After searching YouTube for a while today looking for new and interesting things and stuff, I came across an advert for Microsoft Surface technology. The Rio in Las Vegas has recently installed Surface and the ad demonstrates a few ways in which the technology can be used. The usual things appear such as seeing what is on at the Rio, what there is to do in Vegas and ordering drinks from the table. The main focus of the ad however is flirting.
The video shows girls using Surface to control ceiling mounted cameras above other tables to ogle men, then it allows them to send a message to that person or table. The guy then orders a drink and has it delivered to the girls’ table, all without leaving his seat. I like the integration of an instant messaging system and the new slant on the technology but I feel that the sexual undertones the voice-over suggests are far too optimistic. Now you don’t actually have to stand up to order a drink you don’t have worry about staggering over to the bar, falling flat on your face and embarrassing yourself.
No more is Surface simply resizing and moving around images and video (which is what you normally see in touch screen demos) and the premise of social interaction seems to be a good one, especially in an environment where everything is to excess.
I am going to be in Las Vegas in August so I will definitely be checking this out first hand and let you know what it is actually like to interact with.
As they say, sex sells. So why not use it to sell Microsoft Surface technology? Now it seems like there may be a use for it after all.
I love comedy. I love wit. I love being a geek. So what happens when you combine all these? You get the competition from cracked.com to Photoshop the best powerup into real a real-life situation.
Some people (I hope) didn’t spend much time on the Photoshopping but some didn’t need much.
The favourite of mine is below.
To see all 30 entries and the winner click here
Oh and the title of this post is the sound that Mario makes when he gets a powerup in case you didn’t quite get the strangely spelt, obscure reference.
So who broke Facebook? Come on, own up.
I’ve noticed recently that Facebook is having a whole bunch of problems that are quite serious isues with regard to users.
These include:
- Photo tag requests are not displayed correctly – when you click to view the tag request it appears people have tagged the search button, go home and then click the request again and all is ok.
- Videos that are uploaded run far faster than they should but keep the audio running normally. Makes for some interesting viewing.
- People tag you in some photos or video and Facebook notifies you, you click to view the photo and it takes you to a random photo – it appears the album does not exist.
I think it is possible that Facebook has become too big, with so many people adding hundreds of pointless applications it seems likely that it has put unexpected stress on their services. Imaging how much storage and processing power they need when you consider how many photos you upload and how much you pay for that. Its free, exactly.
I read recently that Facebook was broke and running out of storage space so were approaching a series of venture capitalists for funding to buy more servers.
So could all this mean the end for Facebook? Only about a quarter of my friends lists actually update it now compared to pretty much all of them 6 months ago.
Google… are you interested? They are building their own social networking applcation to run on 3rd party websites as a means of seeing what your friends are up to and collaboratively reading web pages. I can’t remember off-hand what that was called or exactly what it does but I am keeping my ears close to the ground to find out more. Would Facebook be a nice addition to this? After all Google did buy YouTube, why not Facebook?
I recently purchased a Hercules DJ Console RMX which is a midi mapped laptop DJ mixer. Yeah… that sounds about right. Anyway it hooks up to my laptop and uses special software controlled by the physical console to mix mp3s like a proper DJ would do. I had been playing with the software for a while after an experience with it at Fraser’s birthday where he got the console and we were all having a go at being DJs. Guy Incogneto is a username I have had for a while now and it suits me as a DJ name, I never liked the ‘DJ’ part of a DJ’s name anyway.
This had such an effect on me that I had to buy one myself and play around. After a little bit of practice I can already notice myself getting better. There are still some cringe worthy moments in some of my mixing but I am learning.
Visit Fraser’s website here for links to his mixes.
You can subscribe to my podcast which will automagically show new mixes when they’re uploaded. Click ‘My Podcast’ under ‘Subscribe’ on the right hand menu to subscribe via iTunes or through Google reader with an embedded Flash music player.
Also you can download my latest mix here
I have been playing around in illustrator for about an hour watching the final of The Apprentice, this is the result. I was trying to create something simple and not really sure what the outcome was going to be. I’m pleased with the result so I thought I’d post it up for all to see.
Reading an article on Slashgear about a new creation from Continuum Studio I couldn’t help but wonder what similarities their new ‘Smart Bracelet’ has to a criminal electronic tag.
The principle is exactly the same. You put a bracelet on your child and you wear the master which alerts you when they have moved outside a certain radius that you set. It then shows you exactly how far away they are and in which direction. Now I am all for children’s safety and this sounds like a brilliant invention that I’m sure will do well with concerned parents who want to let their children play but also want to know where they are but I just can’t shake this image of a child in a prison outfit running around with a bleeping tag on their leg.
What happens when the child learns that they can just put the bracelet on their dog ’spot’ and let him run around outside the perimeter fence driving their parents mad thinking they’ve lost their child. “They should be right in front of me!” … leading to
“Oh my god the dog has eaten the children!”. It also reminds me of when you lose your phone and have to press the page button on your base station at home so the handset beeps allowing you to find it. Could this work with the prison children? I can just imagine concerned parents pressing a button and a loud noise goes off in the distance with their child trying to cover it up because if anyone hears it they are sure to get teased for being so cool (Sarcasm implied).
The trouble is, where do you draw the line? At what age to you stop wearing it? As everybody knows, parents never stop worrying about where they’re children are and if they’re safe. Should I be wearing one? Should everyone? What about when my parents get too old to look after themselves, does the system come full circle and I start to tag my parents in case they wander off unaccompanied?
Its all very ‘Logan’s Run’…
Please click the images to view the full set in Flickr.
Walking home from Rave On Air today I saw a beautiful collection of buttercups. Here is my favourite picture. Click to see the other images in Flickr.
User testing with large groups of people was very interesting today.
It was a ‘live’ environment so there was the ‘Virtual Earthquake’ going off in the background and the ‘Red Carpet’ crowd cheering loudly, all of which meant it was difficult for people to understand Shoutbox as their shapes were quickly overridden with the ambient sound pollution.
When the room was quiet though and a small group of people came in, it was easy to see them enjoying Shoutbox. Once the simple explanation was given they tried it out for themselves and created shapes. Some even had competitions to see who could create the largest shape or the fastest shape.
Even when there were no groups in the room you could see members of the Interaction course playing with it. Tom was playing a piece of wood like he would his bongos to create a series of shapes that were in time and also played back the same noise. He said “it would be great for VJs”.
The only problem with it is one that was expected and that is running it from my laptop. We have perfectly good G5 quad core Macs in iLab but we can’t use those, instead we were stuck with some old G4s that had no microphone input, the MaxMSP trial had expired on some of them and some had an administrator password that nobody in the entire faculty knew.
For the delegates tomorrow the flash .swf file will need resetting after every group so that it is a smooth as possible. Even though the shapes are deleted after a new one is created, where there is a very loud consistent noise (like from either of the other two sound based installations) the collision detection struggles on the relatively poor performance of my laptop.
Here are some pictures of today. Click to view the whole set in Flickr.
The setup for Rave On Air should have been very smooth today as the RC1 was prepared so all we had to do was boot up a computer, install the plugins and away… right? How wrong that is. After many problems with Macs, PC’s, connectors and lack of microphone input on G4s I finally booted up my laptop and it was running on that all day.
The good thing is we were able to watch people use the ShoutBox without saying “Do you want to try it out”. All day people were shouting out at the screen… sometimes there was a lull and only a few small balls were generated from ambient sounds, sometimes interference from other installations would generate too many large balls too quickly and crash the Max application, and sometimes people would re-engage with the installation and generate sounds. This would carry on for a surprisingly long time as louder sounds would be heard more and become more interesting to more people.
Here are a few images of the setup process. Click the images to view the full set in Flickr
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