Category: Science
Augmented (hyper)Reality
Martin, a robotics researcher friend of mine, showed me this video at the weekend:
Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.
It certainly got us talking about where augmented reality may be headed, particularly for advertising. While the video is perhaps a little over exaggerated, the technology is rapidly getting there. Take, for example, the new augmented-reality mapping from Microsoft:
Sleepy Statistics
As you move differently in bed during the different phases of sleep, Sleep Cycle uses the accelerometer in your iPhone to monitor your movement to determine which sleep phase you are in. Come morning and it plots out a graph of your nocturnal activity. Here’s mine from the last couple of nights:
Sleep statistics for 30 – 31 Jan
Went to bed / woke up: 01:18 / 08:27 | Total time: 7h 08m
Sleep statistics for 31 – 01 Feb
Went to bed / woke up: 23:21 / 06:30 | Total time: 7h 08m
Can you guess when I woke to tend to our son? 🙂 Now I *know* when I woke at night…
The Magic Number, Psychology and Website User Experience
This is the first post I have managed to type out in months, besides the regular amalgamations of various Twitterspheric streaming that this site has become. It must be because I’ve just read something that pushes my psychology / computer science / internet geek buttons just enough to warrant a little more rambling than the usual delicious tag or tweet. Jakob Nielson has published an article that cites the classic seven plus or minus two of short-term memory capacity (i.e. executive function) in the context of Website User Experience. Ooooh.
Wearing a helmet puts cyclists at risk
Some research from Bath University suggests that wearing a helmet might be more dangerous than not. And that drivers gave women cyclists a wider berth when passing. Personally I’m not taking any chances cycling around London without a helmet but I am considering growing my hair and wearing a skirt, just to be on the safe side when cycling to work.
Wellcome to the future
Considering where I am working right now, I haven’t seen enough of the local area during lunch breaks and so on. But when I do, I’m happy to have dragged myself away from the usual half hour of joy – slowly dribbling bits of sandwich between the keys. Walking in from a bright Spring afternoon, this place – with its perspex tables, neon lights, beeps, whirls and blips – was all a bit disorientating but then this is the future after all (and maybe that’s how I’ll feel at eighty years old). And what a future it is. I am going there more often. The Wellcome Wing at the Science Museum that is – not the future. Although you never know…