Humans and cameras. The ultimate cyborgian relationship.
Machines helping humans to preserve memories. Humans helping choose settings that help a camera best represent reality. Beauty results when humans and machines operate in symbiotic harmony.
With that said, Mark Coleman is one of the most harmonious cyborgs I’ve encountered.
Mark is excited to help capture CyborgCamp on film, so that our memories of it will be highlighted by his own flavor of cyborg history.
If you’re not familiar with Mark yet, he is a professional photographer with over twenty years of experience. He works in numerous major markets including Milan, Italy; Madrid, Spain; San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and the Pacific Northwest. Mark’ clients include the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Adrian Belew, Jethro Tull, Warner Bros., EMI, Karl Kani Jeans, Zoom, Eyemazing and Face magazines (among others). His fine art work has been exhibited in the LA County Museum of Art’s gallery.
With that said, he’s one of the friendliest people you’ll ever meet — just like the rest of the Portland Tech community. Needless to say, we’re really excited to have him at CyborgCamp, and hope you are too! Thanks Mark!
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You can find Mark Coleman on Twitter @kram, and more of his professional work at MarkColmanPhoto.com.
A lot of times we wait around for technology to just “appear” like we see in films. But if we continue to do that, nothing will get built. Thankfully, people are out there filling in the gaps.
Zigelbaum showed me what he was working on during the first night of MIT’s Futures of Entertainment 3. When he told me about it, I knew it was the thing I had thought about before when the opportunity to visit MIT had presented itself.
All of this was apparently built off of the original prototype system used in Minority Report. What made me happy was that the UI was exceedingly smooth and enjoyable to use. It was a relief. A complete and total relief.
A tremendous thanks to Jamie for letting me take pictures and showing me the lab. He is a very interesting and awesome person and I highly recommend his existence to you.
These are new gloves (he said that eventually they wanted the gloves to not have to be worn, and for the device itself to be able to recognize gestural movement.
G-stalt – the rules for interacting with the system. A set of a new sign language for controlling movement from a distance. It was great to have these up on the wall when I tried on the gloves to interact with the system. Very intuitive and simple to learn. Especially with the rewards of being able to move things across the room without touching them.
Sensor/Cam: part of the set of twelve needed for the full control of the system. Less can be used, but the resolution of movement suffers with each lost sensor.
Here are Some Moving Pictures For You
And here’s the tiny amount of video footage I was able to get (in chunks, in between furiously deleting old videos from my camera to make room for the new. Hopefully it conveys the excellence of the system).
Zigelbaum also showed me something secret that I can’t say anything about (yet). Let us just say that it was very cool, and that it will be public soon enough.You can read more about Gesture Recognition on Wikipedia if you want. Or you could run into me somewhere and hear a lot of hot air on what I’ve been calling “8 bit haptics”.
Anywho, this stuff rocked. The Media Lab was ultimate. I can’t wait to go back.
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Jamie Zigelbaum is Ph.D. student in the Tangible Media Group at the MIT Media Lab. His research interests include the social implications of physical interface media, frameworks for next generation interfaces, and tangible interfaces for abstract digital information. He received a B.A. from Tufts university working with Professor Rob Jacob. At Tufts he created a multidisciplinary major in HCI, drawing from neuroscience, psychology, computer science, and human factors engineering.
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Amber Case is a Cyborg Anthropologist who also posts over at the Makerlab Blog, which is something you might enjoy reading if you enjoyed reading the post above. It’s about more experimental tech and activities related to pushing the limits of art and technology. If not, you can always follow her on Twitter @caseorganic.
Sometimes graphs are really fun to make. This one was especially fun and easy to make (read how to make your own below). It gives some info on topics that CyborgCamp may touches on.
To make this graph, I simply went to the ‘About Page’ of the CyborgCamp site and selected all of the text. Then I pasted it right into the text box on Wordle.net/create. Wordle is an especially useful tool to use if you want to examine the word volume on your website. Just copy and paste, and Wordle generates a sweet graph.
We at CyborgCamp are interested in discussing things like the future of Robots. In our opinion, the future has to be fun, or humans won’t be interested in adopting it.
Hexapods
Sure they may look weird, but we’re all about embracing strange amalgamations of humans and computers. With that in mind, here are some dancing robots from the “Best of the third Austrian Hexapod Championships: Dance Category’.
A hexapod is a six-legged robot. Technologists prefers to install wheels for locomotion purpose, but nature equips its creatures with legs, which are advantageous when it comes to moving securely across uneven terrain. The video is from Hagenberg/Austria.
Just like in a “real” soccer match, the stars of the robot football European championship will be cheered on by their supporters. But these aren’t flesh-and-blood fans; they’re so-called hexapod robots.
The Top 10 in the Austrian Hexapod Championship’s Dance category will be livening things up during halftime breaks.
Running is a very complex process. Robots with six legs have proven to be the simplest and most secure variant. The Hardware/Software Systems Engineering program at Hagenberg Technical College stages an annual championship for six-legged robots. This year, 39 teams from schools throughout Austria took part. The aim is to get as many students as possible fired up about robotics.
Anyone who’s interested can get a free Hexapod 2008 DVD from the 2008 Hexapod Championships. Read more at the EUROBY2008 website.
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What does this have to do with CyborgCamp? Everything. Well, not everything. It’s just fodder for thought. Also, comic relief. Finally, we are seeing robots with enough motor control to entertain us a little more than usual. Here are robots with personality!
An unconference about the future of the relationship between humans and technology. We’ll discuss topics such as social media, design, code, inventions, web 2.0, twitter, the future of communication, cyborg technology, anthropology, psychology, and philosophy.
