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The battle between the incompatible Wireless USB and Cable Free USB is heating up (or is it melting down). Freescale Semiconductor pulled out of the UWB Forum which it co-founded with Motorola and Pulse-Link to focus on Cable Free USB.

Meanwhile, Intel and others are backing Wireless USB, based on the incompatible UltraWideBand standard by WiMedia. WiMedia’s Wireless USB now has more supporters and momentum. The Bluetooth standard will integrate WiMedia’s UWB approach into faster Bluetooth. Bluetooth throughput will be improved from its current 0.7 Mbps or 3Mbps to new speeds ranging from 53.3Mbps to 480Mbps.

Wireless USB can send HDTV signals from settops to montiors. It can also send low data rate sensor data to tiny PCs like the OQO or Ultramobile. Think "smart clothing".

A McGill University neuroscientist will attach sensors to Boston Pops conductor Keith Lockart, five musicians and 50 audience members. The goal: measure physiological responses to the music (NPR audio).

The Conductor’s Jacket, is a wearable physiological monitoring system for musicians, designed to provide a testbed for the study of musical and emotional expression.

The project has two aims, Dr. Levitin explained. "First, we’re hoping to see distinctive physiological signatures of the emotions that Maestro Lockhart is feeling as he conducts, and then see the transmission of them to the musicians and the audience members. Second, we’re hoping to quantify differences in physiological arousal and impact between actually being at a concert versus seeing it on a large screen."

The sensing equipment was designed by Dr. Teresa M. Nakra, herself a conductor and music technologist. Nakra teaches at the College of New Jersey and runs Immersion Music Inc., a nonprofit organization she founded to develop interactive musical experiences that blend traditional forms and new technologies.

You’re The Conductor is an interactive exhibit for children to conduct the Boston Pops orchestra. To use it, you simply pick up the custom-designed infrared baton and start conducting. In front of you, you will see and hear the orchestra playing, following your conducting gestures, on a large projection screen. The larger your gestures, the louder they play. The faster you conduct, the faster their tempo becomes.

Here are some midi technologies that can be used. Video sources can also be used to recognize gestures that don’t inhibit a performer’s physical movement.

Originally from unmediated on April 9, 2006, 2:11pm

The Center for Media and Democracy has published a new report that pinpoints 77 local TV stations (map) that have aired VNRs without disclosure over the last ten months. The worst offender? Fox’s KOKH-TV in Oklahoma City which aired five VNRs in their entirety, even with the publicist’s original narration. What’s even more damning is the fact the report has posted extensive video clips showing VNRs airing on a variety of stations. Meanwhile, VNRs are a hot-button issue for Congress and the FCC, and the new report is a setback in RTNDA’s battle to keep regulation at bay. Today the RTNDA issued a press release that “strongly urges” stations to fully disclose all outside material in news programming. But this story in the NY Times suggests the RTNDA may be on the losing end of this battle, thanks to dozens of TV stations that continue to ignore common sense and basic journalism values.

Originally from unmediated on April 9, 2006, 1:31pm

After the server on a USB key, there is this project at Nokia of having a server running on a mobile phone (via).

The motivation here is quite technology-driven:

For quite some time it has been possible to access the Internet using mobile phones, although the role of the phone has strictly been that of a client. Considering that the modern phones have processing power and memory on par with and even exceeding that of webservers when the web was young, there really is no reason anymore why webservers could not reside on mobile phones and why people could not create and maintain their own personal mobile websites.

But things gets more interesting when they talk about the implications:

As a mobile phone contains quite a lot of personal data it is straightforward to semi-automatically generate a personal home page. And contrary to websites in general, a website on a mobile phone always has its “administrator” nearby and he or she can even participate in the content generation. For instance, we have created a web-application that prompts the phone owner to take a picture, which subsequently is returned as a JPG. That is, on a personal device the website can be interactive.

Further, that a website becomes mobile implies that certain properties of websites that hitherto have been mostly meaningless now need to be taken into account. As long as a website resides on a stationary server the physical location of that server lacks meaning, because it will never change. With a mobile website it does change and it is meaningful as the content that is shared may depend upon the current location and context. For instance, if you browse to a mobile website and ask the “administrator” to take a picture, the image you get depends upon the location of the website. Current search engines that update their indexes rather rarely may need modifications to be able to cope with the dynamism introduced by mobile websites.

Implications

We believe that being able to run a globally accessible personal website on your mobile phone has the potential of changing the Internet landscape. If every mobile phone or even every smartphone initially, is equipped with a webserver then very quickly most websites will reside on mobile phones. That is bound to have some impact not only on how mobile phones are perceived but also on how the web evolves.

Why do I blog this? even though the motivation at first glance was very engineer-centric, there are some curious implications, especially when thinking of the internet of things/blogject mumbling.

Originally from unmediated on April 9, 2006, 1:23pm

multi channel internet tv

At m-cult, the M2HZ collaborative, distributed television project, initiated in August 2005, proceeds with the first programme of 2006 - Map to Postfordist Life.

tablished in 2000 to support production, research and development of new media culture by an active involvement in the practices, policies and structures of the field. Aiming at a sustainable development of media culture, m-cult works to create productive and critical, interdisciplinary encounters between actors in culture, technology and society.

m-cult focuses on social and cultural innovations in urban, wireless and participatory media, and on developing open infrastructures and transdisciplinary competences in new media culture. m-cult carries out research projects, consults on media culture and technology development, disseminates information and organises events in media research, arts and technology.

m-cult’s project to establish a lab for urban media now has a concrete target. The plan is to launch a collaborative production environment at Kansatalo (’People’s house’, named after an extinct insurance company) located in Kurvi, Eastern Helsinki. The Kurvi space is aimed to support production of urban and media culture and to house a continuous series of workshops, seminars and debates. Negotiations about the project are now in their final phase, and results are expected in May 2006.

Originally from unmediated on April 9, 2006, 1:26pm

Exploding Television

Exploding Television is a live internet broadcast during Rotterdam Film Festival. Talks, Workshops, documentation of the Exhibition, and Artist Works can be seen in the archive.

See the streaming video of the DIY_tv session focusing on the growing phenomenon of independent microTV broadcasters.

The Italian microTV movement, Telestreet, started as a loose group of TV micro-broadcasters that first went to air in Italy in 2002 in a neighborhood station based in Bologna. These loosely affiliated broadcasters share an enthusiasm for exploring the socializing power of free-to-air video (TV) broadcasting. Often their content is sourced from the independent content archives such as V2V and the Italian viral video distribution project NGV. However, in the words of their manifesto, “Television must be considered a new prosthesis and an extension of the net [...] the horizontally of the net must meet the ’socializing’ power of television.”

In the words of David Garcia “[Telestreet] are squatting the shadows or blank spots which terrestrial broadcasters cannot reach.” They not only make their own content, but also their own transmitters and antenna. Dedicated to the socializing power of broadcast television, the project has provided an important inspiration for many Italian media activists, and has fueled a movement dedicated to the development of critical approaches to localized production and distribution of TV.

Originally from unmediated on April 9, 2006, 1:25pm

Filed under: Culture

src="http://www.joystiq.com/media/2006/04/Bacon-Footloose.jpg" alt="" />Sure, Grand Theft Auto purportedly
trains kids to kill hookers, but what about the decadence caused by the Waltz? According to The Times of London in 1816,
this "foreign dance" was seen so unfit that the paper felt it "a duty to warn every parent against
exposing his daughter to so fatal a contagion." Then came movies in 1909, blasted for causing many to lead
"dissolute lives." The telephone? Yeah, that, too.

Wired has a few choice quotes from
the advent of each of these technologies and art forms, among others. Of course, the point of this comparison is to
show that the current hysteria over video games –
"known" to promote drinking, drug
usage, and sexual deviance — is just an initiation rite. While some works of art will always cause controversy
(Catcher in the Rye, for some reason, is still not allowed in some schools), as a sect of society this hooplah
should be a passing phase in its
maturity.

[Image from the film Footloose;
Thanks, White Rose Duelist]

[Update: fixed a typo -- thanks, Garold]

Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Originally from unmediated on April 9, 2006, 1:33pm

Visceral Cinema: Chien by Scott Snibbe re-imagines the surrealist masterpiece Un Chien Andalou, by Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel. The work combines key moments from the film with viewers’ shadows to form interactive projections. All of the action occurs in silhouette. Initially, viewers see a large video projection of a man pulling a grand piano towards the viewer. When viewers walk between the projector and the projection, their shadows affect the projected man’s actions. If a viewer moves between the man and the piano, the piano is pushed back, causing the man to strain harder and lose ground. If a viewer intersects the man, the man dissolves into ants at their point of intersection, and the ants gradually overtake the entire screen. This application of surrealist techniques to an interactive setting plays with viewers’ sense of image, representation, shadow, body, and self.

Originally by Ruairi from Interactive Architecture dot Org on April 4, 2006, 7:22pm

I’m always looking for flexible materials for my kinetic interactive installations. Heres a LED substitute for neon lights with the added property of being able to change shape. Mule Lighting has developed a product that looks like traditional neon but is much more versatile.

PDF

The uniform and super-bright light output is achieved through a proprietary optical maximization technique which is completely sealed and impervious to shock and vibration.LED-FLEX is suitable for wet locations and can withstand extreme temperatures.

via transmaterial

Originally by Ruairi from Interactive Architecture dot Org on April 5, 2006, 7:21pm

a cool 6-minute video that uses Morse code to visualize & sonify a section of the index from the book “Point and Line to Plane” written by Wassily Kandinsky in 1926. by presenting an abstract video sequence which linearly reads Kandinsky’s text using Morse code, the work reverts filmic strategies of narration to a paradox. the content & meaning of the video are not dictated by its visual narrative but rather by the time sequence in which the video & sound clips are edited. see also dynamic film recomposition & sorting video pixels.
[andresramirezgaviria.com]

Originally from information aesthetics on April 4, 2006, 4:29pm

A potentially new way to build adaptive spaces out of generic robotic forms. Seemingly simple although no doubt devilishly complicated to develop, graceful in their movements and strangely cute considering their sandy brown color. With half a tongue in cheek, I imagine these little robots being the bricks and mortar of the interactive architecture world.

See Video

Developed at the Cornell Computational Synthesis Lab, here’s their explanation of the principles of the project “Self-replication is a fundamental property of many interesting physical, formal and biological systems, such as crystals, waves, automata, and especially forms of natural and artificial life. Despite its importance to many phenomena, self-replication has not been consistently defined or quantified in a rigorous, universal way, nor has it been demonstrated systematically in physical artificial systems. Our research focuses both on a new information-theoretic understanding of self-replication phenomena, and the design and implementation of scalable physical robotic systems where various forms of artificial self replication can occur. Our goal is twofold: To understand principles of self-replication in nature, and to explore the use of these principles to design more robust, self-sustaining and adaptive machines.”

Website

Originally by Ruairi from Interactive Architecture dot Org on April 6, 2006, 7:04pm

a 50-foot long table, with several projections spanning the entire surface, showing a huge information graphic. over 3000 documents written by Churchill & his contemporaries & photograps spanning a century of British history can be browsed by museum-goers using a touch-based interface. all documents are arranged in chronological order & can be explored via touchstrips placed along the length of the table. [davidsmall.com & electrosonic.com]

Originally from information aesthetics on April 6, 2006, 4:41pm

the idea of color changing concrete that can be used for information display was originally posted a while ago, but now seems to have finally reached the prototype phase. the system is able to dynamically display patterns, numbers & text in concrete surfaces. potential application range from simple products for the home to large-scale architectural installations.
[chromastone.com & chromastone.com (mov)|thnkx Martin]

Originally from information aesthetics on April 9, 2006, 8:40pm

Roop points me to this, a short and funny sketch, 1601, about language, manners and flatulence by Mark Twain, with a background to the story and its printing.

[Mem.--The following is supposed to be an extract from the diary of the Pepys of that day, the same being Queen Elizabeth's cup-bearer. He is supposed to be of ancient and noble lineage; that he despises these literary canaille; that his soul consumes with wrath, to see the queen stooping to talk with such; and that the old man feels that his nobility is defiled by contact with Shakespeare, etc., and yet he has got to stay there till her Majesty chooses to dismiss him.]

her maiste ye queene a fantasie such as she sometimes hath, and had to her closet certain that doe write playes, bokes, and such like, these being my lord Bacon, his worship Sir Walter Ralegh, Mr. Ben Jonson, and ye child Francis Beaumonte, which being but sixteen, hath yet turned his hand to ye doing of ye Lattin masters into our Englishe tong, with grete discretion and much applaus. Also came with these ye famous Shaxpur. A righte straunge mixing truly of mighty blode with mean, ye more in especial since ye queenes grace was present, as likewise these following, to wit: Ye Duchess of Bilgewater, twenty-two yeres of age; ye Countesse of Granby, twenty-six; her doter, ye Lady Helen, fifteen; as also these two maides of honor, to-wit, ye Lady Margery Boothy, sixty-five, and ye Lady Alice Dilberry, turned seventy, she being two yeres ye queenes graces elder.

I being her maites cup-bearer, had no choice but to remaine and beholde rank forgot, and ye high holde converse wh ye low as uppon equal termes, a grete scandal did ye world heare thereof.

In ye heat of ye talk it befel yt one did breake wind, yielding an exceding mightie and distresfull stink, whereat all did laugh full sore, and then–

Ye Queene.–Verily in mine eight and sixty yeres have I not heard the fellow to this fart. Meseemeth, by ye grete sound and clamour of it, it was male; yet ye belly it did lurk behinde shoulde now fall lean and flat against ye spine of him yt hath bene delivered of so stately and so waste a bulk, where as ye guts of them yt doe quiff-splitters bear, stand comely still and rounde. Prithee let ye author confess ye offspring. Will my Lady Alice testify?

Originally by Robin Varghese from 3quarksdaily on April 9, 2006, 2:25pm

Originally from BLDGBLOG on April 9, 2006, 9:28pm

Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times:

"Sweet and Low" is the story of those ubiquitous little pink packets of sugar substitute that you see in restaurants and diners and coffee shops — the story of the role saccharine played in the diet revolution that began sweeping America in the 1950’s and the story of the artificial sweetener wars that raged in the 80’s and 90’s.

It is the story of how Ben Eisenstadt, the son of Polish immigrants, lived the American Dream: how this short-order cook turned an old Brooklyn cafeteria into a factory called Cumberland Packing, invented the sugar packet and Sweet’N Low, and made a tidy fortune. It is also the story of how that sweetest of dreams turned sour, when scandal overtook the company in the 1990’s with allegations of influence-buying, tax evasion and possible mob ties being lobbed at some of its top brass.

But most of all, "Sweet and Low" is the story of the Eisenstadt family, as written by Ben Eisenstadt’s grandson Rich Cohen — a rollicking, utterly compelling family saga that is part detective story, part morality tale, part tragedy and part farce. It is a story peopled with eccentrics and naïfs and scoundrels, and a story recounted with uncommon acuity and wit.

More here.

Originally by Abbas Raza from 3quarksdaily on April 9, 2006, 2:36pm