Future Vision (2011)

1st ever Augmented Reality linking to Wikipedia in a museum Mar de Fons is the title of an art exhibition that is taking place in the Mataró Museum, a local museum not faraway from Barcelona. One of its peculiarities is that you can find more information about the paintings with any mobile devices, thanks to image recognition with augmented reality (AR) that links to Catalan Wikipedia articles. The exhibition - mainly about sea paintings, with an important role of local artists- was inaugurated on March 30, 2012 and will be open until September 29, 2013. How it works Visitors can interact with the artworks focusing them with their smart phone.

» Napster, Udacity, and the Academy Clay Shirky Fifteen years ago, a research group called The Fraunhofer Institute announced a new digital format for compressing movie files. This wasn’t a terribly momentous invention, but it did have one interesting side effect: Fraunhofer also had to figure out how to compress the soundtrack. The result was the Motion Picture Experts Group Format 1, Audio Layer III, a format you know and love, though only by its acronym, MP3. The recording industry concluded this new audio format would be no threat, because quality mattered most. Is this the future of Project Glass? – Cell Phones & Mobile Device Technology News & Updates Wearable technology, and computing equipment that acts more like another limb then a gadget, has gotten a lot of attention recently thanks to Google . Project Glass made a big splash not too long ago at Google’s annual developer conference when they showed several users falling on to the Moscone West in San Francisco. Google’s pretty bent on showing us the sharing possibilities with Project Glass, but it feels like in time that technology could become a ubiquitous part of our lives.

Qualcomm Extends Vuforia Augmented Reality Platform To The Cloud (Video) Qualcomm announced an upgrade to their Vuforia Augmented Reality platform on Wednesday. Vuforia is a platform that focuses on using images as the “targets” to launch an AR experience, rather than requiring consumers to scan QR codes or other glyphs. So instead of scanning a barcode, you just scan a specific picture to start the AR experience on your mobile phone or tablet (it could launch a video, or a 3D model, etc.) There are many AR companies that employ this method of recognizing images.

Essay critiques the ideas of Clay Shirky and others advocating higher ed disruption Clay Shirky is a big thinker, and I read him because he’s consistently worth reading. But he’s not always right – and his thinking (and the flaws in it) is typical of the unquestioning enthusiasm of many thinkers today about technology and higher education. In his recent piece on "Napster, Udacity, and the Academy," for example, Shirky is not only guardedly optimistic about the ways that MOOCs and online education will transform higher education, but he takes for granted that they will, that there is no alternative. Just as inevitably as digital sharing turned the music industry on its head, he pronounces, so it is and will be with digital teaching. And as predictably as rain, he anticipates that "we" in academe will stick our heads in the sand, will deny the inevitable -- as the music industry did with Napster -- and will "screw this up as badly as the music people did." His views are shared by many in the "disruption" school of thought about higher education.

MIT Creates Amazing UI From Levitating Orbs Anyone else see The Avengers? Just like in Iron Man 1 and 2, Tony Stark has the coolest interactive 3-D displays. He can pull a digital wire frame out of a set of blueprints or wrap an exoskeleton around his arm. Those moments aren’t just sci-fi fun; they’re full of visionary ideas to explore and manipulate objects in 3-D space. Except for one thing: How would Stark feel all of these objects to move them around? In reality, he’d be touching nothing but air.

Qualcomm extends Vuforia augmented reality to the cloud Remember Vuforia? Qualcomm’s augmented reality platform allows you to scan real world objects and create “interactive experiences” on your smartphone or tablet. The technology had its limitation though, only scanning photos against a local database of 80 images. Now Qualcomm has announced that by adding the cloud into the mix, so the platform can perform image recognition against over one million images. That will make it much easier for developers and partners to use the platform, with American Apparal fully onboard with the program. The Ecologies of Yearning #opened12 (with image, tweets) · audreywatters Ecology of ideas -- Bateson Bateson's Hierarchy of Learning Zero learning: "receipt of signal." No error possible

Robotic Quintet Composes And Plays Its Own Music Sound Machines 2.0 is Festo's latest effort to create robotic musicians. The German engineering firm Festo has developed a self-playing robotic string quintet that will listen to a piece of music and generate new musical compositions in various musical styles effortlessly. Dubbed Sound Machines 2.0, the acoustic ensemble is made up of two violins, a viola, a cello, and a double bass, each consisting of a single string that is modulated by an electric actuator for pitch, a pneumatic cylinder that acts as a hammer to vibrate the string, and a 40 watt speaker. A new composition is generated in a two-stage process. First, a melody played on a keyboard or xylophone is broken down into the pitch, duration, and intensity of each note, and software with various algorithms and compositional rules derived from Conway’s “Game of Life” generates a new composition of a set length.

Total Immersion Develops First Ipad 2 Augmented Reality Application Posted on March 14, 2011 by Total Immersion Front and Rear-Facing Camera Features Enable A Whole New Level of Interactivity LOS ANGELES, CA (March 14, 2011) –Total Immersion, the global leader in augmented reality, revealed today the first augmented reality application developed for the iPad 2. This playful application titled, “AR Magic Mirror” gives users a selection of wacky virtual hairstyles, glasses and accessories to try on, or to try on their friends. Openness, the double bind, and ecologies of yearning. » EdTech@VCCS I’ve seen my share of conference keynotes, some tedious, some exhilarating, many forgettable. But I have never seen a keynote quite like the one delivered by Gardner Campbell on the morning of the first day of the OpenEd Conference. In fact, calling it a keynote is a disservice.

How to Spot the Future Photo: Brock Davis Thirty years ago, when John Naisbitt was writing Megatrends, his prescient vision of America’s future, he used a simple yet powerful tool to spot new ideas that were bubbling in the zeitgeist: the newspaper. He didn’t just read it, though. He took out a ruler and measured it. The more column inches a particular topic earned over time, the more likely it represented an emerging trend. Elite education for the masses They included Patrycja Jablonska in Poland, Ephraim Baron in California, Mohammad Hijazi in Lebanon and many others far from Baltimore who ordinarily would not have a chance to study at the elite Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. They logged on to a Web site called Coursera and signed up. They paid nothing for it. These students, a sliver of the more than 1.7 million who have registered with Coursera since April, reflect a surge of interest this year in free online learning that could reshape higher education. The phenomenon puts big issues on the table: the growth of tuition, the role of a professor, the definition of a student, the value of a degree and even the mission of universities.