A really noteworthy invention from the mind of the young and talented Pranav Mistry closes the gap between real and virtual worlds. Things are really getting interesting.

PS. Why is Maes presenting the “SIxthsense” and not the designer himself?

The other day the BBC reported on a new start up company that since March 2009 offers 3D imaging technology and 3D videos of live events for users to interactively enjoy. The company called Yellowbird touts this new technology that will change the way we experience events and videos. Almost two yeas ago I already reported on another company Immersivemedia the first to offer this same technology (pictured on the left) and 3D videos. Despite Yellowbird being still in development and rather rudimentary in comparison to Immersivemedia technologies (long available to the military and the public) both companies and the new found public and media attention are a sign of the new momentum that 3D imaging is gaining. Once again I still think that the best of these new technologies and applications has still to come. The technology to support these applications is already here, they just need to be refined and rethought outside the box. Watch demos here (Immersivevideo) and here (Yellowbird). My original 2008 article is here

A good article on incoming 3D technology here at endgadget. I know we tried it before and it did not work. But I am confident that things will be different this time, so look out for 3D technologies coming home soon.

“U.S. Senator John McCain has introduced legislation that would block the U.S. Federal Communications Commission from creating new net neutrality rules, on the same day that the FCC took the first step toward doing so.”  Reuters full article here

Needless to say, Net Neutrality is the biggest battle we are facing today to maintain a free internet. It is amazing how the rhetorics of McCain´s proposal totally twist the reality of the facts.

If you do not know enough about it, DO read about it  here

PS. I cannot find info regarding the author of the image, if you do know who made it please let me know and I will credit.

I have set up a live stream of the Cumbria conference with the hosts in Carlile this is the direct link:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/cumbria-ivsa-2009
started at 10 am GMT 22d of july look for program on visualsociology.org

Another one going down in history with the likes of Mosaic (many will wonder what that is/was right???) and what about the first peep to peer file exchange software? name it in less then 2 seconds if you can. The name is more catchy but its faith equally predictable. Naturally the game is not over neither the debate.

This is the link to the Phd course on “Audiovisuality in the Era of Digital Convergence” that I organized in collaboration with Professor Taisto Hujanen. Selected contributions will be published in the forthcoming special issue of “Visual Studies”, “The New Economy of the Image” that I am editing for publication at the end of the year. Stay tuned for more details.

A lawyer representing one of the men convicted in the Pirate Bay trial has called for a retrial after reports that the judge was a member of the same copyright protection organisations as several of the main entertainment industry representatives.
http://www.thelocal.se/19028/20090423/
from the article: “Pirate Party chairman Rickard Falkvinge has called for the verdict to be scrapped.
“The copyright lobby has really managed to bring corruption to Sweden,” he said in a statement.
One of the groups of which Norström is a signed up member is Svenska föreningen för upphovsrätt (‘the Swedish Copyright Association’), where he is joined by Henrik Pontén, Peter Danowsky and Monique Wadsted, all of whom represented the entertainment industry in the case against file sharing site The Pirate Bay.
The judge also sits on the board of Svenska föreningen för industriellt rättsskydd (Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property), a group actively advocating for more stringent copyright laws.
Norström argues that he was not however swayed in his judgement by involvement with copyright protection groups.
“My view has been that these activities do not constitute a conflict of interest,” Norström told Sveriges Radio.” REALLY!!!!!!!!????
Excerpt from the same article: www.thelocal.se

I have been using  this relatively new search engine www.searchme.com for a while and it seems to have matured enough for you to try. The search engine seems to have taken the hint from the Leopard OS and iTune´s interface to adapt the rendition of its results. Although not perfect it has become one of my favorite search engines to use for a quick glimpse at basic search results and their contexts. A very simple, and powerful, yet strangely unexplored change in direction in a mostly text based endeavor.  The new Safari browser (4 Beta) seems to move also in an interesting direction in exploring new ways of visualizing the desktop environment. All a little bit rough at the moment but worth exploring. I wonder if Google inc is paying attention?

Access to thepiratebay.org has been blocked here in Denmark. Soon also Google, Yahoo, Youtube and other prominent search engines will be blocked, the court´s ruling suggests, because they are also linking to copyright infringing materials.

Well it is actually only thepiratebay.org. My point is that although the issue of indexing and distribution of copyrighted content might well be the issue of the decade in some circles the decision to ban a website based on an indexing service is very very controversial. The problem is complex and a one web site ban will not solve the problem.

And so it seems that the day Barack Obama sworn in as the 44th president of the United States CNN decided to use a spectacular new technology to show a 3D image of the moment he was sworn in  (Photosynth anybody?). The image promises to mix and merge pictures taken by people attending the event (Photosynth for sure!), and also show an image taken by a satellite. Lets see what they will do exactly, but clearly new Social Navigation Systems are moving fast.

UPDATE: and there you go! It was a rather banal application of Photosynth, the special occasion and world wide distribution of the picture will sure make this picture a favorite among the examples of scholars that will flock on the subject. Collective Image Making it is, one more reason to read my article -teaser- and the final article (which is way more juicy then the teaser) about the evolution and the implications of these new forms of Image Making

this is the link to “the moment”

UPDATE 24/1/09
Well there is another picture circulating that is also quite interesting, and actually nicer to navigate. Conceptually is not as interesting as the CNN “The moment” coproduction, but visually quite intriguing and based on a similar digital merge here it is LINK (Photo David Bergman)

 Full Essay LINK

Remindfull of a technology that Ridley Scott created for Rick Deckard to use in his 2019 Los Angeles (Ridley Scott, Blade Runner 1982). As it happens reality has exceeded the fantasy allowing us to seamlessly move from one image into another in a virtual continuum of increasingly global spatial representations. As the map of the Empire that the cartographers continued to grow with increasing levels of detail, the virtual map of the world is acquiring a scale and scope that further exceeds their ambition. This virtual map deserves attention, because it is different both in its genetic nature and in its multiple evolution. It combines elements (Image, Text and Sound) that never before could be combined so seamlessly together. The map is built by the cooperation of two entities. On the one hand we have the (soon to be interconnected) platforms that are offered for its growth, we could say this is the equivalent of the kind of “surface” that is offered for the renditions of the map (in our case Google Earth, Google Maps, Photosynth, QuickTime VR, iPhoto 2009 etc, etc). And on the other hand we have the new generation of cartographers comprised by all the individuals  around the world that contribute with pieces of representation of the world to the enormous puzzle of the virtual map.
Read the rest of the essay here

Preferred Reference System:
Francesco Lapenta, 2008, “Mapping the World. A Brief Essay on the Changing Staus of Digital Photography. Google maps, Photosynth, Flickr, iPhoto 2009 and the Digital Merging of Collective Image Production.”, www.visualstudies.eu

Finally a rough draft of the Geomedia article for you to browse. As you will see it is in a very rough form but wanted to bring it out to have feed back from you. The article discusses the new generation of location based technologies and the ways in which they will rearticulate our perception of time, commodification of space, digital merging of collaborative pictures, sound, and texts collections using WEB 2.0 tools and logics and available and developing softwares and services, PhotoSynth, Google maps, Flicker. The article also describes the social behaviors that will be favored by these new technologies (which I call Social Navigation Systems). Feed back are appreciated and needed so do write back with comments and ideas, anything suggested and used in the final article will be of course properly credited and accounted for.

geomedia-and-the-rise-of-social-navigation-systems5th (Version 5, 2008 December).  The article is set on private, please do e-mail me if you want to read the draft.

New info about the article will be periodically updated here until completion and publication.

This is really an interesting move, and one that is going to give a lot of momentum to the Creative Commons License system. President elect Barack Obama new governmental website  www.change.gov is now registered under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. This is interesting news on more then one level, and certainly one that is keeping me interested in what the new administration might do for the power´s balance over the Internet.

A really interesting article written by Gry Hasselbalch about the new found consciousness required for the wise use of the ever present social networking websites/tools:

From the year of ME to the year of OOOPS

excerpt: “Ok, so 2006 was the year of “me”, the year when we the ”I” generation took the media and used it to its very limits to express ourselves. The public debate was rolling over its own borders of excitement over all the new possibilities that we suddenly had to express ourselves with:

Blogging, moblogging, youtube, SecondLife, myspace, Linkedin…uuhh nice….and twitter and jaikuu!!! and and and….

And then came 2008, the hang over year, the year of “OOPS” when ”me” the average person suddenly realise what I actually put out there. Organisations, media and even politicians start talking about the responsible media use and user, about how we should think about what we put out there. Campaigns, regulations, codes of conduct, guidelines, recommendations….”

In what has become an arms races towards the freedom of information and knowledge for all, the European Union has announced the launch of its new universal library project called Europeana. The scope of the project is ambitious, to have 10 million books online for 2010.  We can only celebrate and praise all the institutions that in one project or another are attempting to the systematization and free distribution of human knowledge. So long live the Europeana and the legacy of the Universal Digital Library and Google books.

More content to come, for the moment please read my definition of what I call Social Navigation Systems, the new web site will soon be open to discuss everything related to Geomedia, Social Navigation Systems and my hypothesis of a WEB 3.0 series of applications.

The new American President-elect Barack Obama  agenda for the Internet and technology!

Some highlights: “Protect the Openness of the Internet, Encourage Diversity in Media Ownership, Protect Our Children While Preserving the First Amendment, Safeguard our Right to Privacy, Invest in University-Based Research, Reform the Patent System”.

The agenda and the campaign run by President-elect Barack Obama are interesting on many levels, the question I keep having in mind however is; will this new administration go down in history also as the first to develop a new form of active political participation based on technology based social networking (hence GOV 2.0) ?.  Certainly the use of WEB 2.0 tools made by the campaign has been unique, but what is more interesting is that it seems that the president-elect has no intention to let go of these tools. The big question: representational democracy has always been based on the fact of electing someone to “represent” you, to be your vice, in the political process. Technology has strongly changed our ability to participate to the political process. Should not this be transformed in a set of new “democratic” tools to have direct effect on our policy makers decision making? Barack Obama´s technology agenda and new website seems to indicate so, will it be then GOV 2.0 after all?

An incredible amount of image manipulation software is being developed lately these are two that got me realy impressed.

Photosynth: this is quite amazing and certainly will have incredible commercial applications, somehow competing with Google StreetView, has the potential to move into a wealth of image details that are out of (legal?) reach for StreetView. Certainly one to keep an eye on.

The second one does not have a cool name yet, in a typical scholar research style the name of the project is called “Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene“, a project developed by a number of scholars from the University of Washington, Microsoft Interactive Visual Media Group (again!) and Adobe ( I am sure you will notice the similarities with Photosynth)

The conference finished today. It was extremely interesting and we will do our best to maintain the connection with all the new Latin American scholars that participated. See you all at IVSA2009.

This is the Conference Program: here

You can find the conference Panels Pdf file here

The list of the sessions: sessions_list

This is FLACSO address and info on how to reach it: here

This is a view of FLACSO from google: here

THE LIVE CHANNEL: well the live connection was a test, it worked to a certain extent, but not really, the campus connection could not hold the live stream so w had to give up. We will however certainly improve it next year, bookmark the link: here