Tom Hume

Quadratura are doing an event in London in June. Go see their showreel, it looks amazing. Mr BigFug does lovely things with light :)

(and guitars)

Batty: I've done... questionable things.
Tyrell: Also extraodinary things, revel in your time.
Batty: Nothing the God of bio-mechanics wouldn't put you in heaven for.

One part of OverTheAir that I was particularly looking forward to was the hack-day element: getting a load of mobilists under one roof, working overnight within a tight timeframe to put together a novel demo. We'd had an idea beforehand that we'd like to do something which touched on the real world, and there's a fair amount of cynicism internally at FP about the value of some of the mash-ups you see out there today (which is not to say that there aren't some amazing ones too).

So Mr Hopper packed his soldering iron and Arduino kit, and we brought along a collection of devices: a GPS unit or two, a Sony Ericsson K850i and (of course) an iPhone. You can't hold your head up high these days if you don't do iPhone.

On actual ideas, I confess we were a bit fuzzier. I had some vague ideas of things I wanted to explore (e.g. bringing a bit of plausible deniability to digital communications, where it tends to get bumped out in favour of clear explicitness which is quite rare in meatspace), but had no idea of how to turn these into anything practical. So we went with doing something neat with robots.

The K850i is a strange device: a weird keypad and a mix of touch-screen and physical keys which a few handset vendors seem to be trialling at the moment. I find this hideously annoying, there's a really obvious jarring in my head when I press a button on these devices and have to work out whether it's actually been pressed by either looking for visual feedback or feeling through my finger - depending on which key I'm pressing.

But it has one lovely little feature, and that's an accelerometer accessible from J2ME via the mobile sensor APIs (JSR-256). Early this year one of our gold card days yielded an amusing little app using these APIs - a mobile spirit level - so we had a good idea of what we could do with them.

So robot arm, meet wavy mobile: we hooked up the accelerometer in the handset to the network, and (via a little bit of SSH tunnelling to work through the Imperial College firewalls at OverTheAir) connected it to a server running locally on a laptop, with said laptop driving the servos in the arm (connected using the Arduino kit). The result: with a 1-2s delay we could control the arm in at least two axes by moving the phone around.

This was quite fun, but I think we struggled to see it being hugely valuable to the human race. I had some vague ideas about getting the robot on stage, holding hands with it and swaying side to side singing "Give Peace A Chance", but they didn't generate the same excitement in the team that they held for me :)

So next step, add a camera: this was glued onto the end of the arm (making it quite heavy and giving us the sense of the machine straining slightly whenever it lifted up), and connected to an Ee-PC, which took photos from it at regular intervals and uploaded them to a publicly accessible web server. So now we had an arm which could be directed around, and which reported on what it saw: a little more useful, perhaps.

All this took us until about midday on the Saturday - an hour before the original competition deadline, with a few strained nerves as we ironed out last-minute problems and finally achieved consistent control of the beastie. It was here that things really took off as MarkNG and Bryan jumped in, taking the camera output and spreading it as far and wide as possible: in the run-up to 2pm (when the competition eventually drew to a close) photos started appearing on Flickr, in a Flash Lite client, on a Series 60 widget and, of course, on the obligatory iPhone. Our plans to show photos back down on the controlling MIDlet never quite emerged - some last-minute network problems courtesy of Orange (who suddenly started blocking our connections on port 8080 mid-way through the morning, necessitating a switch to Vodafone) had stumped a couple of us for an hour or so, and we never quite got round to completing this part.

The presentation was pretty ghastly, I'm afraid. Carrying a presentation laptop, controlling laptop, photo dumping PC, iphone, S60, iPhone, K850i, etc., all on-stage was a bit of a logistical problem (and we panicked a piece of kit would unplug/break/fall apart). Our preparation was minimal and I was far more nervous than in the previous days talk - when a few technical hitches stopped us showing the robot or phone on the large projection screens supplied, we called the demo short (after showing a film we'd made of it working). At least we managed to vividly demonstrate a theme Bryan and I had talked about the day before: that user interface concerns should be primary in any mobile project, and that development-led products are likely to suffer :)

I was genuinely surprised but obviously chuffed when we won the Best Overall Prototype; I (and a few other people I spoke to) had thought we were odds-on for "most over-engineered", but didn't expect anything else - and competition was strong. The prize, whilst generous, came second to hearing Matthew Postgate intone the words "Octo Bastard" in best BBC English - before the watershed! In particular I thought the LastMinute guys did a cracking job with their accelerometer-based sword-fighting game: I kick myself that we've never thought of this, it was so beautifully elegant and seemed to work really well. I hope that someone turns this into a real product, and I'm rather looking forward to an upcoming project where we will be collaborating with some of the folks from the team that built it :)

So, lessons from all this? Prepare more for presentations next time. Try and get some design involvement (both Hack Days I've done so far have led to the creation of bizarre hardware stuff, I'd like to go for elegance next time). And once you have your hack writing out to a web server, it's clear a whole load of other stuff opens up to you: widget platforms, mobile browsers, web services. As the mobile and fixed web converge (or the former subsumes the latter) it's the web-based services which are going to provide a basis for lots of interesting things, I think.

Also see Mark's writeup of the event, here.

At 6 o'clock this evening I dashed from the office up to Brighton station and hopped onto a train bound for London Bridge, to make it to This Happened. It was an absolutely enchanting evening of four talks, each running through the background to a product and its design process. It's late and I only have a few scrabbled notes, but I want to get them down whilst the memory is fresh:

1. Jussi Angesleva on the nasty realities of creating digital wave-patterns which seamlessly(ish) transferred themselves into real water, for an installation in Japan. Interesting to hear about the horrors of doing work which integrates with a space without taking it over (or just sticking up a screen and projecting cute stuff onto it). Cue lots of stories on the pain of cross-continental collaboration or "getting your hands dirty at a distance": edit/compile/test in real life. Icky, and unnervingly familiar: the real world is messy, physical proximity and the ability to have conversations wins out over documentation and electronic tools. Hmm, where have I heard that before?

2. Mr Schulze gave a slightly downbeat and self-effacing version of the Olinda story. It was refreshing to hear that even geniuses have problems balancing consultancy and their own product development, and a bit sad that the beeb can't produce the Olinda radios: I really hope that someone takes the open source designs and builds them (and that a suitable public back-end can be found for the social goodness which lurks backs them up). I wanted to know more about the modularity of the hardware too - Jack hinted at some smarts behind that side of things.

3. Kenichi Okada showed off animal superpowers, my absolute favourite: toys to give children the perspective of animals (giraffe for adult-style height of vision, ant for microscopic sight through "feelers", and bird for a homing instinct). Beautiful looking toys, charmingly simple, wonderfully presented. Timely for me too: I've been thinking a lot about animals recently, and had a blog post on the topic which MarsEdit seemed to drop somewhere :(

4. And finally, Hattie Coppard of Snug and Outdoor ran through their experimental playground kit: incredibly cute, kinda life-size lego. And her slide on narrative and play had my Loco-sensors tingling: arenas, pathways, obstacles, territories, thresholds, destinations and sanctuaries being the components of games. What a beautiful way to envisage outdoor play!
   

All great stuff, all thoroughly recommended. Please don't tell your friends, I think I only just scraped onto the entry list this time around and will be sad to miss the next one :)

...so I'm listening to the excellent Long Now Foundation podcasts whenever I travel from A to B without something specific to think about or do (i.e. walking to work, to class, etc.) - and they're absolutely excellent, thoroughly recommended.

This evening, Brian Eno talking about how the Long Now Foundation were approached and asked to think about storage of nuclear waste. He relates the tale of the Yucca mountain storage facility, designed to last for 10,000 years - and how they reckoned this was the wrong approach. 10,000 years is far too long a timescale to think sensibly about doing something so risky and it would be better to work out how to store waste reliably for 100 years - with the aim of coming back then to rethink the problem with new technology.

And my brain's thinking "hmm... don't plan the whole thing out in advance, but do a chunk, then come back to it and replan... what does that remind me of".

Either I'm an incurable saddo, or there's a theme here. (erm, or both).

Whatever, hopefully I'll be the top result on google for "Agile Nuclear Waste Storage".

Friday morning. Turned up late for a Kevin Warwick lecture, as tradition demands.

Icky demo video, very sensationalist stuff. Kevin talks about broadcasting electrical impulses from himself across the internet.

"Tonight when you're bored, get some very thin wires and try to push them into your nervous system"

25-30 minutes before an epileptic fit, signals in the brain occur which indicate the onset of epilepsy - so fitting sensors to the brain can have a definite medical benefit here.

Talks about cultured neural networks - biological tissue hooked up to simple robots.

Next, Holm Friebe and Philip X from Zentral Intelligenz Agentur on the topic work, its quality and its changing nature.

"Rules of working together professionally and still remaining friends": working in a laid-back manner using digital technology. They've been road-testing these concepts in their own company; this is an interim report. They've distilled them into 7 rules:

How do you integrate individuals with a strong sense of individualisation, who wouldn't fit into a normal business?

(I'm starting to have my "we're special, not like other people" buttons pressed. A bit like people who capitalise the word "creative" and talk about "working spaces for creative people" - imagination fascism)

Their business turns over 200k euros per year - so not exactly a commercial heavyweight, but living costs are low in Berlin.

Their name serves as an entrance filter - people who don't get it won't make good customers for them.

1. Start with no offices; if you hang around at the same place all the time, you won't be able to stand each other;
2. No employees, so no-one depends on the company materially;
3. No fixed costs - they only spend 15 euros on servers a month; this keeps you independent of clients and incorruptible - you can always say no;
4. No pitches;
5. No exclusivity;
6. No working hours;
7. No bullshit;

All you need is "a good name, a web site and some business cards"

(I would be pleasantly surprised if anyone made a commercially successful business out of this. For instance, I find colocation to be one of the best parts of working with someone - the random sparking of ideas you get by being around someone for the working day is where interesting stuff happens.)

They've broken these rules already - they have offices. "But they're not meant to impress clients".

They've set up a co-working space based on the commercial model of a gym.

Rule 2: engage in client work and self-induced projects with equal committment. Sounds lovely and I would agree this is worthwhile: R&D seems important for technology or design-based businesses (and probably lots of others).

Rule 3: instant gratification, distribute profits immediately after a job is completed. People need to pay their rent (of course) but I'm not sure how that implies this. They keep 10% of profit for the company to accrue some play money for their own projects. They pay bills immediately.

Rule 4: Pluralism of methods: find technical solutions for social problems, use online tools wherever possible. I know some people really grok this, I love physical colocation myself. They wrote their own collaborative editing tools and voting mechanisms.

Rule 5: Fixed ideas. e.g. turning everything bad and annoying about Powerpoint into an on-stage format. They pulled 20 presentations off the net and got folks to get up and improvise presentations. Another project: direct feedback for poetry slam, letting callers leave feedback. The poets were wired up to a current and administered electric shocks when they received negative feedback.

Rule 6: Responsibilities without hierarchies. Each project has 1 person in charge, but it can be anybody. People play different roles within different projects. At the beginning of the year they have a retreat in the countryside, plan out upcoming projects and the year.

Rule 7: The Power of Procrastination. Don't try to be too efficient. Good ideas will adapt and catch on, even if you neglect them for a while.

Rule 7.5: No PR, if you do interesting stuff the press will come to you.

Next, Mieke Gerritzen on different views on natural and visual culture:

Mobile network masts are being disguised as trees, despite the additional cost of doing so. In Dubai they've just built islands in the shape of a world map. The Netherlands keeps a country that's below sea level dry.

Nature becomes culture: every square metre of ground in the Netherlands is man-made ("God created the world, except for the Netherlands: the Dutch did that").

We have designer hypoallergenic cats on the market. Next year we can expect transgenic cats which will remain kitten-sized for their whole life.

Shows logo drawn on the wing of a butterfly.

We have a shortage of human organ donors. Shows artists impression of an organ printer.

The featherless chicken has been created in Tel Aviv. It's a more convenient and energy-efficient chicken to live in warm countries where feathered chickens have trouble and air conditioning is expensive.

Colouring plate for children showing the sheer volume of animals on a contemporary farm.

Edible packaging for apples. To help people get their 2 portions of fruit a day, they're growing bizarre double-apples. As buildings become more inspired by nature, nature is becoming more controlled by man.

Nature becomes culture, culture becomes nature.

Shows video about implants and the increasing use of them in medecine. Fictional story about metal implants growing after insertion - didn't we get this stuff out of our system with Tetsuo The Iron Man? Reasonably disturbing images of people and animals with metal growing out of them - wooooo.

Lots of assertions I don't get, like "science fiction is becoming fact".

"Second life is not sustainable".

"Reality and virtuality are becoming equal".

Photo of unborn child using mobile phone.

I'm reminded of Adam and Joe's "Goiter"...

Shows off skeletons of Disney characters.

What she said.

I'm not going to 3GSM this year - we're just too busy (more on that soon, I hope!), so Mr Falletti is representing Future Platforms in Barcelona in 2007. But to try and bask in some of the reflected glory of 3GSM, I'd like to offer a competition.

Last year I came across some really appalling slogans from companies exhibiting. This year, I'll offer a bottle of bubbly to whoever sends me the worst slogan of 2007, as a photo. Judging will be done by me and whoever's nearest me when I run through the entries.

"Never underestimate the power of intent" was my Worst Slogan 2006, for it's pomposity and lack of any discernible meaning. Can you find better this year?

We had the pleasure of seeing Adam Bloom play the Komedia this last Friday, and I have to thoroughly recommend that if you get a chance to go see him, you take it. One of the best stand-ups I've seen in ages, and there's loads of footage of him on Youtube to boot :)

Whilst Mr Melon enjoys the delights of Costa Rica, he's found time to get some of his artwork mugged up - check out Animalgebra on DeviantArt.

It had to happen: "FakeYourSpace is an exciting new service that enables normal everyday people like me and you to have Hot friends on popular social networking sites such as MySpace and FaceBook. Not only will you be able to see these Gorgeous friends on your friends list, but FakeYourSpace enables you to create customized messages and comments for our Models to leave you on your comment wall. FakeYourSpace makes it easy for any regular person to make it seem like they have a Model for a friend."