Aram Squalls

The metaverse inches closer to reality with Google's "liquid galaxy"

Google's new project, "liquid galaxy," is kind of like The Veldt. Once large-scale, flexible AMOLEDs become affordable, this can be more or less seamless.

So long, Photoshop. You'll be remembered quaintly.

This is so staggeringly simple and such a deft piece of complex engineering, I am blown away. A new program called PhotoSketch turns simple line drawings into photocollages using image search, mapping, cutting, pasting and blending algorithms. In other words, you draw a doodle, and the program turns it into a photorealistic image.

I can easily imagine the day when this functionality is available for audio and video. Without advanced technical expertise, people will be able to create their own films, games, and songs simply by sketching their favorite actors, locales and musicians into the frame. Of course, the Andrew Keens of the world will decry it as yet another victory for mediocrity over greatness. I prefer to think of it as yet another victory for free expression over cultural exclusivity.

Can't wait to play with it.

PhotoSketch: Internet Image Montage from tao chen on Vimeo.

The world's biggest musical collaboration

Today, my client Pepsi released The Ultimate Refresh, a remix project allowing anyone in the world to upload their own accompaniment to a track by LMFAO, and to remix other people's submissions with the original song. It's a pretty cool riff on the Through-you.com aesthetic -- four videos play at once, in a 2x2 matrix.

I'd like to take full credit for the idea, but can't; although I worked on the project, I came in on the tail end of it.

Check it out, let me know what you think.

All the world's a board game, and all the men and women merely tin shoes...

Well, it's finally happened. Hasbro and Google have teamed up to launch Monopoly City Streets, an online riff on the capitalist world's favorite board game, using Google Maps as the platform.

Although I think this is a great mash-up, I'm a little disappointed because, from the little the blog and site reveal (official launch is tomorrow), this appears to be more like an MMO, and less like a big game. In other words, it seems to be using computers to bring the real world into the confines of the screen, rather than bringing the datasphere out into the world we inhabit physically.

One of the spiels I find myself giving often of late is about how the moment of the metaverse has passed, and the adventures in meatspace are just beginning. With mobile smartphones, connected cameras, and emerging solutions like MIT's 6th Sense, there's no reason a game like this should be confined by the keyboard and monitor; we should be able to "buy" streets and buildings, and to pay and collect rent, by traversing actual cities as well as virtual ones.

Of course, there very well may come a day when processing becomes so ubiquitous and latency-free that there's no perceptible difference between bringing physical experience into the computer and bringing data into the physical world. But until then, I'd like to be out and about, footloose and fancy free, rather than chained to a glowing square and a brick of keys.

My radio interview on Beatles Rock Band

Today I spent an hour on MPR's "Midmorning" (along with Daniel Radosh and Jason Della Rocca) discussing the soon-to-launch Beatles Rock Band, and some of its bigger-picture implications for the media industry and society at large. We also responded to a lot of listener questions. Altogether, it was a nice, freewheeling conversation, aided by host Kerri Miller's terrific moderation.

Here's the stream of the show:

Visions and Revisions of Cyberspace

I'm currently putting together the syllabus for my NYU Masters course this Fall, entitled "Topics in Digital Media: Visions and Revisions of Cyberspace." Usually when I teach a class like this, I tell a story on a timeline, painting cyberculture as an evolving entity. This time, however, I'm thinking about it in terms of subject areas, in which each week traces the past, present and future of a given meme or concept. My tentative list of 10 concepts/subject areas is as follows:

1: The Memex and the Mushroom Cloud
2: The Metaverse
3: Hackers and Gamers
4: OSS/FS/CC
5: dot-com Fantasies
6: Web 2.0
7: Remix/Configurable Culture
8: The Cloud
9: Surveillance, Sensors and Robots
10: Adventures in MeatSpace

I'd love any and all informed feedback on either (a) subjects I need to add, delete or merge, and (b) vital readings/viewings/playings for a given subject. Email or blog comments will do. Thanks!

Who says government monopolies can't innovate? USPS puts AR to good use

I love, love, love this augmented reality application by the US Postal Service, for its combination of high-tech geekiness and good, old-fashioned functionality. Want to know which package size is appropriate for the item you're shipping? Hold it up to your webcam, and see how virtual boxes fit around it.

 

(Seen on Adverblog)

If Terry Riley and Kutiman had a baby

Bassist and composer Darren Solomon very cleverly married Terry Riley's "In C" with Kutiman's Through-You, and added interactivity, producing a hypnotic, finite-yet-infinite YouTube mash-up site called "In B Flat."

It's delectably simple, yet wonderfully compelling. Kind of like a sonic chocolate-chip cookie.

Gorgeous trompe l'oeil digital projection

Some really creative folks in Germany used a high-definition digital projector to produce amazing trompe l'oeil effects on the side of the Hamburg Kunsthalle. The animation takes its cue from the gridlike pattern on the face of the building, and builds from there.

Kind of reminds me of the in-station subway advertisements for New York's New Museum last year.

Mechanized telekinesis strikes again -- this time, as a souped-up TV remote

There seems to be little question that thought-reading machines -- once the exclusive province of science fiction -- are now becoming a viable technology. Although the concept immediately calls up the worst imaginable dystopian nightmares of ultra-Orwellian, networked global mind surveillance for some of us, the press has mostly covered the technology with a "gee-whiz, what won't they think of next" angle. News stories primarily consist of feel-good tales of paraplegics remotely controlling computer cursors and digital prostheses, and torture-free detention centers where the awful truth is sucked painlessly from the minds of terrorism suspects.

But there's something even more deeply unsettling about the new edge of banality creeping into these fantasies. According to the latest version of the story, these amazing new technologies will allow us to change the volume or channel of our TV sets without us having to exert all of the energy it takes to hit a remote control with our thumbs.

Really? That's it? You create a helmet that reads thoughts, and sell it as a souped up TV-remote-skullcap? What's next, a time machine you can use to find a parking space during street-cleaning hour?