Well, it’s 2010 and what a harsh decade it has been! To ring in the New Year on a positive note, I harvested an old edge-lit display mechanism from my stores and lit it up with a few LEDs and an Arduino. I used a simple pulse-width modulation (PWM) routine to do the fading. It’s not terribly exciting, but you can watch the video…

Spacehopper Demo

I’ve been working with my colleagues on a project for SonyEricsson around the release of their latest mobile phones series (Satio and Aino). The project involves using twitter to inflate a warehouse full of spacehoppers on a live webcam. The hoppers will be “released in the wild” as part of the product launch, and tweeters can suggest what their fate should be. The whole system uses an Arduino-controlled solenoid array which takes its input from a Ruby script which is listening to the twitter streaming API. Tweets sent via the API are used to randomly inflate one of the 49 hoppers on the array. The hoppers, username and the tweet message are displayed via a live feed. Sony Ericsson have posted the “making-of” video on YouTube, and I found myself simplifying the technical details, yet again…

Just read Danah Boyd’s excellent blog post on the twitter “backchannel” phenomenon and the difficulty it presents for speakers who are placed in a very awkward position. Her extremely negative experience at Web2.0 Expo illustrates how difficult it is for public speakers to cope with live (and often unmoderated) twitterstreams onstage behind them. The shift in the structure of this social discourse does not offer anything of significant benefit for either the speaker or the audience. Danah’s experience captures it better than I can and for the full scoop, head on over to her blog and read about it.  I, for one, certainly hope this is not the future of public speaking. And I’m no luddite!

Wow. It had to happen, of course. Shapeways have developed 3D printing in a material other than resin or polymer, the traditional materials for rapid prototyping physical objects. They can do it in stainless steel! The magic isn’t toooo surprising though, as they use the same techniques. Stainless steel dust is fused into a solid form layer by layer. The finished model is then bronze filled and baked. The piece comes out with a matte finish but can then be tumbled for a polished finish. They appear to be targeting the maker/craft community and I can think of a lot of fiddly parts that I’d need to make. But it’s still not as good as the 3D printer that the clever guys at EvilMadScientist Labs (rock on, guys!!) homebrewed, which makes 3D models in cane sugar!

Whenever the big kid on the block makes a new announcement, it’s a popular pastime to beat up on him. People have had a lot of fun beating up on Microsoft for years and now that Google have matured and become one of the biggest fish in the sea, they are a target too. I’m not worried about everything becoming Googlified, though, and moreover when they come out with interesting new open-source technologies like Google Wave, I get pretty excited. There’s been a wave of hype since they gave their preview at Google I/O 2009, and with good reason. This communication format promises to be as grounbreaking as email and will enable new kinds of social interaction, facilitated by real-time updating, sharing, editing and even…wait for it…Natural Language Processing. Imagine real-time chat translation in dozens of different languages. I always take any NLP announcements with a grain of salt, and to be sure this technology will have its teething pains. However, the demo is extremely exciting. (I’ve signed up to the developer’s list for updates.)

At the very least, if this technology catches on it will truly change the kinds of online social interactions that are possible and will make significant challenges to both current social networking stalwarts (Facebook, etc.) and the old standby desktop applications. I can see particular benefits for collaborative document editing, technology enhanced education, an dare I say it: Physical computing.

Since Wave uses an open protocol standard, anyone can develop for it. I’m envisioning online collaborative conversations actuating physical devices and real world sensors updating Waves. The possibilities are exciting!