Future Converged

Direct Digital Manufacturing

Ehsan Honary — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 16:38:00 GMT

You browse the site looking for the product you are interested in. You read some of the reviews to see what other people think of it. You check all the images, 3D models of the product and its interactive features. Finally you decide that it’s worth the money and you go ahead and pay for it. Somewhere else, in the middle of the country, a machine comes to life. It has received a command from an online retailer to make a product. The machine is given the Universal Standard Identification Number of the product. It contacts a product database and downloads the latest design data for your selected product. This digital data contains all the information necessary to manufacture the product. Having finished downloading the data, it starts the fabrication process using appropriate material. After a while, the fabrication of different components of the product is completed. These parts are assembled together with an assembly robot. The product is then sent via conveyors for packaging and is finally shipped to you.

This is the future of rapid product manufacturing and delivery. Today, such technology is mainly used by engineers for rapid prototyping. As the machines become more sophisticated, as the internet gets more mature and as global logistics becomes ever more efficient, there comes a time that products are made one at a time based on order; manufacture-on-demand. Perhaps there will always be a need to mass manufacture common products for efficiency, but as the Long Tail has shown us, there is a lot of scope in making low-volume products with infinite diversity for every taste.

Avatar

Ehsan Honary — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 14:57:00 GMT

Everyone is looking at you. You look gorgeous. Every now and then few people invite you to become their friend. You have a huge network of them. You feel very confident. You tend to switch your cloth every two hours. Won’t take much effort tough. You just want to experiment. It makes you feel better when you are always appropriately dressed depending on your surrounding environment. Now you decide to go and show off your latest dress on a catwalk. You look so real and so magnificent. Let’s have some fun …

This is the virtual world of our dreams. Your avatar is the representation of your digital self. As it was fantastically portrayed in the movie, The Matrix, your avatar can become a big part of you when you are in a very realistic looking virtual world. People will be paying a lot of attention to their avatar in a virtual world.

Immersive Peripheral Interfaces

Ehsan Honary — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 10:48:00 GMT

You step in the zone. You are in a jungle. You can hear sound of strange creatures around you. You draw your sword. The fun is to about to begin. There will be lots of hack and slashing. Your pulse is getting faster. Your senses are sharp and you are tense. From the corner of your eye you see some movement. This is it! You raise your sword, spin around, make a double duck move while pressing the button on the sword which makes you fly three times higher than normal and land behind the creature. Then, woosh, and its head rolls down … Wooh you have made it. You wipe your sweat off your forehead. Let’s move on.

An immersive 3D capture device can monitor your movements in the real world and map them to the virtual world you are interacting with.

Machinima

Ehsan Honary — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 10:47:00 GMT

Ever wanted to visualise your fantasies and see them like a video? Or perhaps you wanted to express your creativity after seeing a movie and try it the way you wanted to see the story unfold. In recent years, Machinima has helped the rapid production of story-focused in-game fan videos. Using a game engine and environment, a Machinima creator, also called Machinimator, can use existing game characters, sets and environment to create a film. Of course new sets and characters can also be created and added to the world. This result is then compiled, captured, edited and made into a film.

As animations become more realistic and easier to make, there will be a huge interest to make videos for good stories that are not yet told. On one side of the spectrum, ultra-realistic animations are becoming ever more popular. These however are usually designed by professional with access to high-end software and render-farms.

On the other side of the scale, average users may just want to visualise a fantasy with semi-realistic graphics and be willing to give up the realism for tool simplicity. In this case, the ease of video production is the key. The current trend in Machinima is the use of scenario builders in 3D games to create videos out of the components provided by the games. These editors are usually used to make the game itself, so they are incredibly powerful tools. What you can make with them is only limited by what each game engine can artistically provide. Apart from game engines, Machinima can also be created using virtual reality tools such as Second Life. These can be much more open and cover a wide range of possibilities; though they may not have the fancy polish and style of latest games (see a movie made in Second Life).

Location Based Information Delivery

Ehsan Honary — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 14:19:00 GMT

Suppose you are driving and suddenly see a nice mountain far away in the background. You and your partner are curious to know what it is called. It stands out from the environment, so it must be well known. You both are now curious to know if it is worthy of a visit. But you want to make a decision before getting to the next junction, you probably have to turn at some point to get off your main route and go visit it. Your partner simply activates your Location Based Information Delivery Device and gets to annotate your environment with names. The device shows you the names of the main features of the environment overlaid on a 3D map of the world around you. You can then get extra information such as height of the mountain and its history (derived from sites such as Wikipedia). You can also get a list of businesses around the area to get a feel for what the place stands for. All of this takes places in a space of 45 seconds. You still have time to decide if you want to go and re-plan your journey to the new destination which is as easy as tapping on the mountain to get your route planner re-plan your journey.

This is not long term future. This is about to happen very soon. Such information delivery devices will become critical part of everyday life for many people, just as mobile phones have become today.

Micro Projectors

Ehsan Honary — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 17:41:00 GMT

Imagine you live in a world that the concept of a screen no longer exists. You no longer need to have a fairly large gadget (like a TV) to view films or play games. Imagine when any wall can be a display and just about any device can produce a large screen for you on any wall you want. You no longer have to look at a tiny screen of a mobile phone and hope that you can actually read it. Your experience goes from ‘lean forward and squint’ to ‘sit back, watch and enjoy’, making your experience a lot richer and more rewarding.

Invisible Cloak

Ehsan Honary — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 10:35:00 GMT

You are walking around in the ruins trying to be careful not to create too much dust. After all, you don’t want to give your position away. The situation is critical. The enemy is coming towards you in droves and you need to get out of here to get yourself back to the base. You were part of an advance reconnaissance team on a top secret mission. The last thing you want is to let the enemy know you where here. It will lead to all sorts of political issues. You are wearing the latest gadget the military has acquired; the Invisible Cloak. It is almost a privilege to wear it. It effectively makes you transparent, much like the good old Predator movie. You can’t believe they actually made it. But here it is and you are wearing it. The module that comes with it is rather bulky, and makes you twice as large, but at least they won’t be able to see you …

Invisibility has been our dream for a long time and as demonstrated in many movies and work of fiction such as ‘The Invisible Man’ by H. G. Wells, it can be put to good use or it can be abused.

Self Replicating Machines

Ehsan Honary — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 15:17:00 GMT

You are amazed by its sheer complexity. You can see machines of all types. This thing makes everything; digger robots for mining, transport robots, warehouse robots, energy capturing robots, assembly robots, designer robots, repair robots, meta-repair robots and everything in between. The end result of all this effort; more robots.

You don’t want to call this thing a factory although that is a close approximation. You like to think of the whole system as one big self-replicating machine. It is all self-contained and self-maintained by machines. We had never had it so good. Life is easy …

Self-replicating machines have long been a goal humans have longed for. Its advantages are clear. You setup the machine once and it doesn’t need human intervention. It can go on its own business and make the final product you are after while making all other products necessary to sustain itself, find energy and material and also grow its production capacity if required.

Self-replication can be considered in two separate scales; macro and nano. In macro scale, self-replicating machines are usually depicted as robots while nano-scale self-replicators are used to construct nano-machines used for a different set of applications. For example, macro scale self-replicators can be used to terraform a planet and make it habitable, while the nano-scale replicators can be used to hunt for cancer cells in a human body and attempt to kill them.

Exergaming

Ehsan Honary — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 12:02:00 GMT

Finally, you swing around your axe, spin around yourself and bang. The monster is dead! Wooh! You are breathless. That required lots of complicated manoeuvres. You had to fight the monster five times before you could take it down. Your heart rate is up and you are panting. You need to rest a bit. This game is so cool. You drink some water. Right! You are ready for more. You resume your walk in the jungle. You hear some noises. Suddenly, you see two orcs approaching you from left. Ok, this time you need to kill them both at once…

Exergaming is a combination of exercising and gaming. The game creates an environment for you that is entertaining and motivates you do perform fitness-related exercises usually using dedicated hardware interfaces.

Robotics

Ehsan Honary — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 17:26:00 GMT

You are sitting in a football (soccer) stadium. There is a huge crowd. You know that apart from the 100,000 people in the stadium, there must be at least a couple of billion people watching the event. This is unprecedented and there has been a huge media interest for this. By now, everyone on the planet must know what is about to happen today. A lot of the details have been deliberately kept secret, so anticipations are high. It feels more like a product lunch of a super-cool gadget than a competition between several teams. But, oh galaxies, isn’t this exciting. The teams have been practicing for years, but everyone is drawn into anticipation to see what is about to happen. It is World Cup after all, and it is the first game between two very interesting teams. One is the champion from last World Cup and the other is, well, a team of robots! The referee blows his whistle and the captain of Team Invincible kicks the ball. Here we go … They are so agile. Wow, this is going to be a close one. Is it actually possible that they could win, in a fair game? That will be news indeed. First time in history! They look so lifelike and superior, you feel you don’t want to mess with them. It’s as if everyone wants both sides to win. Humans versus machines. At last, the dream is coming true. The football of the century; 11 humans versus 11 robots and one goal: to win the World Cup. Humans want it just as bad as the robots. It is 2050 …

Robotics is a technology that most people are familiar with as the idea of intelligent machines is quite old. Numerous works of fiction and movies on this subject show how interested we are in making and using robots for a variety of applications.

Ultra-Realistic Animations

Ehsan Honary — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 13:43:00 GMT

You are watching a video with your mouth half open. You simply cannot believe what your see. How is it possible that the prime minister of Britain would say such a thing? It is so politically incorrect; that he might as well shot himself in the public.

Two days later, it is revealed that the footage is fake and it’s been produced by ‘Invincible Animators’ who created the video using 3D animations and morphing techniques to achieve the result. This immediately leads to lots of conspiracy theories on the net that suggest the Prime Minister actually said those words and this is just a cover up trying to convince the world that this never happened. Everyone is amazed and you start to wonder how can you trust a video source now? After all it can be faked again.

The above scenario is perhaps a dark side of this technology, though there are many lighter sides to this too. Ever since 3D animation industry was conceived, the holly grail was to make a photorealistic animation that looked like it had been filmed from a real scene in the world. The industry has come a long way since it’s inception as it can be seen in special effects produced by Hollywood. We are still a few years away from getting the holly grail, but we are advancing quickly.

Life Logging

Ehsan Honary — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 16:21:00 GMT

There was a lot of excitement. It was your wedding day. The guests were all dressed up and ready to go. You had a very tight schedule today and you wanted to enjoy every minute of it. You didn’t want to miss anything and wanted to keep it recorded for future. Almost everyone had a camera. They also didn’t want to miss anything. After all they were your immediate family and have been anticipating this day for a long time. They were just as happy as you were. When you arrived in the registry office, everyone was ultra-excited. Almost simultaneously everyone started to take pictures of you and your partner. They didn’t want to miss the great shot. The problem was that now everyone was engaged in photography rather than paying attention to the event itself. You and your partner didn’t know where to look as everyone was pointing a camera at you. When the pictures came out, they didn't look as elegant as you hoped for. People were posing for a picture, but not everyone was looking at the camera. Everyone wanted to log the event, but they had to sacrifice their participation. You wished that there would come a day that you didn’t have to worry about logging your life or events, that something would automatically log them for you while you enjoyed the especial moment.

Virtual Robotics

Ehsan Honary — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 16:32:00 GMT

You bump into a pretty girl on your way to Mount Blue. She has a very nice body with exotic flowing dress which dances on her body as she moves. She has caught your attention. You decide to say hi. She responds and you start a casual chit chat with her. She seems very nice. Her name is Red Roosa. You are already thinking about changing your plans. She seems very friendly and very relaxed. You ask her if she is interested to go to a Night Club you have recently discovered. It’s new and is quite flashy. They have these new interactive dance routines which means you can influence the dance for the group as a whole. Mmmmm, going with her should be fun. You take her there, and well, you go for a dance. It’s incredible. She is really a nice person. The dance heats up and you are just wondering what to do next. Anything is possible …

Now, imagine if suddenly someone who was also in the dance club sent you an instant message saying “Not to ruin your night or anything, but did you know Red Roosa is a bot?”

You reply only to him, so that Red Roosa can’t see your chat, “Oh really! I didn’t know. Ok, well, thanks for letting me know.” You get back to her and carry on from where you were as if nothing has changed …

Avatars in a virtual world usually represent a person. However, an avatar can also be driven by an artificial intelligence. This is what the guy was referring to when he said she is a bot (robot).

A bot in a virtual world can look like any other and may prove to be more difficult to differentiate with real humans. Interaction between virtual robots and humans will become more complex and commonplace as virtual worlds become mainstream.

Virtual Retinal Display

Ehsan Honary — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 14:11:00 GMT

You were still in wonder of the latest gadget you were wearing. It’s a lot lighter than your current head-mounted-display, but that’s not what has impressed you most. It’s the clarity! Everything looks so natural. You can see overlaid computer generated visuals even at the periphery of your eyes. It’s as if the overlaid features belong to the scene. The effect is even more noticeable as you move your head around. With your head-mounted-display you could only see objects when they entered the display in front of your eyes as you looked towards them and you always struggled with focus. Despite great advances since the early days, it seemed they still couldn’t get the hang of it. But now, this retinal display was such a joy to use.

Virtual retinal display works by drawing a laser raster display directly on your retina. You get to see a conventional display in front of your eyes with a large field of view. If carried out accurately, you won’t be able to tell the difference from what you see normally. Ultimately, there will be no edges, no flicker, no sense of looking at a computer display.

Internet TV

Ehsan Honary — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 11:14:00 GMT

The dream has finally come true. There was so much hype around TV getting streamed over the internet for the past decade or two. But now, the new model is well established. Content is truly dynamic these days, from production to distribution, to rating, commenting and feeding. There is always someone who is producing something for any imaginable taste. The best way to find these videos is to see what likeminded people watched. Computers take care of it all now. For every type of content (like comedy, thriller, cooking, etc.) computers combine two kinds of data: what I like to watch and what others like me like to watch. It is quite efficient. The computer knows when I watch programs, what I watch, when I stop watching them and how I reacted to programs it chose for me. It also has access to similar content through channels, feeds and ratings provided by other citizens of this planet. Basically, everyone is programming the machines for everyone’s benefit. At last we are free. Gone are the days we had to watch low quality programs when they wanted us to see them.

Regenerative Dentistry

Ehsan Honary — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 10:54:00 GMT

You had an accident and lost two of your front tooth. You look pretty different now. You need to do something about them. You go to your dentist. He takes some sample tissue from your current teeth and you leave. When you return sometime later, he implants newly grown embryonic tissue into the place of your missing teeth. She advices you on your new diet and you leave. A few weeks later you come back for check-up. He shows you the small teeth growing in your jaw. It is identical to what you had before, since it is derived from your own genes. The cells know which tooth they have to become by getting signals from their surrounding environment. Eventually, your teeth are fully grown and are like the original you had before the accident.

You feel confident about your looks and wonder what people did in the past when they lost their teeth. The thought of false teeth makes you shiver.

Virtual World

Ehsan Honary — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 14:10:00 GMT

Imagine a world where you have two lives; real and virtual. Imagine that the virtual world looks and sounds just as real as the real world. Imagine that when you are in the real world and you see something, you get the same reaction as you do when you watch a movie. Imagine being able to interact with objects and people in that world and manipulate them as you wish. Imagine being someone else. Someone you wanted to be, but could never do in reality. Imagine interacting with others in ways you could never dream of doing in the real world.

This imaginary world can be a Virtual World or a Virtual Reality. With virtual reality you also get to immerse yourself using head mounted displays or other type of real-world sensors and projectors to enhance the virtual experience.

Multi-Touch Displays

Ehsan Honary — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 13:23:00 GMT

You have arranged a meeting and your visitors have just arrived. You guide them into the appropriate meeting room and after the initial greetings everyone is getting themselves prepared for the meeting to start. Naturally, you want to exchange business cards with everyone and also distribute some flyers about the projects you are doing. Everyone place their mobile phones on the Display Table at the centre of the meeting room. You simply drag all the files by your finger to the mobile phones that are placed on top of the screen. The files are copied wirelessly to their mobiles. The process is secure since only those mobiles that are physically on the screen will get the files and you know that the system will take care of the rest. Sometime later, everyone is standing next to the screen hanging on the wall. Everyone is busy rotating the 3D models so they can get a feel for this new version of the plastic toy you want to manufacture for your customer. Working simultaneously, they use their fingers and use touch gestures to interact with the screen, zooming, rotating and shaping the model as they like.

Display tables are displays that are laid out horizontally with touch sensors. The sense of touch is captured with different techniques such as camera, pressure or temperature sensors.

Since you can use touch, it is believed that you will achieve certain tasks more naturally and intuitively. For example, to do a drag and drop, you may use your finger to touch the display and move one digital object from one place to another place. You can also use the device collaboratively with someone else to exchange digital material. The beauty of this interface is that you won’t need any instructions to operate a new software service. You can use your intuition to find your way around and interact with objects displayed.

Flexible Displays

Ehsan Honary — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 16:48:00 GMT

1. What is it about

You are sitting in a train. You were lucky to find a seat with a table in front of it. Great! Now, you can get some work done. You are travelling light. You just want to note down some of your thoughts from the previous meeting before you head for the next one. You take out you iTube. It is a cylindrical object with a few buttons on it. You press one of the buttons and roll out a fairly large display until the device clicks. Done! You put it on the table. It’s time to reach for the other gadget in your pocket. This one is also wrapped. You unwrap the keyboard and put it next to your display. You press a button and all devices come out of sleep. The display is now on. You tap on the display to activate an application. No you start typing away. You always preferred your own keyboard. The keyboard and the display are wirelessly connected to the PDA which is somewhere in your pocket. You are online … You are glad you didn’t have to bring that heavy laptop again. This is so much better.

Augmented Reality

Ehsan Honary — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 15:58:00 GMT

You are in a science museum wondering about the complexity of the mechanical clock in front of you. It’s simply amazing. It has got your attention. You want to know more about it. The clock is almost 100 years old, but its enormous and has so many parts. You are wondering how it actually works. What turns what, and what is that cylinder for? You switch to augmented reality to get a better idea. Now you can see the names of the components overlaid on what you see in the museum. The gears are drawn with a different colour. You make a gesture to open the box behind the face of the clock and now you can see how the gears inside look like. Then you make another gesture and the gears start rotating. Aha! Now you understand the role of that cylinder. So that’s how it works …

Augmented reality is a display system that combined the reality with virtual data. The system is interactive in real-time and virtual objects are generated and inserted into the world as 3D items. Augmented reality is strongly related to Location Based Information Delivery in terms of combining digital information with real world images. The difference is that augmented reality mainly deals with 3D objects and is interactive.

Some believe that reality, augmented reality, augmented virtuality and virtual reality, belong to a Virtuality Continuum where you may go from one extreme to another. In effect they all belong to Mixed Reality.

Participatory Big Brother

Ehsan Honary — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 09:59:00 GMT

The Prime Minister is about to resign. This is big news. It’s probably the first time in history that it happened this way, but he deserves it. The incompetent man made a big mistake. You see, politicians usually underestimate the power of technology and social change and are quite slow to understand the implications of a new trend. He was on a casual tour of universities, to promote his ‘educational reform’. These days everyone is equipped with wearable camera and everything you do and say are pretty much recorded on many machines. A politician has to be extremely careful to make sure what he says is politically correct or he will have to come up with deep explanations later on. In this case, he forgot that his casual remarks about student’s capabilities, income and future may turn out to show how he thinks about the world and how out of step he is with the majority of the people. It was like a window to his soul and everyone saw that it was corrupted to the core.

With the advance of mobile devices, sophisticated sensors all networked together, we will end up with access to a vast amount of information on just about anything in real-time.

Gestural Interface

Ehsan Honary — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 13:34:00 GMT

The scene in Minority Report where Tom Cruise uses gestures to search through a large amount of visual data to find what he is looking for is perhaps the best representation for this technology. Hand gestures and body movements have far more variety than the current mouse and keyboard-based input systems. Gestures can be executed faster and we are more natural at doing them. Controlling any computer device from PCs to mobiles to Display Walls can all benefit from this technology.

Mars Colony

Ehsan Honary — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 10:26:00 GMT

You are standing on the surface of Mars and are wondering how much effort it took humanity to get this far. In front of you there are three domes. One is your habitat, the other is used to extract water from the ice found in the rocks underneath and the third is the amazing BioGenDome, the eco system that supports life, you and is the main reason you are on this planet.

It took several spaceships, many missions and a lot of engineering to set them up. It’s been many year since that historic day when men set foot on Mars. A lot has happened since then. It still took anywhere between 6 month to two years for a round trip from Earth. The long term residents had to make this place like their home. Most of the difficulty wasn’t the lack of resources or day-to-day survival issues, though these had to be addresses anyway. The biggest problem was psychological. It could be very lonely here. With just a handful of people, there wasn’t much to interact with. At least you can be sure of one thing now. This mission, this whole colony, wouldn’t have been possible if it wasn’t because of the robots. They made all the difference. Everybody thought that the robot’s most important use on Mars would be to explore, make geological and biological discoveries or help us make the domes. Instead it turned out that they were far more useful as companions. We use them like pets. It’s wonderful. They are quite intelligent, though they are really like pets because sometimes they don’t understand the most obvious things. Either way, we love them. They keep us happy, engage us mentally and emotionally and it always feels that they know us better than ourselves. They make this place much more bearable. Actually it’s quite enjoyable here. “Hey R. Andy, where have you been all this time. I was starting to get worried…”

Wearable Computing

Ehsan Honary — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 13:23:00 GMT

Imagine you are on your holiday and you are exploring a city you have never been to before. You want to know everything about this new place, understand its history, how people lived here in the past and how they live today. You want to quickly understand what this place stands for.

Now, imagine if you took your ‘Wearable Computer’ with you. While you are exploring the city, you come across some ruins. You are curious to know what they are. You use the touch screen on your wrist to request information for your present location. The GPS device embedded in your gadget knows where you are. Based on your location, information is pulled from a variety of sources available on the net and are aggregated by your device. At the same time, the camera attached to you is recording the environment around you. The camera records the orientation when pictures were taken. The collected information is then displayed back to you overlaid on top of the images taken by your camera. Names of places hover over various ruins, buildings and features of the environment you are in. You can even get to see extra pictures (taken by other visitors in the past), read the place’s history, news and latest developments. You can also add your own inputs, pictures and any other sensory information you collected for others. You can even set it to automatically broadcast this information, so you don’t have to think about it.

You can accomplish all of this with a number of devices attached to your body that seamlessly work together.