It was a mission that combined one of the most daring feats of exploration in human history with one of its most dazzling achievements of science and engineering.
The world was left to marvel at the power of American technology and the scale of its ambition.
But this was all 40 years ago - and it was all ruinously expensive.
So one of the most intriguing problems which President Obama has to resolve in the coming months deals not with the instability of General Motors or the transparency of the system of regulation on Wall Street or even the intransigence of North Korea.
It is about the future of human flight.
To put it bluntly - is the Obama administration ready to pay the colossal bills that would be run up if America were to decide to return to the Moon by 2020?
And is the recession-hit America of 2009 really ready to contemplate a mission to Mars to open a new frontier in the heavens?
No appetite
The White House has ordered a public review of America's options.
It opens at a time when the country's relative standing in space is at an unusually low point.
The Space Shuttle programme which was launched in 1981 will come to an end next year when the last craft will be cannibalised, mothballed or scrapped.
But Nasa's proposed replacement programme, Constellation, will not be ready until five years after the Shuttle is gone - and that will leave America, for so long the leader in the world of human space flight, out of the game, at least temporarily.
Jeff Hanley, the Nasa official in charge of Constellation, says the reason for that is simple.
Having the new generation of launch vehicles ready earlier would have cost much more money, and America's appetite for spending big on space has declined sharply over the years.
"At the peak of the Apollo project Nasa's budget was something like 4% of the federal budget," he told me.
"Today, less than half a penny of every federal dollar goes to human space flight."
The first public hearing of the new review committee drew quite a crowd. Many engineers and contractors who work on the space programme were in attendance.
Most of them would have drawn some encouragement from what they heard from John Holdren, President Obama's science adviser.
"This is a president who gets it," he told them. "He understands the importance of human space flight. He was clear in his campaign, and since, about his commitment to go back to the Moon and other destinations beyond low-Earth orbit."
But the problem for Mr Obama is simple. It is about money.
Spiritual need
America's budget deficit for this year is going to be around $1.7tn (£1.04tn) - these are hardly the circumstances in which you embark on a major new national project, the immediate practical benefits of which may be rather nebulous.
In the 1960s, America underlined the startling power of its economy by simultaneously undertaking two of the largest and costliest projects in its history - the space programme and the Vietnam war.
The days of that kind of boundless prosperity are over and Americans are going to take some persuading that tax dollars should be spent on a long-term attempt to reach Mars - with the creation of some sort of base on the Moon as a proving ground.
If the space community wants to win the argument it has three possible options.
First, it can argue that there is some kind of economic benefit to the project - either through materials that might eventually be found in space, or through technologies designed to get there.
It is sometimes argued that materials like Teflon and Velcro were created as a result of the space programme - but even if they had been, that is a very expensive way to coat a frying pan or fasten a jacket.
Then there is the philosophical argument that the urge to explore the unknown is part of what makes us human and that we have to answer a kind of collective spiritual need to seek new frontiers - a tough argument to sell in a recession.
Finally, there is the strategic dimension.
The US victory in the race to the Moon in the 1960s was a victory over the communist Soviet Union, America's main strategic rival.
It proved the superiority of American technology - and the greater resources of its economy.
If the United States does not commit itself to a further major programme of exploration it might find itself abdicating space to China, which is expanding its own efforts.
There is no point in winning one Cold War over a communist superpower if you go on to lose a second one.
Triumph and disaster
Michael Neufeld, a historian at the Air and Space Museum, says the last of those arguments is the weakest and he does not believe the American people will buy the idea that a Chinese presence in space represents some kind of threat.
"People are going to have to be convinced that the scientific or the exploration benefits of sending humans to the Moon - and maybe later to Mars - are worth it."
That may not be an easy task.
Man has been in space for nearly 50 years now and the truth is that for long parts of that period the public has been bored by the repetition of space travel and stunned by its cost.
Only moments of triumph like the Moon landings and disasters like the losses of the Shuttles Challenger and Columbia really seared themselves into the memory.
We will know within a few months whether Mr Obama himself has bought into any of the economic, philosophical or strategic arguments for reaching out to the heavens - and more importantly, the extent to which he will be prepared to commit American taxpayers' money behind them.
We are told he "gets" space.
We will soon find out if the American people still get it too.
That's right, the government is working on a robot that eats organic material for fuel.
Fox News is reporting that Robotic Technology Inc., a Maryland company, is under contract with the Pentagon to construct a steam-powered robot that fuels itself by eating organic material, whether it's wood, grass, the neighbor's annoying dog or the actual neighbor himself. That's right, this robot, called EATR (Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot), sounds like something ripped straight out of sci-fi horror movies, consuming human flesh to carry out its mission. However, there's nothing fictional about this metal monster, but just don't expect to see something menacing with metal talons or gaping mechanical jaws.
"The purpose of the Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot (EATR) (patent pending) project is to develop and demonstrate an autonomous robotic platform able to perform long-range, long-endurance missions without the need for manual or conventional re-fueling, which would otherwise preclude the ability of the robot to perform such missions," reads the company website. "The system obtains its energy by foraging--engaging in biologically-inspired, organism-like, energy-harvesting behavior which is the equivalent of eating. It can find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass in the environment (and other organically-based energy sources), as well as use conventional and alternative fuels (such as gasoline, heavy fuel, kerosene, diesel, propane, coal, cooking oil, and solar) when suitable."
As Fox News pointed out, the robot would serve extremely well for the military, capable of roaming battlefields and other hostile environments for months--or perhaps even for years--without having to be manually refueled or serviced thanks to its unique system. By using the EATR platform, the government could build many useful tools including a mobile unmanned gunner, a roving medical center, a transport, or what could spark a first generation of Terminators that will eventually eat all of mankind.
Robotic Technology plans to commercialize EATR in addition to its contract with the Pentagon. Check out the company's full overview here in PDF format.
Obviously a dramatization/far stretch of the truth, but I think the author of this article understands an eventuality when he sees it in this case. We can't have a skynet without a killer robot army can we?
"Despite the far-reaching reports that this includes “human bodies,” the public can be assured that the engine Cyclone (Cyclone Power Technologies Inc.) has developed to power the EATR runs on fuel no scarier than twigs, grass clippings and wood chips -- small, plant-based items for which RTI’s robotic technology is designed to forage. Desecration of the dead is a war crime under Article 15 of the Geneva Conventions, and is certainly not something sanctioned by DARPA, Cyclone or RTI."
We all know of Honda’s ASIMO humanoid robot and its amazing walking and running capabilities. Other research labs though are not far behind developing robots just as capable. In fact, Toyota has an excellent and very advanced robot in the making even though they entered the game much later than Honda.
Toyota’s most recent humanoid robot prototype (one of many partner robots the automotive giant is developing) stands 130cm tall and weighs 50Kgr. Its legs have 7 degrees of freedom and it can run at an average speed of 7 km/h. In contrast, ASIMO’s maximum speed is 6km/h. The Toyota researchers had to develop new real-time methods for balance control. These methods make it possible for the robot to remain balanced when an external force such as a push from a human is applied when in motion.
The below video from Toyota demonstrates the running capabilities of the new humanoid robot. The robot takes a step every 340ms and has no contact with the ground for 100ms of that. Notice in the video how the robot remains balanced even after pushed by the human.
Finally, even though this new robot is impressive, it is still limited on moving over flat surfaces and it can only recover from small external forces. But then again, even Rome was not built in one day!
A few blogs are passing around videos of the Ishikawa Komuro Lab's high-speed robot hand performing impressive acts of dexterity and skillful manipulation. However, the video being passed around is slight on details. Meanwhile, their video presentation at ICRA 2009 (which took place in May in Kobe, Japan) has an informative narration and demonstrates additional capabilities. I have included this video below, which shows the manipulator dribbling a ping-pong ball, spinning a pen, throwing a ball, tying knots, grasping a grain of rice with tweezers, and tossing / re-grasping a cellphone!
Based on the video, the hand uses high-speed actuators with harmonic drive gears. The hand can close in 1/10th of a second! Personally, I find the tweezers grasping the grain of rice the most entertaining -- very anthropomorphic.
If you'd like to learn more about this (and other) robots from the Ishikawa Komuro Lab, see their website.
Maybe the true solution to Mars exploration is a one way trip. It should not be difficult to find people of all ages willing to make a one way trip in the name of SCIENCE.
NOW that the hype surrounding the 40th anniversary of the Moon landings has come and gone, we are faced with the grim reality that if we want to send humans back to the Moon the investment is likely to run in excess of $150 billion. The cost to get to Mars could easily be two to four times that, if it is possible at all.
This is the issue being wrestled with by a NASA panel, convened this year and led by Norman Augustine, a former chief executive of Lockheed Martin, that will in the coming weeks present President Obama with options for the near-term future of human spaceflight. It is quickly becoming clear that going to the Moon or Mars in the next decade or two will be impossible without a much bigger budget than has so far been allocated. Is it worth it?
The most challenging impediment to human travel to Mars does not seem to involve the complicated launching, propulsion, guidance or landing technologies but something far more mundane: the radiation emanating from the Sun’s cosmic rays. The shielding necessary to ensure the astronauts do not get a lethal dose of solar radiation on a round trip to Mars may very well make the spacecraft so heavy that the amount of fuel needed becomes prohibitive.
There is, however, a way to surmount this problem while reducing the cost and technical requirements, but it demands that we ask this vexing question: Why are we so interested in bringing the Mars astronauts home again?
While the idea of sending astronauts aloft never to return is jarring upon first hearing, the rationale for one-way trips into space has both historical and practical roots. Colonists and pilgrims seldom set off for the New World with the expectation of a return trip, usually because the places they were leaving were pretty intolerable anyway. Give us a century or two and we may turn the whole planet into a place from which many people might be happy to depart.
Moreover, one of the reasons that is sometimes given for sending humans into space is that we need to move beyond Earth if we are to improve our species’ chances of survival should something terrible happen back home. This requires people to leave, and stay away.
There are more immediate and pragmatic reasons to consider one-way human space exploration missions.
First, money. Much of the cost of a voyage to Mars will be spent on coming home again. If the fuel for the return is carried on the ship, this greatly increases the mass of the ship, which in turn requires even more fuel.
The president of the Mars Society, Robert Zubrin, has offered one possible solution: two ships, sent separately. The first would be sent unmanned and, once there, combine onboard hydrogen with carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere to generate the fuel for the return trip; the second would take the astronauts there, and then be left behind. But once arrival is decoupled from return, one should ask whether the return trip is really necessary.
Surely if the point of sending astronauts is to be able to carry out scientific experiments that robots cannot do (something I am highly skeptical of and one of the reasons I don’t believe we should use science to attempt to justify human space exploration), then the longer they spend on the planet the more experiments they can do.
Moreover, if the radiation problems cannot be adequately resolved then the longevity of astronauts signing up for a Mars round trip would be severely compromised in any case. As cruel as it may sound, the astronauts would probably best use their remaining time living and working on Mars rather than dying at home.
If it sounds unrealistic to suggest that astronauts would be willing to leave home never to return alive, then consider the results of several informal surveys I and several colleagues have conducted recently. One of my peers in Arizona recently accompanied a group of scientists and engineers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on a geological field trip. During the day, he asked how many would be willing to go on a one-way mission into space. Every member of the group raised his hand. The lure of space travel remains intoxicating for a generation brought up on “Star Trek” and “Star Wars.”
We might want to restrict the voyage to older astronauts, whose longevity is limited in any case. Here again, I have found a significant fraction of scientists older than 65 who would be willing to live out their remaining years on the red planet or elsewhere. With older scientists, there would be additional health complications, to be sure, but the necessary medical personnel and equipment would still probably be cheaper than designing a return mission.
Delivering food and supplies to these new pioneers — along with the tools to grow and build whatever they need, for however long they live on the red planet — is likewise more reasonable and may be less expensive than designing a ticket home. Certainly, as in the Zubrin proposal, unmanned spacecraft could provide the crucial supply lines.
The largest stumbling block to a consideration of one-way missions is probably political. NASA and Congress are unlikely to do something that could be perceived as signing the death warrants of astronauts.
Nevertheless, human space travel is so expensive and so dangerous that we are going to need novel, even extreme solutions if we really want to expand the range of human civilization beyond our own planet. To boldly go where no one has gone before does not require coming home again.
Ask me again in 30-40 years after I've hopefully completed most of what I want to do in life, and I would almost certainly do something like that. Go spend the rest of your life on Mars as one of the first pioneers and you would be immortalized in human history.
It's important work! Considering the need for humans to diversify and settle on other worlds to better the chances of long-term survival, it's possibly the most important work.
A pint-sized version o' th' Tyrannosaurus rex, wi' similarly powerful legs, razor-sharp teeth an' wee arms, roamed China some 125 cargo holds o' voyages ago, spake scientists who remain startled by th' discovery.
Th' predator, nicknamed Raptorex, lived about 60 cargo holds o' voyages before th' T. rex an' be slightly larger than th' crewmate male, scientists spake.
Th' findings, t' be released Fridee in th' journal Science, be based on fossilized remains discovered in lake beds in northeastern China. They show a dinosaur wi' many o' th' specialized physical features o' Tyrannosaurus rex at a fraction o' its size.
"Th' most interestin' an' important thin' about this new fossil be that 'Tis completely unexpected," spake Stephen Brusatte, co-author o' th' article, in a conference call wi' reporters.
"'tis becomin' harder an' harder t' find fossils like this that totally throw us fer a curve," added Brusatte, a paleontologist wi' th' American Museum o' Natural History.
Scientists who be havin' studied th' fossilized animal, which be 5 t' 6 voyages old when 't sank t'Davy Jones' locker, b'lieve 't be an ancestor o' th' fearsome T. Rex.
"Raptorex really be a pivotal moment in th' history o' th' squadron 'ere most o' th' biological meaningful features about Tyrannosaurs came into bein'," spake lead author Paul Sereno, a paleontologist at th' University o' Chicago.
"An' th' surprisin' fact be that they came into bein' in such a wee animal," he added.
Based on estimates o' other similar-sized theropods, or "beast-footed" dinosaurs, Sereno an' his colleagues estimate an adult Raptorex be about 9 feet tall an' weighed about 143 pounds.
By contrast, th' Tyrannosaurus rex, which topped th' prehistoric food chain until dinosaurs sailed' extinct about 65 cargo holds o' voyages ago, be believed t' weigh at least five tons.
Scientists hypothesize that Raptorex ran its prey down, usin' its enlarged skull, powerful jaws an' sharp teeth t' dispatch animals much larger than itself. Like th' T. rex, th' Raptorex also had wee forelimbs, they spake.
"We can say that these features did nay evolve as a consequence o' large body size but rather evolved as an efficient set o' predatory weapons in an animal that be 1/100th th' size o' Tyrannosaurus rex an' that lived 60 cargo holds o' voyages before Tyrannosaurus rex," Brusatte spake.
After th' remains be discovered, they be smuggled ou' o' China an' into th' United States, 'ere they be eventually purchased by a Massachusetts collector, Henry Kriegstein, who donated them t' science. Sereno be later asked t' identify th' fossil.
"I hope that this be a pathway that other important specimens that do find the'r way ou' o' th' poop deck in th' dark o' night do nay get lost t' science," Sereno spake.
Th' Raptorex fossil will eventually be returned t' China, 'ere 't be put on display near th' excavation site, scientists spake.
A rare textile made from the silk of more than a million wild spiders goes on display today at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
To produce this unique golden cloth, 70 people spent four years collecting golden orb spiders from telephone poles in Madagascar, while another dozen workers carefully extracted about 80 feet of silk filament from each of the arachnids. The resulting 11-foot by 4-foot textile is the only large piece of cloth made from natural spider silk existing in the world today.
“Spider silk is very elastic, and it has a tensile strength that is incredibly strong compared to steel or Kevlar,” said textile expert Simon Peers, who co-led the project. “There’s scientific research going on all over the world right now trying to replicate the tensile properties of spider silk and apply it to all sorts of areas in medicine and industry, but no one up until now has succeeded in replicating 100 percent of the properties of natural spider silk.”
Peers came up with the idea of weaving spider silk after learning about the French missionary Jacob Paul Camboué, who worked with spiders in Madagascar during the 1880s and 1890s. Camboué built a small, hand-driven machine to extract silk from up to 24 spiders at once, without harming them.
“Simon managed to build a replica of this 24-spider-silking machine that was used at the turn of the century,” said Nicholas Godley, who co-led the project with Peers. As an experiment, the pair collected an initial batch of about 20 spiders. “When we stuck them in the machine and started turning it, lo and behold, this beautiful gold-colored silk started coming out,” Godley said.
Father Comboué, who one historical text erroneously calls Father Comboné, had a partner in designing his machine, M. Nogué. Together, they got quite a spider silk fabric industry going in Madagascar and even exhibited “a complete set of bed hangings” at the Paris Exposition of 1898. That fabric has since been lost, but the exhibition brought them some attention, excerpted below.
But to make a textile of any significant size, the silk experts had to drastically scale up their project. “Fourteen thousand spiders yields about an ounce of silk,” Godley said, “and the textile weighs about 2.6 pounds. The numbers are crazy.”
Researchers have long been intrigued by the unique properties of spider silk, which is stronger than steel or Kevlar but far more flexible, stretching up to 40 percent of its normal length without breaking. Unfortunately, spider silk is extremely hard to mass produce: Unlike silk worms, which are easy to raise in captivity, spiders have a habit of chomping off each other’s heads when housed together.
3-weavingTo get as much silk as they needed, Godley and Peers began hiring dozens of spider handlers to collect wild arachnids and carefully harness them to the silk-extraction machine. “We had to find people who were willing to work with spiders,” Godley said, “because they bite.”
By the end of the project, Godley and Peers extracted silk from more than 1 million female golden orb spiders, which are abundant throughout Madagascar and known for the rich golden color of their silk. Because the spiders only produce silk during the rainy season, workers collected all the spiders between October and June.
Then an additional 12 people used hand-powered machines to extract the silk and weave it into 96-filament thread. Once the spiders had been milked, they were released into back into the wild, where Godley said it takes them about a week to regenerate their silk. “We can go back and re-silk the same spiders,” he said. “It’s like the gift that never stops giving.”
Of course, spending four years to produce a single textile of spider silk isn’t very practical for scientists trying to study the properties of spider silk or companies that want to manufacture the fabric for use as a biomedical scaffold or an alternative to Kevlar armor. Several groups have tried inserting spider genes into bacteria (or even cows and goats) to produce silk, but so far, the attempts have been only moderately successful.
Part of the reason it’s so hard to generate spider silk in the lab is that it starts out as a liquid protein that’s produced by a special gland in the spider’s abdomen. Using their spinnerets, spiders apply a physical force to rearrange the protein’s molecular structure and turn it into solid silk.
“When we talk about a spider spinning silk, we’re talking about how the spider applies forces to produce a physical transformation from liquid to solid,” said spider silk expert Todd Blackledge of the University of Akron, who was not involved in creating the textile. “Scientists simply can’t replicate that as well as a spider does it. Every year we’re getting closer and closer to being able to mass-produce it, but we’re not there yet.”
For now, it seems we’ll have to be content with one incredibly beautiful cloth, graciously provided by more than a million spiders.
A pilot program at the county's Solid Waste Transfer Station in Derwood could one day change the way plastics are recycled in Maryland.
At its highest capacity the generator can melt 25 tons of plastic into oil daily in the alternative fuel program run by Envion Inc. of Washington, D.C.
"It's very simple, we just reverse engineer the plastic," said Envion chairman and CEO Michael Han. "You take untreated plastic waste, it goes through the generator on a conveyer belt and once the plastic is in the generator, it melts down to oil."
Han, 39, founded Envion in 2004 using his uncle's concept of converting solid waste into its original form, which for plastic, is oil, he said. A far infrared ray inside the generator heats the plastic at a consistent temperature to evenly melt the plastic, he said. The generator allows the engineers to monitor and control how much heat is used, Han said. Prior previous attempts from other engineers to convert plastic back into oil in were unsuccessful because they didn't have the technology to do it and have a quality product, Han said.
Old plastic milk jugs, water bottles and yogurt tubs are chopped into small pieces and are tested by Envion's 66 engineers to see which ones revert to cleaner oil, Han said. The plastics are then loaded into the generator and melted.
The generator at the waste station, which can handle more than 6,000 tons of waste a year, costs $4 million to build. Envion would sell its larger generator, which can turn 10,000 tons of plastic into 420,000 gallons of oil a year, to companies, Han said. The generator at the waste station in Derwood has produced more than 10,000 gallons of oil, he said.
Twenty-five oil and recycling companies have put in orders for 390 generators, Han said. Companies will pay a one time $7 million licensing fee and $200,000 annually for maintenance of the generators, he said.
The generator is safe for the environment and runs on remnants of the melted plastic, Han said.
Oils from the melted plastic range from $1 to $1.50 a gallon, Han said. Han said gasoline companies are some of his biggest customers. Han declined to name his buyers.
"The ethanol players and companies that manufacture gasoline are our main customers," said Han, who said his oil can be added to crude oil during the refining process to create gasoline. "They come and collect the oil from us. We have a 5,000 gallon storage tank at the center."
Montgomery County Councilwoman Nancy M. Floreen (D-At large) of Garrett Park, head of the council's Transportation, Infrastructure, Energy and Environment Committee, said the committee has "put pressure on county's waste department" to find alternatives for safe energy resources.
Peter Karasik, manager of the waste station, said the station provides at no cost less than 10 percent of the plastic Envion has used.
"We would be interested to see what plastics they can take from our center once they have completed their research," Karasik said. "What we're interested in is if their research is successful they could find investors to build a center here in Maryland with the generators."
Todd Makurath, a spokesman for Envion, said the company is looking around the country where a fulltime operation could be housed. County spokeswoman Esther Bowring said the generator will remain at the waste station until May.
A Japanese man has just married his girlfriend, Nene Anegasaki.
Here's the catch: Nene is a video game character from the Nintendo DS game Love Plus.
BoingBoing has the details on the ceremony, which was broadcast live on the Japanese site Nico Nico Douga:
The wedding took place during a Make: Japan meet-up held at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. In attendance were a live audience, an MC, the bride's virtual video game girlfriend -- who made a speech -- and a real human priest.
BoingBoing notes that the ceremony included an MC, deejay, and a priest. It kicked off with a slideshow of photos highlighting the bride and groom's "special moments together."
The groom, who calls himself "SAL 9000", reportedly had a string of anime girlfriends before Nene.
LovePlus seems to hook its players more than other dating sims. BoingBoing previously wrote about a woman whose husband "Koh" confessed to being "hooked" on his high-school, virtual girlfriend from Love Plus.
Asked what he did with the Love Plus girl, Koh explained,
OK, this is pretty embarrassing. The DS has a mic and a touchscreen, so... one time, she asked me to say "I love you" a hundred times into the mic. I was on the airplane when she asked me that, so I was like, no way. There was also this part where you have to hold her hand on the touchscreen. If you touch her hand with the stylus, you get to hold her hand. And then there's the part where you have to kiss her.
Sure, it's probably mostly performance art, but we're going to be reading a lot more stories like these in the years to come. Nene probably isn't self-aware, but as we start creating more sophisticated artificial intelligences, humans will need to be able to form real bonds with these beings for them to be accepted as beings. There will come a time when this kind of story is considered old hat.
Of course, that isn't now, so let's all laugh at him. Ha-ha!
I had heard about this. I thought this was just a rumor. I just could not BELIEVE this. My faith in humanity just slumped slightly. That loss has been transferred completely to robot-kind.
Here are Popular Science's most amazing scientific and most amazing medical images of the past year. I love this kinda thing. There are dozens of amazing images ranging from microscopic cells to beautiful nebulas. Check it out.
Electronic devices are getting smaller, and so are their interfaces. If you’ve ever had problems typing on your mobile, or changing a song on your iPod while jogging, Chris Harrison has the answer. His Skinput prototype is a system that monitors acoustic signals on your arm to translate gestures and taps into input commands. Just by touching different points on your limb you can tell your portable device to change volume, answer a call, or turn itself off. Even better, Harrison can couple Skinput with a pico projector so that you can see a graphic interface on your arm and use the acoustic signals to control it. The project is set to be presented at this year’s SIGCHI conference in April, but you can check it out now in the video below. Skip past 1:00 to avoid the intro, but make sure to catch the Tetris game demo at 1:19, and the cool pico projector interface starting at 2:05.
Incorporating your body into your mobile systems could be the next big theme in human computer interfaces. The Skinput system bears a strong resemblance to the I/O for Sixth Sense, Pranav Mistry’s open source personal augmented reality device. Whereas Mistry uses a camera to capture video input, Harrison has focused on acoustics. Researchers at Microsoft have taken a third tactic: using the electric signals on the skin’s surface that correspond to muscle movement as input commands. All three are pretty novel approaches to controlling your technology through your body, and any one might make headway in the next few years. Together, they suggest that the best way to take advantage of miniaturized mobile devices is to make them part of you.
I’ve been impressed with Harrison’s work at Carnegie Mellon’s Human Computer Interaction Institute since I reviewed his Scratch Input device last year. That system used acoustic signals on hard surfaces to control various electronics. Skinput is the logical successor to Sratch Input, taking the basic premise of an acoustic interface and upgrading it with projected video and augmenting it by placing it on the body.
As advanced as Skinput may be, however, it’s hard to know if it will ever make it out of the prototype phase. Novel I/O systems are amazing to watch, but transitioning them into a marketable product can take years. Here’s an idea though: Mistry’s Sixth Sense device is open source, maybe Harrison should try to combine it with Skinput. Together, visual and audio input could give the personal AR system a dynamic and sensitive set of complex controls able to take on any task.
Whenever I see this level of engineering and inventiveness I’m as impressed by the people behind it as I am with the technology itself. Harrison’s already on my radar after Sratch Input, even more so now with Skinput. Prototypes like these help shape the dialogue about the future of human computer interfaces even if they never make it to market. (Relatively) young inventors like Harrison, Mistry, and countless others are going to make this century a truly remarkable one to live in. Maybe in a few years I’ll be writing these posts on my arm while I’m out jogging. Make it happen, Harrison!
Comments
Poisoning isn't always the most effective route. It didn't work worth crap when the british introduced the European rabbit.
Obviously a dramatization/far stretch of the truth, but I think the author of this article understands an eventuality when he sees it in this case. We can't have a skynet without a killer robot army can we?
EDIT: They toned it down a bit.
Way to pussy out RTI.
Toyota's running humanoid robot
The evil bee-powered robot dog's still scarier, but humanoid hunter-killers can't be far off now!
Seriously impressive dexterity and speed.
(courtesy of @ashman01)
A one way ticket to Mars
(translated fer yer convenience, sea-dog)
But it's supposed to be stronger than steel... can you imagine, cloth with a higher armor value than any mail or plate we've yet produced?
Imagine once you get an enchant on that bitch... whoo.
Man, just like home!
Sure, it's probably mostly performance art, but we're going to be reading a lot more stories like these in the years to come. Nene probably isn't self-aware, but as we start creating more sophisticated artificial intelligences, humans will need to be able to form real bonds with these beings for them to be accepted as beings. There will come a time when this kind of story is considered old hat.
Of course, that isn't now, so let's all laugh at him. Ha-ha!
Here's the project page. Also I'm totally going to be reading more from Singularity Hub in the future. I can never get enough of this stuff.
(courtesy of @dresdencodak)
Excellent.
>SELF-DESTRUCT SEQUENCE INITIATED<
Oh Crap!
*unsteeples fingers*