The End of Cyberspace

links for 2007-06-26

• Discovery Channel :: News - Technology :: Brain Device Moves Objects by Thought
  "The "brain-machine interface" developed by Hitachi Inc. analyzes slight changes in the brain's blood flow and translates brain motion into electric signals."
  (tags: interface brain science Japan)

Brain-machine interface

Discovery News reports on Hitachi's development of a simple brain-machine interface that "analyzes slight changes in the brain's blood flow and translates brain motion into electric signals." It's activated when it detects "activity in the brain's frontal cortex, which handles problem solving." In a recent demo, doing sums or singing a song activated an electric train, but researchers are working on other applications.

Underlying Hitachi's brain-machine interface is a technology called optical topography, which sends a small amount of infrared light through the brain's surface to map out changes in blood flow....

Since 2005, Hitachi has sold a device based on optical topography that monitors brain activity in paralyzed patients so they can answer simple questions — for example, by doing mental calculations to indicate "yes" or thinking of nothing in particular to indicate "no."

"We are thinking of various kinds of applications," project leader Hideaki Koizumi said. "Locked-in patients can speak to other people by using this kind of brain machine interface."

Technorati Tags: brain, end of cyberspace, interface

Haptics pay off

For Nintendo, anyway:

Nintendo Co. Ltd. zipped past Sony Corp. in market value on Monday and became one of Japan's top 10 issues for the first time, as it elbows the PlayStation maker out of its decade-long dominance of the game industry.

Nintendo has offered a slew of innovative and easy-to-use game software such as "Brain Age" and "Nintendogs" for its hardware in recent years, broadening the game-playing population beyond young males to women and the elderly.

Technorati Tags: end of cyberspace, games, interface

links for 2007-06-22

• Science Panel Finds Fault With Estimates of Coal Supply - New York Times
  "The United States may not have nearly as much coal as is popularly believed, and mining the remaining resources may be more dangerous for workers and the environment than current operations, the National Academy of Sciences said in a report Wednesday."
  (tags: energy coal mining future environment)

links for 2007-06-19

• Invitation Fellowship Programs for Research in Japan
  "This program is designed to enable Japanese researchers to invite their foreign colleagues to Japan to participate in cooperative work and other academic activities."
  (tags: research Japan)

links for 2007-06-14

• ZenZui
  "In the future, when anthropologists look back at the evolution of personal computing technologies, desktop computing will be viewed as a mere footnote to the cultural, technical, and sociological impact of mobile devices."
  (tags: zooming_interface interface mobility ubicomp endofcyberspace)
• HHMI News: Robert H. McGhee to Leave HHMI to Join Rice University School of Architecture
  Howard Hughes architect "Robert H. McGhee... will leave the Institute... to join the faculty of the Rice University School of Architecture as Professor of Practice and director of a future graduate program in the design of research labs."
  (tags: laboratory endofcyberspace architecture science)
• HHMI Bulletin November 2006: Collective Soul
  Short interview with architect Rafael Viñoly, on the design of Janelia Farm, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute center.
  (tags: architecture design laboratory endofcyberspace science)
• HHMI News: HHMI Opens the Doors to Discovery at the Janelia Farm Research Campus
  On the design of HHMI's Janelia Farm. "The architectural designs of the buildings and the laboratories are aimed at achieving Janelia Farm's central objectives—collaboration and flexibility."
  (tags: laboratory science architecture endofcyberspace)
• HHMI Bulletin November 2006: Let The Science Begin
  On the opening and early reaction to Janelia Farms, the HHMI research center in Virginia.
  (tags: architecture science research laboratory)

Zooming

I'm not usually susceptible to the charms of corporate agitprop, but this bit from a zooming browser company named ZenZui caught my eye:

In the future, when anthropologists look back at the evolution of personal computing technologies, desktop computing will be viewed as a mere footnote to the cultural, technical, and sociological impact of mobile devices.

I've been intrigued by zooming browsers since I read about them in Jef Raskin's The Humane Interface (he ends the book with a chapter about the virtues of zooming browsers) and saw one at Groxis, then a startup then led by Paul Hawken (and now, shed of all its original founders, pursuing a strategy best described as inscrutable). The virtues of a zooming interface are pretty clear, and a well-designed one (like the old Grokker app, alas no longer available) is a real pleasure to watch.

Grokker is now presenting itself as an enterprise KM tool, a way to make sense of giant volumes of information; ZenZui is going in a completely different direction, to mobile devices. In a small space, with limited ability to interact with an input device (or little interest in doing so), it's an obvious way to go. A couple mobile devices have used them-- I had a beloved Sony PDA that had one, but it wasn't the main interface for the whole device-- but we still have yet to see a popular application, either on the desktop or handheld, that uses zooming. Strange.

Technorati Tags: design, information design, interface

links for 2007-06-13

• Web 2.0 and Social Computing Expert Has Predicted the End of 'Cyberspace' (SocialComputingMagazine.com)
  Short piece on concepts surrounding end of cyberspace.
  (tags: endofcyberspace web2.0 socialsoftware)