We are entering a new space

Posted on December 7, 2011 | Leave a comment | Edit

I am fascinated by the changes in our situated awareness made possible by the merges in gaming and personal technology. Chris Chesher discusses the impact of gaming on sat nav systems in the journal Convergence and how we are entering a new space as we share our control systems with our game environments. I’d like to go further and suggest that our self awareness is shifting as we incorporate visual displays onto mirrored surfaces, ranging from the rapidly becoming pervasive rear view mirror/backup monitor/sat nav, to these newer technologies in R&D.

There is a qualitative shift from the ‘shopping’ style magic mirrors, which show you with different outfits, watches etc. Shopping mirrors function as a ‘paper doll’, you are selecting outfits for yourself much as you would in real life. However, the use of mirrors as channels for other information changes the space that you (in a mirror) are in. The more you switch modes the more you are changed. All the way to the complete carnival mirror changes below!

Via Pop Sci | An Augmented Reality Mirror That Alters Your Appearance

excerpt… Using a webcam hooked up to custom PC software, a pair of researchers at Queen Mary, University of London, have created an augmented reality “mirror” that morphs your facial features at will.

Unlike existing applications that overlay virtual features onto real-world video, this program doesn’t add any synthetic elements to the video feed. It creates a 3D model of the user’s face, tracks their features, and then subtly warps the video. The user can then see how they would look with a smaller nose, wider mouth, or Powerpuff Girl eyes.

Via Mashable | via Augmented Mirror of the Future Reflects You and Your World.

excerpt… The New York Times‘s R&D Lab has developed a digitally enhanced mirror that allows you to interact with personalized data during your morning routine.

Unfortunately, the mirror won’t be making its way into your local Restoration Hardware any time soon. Rather, it’s a proof of concept designed to explore “how the relationship between information and the self is evolving and how media content from the New York Times and others might play a part,” The Lab’s team explained on a page outlining the project.

Friedrich Kittler, the ‘Derrida of the Digital Age’, recently passed away. His work in theorising technological relations was hugely influential in cultural and new media theory. Kittler was neither a technophile, nor a technophobe but strongly and with great detail expressed the ways in which people were shaped by their technologies. From an excerpt of his obituary in the Guardian via Berkeley Center for New Media:

Kittler once wrote: “We are the subjects of gadgets and instruments of mechanical data processing.” He was entirely serious. In his extraordinary book Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986) he argued that “those early and seemingly harmless machines capable of storing and therefore separating sounds, sights and writing ushered in a technologising of information”.

Later technologies – the internet in particular – further extended technology’s domination over us. He told one interviewer in 2006 that the internet hardly promotes human communication: “The development of the internet has more to do with human beings becoming a reflection of their technologies … after all, it is we who adapt to the machine. The machine does not adapt to us.”

Kittler, sometimes dubbed the “Derrida of the digital age”, thus tapped into humanity’s fear of being neutralised by its own tools. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter was written in the wake of such science-fiction fantasies as William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto (1985) and the first Terminator movie in which übercyborg Arnold Schwarzenegger travelled back in time to destroy humanity. Kittler’s point was not that machines will exterminate us; rather that we are deluded to consider ourselves masters of our technological domain.

The work of recent cultural theorists like Derrida, Haraway, Latour and Kittler provides the most far sighted and yet grounded suppositions about the way in which humans and technologies operate. They have led the return to investigating the ‘stuff’ or material of communication and culture, balanced in a the web of social and power relations. The work of cultural theory casts a wide net over the social sciences for methodology and also over the material sciences for matter. The concern of cultural theory is very relevant for robotics.

Understanding the methodology and ‘use’ of cultural theory is perhaps harder to grasp. Two useful articles are Ien Ang’s ‘Who Needs Cultural Research?’ and Raymond William’s classic (but difficult) ‘The Uses of Cultural Theory’.

As Ang explains it, culture has little to do with ‘high’ or ‘pop’ culture and everything to do with how meaning and value are produced in the world. “In other words, culture is not only very ordinary, to speak with Raymond Williams, it is also fundamentally practical and pervasive to social life, as it is inherent to how the world is made to mean, and therefore how the world is run.”

“In short, the distinctive intellectual currency and social utility of cultural studies research lies in its capacity for inducing conjunctural questioning, rather than in providing positivist answers to set questions.” Ang admits this makes cultural theory resemble essay writing, however good cultural theory can provide both early response to emerging situations and the most challenging approach to accepted ones. “The very notion that culture is always contested, that meaning is always negotiated and constructed in concrete contexts, can be mobilised and applied in myriad strategic contexts in partnership with other specialist knowledge producers and users. There’s nothing more practical than that.”

I believe that Friedrich Kittler, like Ang and Williams, was immensely practical. His understanding of the relations between technology and war extends well beyond considering the military-industrial complex and the production of machines, but to the warring discourse networks of different technologies. His work will continue to be influential for anyone studying innovation and the global economy, and of course, human-robot culture.

The 2011 Loebner Prize competition is over and the winner is… Rosette, by Bruce Wilcox, who scored 1.5 and wins the bronze medal and $4000 USD. None of the entries fooled the judges, so no silver or gold medal was awarded. As far as we know the Minsky Loebner Prize Revocation Prize has still not been awarded either. Judges this year included Noel Sharkey, Antony Galton, Paul Marks, and Jonny O’Callaghan. This year’s event was held at the University of Exeter. The rest of the 2011 results can be found on the Exeter website. Full transcripts have not been published yet but should appear on the Loebner website shortly. The I Programmer blog posted the transcript of Rosette’s winning conversation. If you’d like, you can chat with Rosette yourself. Read on to see a transcript of my own chat with Rosette.

Timely as I’m off to a seminar on ‘AI – a Legal Perspective’ via Ryan Calo’s Stanford Internet Law group, who seem to be the group spearheading the discussion of robot identity.

Two great ideas I’ve been following recently: Hybrid Wisdom Lab’s Collaborative Discovery Engine and World Bank’s Water Hackathon.

I wonder if there’s a future together for them? Solutions to water problems shared by water professionals using this visual social search?