Loosely Assembled

How have people organized information over the centuries, and millennia? Are we predisposed toward more ‘linear’ or more ‘digital’ forms? How long have we been trying to cope with the problem of information overload? Are hierarchical trees a fundamental paradigm rooted in our own reproduction? How many times has the internet already been invented? How can we reinvent it again? How can we get enough distance from it to see it clearly?

In the 1890s and 1900s Paul Otlet designed and built a network where organized data could be explored, via “links” and a “web”.

via information architect and writer Alex Wright during a particularly good SALT lecture.

Anselm Hook has just posted a lengthy and thoughtful article on the trend and forthcoming requirements for the emerging Augmented Reality Revolution.

The article is worth reading for all sorts of reasons, and for all sorts of people, but I’m just going to comment on the bits that caught my immediate attention.

The opening section declares:
AR is going to make it possible for us to see through walls. It will remove some of the blindness that has crept up around our industrial landscape.
I wonder how this might be applied to open government, and transparency in the corporate world, will we be able to see through the walls of our local police department? Is this another potential tool for radical reality?

Will geo-based mashups finally be able to reach us out in the world?

Anselm talks about needing ways to filter the floods of future data, but I propose we should focus on getting enough well rounded data in first, otherwise we’ll be filtering against a small, platform specific, subset. One way to encourage increased data input to the AR universe (whether it’s distributed or unified) will be to recognize AR as a natural evolution of the geoweb movement, for it to benefit from the existing momentum, to explicitly be backwards compatible with the current generation of geodata. I do however expect metadata around AR items to blossom, meaning old geodata may need to do some freshening up to stay relevant.

Regarding the discussion about a universal AR platform, I imagine there may be an open data store, with viable APIs that support a multitude of creative experiences, but I also envision a closed, all in one, walled garden player that will probably be a little later to the game, but will come out swinging with an effortless interface.

I’m left with an exciting expectation of an Augmented Reality Universe, with many evolving access methods and platform standards, a possible replacement for the web as we know it.

Seems like they should have created the demo with an AR app so that he can actually look through the phone’s camera into his own physical space.

via @paigesaez

“Can we have it look at a picture? Can we have it listen to a piece of music? Can we have it show emotion? Can we have it get sick?” he says. “When you impose damage or disease, how does the virtual brain recover from a stroke? How does it deal with Alzheimer’s disease or Parkinson’s disease?”

Read the article

Touch screen mechanical turk tabletop pc performance artist!

(Via @caseorganic.)

Due to the iPhone/iPod craze, many recently released DVDs have been including H.264/MPEG-4 versions of the content that can simply be dragged over into iTunes, eliminating the need for all kinds of special software to copy, convert and compress the original DVD video. The industry has exhibited a rare spark of intelligence in this matter, leveraging the new use case scenario to sell special ads targeted at gadget lovers (yes the H.264 version are wrapped in ads, but can be easily circumvented, even in iMovie). The industry is banking on the convenience and time saving feature of this new product line, realizing that most people won’t spend upwards of 2 hours editing and encoding movies just to avoid a few minutes of ads.

Go forth and watch movies :D