At some point in every tech-savvy young person’s life, they’ll come to a humbling realization: ”My dad took care of me, but now I need to take care of his needs… and by needs, I mean streaming free songs off the Internet.” In this cute and actually sort of helpful PSA produced by Fuse to promote their Spotify playlists, you’ll learn the best ways to assist those loved ones (we’ve all got ‘em) that just can’t quite figure out that darned computer. Which is important, because you don’t want to miss out on all the Your-Mom-and-I sexy time playlists that your dad secretly wants to share with you, and your mother has to get her Toto fix somewhere. Click through to watch the PSA, and let us know about your own trials and tribulations teaching someone else how to work the Internet in the comments. Because everyone has enough Internet, mom.
The Descriptive Camera, created by Matt Richardson, “works a lot like a regular camera — point it at subject and press the shutter button to capture the scene. However, instead of producing an image, this prototype outputs a text description of the scene.” Instead of printing the image, the camera sends the information it captures to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, where humans pick up the job, describe the image and send it back to the camera, a process that takes about three to six minutes. Obviously, right now it’s not the most practical thing in the world, but imagine being able to automatically “tag” photographs with metadata every time you take a picture. It’s like Google’s image search function, only in the real world. Wild. Click through to see photos of the camera, and head here for more information on the project.
Jason Silva is a man who likes to talk about things. Big things. A recent profile of him in The Atlantic aptly referred to Silva as “a part-time filmmaker and full-time walking, talking TEDTalk.” A former host at Current TV, he now spends his time making “Philosophical Espresso” — ie, short, entertaining videos that effortlessly tackle subject matter that most people find daunting, like the beginning of infinity or network theory. He’s like that brilliant guy who lived on your floor in college and would keep you up half the night engaging in a deep conversation about the meaning of life. Granted, he’s much more informed — and not stoned out of his mind.
“The problem, as I see it, is that a lot of these stunning philosophical ideas are diluted by their academic packaging; the academics don’t think so because this is their universe, they could care less about how these ideas get packaged because they’re so enmeshed in them,” he explains in the interview. “But the rest of us need another way in. We need to be told why these ideas matter, and one of the ways to do that is to present them with these media tools.”
Click through now to check out his series of vignettes on the human condition, and if you live in New York, be sure to your mark your calendar for April 20th, when he’ll be part of a panel discussion on “Imagining Space” at The National Arts Club.
Back in February when we told you that Google was in the process of creating glasses that “stream information to the wearer’s eyeballs in real time,” we assumed that it would be years (or at least months) before we actually saw anything come of it. Well readers, apparently the future is now, because a prototype version of those crazy-sounding Internet goggles was unveiled today, along with a POV video that allows you to imagine what it would be like to wear a pair while navigating through a typical day in New York.
From the looks of the promo clip, they’re trying to get a very specific demographic excited about this project; we don’t want to use the dreaded “h” word, but this is a guy who shops at the Strand, wants to learn how to play the ukelele, drinks Mud Truck coffee, and shares street art with his pals. Anyway, click through to watch the video, and let us know in the comments how you feel about this new technology. Does the idea of Google knowing exactly where you are and what you’re looking at seem at all freaky to you? More importantly, would you ever be caught dead in a pair of augmented reality glasses that look like this?
Okay, it’s officially the future. Or at least, it’s officially that much closer to Star Trek. According to MIT’s Technology Review, Microsoft research scientist Frank Soong has developed software that can translate any spoken or written text into another language, with the speaker’s voice remaining intact and recognizable — no robot voices here. “The word is just one part of what a person is saying,” says Shrikanth Narayanan, a USC professor working on a similar project, “Preserving voice, preserving intonation, those things matter, and this project clearly knows that. Our systems need to capture the expression a person is trying to convey, who they are, and how they’re saying it.”
Of course, a product like this could have lots of practical applications beyond just epic awesomeness. “For a monolingual speaker traveling in a foreign country, we’ll do speech recognition followed by translation, followed by the final text to speech output [in] a different language, but still in his own voice,” said Soong. Or, if after this technology is common anyone actually has the discipline to learn a new language for themselves, the software could also be used as a teaching tool, with the rationale that phrases heard in one’s own voice might be easier to learn. Sounds like a win win to us. [via The Mary Sue]
Inspired by the acclaimed “Sagan Series,” Evan Schurr has assembled a series of powerful statements by famous astrophysicist and science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson, who is worried that Americans have stopped dreaming about tomorrow, that in the past “we reaped the benefits from economic growth because you had people wanting to become scientists and engineers, who are the people who enable tomorrow to exist today… without it, we might as well just slide back to the cave, because that’s where we’re headed right now, broke.” Tyson implores us to start dreaming again, to spend money on our future, to advance frontiers. We have to admit, we got goosebumps.
Well, this is awesome. The Australia-based scientific expedition Catlin SeaView Survey aims to ”document the composition and health of coral reefs on the Great Barrier Reef and Coral Sea across an unprecedented depth range” and to turn the photographic portion of that documentation into a searchable, Google Street View-type database built from 360-degree panoramic photographs. According to the survey’s website, “the images from the expedition, when stitched together, will allow scientists and the public at large to explore the reef remotely through any device connected to the Internet. It will allow them to choose a location, dip underwater, look around and go off on a virtual dive.” The project will get started in earnest in September, but you can head over to their website to check out some samples of the interactive imagery — and we think this is going to be pretty amazing. [via PetaPixel]
Today in sci-fi daydreams/nightmares coming true, The New York Times’ Bits blog has learned that Google is in the process of creating glasses that “stream information to the wearer’s eyeballs in real time.” With an augmented reality interface, Android-based capabilities similar to smartphones — 3G or 4G connection, GPS, “a low-resolution built-in camera that will be able to monitor the world in real time and overlay information about locations, surrounding buildings and friends who might be nearby” — and a target price point of $250-600, the glasses are reportedly being built at the clandestine Google X labs.
The project certainly sounds exciting, but it’s not all happy nerds in futuristic Google goggles that look like Oakleys. The prospect of Internet-linked glasses with discreet recording capabilities have apparently already raised well-founded questions about surveillance and privacy. So, what do you think, readers? Do you welcome the prospect of viewing the world through augmented-reality lenses, or is this new development a bit too Big Brother for your liking? [via The Mary Sue]
Forget locking your iPhone or carrying your wallet on a chain — here’s now you really stick it to any wanna-be muggers that cross your path. A group of UK scientists in the late ’50s and early ’60s came up with several ingenious (and completely bizarre) anti-crime inventions, like a bowler hat that doubles as a helmet, or a briefcase that, when stolen, crushes the hand of the thief and sprouts three enormous metal legs to foil the getaway. Well, we can’t lie — that would definitely work on the subway. UK-based media company British Pathé has archived vintage videos explaining the proper usage of these inventions, so watch one of our favorite tactics for “beating the bandit” below, and then head over to their website for even more.
Here’s yet another noteworthy addition to our ever-growing reimagined album covers file: Part addictive time waster, part discovery engine, “Musaic,” the brainchild of Australia-born, US-based software engineer Ian Mckellar, uses the opensource API of rdio online music streamers to randomly display album art that is made up of other album art in mosaic form. Meta, right? Click through for a few of our favorite examples, and head over to Mckellar’s site to start clicking around his album art generator (which, it should be noted, is still a work in progress) for yourself.
