In The Palm Of Your Hand

When Star Trek originally premiered in 1966, voice controlled, pocket sized super computers were wild fantasy for the far distant future. 

Even in 1987, with the arrival of The Next Generation, handheld touch interface tablets were seen as science fiction, belonging in the 24th century. 

Yet right now I'm writing this very post on my phone, a tiny super computer that lives within my arms reach at all times. This device has access to the entire knowledge of humanity, and has over 100,000 times the processing power of the computer that landed the first men on the moon (and over a million times the RAM, for that matter). 

My phone has a camera capable of recording HD video at 60 frames per second, or snapping photos in almost any lighting condition in the time it takes to get it out of my pocket, and can send them to anyone on the entire planet I have contact with at the speed of light. 

And what do I use all this astonishing power for most of the time? Photographing my kids a dozen times a day, doomscrolling on Twitter and texting my wife. Occasionally, I'll set an alarm by shouting a command at it, which is supposed to feel like Michael Knight talking to his wrist watch, but never manages to feel as elegant. 

Recently, I've been wearing down my battery playing a mobile card game, and I've been known to hunt imaginary pocket monsters on this wondrous device too, but I overall, I think I'm vastly underutilizing this incredible package of microprocessors that just 40 years ago was unimaginable in our lifetime. 

What is to come 40 years from now? 

Who Watches The Watch?

Technology is amazing. 

My alarm on my phone went off this morning at 6:10am, to have me up and ready when the kids I was caring for arrived at 6:30. Without even taking my arms out from under the covers, I silenced it with a tap on my Watch. 

I wear an Apple Watch, which connects to my phone and tracks my general heath, though I haven’t referred to it much. But I did recently start the sleep tracking feature, and now at 11pm I get a gentle pulse on my wrist to remind me that I should be heading to bed, and in the morning, at 7am, I get a gentle musical call to start my day on, if I’m not already up at crazy-o’clock for work. My Watch can monitor my heartbeat too, and tells me that I dropped to a steady 48 beats per minute around 4:30 this morning. I guess it can track blood oxygen levels too, because it somehow tells me that I dropped to a mere 12 breaths per minute around the same time.

I also know that when I go for a run it triggers the Watch to offer to track the run, and although it takes a few minutes to register that I’m trying to stay fit, and not, say sprinting away from a rampaging rhino, the Watch knows enough that it will post-date the run to roughly the actual start time, not the time I agreed to register the activity. 

I’m very grateful to have this technology available to me, even if I probably only use 10-20% of its features to their fullest. 

There are two features I love the most, though. Tap to pay lets me tap my Watch to pay almost anywhere. It’s just so convenient and secure not having to get out my wallet all the time. 

But the feature I use more that any other on my Watch is Find My Phone. Ever since I got a Watch and discovered this feature, if I have put my phone down anywhere and I can’t see it in a five second glance from exactly where I’m standing, I just tap my wrist and ping my phone, setting off a sonar-like ping sound, telling me exactly where my phone is. The fact that this feature works even when the phone is on silent or sleep mose is amazing. This one, simple feature has literally saved minutes of my life. 

Technology. 

Amazing.

Mobile Girl

Claire and I are pretty tech connected people. We both use our desktop PC's, iPads and phones daily, and Ada is present for a lot of that interaction of man and machine.

So it comes as no surprise to learn that Ada has a fascination with mobile phones and iPads. She sees us on them all the time, and they glow with inviting colours. Claire let Ada chew on her bright red silicone phone cover when she started teething, and she still likes to play with that.

But few toys hold her attention when our phones are in sight. I sometimes let her play with my phone if she's by my side on a soft surface, but all too often, it ends up in her mouth at some point, and that's just not healthy, for baby or phone.

So, on my way home today, I stopped into my phone network's local store and asked about the dummy display phones they keep on the display shelves, and what happens to them once they're no longer needed. One of the staff immediately asked what model my own phone was, disappeared into the back room and returned with a dummy version of my phone.

He handed it to me and suggested I give it a good and thorough cleaning. I thanked him, and walked home, delighted, with an unusual gift for my darling girl.

Ada now has her own phone to chew on, play with and babble at, just like mummy and daddy does. Because it's the same model as my own phone, it looks and feels the same, and even weighs the same. It doesn't light up, but at the same time, the screen is always colourful to look at. It even shares a feature with my phone. My lock screen has a digital effect that looks like there's water between the glass layers of the screen. When you press and swipe, the bubble moves with your finger, and it looks really cool. When I washed Ada's phone, actual water got into the device[1], so now there's a bubble of water under the screen that moves when you press and swipe!

Ada loves her phone. Now if only I could find a dummy iPad as well...

[1] - Don't wash your phone by immersing it, kiddies! Also, probably don't use soap and water.

 

Publicity Stunt, Or Real Deal?

This is just a bit too close to fiction to be fact, but you never know:

Warp Drive Engine Would Travel Faster Than Light

It is possible to travel faster than light. You just wouldn't travel faster than light.

Seems strange, but by manipulating extra dimensions with astronomical amounts of energy, two Baylor University physicists have outlined how a faster-than-light engine, or warp drive, could be created that would bend but not break the laws of physics.

"We think we can create an effective warp drive, based on general relatively and string theory," said Gerald Cleaver, coauthor of the paper that recently appeared on the preprint server ArXiv.org

The warp engine is based on a design first proposed in1994 by Michael Alcubierre. The Alcubierre drive, as it's known, involves expanding the fabric of space behind a ship into a bubble and shrinking space-time in front of the ship. The ship would rest in between the expanding and shrinking space-time, essentially surfing down the side of the bubble.

The tricky part is that the ship wouldn't actually move; space itself would move underneath the stationary spacecraft. A beam of light next to the ship would still zoom away, same as it always does, but a beam of light far from the ship would be left behind.

That means that the ship would arrive at its destination faster than a beam of light traveling the same distance, but without violating Einstein's relativity, which says that it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate an object with mass to the speed of light, since the ship itself isn't actually moving.

Read more at the Discovery Channel new site:
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/07/28/warp-speed-engine.html

I Get Excited When I Wii

Last Friday I picked up Wii Fit and dragged it home to try it out. I understand that Nintendo are encouraging an increase in exercising and all that through this game, but just getting it home was tiring enough! The thing weighs quite a bit!

Once home, I unpacked it carefully, synced it up with my machine, and started my all-new fitness regime. After some minor hiccups (I'm slightly over my ideal BMI), I was throwing myself around, avoiding panda bears and zooming off ski slopes! I even went jogging in my living room with Noel!

While the minigames are a lot of fun, it is the yoga exercises that I've enjoyed most. The balance board tracks your center of gravity, so it can tell you when you are going wrong, and help you achieve a good pose. As I know I have a bad posture, I've been focusing my efforts on the exercises that help that area, but I try to get a well-rounded workout. My shoulders are killing me from the push-ups, and my legs were shaking after a few stretching exercises a few minutes ago. My thighs burn, and my blood is pumping.

And I can do all this in my own home, with no beefcakes surrounding me, or no-one to see when I can't do that last push-up. But I still push myself. I'm doing more than I usually do, and I'm going to try to stay at it.

I've set myself a target to lose 1.5kg in two weeks. I thought I'd be ok, but this morning the game told me I've put on weight!! I didn't even have dinner yesterday!

Innovation Upon Innovation

It is said that the greatest inventors in human history were merely working on the backs of those that came before them. It's true. Very little is genuinely new. Nothing is born into the world that doesn't have an ancestry that reaches back to decades, especially technology.

As much as I love Nintendos motion sensitive controls on the Wii, it's not entirely new. People have been trying it out for ages now. Heck, the PS2 had controllerless controllers with the EyeToy, which worked surprisingly well.

Keeping in that tradition, check out these amazing videos that use the Wii Remote in clever and innovative ways. They are all from Carnegie Mellon University Ph.D. Graduate Student, Johnny Chung Lee. His website, JohnnyLee.net is a treasure trove of genius proportions!! And better yet, he posts a bunch of the programmes that he uses to create the videos that follow! Seriously, check it out. It's amazing. I really, really want to see a game using some of these ideas.

First up, using the Wii remote for head tracking on desktop VR displays. Stunning.


Next, using a Wii remote to create low-cost multi-touch whiteboard. This is something I'm really tempted to try out. It would be fun even just to show off and play around with.


And finally, for embedded video anyway, using Minority Report style finger tracking with the Wii remote.


Also worth checking out is Johnny's "Moveable Projected Displays using Projector Based Tracking" from 2003 and, after you've seen that one, find out where that builds to after four years with his video titled "Foldable Displays". It's worth noting, before I get any complaints, that I'm well aware that it is far from a foldable display, and more just a development of his projector technology. It's still freaking awesome! This guy is going to go really, really far if he keeps up this level of inventiveness! I wish I was half as computer savvy and inventive as him.