Notable about the video, and others, is the emphasis on the corporeal identity – face recognition, real-time video of people – seems to continue the anchorage of online identities to literal pictorial and video evidence. Facebook is a good example of this.

—

Elsewhere in AR TwittARound “shows live tweets around your location on the horizon“. I found his summary of technologies used illuminating:

The whole application is developed in Webkit (UIWebView / Safari Mobile). A native Cocoa wrapper delegates location, compass and accelerometer to Javascript in the UIWebView. The 3D scene is based on Safari Mobiles brilliant 3D CSS transforms. The Ajax part is done with jQuery. After writing some native iPhone apps this Webkit approach seems to be ideal for rapid development of applications independent of the iPhone UI.

This setup is related to the non-availability of public APIs for live video on the iPhone, meaning developers can’t publish via the app store:

But here is the rub: we are currently unable to publish these apps on the app store because the iPhone SDK lacks public APIs for manipulating live video.

In early July, a number of developers and academics write the above in their Open Letter to Apple: Let us Augment Reality with the iPhone!. It will be interesting to see what Apple’s plans are in this space.

6-8pm at Horse Bazaar, which is just behind that car with the boot open:

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Should be outstanding – here’s the full details at the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society of Australia Inc. site..

The dining room is never used. I’m writing from it, and my partner has a sewing machine and patterns strewn over the remainder of the table.

The house I grew up in had a similarly placed dining room, connected to the kitchen and lounge room, presumably this also allowed the flow of women back to the kitchen and men to the lounge room. But the main purpose was to cocoon conversation in a space safe from interruptions.

I remember it’s use getting phased out over the years when I was growing up. In fact, it eventually became the TV room. In my upbringing, the television set was marginalised: concealed by cloths, often unplugged to make us think twice about watching it, or put out of sight in the dining room.

So it seems to me that back in the day it was an important ritual to commune with the family in a dedicated room – possibly intentionally disconnected from the day-to-day infrastructure of the house. There children could be interrogated by parents about what they learnt at school that day etc. and parents could conduct coded conversations that protected the children from knowing they couldn’t afford the school fees. Or variations thereof.

This was, in my experience, a space intended to foster connectedness. Our family revived it for visits from my grandmother for a while, but we eventually migrated into the living room.

The living room permits differently to the dining room; it is multi-purpose and can contain technology. Most obviously this is a television, but it can also be a stereo, or a laptop, or in our case a sewing machine. Living rooms can double as workspaces in small houses.

So the potential interruptions are numerous, and the sanctity of the communal eat and converse is threatened. That’s why we need the connected house, where the dining table is brought to you by Microsoft Surface and there are desirous distractions from the mundanity of family first life.

CARLO GOLIN – 28 November – 20 December 2008

Time’s Best Inventions of 08 : Global Seed Vault

From the Match Bar menu.

(I had to look up Vahlrona, or is that Valrhona. Either way, I guess it’s bad-ass chocolate.)

The blurb for the 2008 finals from SuperDeluxe:

Gold Sprints: (separate into three levels as professional cyclist, bike messengers and the general) / Live: CopaSalvo / DJ: DJ Quietstorm (NakameguroYakkyoku), DJ Koba (CopaSalvo) + more / SlidShow: monmon, PAI, SexySushi, Riki and screening cool bike movies!!

Discovered via Jan Chipchase

“The market for personal and service robots is about $3 billion now but is expected to reach $15 billion by 2015″

Newsweek: Why Should We Be Friends?