August 27th, 2008
In some ways, the internet is an incredibly frustrating experience. You’re constantly flooded with incredibly useless information — vapid ideas, pointless everyday minutiae, etc. Wonderful fodder for conversation over a beer; in aggregate, they form the sum total of human stupidity. That’s annoying, but it’s actually also kind of annoying when someone comes up with an incredibly good idea. And because we’re aggregating here, and because the internet is the ultimate expression of the productivist ethos in many ways, there are quite a lot of those two. And they’re frequently quite simple and elegant — and like the best ideas, they make you think, “Well, jesus, that’s obvious. Why didn’t someone already think of that? Hell, I could have thought of that if I weren’t engaged in a futile effort to keep my blog active for the eleventh time.” Okay, I’m a bit of a crank.
The first paragraph is always flavour text. The point here is that Ubiquity is a fabulous idea — the kind of idea that makes you think, “This is going to happen, and it’s going to completely change the way we do things.” And also, “Great, this is my chance to stay relevant!” And that’s when you know you’d better post a quote and a link.
The overall goals of Ubiquity are to explore how best to:
- Empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions. (With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do.)
- Enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs. (In other words, allowing everyone–not just Web developers–to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.)
It’s better if you watch the video
Cool mac users who have Quicksilver will recognize the similarities; Ubiquity is sort of basically Quicksilver for the internets. Both are the products of people realizing that GUIs are not the be-all and end-all of interface design, and in fact that command lines might have a role in modern interaction beyond the domain of leet haxors. Of course, we’re not talking about command lines per se, here. We’re talking about the idea that not everything you do needs to be something that you click on. The thing is that GUIs have so pervaded what everyone knows as the “computer experience” that most people have trouble thinking outside the point-and-click design pattern.
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October 30th, 2007
This weekend was Perth’s first PodCamp, which also happened to be my first PodCamp. I’ve been to other camps: BarCamp, DemoCamp, SummerCamp, etc. There’s plenty of other coverage, of course, on blogs like this one, this one, as well as this one and maybe this one. But having a blog comes with the responsibility of filling it with redundant crap, and I’m not one to break the interrules. My overall impression? Plenty of pod, but there could have been more camp.
I always enjoy unconferences, because I generally do not enjoy getting dressed up and behaving like a pretentious ass. I like the fact that anyone is free to do just about anything they want. As mentioned in one of the posts I probably linked to above, communication in the sessions was a little unidirectional. Certainly, most of the PowerPoint slides were much better than I’m used at these things. However, the spirit was there.
Looking around the room at the start of the day, I could tell that pods are indeed becoming fairly ubiquitous, even here on the backside of the planet. I saw roughly an even split between Apples and PCs — that’s a lot more Apples than I’m used to seeing. Clearly, support for R153 in Apple’s newest pods is making a significant splash in the marketplace. This is to be expected, I suppose, as enthusiasts have been demanding greater pod-pod integration for a while now. I hear talk of pod-pod-pod integration on the horizon — we’ll see.
The first session I attended was, roughly speaking, on the future of the pod industry. The presenter started facetiously, declaring that pods are dead. This is a familiar refrain by now, ever since Steve Evans announced that Podder would be shifting its business model from pods to vods. With all the attention going to wiki-vods these days, and especially with the recent success of VodVod, it certainly seems that pods might go the way of cowboynet and blogfisting. However, the presenter went on to aptly note that with the continuous advances in awesomedrive space, we can expect our very understanding of media to change in short order. The recent 300 terabyte trans-temporal Wikipedia recursion will fit onto our future pods a million times over, with room enough left to store a complete collection of ultaporn.
After that, I popped up for a bit to grab a snack, as I had to prepare for my own presentation. I was skeptical about the pecan tart at first, but it turned out to be reasonably tasty.
I presented on the latest advances in pod-hacking techniques. A lot has changed since Jeff Barnes brought the entire North American pod-network to its knees using nothing more than a zombie scriptlet, a phase inducer, and a spunky can-do attitude. These days, you have to pay attention to the psychic IP stack, as well as the podcops. To be an effective hacker these days, you need your rollerblades to be highly polished, and your hair can’t just be dyed one colour — you need a whole rainbow of colours, and the RGB values need to follow the RFC1U1Z algorithm.
More to come? Pod-ssibly!
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August 11th, 2007
My old labmate Connor Dickie is up to something pretty interesting. His Kameraflage technology is described as
…display technology specifically designed for the camera-phone generation… By rendering content in [infrared] wavelengths we are able to create displays that are invisible to the naked eye, yet can be seen when imaged with a digital camera.
Connor has a knack for dreaming up innovative applications for off-the-shelf technology that seems incredibly sci-fi and captures the popular imagination. I previously worked with him on eyeBlog, which was featured on a number of TV shows. I have no doubt that kamerflage will generate similar levels of interest.
The technology is particularly salient to me because it presents compelling possibilities for interaction in pervasive games. This is essentially dirt-cheap augmented reality, which runs on a ubiquitous device. Games that rely on AR, previously one-off academic exercises, suddenly become massively scalable. Perhaps more importantly, the model of interaction is extremely compelling, and lends itself to detective-style gameplay. The mobile phone becomes a personal magnifying glass that reveals secrets — and every object becomes a potential clue. The potential for creating an immersive experience is pretty serious.
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