Thursday, July 24. 2014New material that makes objects invisible to touch | #material
Via Sploid -----
You're looking at a new awesome nano-material invented that does the seemingly impossible: It hides things from touch. Just a thin layer of this amazing polymer will hide anything under it from being perceived by your sense of touch. In this photo you can see how it "absorbs" a metal cylinder.
How is this magic possible? According to the the scientists at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, this "crystalline material structured with sub-micrometer accuracy [...] consists of needle-shaped cones, whose tips meet." It perfectly adapts and absorbs the shape of anything under it. The metamaterial structure directs the forces of the touching finger such that the cylinder is hidden completely. Not only your finger won't be able to detect it, but a force feedback measurement instrument will fail too. According to Tiemo Bückmann, the lead scientists in the project, "it is like in Hans-Christian Andersen's fairy tale about the princess and the pea. The princess feels the pea in spite of the mattresses. When using our new material, however, one mattress would be sufficient for the princess to sleep well."
What does this mean in real life? The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology claims that the material was developed for purely experimental purposes, "but might open up the door to interesting applications in a few years from now, as it allows for producing materials with freely selectable mechanical properties. Examples are very thin, light, and still comfortable camping mattresses or carpets hiding cables and pipelines below." I like that. Carpets that can perfectly hide cables is something I'd pay money for. And I'd love a camping blanket that perfectly absorbs any rock and twig on the ground, leaving a smooth surface to sleep on.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Science & technology
at
07:54
Defined tags for this entry: artificial reality, materials, nanotech, research, ressources, science & technology
What Else Could Smart Contact Lenses Do? | #vision
----- Besides health tracking, contact lens technology under development could enable drug delivery, night vision, and augmented reality.
Last week Google and Novartis announced that they’re teaming up to develop contact lenses that monitor glucose levels and automatically adjust their focus. But these could be just the start of a clever new product category. From cancer detection and drug delivery to reality augmentation and night vision, our eyes offer unique opportunities for both health monitoring and enhancement. “Now is the time to put a little computer and a lot of miniaturized technologies in the contact lens,” says Franck Leveiller, head of research and development in the Novartis eye care division. One of the Novartis-Google prototype lenses contains a device about the size of a speck of glitter that measures glucose in tears. A wireless antenna then transmits the measurements to an external device. It’s designed to ease the burden of diabetics who otherwise have to prick their fingers to test their blood sugar levels. “I have many patients that are managing diabetes, and they described it as having a part-time job. It’s so arduous to monitor,” says Thomas Quinn, who is head of the American Optometric Association’s contact lens and cornea section. “To have a way that patients can do that more easily and get some of their life back is really exciting.” Glucose isn’t the only thing that can be measured from tears rather than a blood sample, says Quinn. Tears also contain a chemical called lacryglobin that serves as a biomarker for breast, colon, lung, prostate, and ovarian cancers. Monitoring lacryglobin levels could be particularly useful for cancer patients who are in remission, Quinn says. Quinn also believes that drug delivery may be another use for future contact lenses. If a lens could dispense medication slowly over long periods of time, it would be better for patients than the short, concentrated doses provided by eye drops, he says. Such a lens is not easy to make, though (see “A Drug-Dispensing Lens”). The autofocusing lens is in an earlier stage of development, but the goal is for it to adjust its shape depending on where the eye is looking, which would be especially helpful for people who need reading glasses. A current prototype of the lens uses photodiodes to detect light hitting the eye and determine whether the eye is directed downward. Leveiller says the team is also looking at other possible techniques. Google and Novartis are far from the only ones interesting in upgrading the contact lens with such new capabilities. In Sweden, a company called Sensimed is working on a contact lens that measures the intraocular pressure that results from the liquid buildup in the eyes of glaucoma patients (see “Glaucoma Test in a Contact Lens”). And researchers at the University of Michigan are using graphene to make infrared-sensitive contact lenses—the vision, as it were, is that these might one day provide some form of night vision without the bulky headgear. A Seattle-based company, Innovega, meanwhile, has developed a contact lens with a small area that filters specific bands of red, green, and blue light, giving users the ability to focus on a very small, high resolution display less than an inch away from their eyes without interfering with normal vision. That makes tiny displays attached to glasses look more like IMAX movie screens, says the company’s CEO, Steve Willey. Together, the lens and display are called iOptik. Plenty of challenges still remain before we’re all walking around with glucose-monitoring, cancer-detecting, drug-delivering super night vision. Some prototypes out there are unusually thick, Quinn says, and some use traditional, rigid electronics where clear, flexible alternatives would be preferable. And, of course, all will have to pass regulatory approval to show they are safe and effective. Jeff George, the head of the Novartis eye care division, is certainly optimistic about Google’s smart lens. “Google X’s team refers to themselves as a ‘moon shot factory.’ I’d view this as better than a moon shot given what we’ve seen,” he says.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Design, Science & technology
at
07:50
Defined tags for this entry: artificial reality, design, design (interactions), design (products), devices, science & technology, screen, smart, vision, visualization
Wednesday, July 23. 2014“Force Illusions” | #perception
----- Could “Force Illusions” Help Wearables Catch On? By John Pavlus
What if the compass app in your phone didn’t just visually point north but actually seemed to pull your hand in that direction?
Two Japanese researchers will present tiny handheld devices that generate this kind of illusion at next month’s annual SIGGRAPH technology conference in Vancouver, British Columbia. The “force display” devices, called Traxion and Buru-Navi3, exploit the fact that a vibrating object is perceived as either pulling or pushing when held. The effect could be applied in navigation and gaming applications, and it suggests possibilities in mobile and wearable technology as well. Tomohiro Amemiya, a cognitive scientist at NTT Communication Science Laboratories, began the Buru-Navi project in 2004, originally as a way to research how the brain handles sensory illusions. His initial prototype was roughly the size of a paperback novel and contained a crankshaft mechanism to generate vibration, similar to the motion of a locomotive wheel. Amemiya discovered that when the vibrations occurred asymmetrically at a frequency of 10 hertz—with the crankshaft accelerating sharply in one direction and then easing back more slowly—a distinctive pulling sensation emerged in the direction of the acceleration. With his collaborator Hiroaki Gomi, Amemiya continued to modify and miniaturize the device into its current form, which is about the size of a wine cork and relies on a 40-hertz electromagnetic actuator similar to those found in smartphones. When pinched between the thumb and forefinger, Buru-Navi3 creates a continuous force illusion in one direction (toward or away from the user, depending on the device’s orientation). The second device, called Traxion, was developed within the last year at the University of Tokyo by a team led by computer science researcher Jun Rekimoto. Traxion also generates a force illusion via an asymmetrically vibrating actuator held between the fingers. “We tested many users, and they said that it feels as if there’s some invisible string pulling or pushing the device,” Rekimoto says. “It’s a strong sensation of force.” Both devices create a pulling force significant enough to guide a blindfolded user along a path or around corners. This way-finding application might be a perfect fit for the smart watches that Samsung, Google, and perhaps Apple are mobilizing to sell. Haptics, which is the name for the technology behind tactile interfaces, has been explored for years in limited or niche applications. But Vincent Hayward, who researches haptics at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, says the technology is now “reaching a critical mass.” He adds, “Enough people are trying a sufficient number of ideas that the balance between novelty and utility starts shifting.” Nonetheless, harnessing these kinesthetic effects for mainstream use is easier said than done. Amemiya admits that while his device generates strong force illusions while being pinched between a finger and thumb, the effect becomes much weaker if the device is merely placed in contact with the skin (as it would be in a watch). The rise of even crude haptic wearable devices could accelerate this kind of scientific research, though. “A wearable system is always on, so it records data constantly,” Amemiya explains. “This can be very useful for understanding human perception.” Related Links:
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Interaction design, Science & technology
at
09:59
Defined tags for this entry: artificial reality, cognition, devices, interaction design, research, science & technology
Thursday, July 10. 2014Q+A, Antonio Damasio about feelings | #neurosciences
----- For decades, biologists spurned emotion and feeling as uninteresting. But Antonio Damasio demonstrated that they were central to the life-regulating processes of almost all living creatures.
Damasio’s essential insight is that feelings are “mental experiences of body states,” which arise as the brain interprets emotions, themselves physical states arising from the body’s responses to external stimuli. (The order of such events is: I am threatened, experience fear, and feel horror.) He has suggested that consciousness, whether the primitive “core consciousness” of animals or the “extended” self-conception of humans, requiring autobiographical memory, emerges from emotions and feelings. His insight, dating back to the early 1990s, stemmed from the clinical study of brain lesions in patients unable to make good decisions because their emotions were impaired, but whose reason was otherwise unaffected—research made possible by the neuroanatomical studies of his wife and frequent coauthor, Hanna Damasio. Their work has always depended on advances in technology. More recently, tools such as functional neuroimaging, which measures the relationship between mental processes and activity in parts of the brain, have complemented the Damasios’ use of neuroanatomy. A professor of neuroscience at the University of Southern California, Damasio has written four artful books that explain his research to a broader audience and relate its discoveries to the abiding concerns of philosophy. He believes that neurobiological research has a distinctly philosophical purpose: “The scientist’s voice need not be the mere record of life as it is,” he wrote in a book on Descartes. “If only we want it, deeper knowledge of brain and mind will help achieve … happiness.” Antonio Damasio talked with Jason Pontin, the editor in chief of MIT Technology Review. When you were a young scientist in the late 1970s, emotion was not thought a proper field of inquiry. We were told very often, “Well, you’re going to be lost, because there’s absolutely nothing there of consequence.” We were pitied for our poor choice. How so? William James had tackled emotion richly and intelligently. But his ideas [mainly that emotions are the brain’s mapping of body states, ideas that Damasio revived and experimentally verified] had led to huge controversies in the beginning of the 20th century that ended nowhere. Somehow researchers had the sense that emotion would not, in the end, be sufficiently distinctive—because animals had emotions, too. But what animals don’t have, researchers told themselves, is language like we do, nor reason or creativity—so let’s study that, they thought. And in fact, it’s true that most creatures on the face of the earth do have something that could be called emotion, and something that could be called feeling. But that doesn’t mean we humans don’t use emotions and feelings in particular ways. Because we have a conscious sense of self? Yes. What’s distinctive about humans is that we make use of fundamental processes of life regulation that include things like emotion and feeling, but we connect them with intellectual processes in such a way that we create a whole new world around us. What made you so interested in emotions as an area of study? There was something that appealed to me because of my interest in literature and music. It was a way of combining what was important to me with what I thought was going to be important scientifically. What have you learned? There are certain action programs that are obviously permanently installed in our organs and in our brains so that we can survive, flourish, procreate, and, eventually, die. This is the world of life regulation—homeostasis—that I am so interested in, and it covers a wide range of body states. There is an action program of thirst that leads you to seek water when you are dehydrated, but also an action program of fear when you are threatened. Once the action program is deployed and the brain has the possibility of mapping what has happened in the body, then that leads to the emergence of the mental state. During the action program of fear, a collection of things happen in my body that change me and make me behave in a certain way whether I want to or not. As that is happening to me, I have a mental representation of that body state as much as I have a mental representation of what frightened me. And out of that “mapping” of something happening within the body comes a feeling, which is different from an emotion? Exactly. For me, it’s very important to separate emotion from feeling. We must separate the component that comes out of actions from the component that comes out of our perspective on those actions, which is feeling. Curiously, it’s also where the self emerges, and consciousness itself. Mind begins at the level of feeling. It’s when you have a feeling (even if you’re a very little creature) that you begin to have a mind and a self. But that would imply that only creatures with a fully formed sense of their minds could have fully formed feelings— No, no, no. I’m ready to give the very teeny brain of an insect—provided it has the possibility of representing its body states—the possibility of having feelings. In fact, I would be flabbergasted to discover that they don’t have feelings. Of course, what flies don’t have is all the intellect around those feelings that could make use of them: to found a religious order, or develop an art form, or write a poem. They can’t do that; but we can. In us, having feelings somehow allows us also to have creations that are responses to those feelings. Do other animals have a kind of responsiveness to their feelings? I’m not sure that I even understand your question. Are dogs aware that they feel? Of course. Of course dogs feel. No, not “Do dogs feel?” I mean: is my dog Ferdinando conscious of feeling? Does he have feelings about his feelings? [Thinks.] I don’t know. I would have my doubts. But humans are certainly conscious of being responsive. Yes. We’re aware of our feelings and are conscious of the pleasantness or unpleasantness associated with them. Look, what are the really powerful feelings that you deal with every day? Desires, appetites, hunger, thirst, pain—those are the basic things. How much of the structure of civilization is devoted to controlling those basic things? Spinoza says that politics seeks to regulate such instincts for the common good. We wouldn’t have music, art, religion, science, technology, economics, politics, justice, or moral philosophy without the impelling force of feelings. Do people emote in predictable ways regardless of their culture? For instance, does everyone hear the Western minor mode in music as sad? We now know enough to say yes to that question. At the Brain and Creativity Institute [which Damasio directs], we have been doing cross-cultural studies of emotion. At first we thought we would find very different patterns, especially with social emotions. In fact, we don’t. Whether you are studying Chinese, Americans, or Iranians, you get very similar responses. There are lots of subtleties and lots of ways in which certain stimuli elicit different patterns of emotional response with different intensities, but the presence of sadness or joy is there with a uniformity that is strongly and beautifully human. Could our emotions be augmented with implants or some other brain-interfacing technology? Inasmuch as we can understand the neural processes behind any of these complex functions, once we do, the possibility of intervening is always there. Of course, we interface with brain function all the time: with diet, with alcohol, and with medications. So it’s not that surgical interventions will be any great novelty. What will be novel is to make those interventions cleanly so that they are targeted. No, the more serious issue is the moral situations that might arise. Why? Because it really depends on what the intervention is aimed at achieving. Suppose the intervention is aimed at resuscitating your lost ability to move a limb, or to see or hear. Do I have any moral problem? Of course not. But what if it interferes with states of the brain that are influential in how you make your decisions? Then you are entering a realm that should be reserved for the person alone. What has been the most useful technology for understanding the biological basis of consciousness? Imaging technologies have made a powerful contribution. At the same time, I’m painfully aware that they are limited in what they give us. If you could wish into existence a better technology for observing the brain, what would it be? I would not want to go to only one level, because I don’t think the really interesting things occur at just one level. What we need are new techniques to understand the interrelation of levels. There are people who have spent a good part of their lives studying systems, which is the case with my wife and most of the people in our lab. We have done our work on neuroanatomy, and gone into cells only occasionally. But now we are actually studying the state of the functions of axons [nerve fibers in the brain], and we desperately need ways in which we can scale up from what we’ve found to higher and higher levels. What would that technology look like? I don’t know. It needs to be invented.
Related Links:
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Culture & society, Science & technology
at
09:12
Defined tags for this entry: culture & society, neurosciences, perception, physiological, presence, psychological, research, science & technology, scientists
Wednesday, July 02. 2014Smart Home Devices Need to Get a Lot Smarter | #smart?
Note: this sounds like a boring "smart house" digital future (of household appliances: the famous "smart washing machine" might finally and sadly indeed be connected, but it will also certainly include a Google login and password...) Surprisingly (or let's rather say pedictably), it is not an architecture magazine that speaks about the stakes of this close future, but a technological one.
----- Imagine a dishwasher that requires a username and password. Smart homes will require unprecedented effort to ensure not just security but also usability.
The battle between Google and Apple is moving from smart phones to smart things, with both companies vying to provide the underlying architecture that networks your appliances, utilities, and entertainment equipment. Earlier in June, at its annual developer conference, Apple announced HomeKit, a new software framework for communications between home devices and Apple’s devices. Meanwhile, Nest, a maker of smart thermostats and smoke alarms that was bought by Google earlier this year for $3.2 billion, recently launched a similar endeavor with software that lets developers build apps for its products and those from several other companies. Indeed, a quick look at the “Works with Nest” website reveals just how interconnected our future is about to become, with smart cars telling our smart thermostats when we’ll be home, smart dryers keeping our clothes “fresh and wrinkle-free” until we arrive, and household lights that flash red when the Nest detector senses smoke or carbon monoxide. In fact, though, many of us are already living amongst an Internet of (some) things. We have desktops, laptops, cell phones, streaming devices like Apple TV and Roku boxes, and even smart televisions. It’s just that these systems have barely begun to work together properly, and therein lies the problem. The visions of Google and Apple will require a lot more than new frameworks and developer conferences to be truly transformative. They will require heretofore-unseen levels of reliability, security, and usability. Otherwise we’re in for a frustrating and possibly dangerous networked future. Wi-Fi is a key enabler of the networked home. But while Wi-Fi is now present in more than 61 percent of U.S. households, many homes have incomplete coverage, and when Wi-Fi doesn’t work, debugging is difficult. It will need to be dramatically more reliable than today to support the networked future. Broadband Internet will need to be more reliable as well—as reliable as electric service is today. For many this may mean cable modems that can fall back to some kind of wireless 4G service, perhaps from a different provider. These modems will need to be dramatically easier to install and maintain than today’s. We will also need improved debugging systems for when the Internet doesn’t work as it should. Today the primary recourse when your Internet is down is to reboot the cable modem, the laptop, or the smart TV—or even all three! And perhaps the problem wasn’t even in the house. To legitimately be considered smart, smart devices must assess what’s wrong with the connection, and then help fix it. Connecting anything to a secure home Wi-Fi network is a challenge for many. And some devices need additional authentication information, such as an Apple or Google username and password. When passwords change, the smart objects need to get the new passwords, or they cease to work. This approach of binding our smart devices to our personal accounts may be an easy engineering decision today, but it will make less sense as more devices show up in households with multiple family members. Families shouldn’t be forced to decide if the dishwasher is bound to Mom’s Gmail account or Dad’s. Instead, the household should have its own identity, with different family members having different levels of access depending on their needs. Differential access will also be critical for the wide range of formal and informal arrangements that many households require. Think about babysitters, housecleaners, maintenance workers, and building superintendents. If these people need some way to interact with your smart devices, there should be some way to give them that access without sharing your username and password. And there should be some way to review their actions after the fact. And all of this delegation and auditing will need to be easy to configure and use without reading a manual or watching a video. Beyond the issue of usability, the smart home will be an attractive target for hackers and malware. Even if the devices themselves repel attackers, other points of vulnerability include malware-infested desktops, laptops, and mobile phones. Smart things will be attacked, almost certainly in ways that we can’t anticipate today. Even simple data leaks might cause significant problems if they can be systematically harvested and exploited—for example, thieves might be able to determine when you’re not home. Voyeurs might hack your surveillance cameras. With both Google and Apple aggressively moving into this space, another concern is the degree of compatibility between devices. Today, these firms are erecting barriers between their home entertainment offerings, with Apple TV and Chromecast, for example, offering separate content, pricing, and streaming models. Some third-party vendors will surely try to stay out of this fight, offering apps that run on both iOS and Android, or are simply controlled via a Web interface. While that kind of strategy might work for a smart light bulb, it’ll be harder for the maker of a major appliance. If companies chose one ecosystem over another, it will be hard for consumers to switch from Apple-powered appliances to Google-powered ones. Two things about the smart home of the future seem sure. First, given the array of resources being lined up on both sides of this fight, there is unlikely to be a dominant winner, meaning less flexibility for homeowners. Second, the coming wave of smart devices will rely on technology that is ill-equipped to guarantee reliability, and will also introduce completely new ways for things to go wrong. So the companies that make them will need to put far more focus on security, usability, and privacy to earn both customer acceptance and trust.
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fabric | rblgThis 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. This website is used by fabric | ch as archive, references and resources. It is shared with all those interested in the same topics as we are, in the hope that they will also find valuable references and content in it.
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