An earlier post on this blog already displayed the possible future of sight using augmented contact lenses. Researchers at MIT take this second sight to a next level by creating a retinal implant that could help blind people regain much of their vision.
People receiving the implant would wear a pair of glasses with a built-in camera that wirelessly powers the implant and sends images to a micro-controller on the eye-ball. These are then processed and send to electrodes implanted below the retina.
Besides the immense value for blind people imagine the future possibilities for truly virtual and augmented reality. Always wanted infrared sight? Or would you prefer to hook it up to your Second Life account? You can also just watch a movie.
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Sometimes next nature breaks down and things fall back on an older nature. Luckily, this guy still had a horse around. Peculiar image of the week.
Via Kottke. Related: Steam Horse, Your grand-grand-parents new media, No Signal.
Bird spotting is not a typical activity for us next nature explorers, yet occasionally we bump into some birds worth mentioning (remember the amazing copy-paste bird, rubber duck XL, the wild birds illegally immigrating into city Zoo, or the plastic flamingos that almost became extinct?)
Undoubtedly these ‘plastic’ birds spotted by photographer Chris Jordan are the most macabre thus far. One wonders what Darwin would have thought of these Albatross babies fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. According to the photographer thousands of chicks a year, kick the bucket from starvation, toxicity, and choking from their diet of human trash.
Feeding your babies plastic is definitely not a good survival strategy for these poor birds. On the other hand, plastic seems to be thriving as a new material all over our planet, with no living organism able to break it down or consume it. Nietzsche already learned us that every second nature typically stresses a first nature, which in effect deteriorates, after which the victorious second nature becomes the first.
Are we ready for a plastic planet? Surely that bit of mindful recycling you are urging yourself to turn into a habit, won’t undo the effect. How long should we wait for the microbes to evolve that are able to digest plastic? Certainly there is more than enough ‘food’ for them available within the ecosystem by now. Somebody please call one of these synthetic biologists to fix us a microbe that eats plastic.
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Old nature provided us with a wide variety of food: fresh milk, crispy vegetables, nutritious meat. Yet this is not enough, we want more:
We want a printed steak, square fishsticks, dinosaur nuggets, organic coca-cola, hyper fruit, cloned meat, potato-free potato chips, frankenwein, vegetarian hamburgers and hypernatural tomatoes. We want vitamine+Q10 yoghurt that makes you loose weight. We want to hear the sound of a sausage when we bite it – we want notice how well designed that sausage sound really is.
Already for thousands of years people have been food designers. How will food technology develop itself into the 21th century? The Philips Food Design Probes investigate how we will eat and source our food in the future, like in 15 to 20 years. There are 3 products we might have in our homes by then:
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Tags:
Bionics,
Design for debate,
Designed by Evolution,
Feed Back,
Food Technology,
Hypernature,
Image Consumption,
Made to debate,
manipulating growth,
Officegarden,
supermarket
Although this TED video has been all over the web and commented on this website already, it still deserves a separate post: Desigineers Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry of the MIT Media Lab – Fluid Interfaces Group envision a ‘Sixth Sense’ a wearable gestural interface to pave the way for a more profound interaction with our environment by augmenting it with digital information. The next nature thinking in their argument is striking:
We’ve evolved over millions of years to sense the world around us. When we encounter something, someone or some place, we use our five natural senses to perceive information about it; that information helps us make decisions and chose the right actions to take. But arguably the most useful information that can help us make the right decision is not naturally perceivable with our five senses, namely the data, information and knowledge that mankind has accumulated about everything and which is increasingly all available online.
Hence, they propose to blend all cultural information within the environment as a natural phenomenon. Culture becomes nature. Our environment becomes the interface again.
Of course, like with every emerging next nature, there is always an older nature lost: You’ll never be able to meet new people without immediately googling them.
Related: On the Road, Augmented phone browsing, Avatar Machine, Datafountain, A Society of Simulations. Thanks Ton & Arnoud.
Buttons are everywhere: throughout your day you press them on phones, alarm clocks, keyboards, elevators, dishwashers and of course on the computer screen. Although buttons did not exist in old nature – taken that nipples do not count as buttons – the little symbols of control have been ubiquitous throughout most of our lives. But for how long?
As technology advances, buttons are replaced by sensors, gesture technology and autonomous systems. In fact, it may well be that our grand-grand-children won’t be pushing buttons like we do, as for them the entire environment has become an interface (again).
Although buttons may one day be grand-grand-parents technology, the current generation of people is still so used to pushing buttons, they are increasingly applied as skeuomorphs, meaning that they have no effect or function and are merely providing the user with a decorative feedback. Such buttons are called placebo buttons.
Examples of placebo buttons are unwired walk buttons at pedestrian crossings in New York City and door-close buttons in elevators, which functioning has been replaced by sensors. In some cases the button may have been functional, but may have failed or been disabled during installation or maintenance. Sometimes the button have been deliberately designed to do nothing besides establishing a illusion of control in the mind of the user.
Now one wonders about that big red button in the White House… could that one be a placebo too? Well allright, better not to try if that one just now.
Related: The buttons, Switch Critters – can you make them switch?, The powerbutton button, Magical interaction, Simulating old nature on next nature, Your grand-grand-parents new media, A society of simulations. Thanks Selby.
Boomeranged metaphor in the news: Google’s algorithm for ranking web pages can be adapted to determine which species are critical for sustaining ecosystems, the BBC reports.
Related: Google tracks flue spread via sick searchers, Google everything, Boomeranged metaphors. Thanks Renhui Zhao.
When a bird builds a nest, we call it nature, but when a human puts up an apartment building, suddenly it’s culture? As if the dividing line between nature and culture wasn’t difficult to draw already, artist Semâ Bekirovic is making it even more difficult.
For months she “fed” the family of coots in her environment with her own stuff (nude photo’s, old toothbrushes, etc), which the coots incorporated in their nest. The result is an artwork beyond her control.
Pity we can’t ask the coots how they feel about their new dwellings. Since they have constructed it themselves, they might be quite satisfied with their next nature building materials. It is merely our human perspective that makes the outlook of this next nest somewhat uncanny.
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Getting information as fast as possible and on the spot is the trend. So what could be more direct than having information fired directly into the eye?
Today — together with his students — Babak A. Parviz, bionanotechnology expert at University of Washington, is already producing devices that have a lens with one wirelessly Radio Frequency powered LED. To turn such a lens into a functional browser, control circuits, communication circuits and miniature antennas will have to be integrated. These lenses will eventually include hundreds of semitransparent LEDs, which will form images in front of the eye: words, charts, imagery enabling the wearers to navigate their surroundings whithout distraction or disorientation. The optoelectronics in the lens may be controlled by a seperate device that relays information to the lens’s control circuit. Read the rest of this entry »
Japanese design agency To-Genkyo proposes a dynamic freshness label for meat products. The hourglass-shaped label contains special ink that changes color based on the amount of ammonia emitted by the meat (the older the meat, the more ammonia it releases).
Hence you can easily read from the handy label if the meat is still fresh!! But wait.. could you not simple derive from the meat ITSELF if it is fresh? Well, some can perhaps, but nowadays most people can not ‘read meat’, so we need an authoritative label to tell us what we can and can’t consume.
Elegant detail: When the meat is no longer suitable for sale, the ink blocks the barcode at the bottom so that it cannot be scanned at the cash register.
Via Pinktentacle. Related: Forefather Ox cloned to revive delicious steak, Image consumption, Where it came from, Orthorexia Nervosa, The meat of tomorrow.
