Note: the workshop continues and should finish today. We'll document and publish results next week. As the workshop is all about small size and situated computing, Lucien Langton (assistant on the project) made a short tutorial about the way to set up your Pi. I'll also publish the Github repository that Matthew Plummer-Fernandez has set up.
The Bots are running! The second workshop of I&IC’s research study started yesterday with Matthew’s presentation to the students. A video of the presentation might be included in the post later on, but for now here’s the [pdf]: Botcaves
First prototypes setup by the students include bots playing Minecraft, bots cracking wifi’s, bots triggered by onboard IR Cameras. So far, some groups worked directly with Python scripts deployed via SSH into the Pi’s, others established a client-server connection between their Mac and their Pi by installing Processing on their Raspberry and finally some decided to start by hacking hardware to connect to their bots later.
The research process will be continuously documented during the week.
Note: a few of our recent works and exhibitions are included in this promising young publication related to architectural thinking, Desierto, edited by Paper - Architectural Histamine in Madrid. At the editorial team invitation, I had the occasion to write a paper about Deterritorialized Living and one of its physical installation last year in Pau (France), during Pau Acces(s). We also took the occasion of the publication to give a glimpse of a related research project called Algorithmic Atomized Functioning.
"The temperature of the invisible and the desacralization of the air. 28° Celsius is the temperature at which protection becomes superfluous. It is also the temperature at which swimming pools are acclimatised.
Within the limits of the this hygrothermal comfort zone, we do not require the intervention of our body's thermoregulatory mechanisms nor that of any external artificial thermal controls in order to feel pleasantly comfortable while carrying out a sedentary activity without clothing.
28° Celsius is thus the temperature at which clothing can disappear, just as architecture could."
Authors are Gabriel Ruiz-Larrea, Sean Lally, Philippe Rahm, Nerea Calvillo, myself, Helen Mallinson, Antonio Cobo, José Vella Castillo and Pauly Garcia-Masedo.
Editorial by gabriel Ruiz-Larrea (editor in chief). Editorial team composed of Natalia David, Nuria Úrculo, María Buey, Daniel Lacasta Fitzsimmons.
Inhabiting Deterritorialization, by Patrick Keller, with images of Deterritorialized Living website, Deterritorialized Daylight installation (Pau, France) and Algorithmic Atomized Functioning.
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.
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.”
Seen everywhere online these days and now on | rblg too... Yet another "trojan horse" by Google to turn you into a mobile and indoor sensor for their own sake (data collection, if I said so). And soon will we be able to visit your flat or the ones of your friends through Google Maps/Earth, or through a constellation of other applications. After clicking at the door, of course.
But also, as it is often the case with such devices, an interesting tool as well... On top of which disruptive apps will be built that will further mix material and immaterial experiences and that will further locate parts of your "home" into "clouds".
As it consists in an open call for ideas, before they'll give away 200 dev. kits, don't hesitate to send them a line if you have an unpredictable one (this promiss to be very competing...)!
“Our current prototype is a 5” phone containing customized hardware and software designed to track the full 3D motion of the device, while simultaneously creating a map of the environment. These sensors allow the phone to make over a quarter million 3D measurements every second, updating its position and orientation in real-time, combining that data into a single 3D model of the space around you.
“It runs Android and includes development APIs to provide position, orientation, and depth data to standard Android applications written in Java, C/C++, as well as the Unity Game Engine. These early prototypes, algorithms, and APIs are still in active development. So, these experimental devices are intended only for the adventurous and are not a final shipping product….”
“Connected devices are central to our long-term strategy of injecting sophisticated computation and knowledge into everything. With the Wolfram Language we now have a way to describe and compute about things in the world. Connected devices are what we need to measure and interface with those things.
“In the end, we want every type of connected device to be seamlessly integrated with the Wolfram Language. And this will have all sorts of important consequences. But as we work toward this, there’s an obvious first step: we have to know what types of connected devices there actually are.
“So to have a way to answer that question, today we’re launching the Wolfram Connected Devices Project—whose goal is to work with device manufacturers and the technical community to provide a definitive, curated, source of systematic knowledge about connected devices….”
[The Audubon Society's micro-dredger, the John James, making new land in the Paul J. Rainey Wildlife Sanctuary in South Louisiana. Karen Westphal, Audubon’s Atchafalaya Basin program manager, will be speaking about this participatory micro-dredging project at DredgeFest Louisiana's symposium, which is this Saturday and Sunday at Loyola University in New Orleans.]
…south Louisiana is disappearing—terrifyingly fast. Sea-level rise, salt water intrusion, and canal excavation for industrial purposes have all combined with the constrainment of the river via flood control infrastructures to radically alter the balance between deposition, subsidence, and erosion. Instead of growing, the delta is now shrinking. Louisiana has lost over 1700 square miles of land (an area greater than the state of Rhode Island) since 1930. Without a change in course, it is anticipated to double that loss in the next fifty years. By 2100, subsidence, erosion, and sea level rise are projected to combine to leave New Orleans little more than an island fortress, effectively isolated in the rising Gulf of Mexico.
Moreover, even where the land itself may not be entirely submerged, the loss of barrier islands and coastal marshes exposes human settlements ever more precariously to the vicious effects of hurricanes and tropical storms, including the destructive waves known as storm surge.
This situation is entirely untenable. You thought Katrina was a terrible disaster? (It was.) Imagine what happens to New Orleans when a Category 6 hurricane hits in 2086, when even the highest ground in the French Quarter and the Garden District is barely above sea level and well below the ever-thickening barriers the Army Corps will throw up to protect America’s newest island.
In response to this apocalyptic but plausible threat, Louisiana is engaging in the world’s first large-scale experiment in restoration sedimentology. With the aid of components of the federal government like the Army Corps of Engineers and a bounty of funds earmarked for coastal restoration and protection as a result of payments owed by BP for the damages wrought by the 2010 Deep Horizon oil disaster, Louisiana has accelerated its nascent crash-program in experimental land-making machines, rapidly prototyping a wide array of weird and wonderful techno-infrastructural strategies for building land. This is an effort to cobble together a synthetic analog to the land-making machine that the Mississippi once was. If you want to understand the future of coastlines and deltas in a world of rising seas and surging storms, you should pay close attention to what is happening in Louisiana.
Researchers at the MIT Media Lab and the Max Planck Institutes have created a foldable, cuttable multi-touch sensor that works no matter how you cut it, allowing multi-touch input on nearly any surface.
In traditional sensors the connectors are laid out in a grid and when one part of the grid is damaged you lose sensitivity in a wide swathe of other sensors. This system lays the sensors out like a star which means that cut parts of the sensor only effect other parts down the line. For example, you cut the corners off of a square and still get the sensor to work or even cut all the way down to the main, central connector array and, as long as there are still sensors on the surface, it will pick up input.
The team that created it, Simon Olberding, Nan-Wei Gong, John Tiab, Joseph A. Paradiso, and Jürgen Steimle, write:
This very direct manipulation allows the end-user to easily make real-world objects and surfaces touch interactive,
to augment physical prototypes and to enhance paper craft. We contribute a set of technical principles for the design of printable circuitry that makes the sensor more robust against cuts, damages and removed areas. This includes
novel physical topologies and printed forward error correction.
You can read the research paper here but this looks to be very useful in the DIY hacker space as well as for flexible, wearable projects that require some sort of multi-touch input. While I can’t imagine we need shirts made of this stuff, I could see a sleeve with lots of inputs or, say, a watch with a multi-touch band.
Don’t expect this to hit the next iWatch any time soon – it’s still very much in prototype stages but definitely looks quite cool.
The possible applications for drones are growing every day. From watching out for poachers in wildlife parks in Africa to delivering textbooks to students, the autonomous flying machines are tackling problems both big and small. The ability for the drones to have onboard sensors and HD cameras makes them ideal tools for mapping and surveillance.
Taking that idea to the extreme, engineers from senseFly, partnered with Drone Adventures, Pix4D and Mapbox, were able to create a digital model of the Matterhorn with a 20-cm resolution in three dimensions. Two teams took the company's eBee drones to the mountain with Team 1 hiking to the summit and launching the devices to fly around the top of the peak. Team 2 launched eBees from the bottom of the mountain to cover the lower parts of the mountain.
SenseFly says, "The main challenges successfully overcome were to demonstrate the mapping capabilities of minidrones at a very high altitude and in mountainous terrain where 3D flight planning is essential, all the while coping with the turbulences typically encountered in mountainous environments."
For the project, 11 flights were made totaling 340 minutes. The drones took 2,188 photos and created an HD point-cloud with 3 million datapoints. The company's eMotion2 software provided the ground control for the flights, automatically creating flight paths for the multiple drones.
Following our residency in Beijing at the Tsinghua University that ended last July, fabric | ch transformed itself into the organizers of a call (!) that will run between next september and october, in partneship with TASML (Beijing). The call is closely related to the work and workshop we've done in Beijing.
The results of this CALL (1st price) will be presented during the next Lisbon Architecture Triennale, CLOSE, CLOSER (curator Beatrice Galilee), so as another list of EVENTS, as an Associated Program and during a talk together with fabric | ch.
An Award of Distinction is open to international submissions.
You can find below a copy of this open call dedicated to individuals or interdisciplinary groups of students and faculty members of Tsinghua University in the fields of Architecture, Design, Art and Sciences (1st prize), so as to the international community (students and professionals, Award of Distinction).
Call : radical designs and sustainable strategies for shared, open and livable personal data centers (& clouds)
In collaboration with fabric | ch, Tsinghua Art & Sciences Research Center Media Laboratory (TASML) is pleased to announce an open call to the Tsinghua community for individuals or interdisciplinary groups of students and faculty in the fields of Architecture, Design, Art and Sciences. Conceived by fabric | ch, the competition is inspired by Deterritorialized Living, a workshop, a project and series of online “tools / atmospherics” developed on the Tsinghua campus during a recent residency.
The purpose of the competition is to explore a radicalized experience of deterritorialisation / detemporalization through intensive use of network, transportation and sometimes biochemical devices as well as to investigate alternative strategies in lieu of corporate approaches to data, data centers and cloud computing. The competition aims to develop speculative and innovative artifacts (code, interfaces, programs, objects, devices, spaces, etc.) for this contemporary situation.
One of the first general purpose computer, the Eniac I, back in 1946.
Context: Since the public emergence of the Internet and the web in the mid ’90s and the ubiquitous presence of wireless communication, peer to peer exchanges, and social networks of all kinds in recent years, we have witnessed a growing tendency towards horizontally mediated decentralization. These conditions have not only deeply influenced the ways in which people and societies interact (social interactions, exchanges, mobilities, artifacts, economies, etc.), but have also affected how clusters of computers and hardware collaborate or exchange information. To some extent, networks have generated some sort of “geo-engineered” milieu that triggers an experience of delocalization: ambient deterritorialization that is always around, always on.
Recently the “network” concept has started to widen its influence: the energy industry is planning to adopt the horizontal model with its “smart grid” plans, in which everybody should be able to produce their own clean energy and store it or share it with the rest of the community. We can witness something similar in alternative, locally produced food: the idea of distributed food that is produced close to the place where it will be eaten, through the approach of highly decentralized and small scale “gardening” or through certain forms of urban “farming”. Rapid prototyping also helps to spur a similar movement in the product design community.
Yet, on the data side, we are witnessing the exact opposite: we have moved from a fundamentally decentralized model towards a highly “mainframed” (centralized) structure of corporately owned data, services and data centers, although these seemingly “immaterial” information architectures appear to be deceptively decentralized, accessible everywhere, anytime.
Should we then consider personal-urban-“data-farming” instead of corporate data centralization too? Or should we rather try urban-“data-gardening” instead? Could we build a highly decentralized, almost atomized open system of small interconnected data centers? Could we possibly inhabit these data centers, taking advantage of the heat they generate, the high-bandwidth network access they provide, the data they collect? Should we also consider their necessary relocation while taking into account their highly mediated nature?
… and a picture of several servers cabinets taken out of Clog: Data Space (2012).
Or should we simply consider the data center figure (and its services) for what it is: the furtive icon of our modernity and of the radically modified relation we maintain to global territory? Should we therefore think about it in even more radical or speculative terms?
Based on the context above, we are calling for proposals under the title of Deterritorialized Living (Beijing sessions) / Inhabiting the Computer Cabinet.
Objective: An abstract space of 9 square meters is proposed for the competition, to be designed into a large computer cabinet that is inhabitable. Its exact shape, height and volume are to be defined by the candidates.
The cabinet can be situated in any natural or artificial place on Earth. It can also be located in an ideal environment (which should be defined in detail). Cooling (natural or artificial) is the only necessary condition: fresh air (and/or other refreshing means) needs to enter the space and to cool down the machines. It is then transformed into hot air charged with positive ions by the processing units that could in turn be used for any other meaningful purposes or symbiotic uses, before eventually being extracted.
The computer cabinet functions as a small data center. A certain number of servers, NAS (networked attached storage), virtual machines, etc. are therefore also installed within this space. The inhabitant(s) have to share the space with the machines in some ways. The status and/or security of the data could also be addressed in some creative ways.
The cabinet is part of a network and can be combined or aggregated with others to form a larger, possibly mobile, mediated and/or networked structure.
Goal: by taking advantage of the physical, informational, computational, chemical, biological, environmental or climatological features of the facility (inside and outside), the project focuses on creating a livable environment within the computer data cabinet (or personal data center). The outcome of the project could be to engage with the overall design or to develop a very specific device, object, software, interface and/or installation within this given framework.
Ressources
http://www.deterritorialized.org is an artificial atmosphere conceived by fabric | ch that is delivered in the form of algorithmically constructed data feeds. It is composed by a set of web services and libraries that were developed in the context of a residency on the Tsinghua University campus in Beijing, between Spring and Summer of 2013 (at TASML). The open data feeds of this "geo-engineered" climate can be addressed and used by any custom designed program or device (the website will be open from the 6th of September).
These open-source, “ambient deterritorialization” data feeds and environments in the form of Deterritorialized Air (N2, O2, CO2, Ar), Deterritorialized Daylight (Lm, IR, UV) and Deterritorialized Time can be freely used in the context of this competition.
Eligibility / Rules
The call is open to all students and young faculty members of Tsinghua University. The application should include candidate’s name and school or department affiliation.
The Award of Distinction of US$ 1000 is open to international submissions.
Works submitted by individuals or teams are all welcome. However we highly encourage interdisciplinary, transdepartmental team participation. All submissions should be written in English.
Submissions shall not be published or made public in other venues until a final decision by the jury is made public.
Submission Deadline
The submission deadline is October 14, 2013, 10pm Beijing time.
Any uncompleted submission by the time of the deadline will be excluded from judgment by the Jury.
Schedule
Competition launch: August 30, 2013
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Final Submission: 10pm (Beijing time), October 14, 2013
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Announcement of winning entries and mentions: November 1, 2013
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Presentation by the winning team in Lisbon at the Lisbon International Architecture Biennial Close, Closer, Portugal: December 14, 2013
Submission Guidelines
Email submission, in one email with one pdf file attached, to call@deterritorialized.org, maximum size limit is 20mb, with the title of the message as the title of your project.
File to be attached to your mail: One pdf document in A3 horizontal layout (labelled: name-of-my-project.pdf), to be screened (the jury will look at your proposition on screen), containing the following, not exceeding 8 pages:
A - Information
Title of the project.
Name / surname, Tsinghua school or department affiliation (or profile for Award of Distinction), email address and date of birth of the representing member for the team (one person only).
Names / surnames, Tsinghua school or department affiliation (or profile for Award of Distinction), email addresses and dates of birth of all other members of the team.
Short descriptive biography (not exceeding 150 English words of each individual).
Links to additional visual materials, including video, website, etc., if needed.
B - Project
Images and diagrams summary of the project (most important elements, in screen quality).
Project concept: describe the conceptual reasoning of the project.
Project description: describe what it does practically.
Technical description: describe the technical components of the project.
Note:Proposal should be written in English. Project title should be listed in the lower right corner of each page on all documents.
Evaluation guidelines
Transformative potential, speculation, risk taking, and the originality yet feasibility of the proposal will be key factors for the jury.
Quality of presentation and documentation (including technical, scientific description and visual presentation).
Note:
The project shouldn’t be a “fantasy”. Its feasibility should be proven in some ways (demo, mockups, proofs of concept, technical schemes), even though the technologies proposed might still be in their research phase.
Jury members
An international jury will select the winning proposal. Jury members will be disclosed along with the announcement of the winning candidates.
Awards / Prizes
Two prizes will be awarded by the jury, along with two honorary mentions.
1st prize: A trip for the winner or one representative of the winning team to Lisbon (including airfare and hotel) to present the results of their proposal during a talk, along with fabric | ch and TASML. Free viewing of the Triennial Close, Closer.
2nd prize: 3000 RMB.
2 honorary mentions
Award of Distinction
Price: 1000 US Dollars
This award is open to international submissions from students and professionals.
About the organizers
fabric | ch is a Swiss based art and architecture studio that combines experimentation, exhibition and production. It formulates new architectural proposals and produces singular livable spaces that mingle territories, algorithms, “geo-engineered” atmospheres and technologies. Through their works, the architects and scientists of fabric | ch have investigated the field of contemporary spaces, from networked related environment to the interfacing of dimensions and locations such as their recent works about “spatial creolization”.
TASML (Tsinghua University Art and Science Research Center Media) is conceived as a research and production unit that aims to synergize the rich resources available among the University’s diverse research institutions and laboratories to create an incubator for crossbred, interdisciplinary experiments among artists, designers, scientists and technologists. TASML also functions as a center and a hub for worldwide exchange and collaboration both with academic and research institutions and the global media art and design community. Through information sharing and knowledge transfer, TASML can also be seen as a catalyst of innovations for other disciplines in the arts and for the creative industry in general.
COWORKLISBOA is a 750 m2 shared office for startups, nano companies and independent or mobile professionals such as designers, architects, illustrators, translators, among others. Getting fat and lazy @ home? Come, it is at LX Factory and Central Station in Lisbon.
Close, Closer, the third Lisbon Architecture Trienale will put forward an alternative reading of contemporary spatial practice from the 12th of September to the 15th of December in Lisbon, Portugal. For three months chief curator Beatrice Galilee and curators Liam Young, Mariana Pestana and José Esparza Chong Cuy will examine the multiple possibilities of architectural output through critical and experimental exhibitions, events, performances and debates across the city.
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.
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.