Wiiron
Gets your cloths ‘virtually’ unwrinkled. Peculiar object of the week.
What is Next Nature?
With our attempts to cultivate nature, humankind causes the rising of a next nature, which is wild and unpredictable as ever. Wild systems, genetic surprises, autonomous machinery and splendidly beautiful black flowers. Nature changes along with us.
Posts Tagged ‘Digital-Presence’
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Transparency Suit
Image consumption has never been as cool as in this brand new clip by Studio Smack, which was created for the upcoming Graphic Design Festival.
The ‘Transparency Suit’ visualizes the unseen flow of information around us into a second skin, a suit that reveals a new field of visual code that increasingly defines who we are. Welcome in the Society of Simulations. Any resemblance with the Matrix is purely not coincidental.
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Breathe, Believe, Surf the Web
A while ago a plan was proposed within the European Union to add a “Three Strikes, Out” law regarding to copyright infringement. After three accuses of copyright infringement by copyright holders for downloading or sharing illegal content, you can have your internet connection taken away for ever.
With the growing amount of stuff people have to arrange via the internet – for instance, more and more insurance companies work only via internet – this would mean people would become socially disabled by blocking their internet connection.
Luckily for all you digital natives the second voting on adopting the Amendment 138/46, which basically states that internet access is a fundamental right, got 407 votes for and only 57 against.
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Digitally Enhance your Ego
Avatars, almost every internet user has at least one of them running around somewhere on the web. We control then in numerous games and forums, but do they also control us?
Researchers at the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at the Stanford university have researched the effects of the appearance of avatars on the behavior of their ‘controllers’. People with a more attractive avatar acted more extrovert and outgoing than the ones with a less good looking one.
This effect however isn’t as surprising as the following effect: it doesn’t wear of once the computer is turned off. In a test the subjects were asked to first interact in a digital space and afterward, without knowing that it still was the same experiment, to split money with another person in real life. People who have been playing with taller avatars were more likely to make unfair split proposal in their favor and less likely to accept an unfair offer from the other side. This also works the other way around: shorter avatars result in less aggressive negotiating and accepting less fair offers.
So are you ready to take your digital booster shots before you go into a meeting? and what kind of negotiator do you want to be?
Read the entire research article by Nick Yee and Jeremy Bailenson (pdf)
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Inkjet Bio-Printing the Skin
In the series of bio-printer stories this inkjet-like bio-printer seems to be the most convincing product to hit the market soon. It sprays skin cells directly onto burn victims, healing their wounds as an alternative to skin grafts. The printer is developed for military applications at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine. Currently they are in the ‘pig test phase’. This is one step away from tests on humans.
Such a printer is also interesting for the consumer market, especially for families with little children. The band-aids with colorful prints for children are hard to beat. But isn’t a colorful printed skin much cooler?
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8-bit Icon Watch
Remember that aggravating 8-bit pixeled watch icon that used to replace your mouse cursor whenever your Apple computer was ‘taking time’ to finish a task? Displaying a wristwatch to show your computer was busy always felt like an odd metaphor – likewise for the sand clock icon on Microsoft computers – yet once it was replaced by the animated rainbow warp, people immediately missed it.
Luckily for all you pixel-nostalgics out there, the icon watch now boomeranged into the physical world. To be worn as a wrist clock for 8-bit retro time telling. Get yours and keep this lost symbol of the pixel era alive. Pass it on to your children!
To order your Icon Watch, please visit our store.
The Icon watch is made of an ABS and stainless steel body with a polyurethane band. Designed by & Design. Size: Case: 1.25h x 1.25″w; Band: .75″w. -
On the Road
Excuse me, I am lost. Can you point me to the information super highway?
Rendering by Chris Baker, photo Erik Pawasser. Via Wired. See also: Car Navigation – Follow the red cable, Need for Speed, Find brain, replace with GPS.
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Stephen Hawking: Übermensch
This sculpture of scientist Stephen Hawking – who is both highly intelligent as well as highly dependent on technology – is our peculiar image of the week. Created by by Dinos & Jake Chapman.
Ironically the piece is called: Übermensch. Seen at Niet Normaal.
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Nano Product: The Twitter Implant
Are we creating the penicillin or the asbestos of the 21st century? In the months preceding our Nano Supermarket Project, Next Nature shares some speculative nanotech products with you. Here’s the second in the Nano Supermarket Products series: the Twitter Implant – sharing your whole life was never easier…
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First tweet from space
That’s one small tweet for man, one giant tweet for mankind.
The virtual realm has physically expanded once again as Timothy Creamer a.k.a. Astro_TJ made Twitter history by being the first person to tweet live from space.
Quote: twitter.com/NASA_Astronauts: “Hello Twitterverse! We r now LIVE tweeting from the International Space Station — the 1st live tweet from Space! (cont)“
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Sign Out Forever
An earlier post on Next Nature learned that The Good People behind Webwill provide us with a service to extend our lives on social networks after our physical death. But what if you wake up one day and realize that your physical life is too short to be spent tweeting, liking and friending people you could also hang around with in real life? What if you don’t want to be part of these social network tribes anymore? The answer: commit web 2.0 suicide!
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MyWebwill.com – Serving your last online wishes
We live an increasing amount of our lives online, but what happens to our digital identity after we are gone? Until now our blogs, photos and social network accounts have lived on without us, leaving our loved ones powerless to control them or wind them down. My Webwill is a new service that helps you tweet, email, or Facebook after you die.
Subscribers can set up a digital will with directions on what should happen to their e-mail and social network accounts after they are diseased. Currently, a Facebook profile, for example, can remain active long after its creator has passed away. In some cases they become posting boards for condolence messages or even gossip – against the family’s wishes.
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Infobesity
Could this 2.0-bird be suffering from Infobesity? Then it must be the result of excessive infocalorie consumption.
Following people and news-sources on microblogservices like Twitter, has become a new addictive nature to many people. While our brains have only just adapted to print, radio, television and the (passive) internet, things worth knowing are now being funneled into them as if they were sponges. Read more »
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The most expensive liquid
Printer ink is assumed to be the most expensive liquid on Earth. If you believe the many websites that quoted the figure above. But little research learns that this is figure is — of course — incomplete. Read more »
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The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan
A candid conversation with the high priest of popcult and metaphysician of media.
From “The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan”, Playboy Magazine, March 1969. © PlayboyIn 1961, the name of Marshall McLuhan was unknown to everyone but his English students at the University of Toronto — and a coterie of academic admirers who followed his abstruse articles in small-circulation quarterlies. But then came two remarkable books — The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964) — and the graying professor from Canada’s western hinterlands soon found himself characterized by the San Francisco Chronicle as “the hottest academic property around.” He has since won a world-wide following for his brilliant — and frequently baffling — theories about the impact of the media on man; and his name has entered the French language as mucluhanisme, a synonym for the world of pop culture.
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Sion Chicken
How SecondLife ends up to be a virtual chicken farm? Watch Patrick Davison explain about the rise of Next Nature on the social platform.
Image by Kaie Magic | Related: Confetti Chicken | SecondLife Prostitute | SecondLife is Not Sustainable
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Virtual Characters tortured for Science
In the classic Milgram Experiment conducted in the 1960s, volunteers were told by an authority figure to deliver electric shocks to another person as punishment for incorrect answers to a test. The other person wasn’t really receiving the shocks, but the volunteers were tricked into thinking they were by shouts of pain and protest. Despite this feedback, some volunteers went on to deliver what would have been lethal shocks.
Professor Mel Slater of the Catalan Polytechnic University has recreated the Milgram experiment using a computer simulated woman, with some interesting results. “The main conclusion of our study is that humans tend to respond realistically at subjective, physiological, and behavioural levels in interaction with virtual characters notwithstanding their cognitive certainty that they are not real.” Some part of the brain just doesn’t know about virtual reality.
Via Medgadget. Related: A Society of Simulations, Autimacy, Avatar Machine, If avatars could vote, WOWOW.
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Re-visualizing Molecular Science
I vividly remember being offended throughout my high-school education because ‘atoms’ where consistently presented as these perfect slick round little spheres. At one time I even called the teacher a fabricator of lies and shouted: “Atoms aren’t balls!!”.
Of course the poor man couldn’t help it, as it was just decided to teach us high-school kids a outdated, simplified 19th century version of the atom model, rather than confusing us with subatomic particles like protons, neutron, up-quarks, down-quarks, gluons and what do you have nowadays.
In retrospect I was just a kid trying to be witty after having flipped through some of the science magazines of my dad, who was a physicist. Nonetheless, I always remained keen on the underestimated role of simulations in modern science.
Are you still reading? Then this call for proposals might be for you. The STRP Festival, Institute of Complex Molecular Systems, and Animation Studio invite artists, designers and scientists to develop a new visual language for molecular structures.
“Recently, a new problem has emerged for molecular scientists. For many decennia they have used a world-wide accepted way of representing molecules, even though these molecules have never really been seen. Unfortunately, this language is not suitable to represent the increasing complexity of the molecular systems and dynamic processes that are subject of modern research. … We think that a breakthrough in this area is only possible with ideas of people with different specialisms.”
Download the full Call for Proposals (pdf).
