service providers that together allow Arbor Networks to form a picture of global Web traffic.
Upstream traffic from six providers that typically service Iran shows a sharp decline after the elections on June 13. Credit: Arbor Networks
This graph zooms in on traffic at the time of the outage following Iran's elections. Credit: Arbor Networks
Labovitz found that on June 13, the day after elections, Iranian traffic fell off almost completely. Traffic came back a few hours later, he writes, though just a little. By June 16, Labovitz says, it was back to about 70 percent of normal.
Labovitz writes,
So what is happening to Iranian traffic?
I can only speculate. But DCI's Internet changes suggest piecemeal migration of traffic flows. Typically off the shelf / inexpensive Internet proxy and filtering appliances can support 1 Gbps or lower. If DCI needed to support higher throughput (say, all Iranian Internet traffic), then redirecting subsets of traffic as the filtering infrastructure comes online would make sense.
Unlike Burma, Iran has significant commercial and technological relationships with the rest of the world. In other words, the government cannot turn off the Internet without impacting business and perhaps generating further social unrest. In all, this represents a delicate balance for the Iranian government and a test case for the Internet to impact democratic change.
Google Books has quietly been one of Google’s most interesting project to date. It has involved the scanning of millions of books (which has been a point of contention with book publishers) and allows users to not only read books but to search them, embed printed words, and even access them on mobile phones.
Today, Google launched a ton additional improvements. In an announcement, the Google books team revealed not one or two, but seven new features within their book-archiving service. Here’s what has changed:
1. Easier embeddability: Embedding books was possible before through a complicated Embedded Viewer API, but now it’s as simple as a YouTube snippet. Like so:
2. Better context with book search: When your’e doing a keyword search, you’ll see more of the context around it to better understand what you’ve actually found. You can also sort these new results by relevance and use “Previous” and “Next” buttons.
3. Thumbnails: There’s a new thumbnail book view!
4. New Contents Menu: It’s a new dropdown menu that allows you to jump to different chapters in a book.
5. Plain Text Version: Google says that this feature is meant for the visually impaired.
6. Page Turn Button: This feature reminds me a bit of the Kindle’s page turning features. It’s even animated.
7. Enhanced Overview Page: The overview page has information like reviews, ratings, tagged words, and more. Here’s one for the book Blink by Malcolm Gladwell:
Overall, it’s a large collection of small feature upgrades that enhance the user experience. And user experience is one thing Google understands very well. With today’s update, books have become even more accessible.
Google books reste un incroyable projet à suivre et dont on attends avec impatience l'arrivée à maturité. Un projet qui pourrait changer bien des façons (universitaire) de travailler. Je pense là bien sûr à la recherche, aux thèses mais aussi à l'éducation.
What if our buildings could harvest power from the air, not wind or solar but literally out of thin air? Its not as crazy as it first sounds with cities literally spewing out electromagnetic radiation from TV, Radio, and Mobile phones constantly. That’s just what Nokia is doing right now, actively researching this for future generations of Mobile phones.
It’s also not a new idea, in fact the first station to harvest the power from the atmosphere has already been built and now stands derelict in a plot on Long Island for sale for $1.6 million. (map)
The tower was conceived by Nicola Tesla to transmit information and power. It was even speculated that Tesla intended for the tower to demonstrate how the Ionosphere could be used to provide free electricity to everyone without the need for power lines. The First transmission tower, Wardenclyffe Tower was actually built, work started in 1901:
In 1901, Nikola Tesla began work on a global system of giant towers meant to relay through the air not only news, stock reports and even pictures but also, unbeknown to investors such as J. Pierpont Morgan, free electricity for one and all….The first tower rose on rural Long Island and, by 1903, stood more than 18 stories tall. One midsummer night, it emitted a dull rumble and proceeded to hurl bolts of electricity into the sky. (via)
Tesla Tower or Wardenclyffe Tower building was designed by infamous NY Architect Stanford White who was later shot at Madison Square Roof Garden by the jealous husband of one of his lovers . (See the excellent book on White called The Architect of Desire us/uk). However the project soon ran into financial problems and when Marconi sent a radio transmission across the Atlantic on the 12th Dec 1901, it helped to scupper Tesla’s much more ambitious project. Tesla quickly tried to change the purpose of the Tower to a power generator and transmitter taking power from the ionosphere, but time and money ran out for him and he eventually had to sell the station to pay his debts. Now the site is derelict and for sale and campaign has started to save the building.
Image from NYT article
So the idea is not new but perhaps more powerful than ever. If we can suck in energy from the air around us for mobile phones then why not by buildings? Whether it would be mega projects of huge pylon towers sucking in power from the city around or more ambiently from integrated receptors on the roofs of housing blocks powering heating systems locally, the idea really seductive.
References:
Nokia want to build phones that will recharge this way.
NYT has an excellent article about Tesla and Wardenclyffe.
Perhaps proof that J.G.Ballard didn't really die, he simply took an engineering job at MIT, scientists at that venerable Massachusetts institution have designed a new concrete that will last 16,000 years.
Called ultra-high-density concrete, or UHD, the material has so far proven rather strikingly resistant to deformation on the nano-scale – to what is commonly referred to as "creep."
This has the (under other circumstances, quite alarming) effect that "a containment vessel for nuclear waste built to last 100 years with today's concrete could last up to 16,000 years if made with an ultra-high-density (UHD) concrete." (Emphasis added).
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So how long until we start building multistory car parks with this stuff? 16,000 years from now, architecture bloggers camped out for the summer in rented apartments in Houston – the new Rome – get to visit the still-standing remains of abandoned airfields, dead colosseums, and triumphal arches that once held highway flyovers?
16,000 years' worth of parking lots. 16,000 year's worth of building foundations.
Perhaps this simply means that we're one step closer to mastering urban fossilization.
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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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