The “Augmented Hand Series” (by Golan Levin, Chris Sugrue, and Kyle McDonald) is a real-time interactive software system that presents playful, dreamlike, and uncanny transformations of its visitors’ hands. It consists of a box into which the visitor inserts their hand, and a screen which displays their ‘reimagined’ hand—for example, with an extra finger, or with fingers that move autonomously. Critically, the project’s transformations operate within the logical space of the hand itself, which is to say: the artwork performs “hand-aware” visualizations that alter the deep structure of how the hand appears.

The demonstration video is impressive…

The annual “hype cycle” chart from Gartner, a market research firm, tries to depict the degree to which certain technologies are exaggerated. Smart robots? Don’t hold your breath. Big data? Not yet. In the firm’s view, innovation advances in stages: from exuberance to pessimism to adoption. Not every technology progresses at the same speed, so Gartner assigns each an estimated time until the end of its ride.

Most of the Technologies listed in Gartner’s chart seem well placed. However, Cloud Computing seems off, especially since much of the ‘computing’ most consumers and even business users do is over the Internet and in the cloud in one sense or another. For example, even a Google search is a cloud computing task. You ask a question and Google’s vast technical infrastructure computes and delivers an answer.

Unless you are actively working to develop the technologies in the “Innovation Trigger” section of the chart, it is probably safe to ignore most news articles about how ‘X’ technology is going to change the world. However, the toys that emerge from the technologies in this section are fun to play with. Technological innovations have to prove themselves by passing through the “Trough of disillusionment” to prove that they are actually useful.

Humans Need Not Apply. via Kottke.

Robot technology would help with self-driving cars, certainly, but the range of these acquisitions hints at even broader ambitions. Again, we don’t know much. They’re all a part of the Google X division, which is top secret by definition. We do know what the new companies in the Google family are up to, though, and that might offer us some clues.

Personally, I’ll feel safer driving in South Florida once robots pilot more of the vehicles on the road. Robot drivers will be far more predictable than the ones on the road now. However, I’m not sure how I’d feel about this guy walking down the street towards me…

…or have this thing galloping in my direction.

Innovation.

(via @JoeTierney)

What makes me sad is that the pinnacle of our computing power, the massive behavioural engine that is Google Adwords/Adsense, has decided that when someone is reading about dinosaurs, the most profitable thing to do is show them ads for games. Not books about dinosaurs, or even dinosaur games, but games.

We take a generation of incredibly smart people who have been rigorously trained to deliver amazing code, running on a massive computing engine, and when confronted with a human being trying to learn something, they try to distract him with games. Can you imagine Google in charge of textbooks? In my children’s time, textbooks will be immersive experiences, complete with Google’s avatars whispering “Psst! Math is hard, let’s play games instead of studying.” Can you imagine Google making eyeglasses? They would obscure anything educational with virtual billboards for dating sites.

Thank goodness for apps like AdBlock that make the web a more beautiful place. I’m not robbing any website publishers any revenue because I wouldn’t be clicking on the ads anyway. I’d just be leaving the site in disgust and finding somewhere else to go.