A Conference on the Future of Humans and Computers
There’s been a great deal of interest in the idea of CyborgCamp recently. In fact, there will be three CyborgCamps this year. Each one will be completely different, with its own local or international crowd, sponsors and ideaset. If you can’t make one, there’s two more to attend!
CyborgCamp Brasil will occur at the end of May 2010 in Sao Paulo, Brasil.
CyborgCamp Seattle will occur in July 2010 in Seattle, Washington.
CyborgCamp Portland will occur in October 2010 at Webtrends.
CyborgCamp’s Pre-party will be graciously hosted at Vidoop, our local Portland Open-Id provider!
Come partake in drinks and festivities before the conference in the morning! Special guests Cami Kaos and Mike (Dr. Normal) will be live-broadcasting Strange Love Live.
They do an extremely incredible, awesomesauce, sweetopian podcast live-streaming Portland tech conversational media event every Friday night at 10Pm.
If you’ve never been able to tune in before, you’ll be able to see it LIVE tonight!
There will be great conversations and some seasonal ale donated by Widmer brewery. Plus wine, snacks, and a live DJ to whip up some Cyborgian tunes.
His name is Alain Bloch, and he’s a sweet Rails developer too.
Friday December 5, 2008 at 8:30pm
You can RSVP here.
Vidoop is located right above Backspace (a regular haunt of the Portland tech community)
117 NW 5th Ave, Suite 210
Portland, Oregon 97209
See you there!
P.S. You might want to go to Beer and Blog first. I hear there’s going to be some very interesting things going on there!
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.
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.
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.
We are excited to inform you that the logos for CyborgCamp PDX 2008 are finalized. They were created by the talented and witty Tyler Sticka, an award-winning Portland designer. If you like his work for CyborgCamp, you should check out Sticka’s other work. It is fascinating.
We’re getting the registration set up so that we can provide a way for everyone to pay for their food. Else, we’re not going to know how much to order. We’re thinking delicious Greek food — because Greek food is brain food. And until we get super-hyper brain speed modulator implants, we’re still limited by our brain’s ability to think in real-time.
We’ll keep you posted on developments as they happen. Of course, you can get really quick updates (and sweet news on Cyborgs from all over the web) by following @cyborgcamp on Twitter.
We’re in need of four more volunteers to help out at CubeSpace at 7Am for setup. If you’d like to get a series of coffee injections and help us carry pieces of furniture around the venue with a bunch of awesome people, please contact Amber Case at caseorganic@gmail.com, or you can message her on Twitter @caseorganic.
If you’d like to volunteer with any other aspect of the camp, check out the planning wiki on CyborgCamp.org.
Until we get the registration system ready, RSVP on Upcoming to let us know you’re going!
Nate Angell is coordinating sponsors. If you know of someone who might like to sponsor please contact him at xolotl@cyborgcamp.org on Twitter @xolotl.
