One of the trends that i always think is gonna be big in future is gaming in the real world. By that I mean that when people themselves will become characters of the games that they are playing in the virtual worlds. The merging of your virtual and real self.  Location based services are getting us there.

That is why it was very interesting to read that Frog Design is working on a location based game in Las Vegas. Interesting stuff.  Read the details of that initiative here : http://designmind.frogdesign.com/blog/frog-brings-ge039s-desert-quest-to-ces.html. And maybe be a part of it in case you are around in Vegas when this is happening .

On a related note, you should watch the following TED talk by Seth Priebatsch. He talks about how the next big thing is gonna be the game layer that will be built on the social layer that has already been created largely by Facebook. Though he talks about known concepts, but the way he puts it all together makes it very fascinating. He is trying to create such a integrated framework that uses game dynamics in order to get people motivated and makes them do stuff. It would be an awesome tool in the hand of marketing people.

And a funny video to follow that up from the Gamify Initiative:

Magnus Larsson, an architecture student takes a very unique architectural view at the problem and proposes very interesting structures that could help bring back greenery to these lands.  What is more impressive is the fact that he intends to do this using a certain kind of bacteria that can turn shifting sand into a solid mass.

Its always inspiring when people are able to combine disparate fields of study, like in this case architecture, microbiology and geology, to come up with innovative solutions to problems.

Self organization and bottoms up systems as followed by ants and flocks of birds are already  widely documented.

Business World recently published a good article about learning from nature about how to invade into existing businesses. The article uses example ranging from Asian carp to the zebra mussel and how they create new opportunities for themselves and those that can adapt quickly enough to help exploit the way they affect things.

Read the complete article here.

Guest writer Heena put together an article for us a while ago where she redefines TechnoTicles from [Technology + Articles] to TechnoTickles[Technology as a result of a Tickle] (mind you the ‘c’ has been replaced by ‘ck’). Here she presents her views on creativity and innovation in the technology space.

A tickle makes me laugh when it catches me unaware. It’s a funny feeling I don’t completely understand. But tickles, the funny sensations, are not just related to my external being as I often find myself being tickled in my brain. The unwanted tickle causes an itch, which makes me take action involuntarily.

Tickles inside our mind can force us to think, to imagine and cause enough irritation to make us take actions that we otherwise won’t dare to do.

Popularly, creativity has been associated with the people from the art world, painters, dancers or musicians. The common trait among them being their thought process that is adapted to boundary less imagination. But creativity is not really limited to the domain of these few fields. Browsing through the history of technology and computing, there are innumerable incidents representing technologists becoming leaders when they married their technological depth to their peripheral understanding of some distant fields. Some of the innovative products and services are presented below in order to elicit this fact.

Creativity happens when we allow ourselves to make mistakes. The ideal way for an organization to be creative is to not just look to the experts, but allow explorers (people who have a passion to explore and those who are not afraid of making mistakes) to make decisions once in a while.

This notion led the Interaction design Guru Alan Cooper to reverse the trend of programming of interactions. Earlier interactions between software and humans were designed by programmers. But the problem lay in that they always designed programs, not products. They designed their code such that it ran more efficiently and could be easily worked upon by other engineering professionals. But the design that Alan Cooper does or that happens at IDEO is very different. Teams at these companies are concerned about Product Design and the interaction that the software has with humans, assuring that human users do not get frustrated with the product and actually end up being delighted. They design products outside in, rather than from inside out. This methodology sets them apart, and is the reason that they are leaders in creative consulting.

The potential of realizing imagination, realizing dreams lies in the simple question: ‘Are we ready to take risks?”.

In the past, people have had ideas that would in their time be considered absurd, but have turned out to be immensely successful and game changing. That is because creativity is a funny thing. The more absurd the thought, the more potential it carries to be creative. Some people just feel these thoughts (resulting from needs) tickle in their brain and around their neck. And just like the sweat it keeps irritating them until they are realized.

Peter Burns, the talented designer of iPod iWatch created his idea during his universities days. While jogging, he used to hate using the standard iPod headphones. He thought there must be a better way to strap on/hold your iPod. So he twisted, substituted, combined, modified and had put the iPod in different use, and now he calls it iWatch.

Doug Engelbart, father of the mouse, realized that problem solvers required the ability to interact with information displays using some sort of device to move [a cursor] around the screen. There were several devices then in use, or being considered for use: the light pen, joysticks, etc. but the best and efficient device was missing. This need ‘tickled’ Doug Engelbart and the technology which bought a revolution in the world of computing, the mouse, was born.

Ray Tomlinson gave society one of the greatest communication tools in history. He was not sure about what he was doing. It was a hack. It probably took five-six hours to create the technology. The idea cropped by observing the facility that had proved its usefulness in sending messages to the same computer. It stuck to him: What about when someone was on another computer, maybe across the country? It would be like the telephone but they wouldn’t have to be there to answer the phone. This idea on implementation gave us our first email.

‘Innovation best comes from people who know nothing about the topic’.

Steven J Sasson (inventor of the digital camera), has very beautifully portrayed the hidden reason behind the innovative ideas in the above statement. With his boundary less imagination and playing with the given tool he created the first digital camera which bought revolution in the world of photography. He was given a charge-coupled device. It was a brand new device and he was asked to do some imaging experiments. Not really knowing what to do, he decided to make an image-capture device, made it portable and he came up with the idea of building a digital camera, different from the conventional camera that existed then. He just adapted an analogist’s way to take pictures, he was no photography expert. I would again call it the ‘tickle’ in his brain, that helped him make the connection, the connection between the previously unconnected elements. When a thing is molded, twisted or related with seemingly unrelated it generates something new and innovative.

At the end I would like to quote words from Abraham Maslow:

The key question isn’t “What fosters creativity?” But it is why in God’s name isn’t everyone creative? Where was the human potential lost? How was it crippled? I think therefore a good question might be not why do people create? But why do people not create or innovate? We have got to abandon that sense of amazement in the face of creativity, as if it were a miracle if anybody created anything.

I think it’s time that more of us let the tickles inside our brains to take control of us, to bring our technology thoughts to the outside world, to be ready to take risks and venture into creating the worlds that we at present only imagine.

Just a day ago, we had written about the Gestural Interfaces from Minority Report which talked about the concepts of real world pixels and recombinant networks. Now Wired magazine published a article about another interesting research which is trying to use swarms of micro-helicopters to create a giant 3-D display. This project called Fly Fire is part of an ongoing project at the MIT SENSEable city lab.

This is exciting, personally for me, as I was discussing this concept with a friend a few days ago, only that we were thinking about nano-bots (which meant we had to wait for nano technology to reach that level) instead of the micro helicopters.

Ultimately this project is a step towards making smart dust, the idea of extremely small computing devices that are self contained and ubiquitous.

Read the full article here.

Checkout FlyFire and other cool projects at the MIT SENSEable city lab here.

John Underkoffler (co-founder of the company and lead of the team that created the Minority Report interfaces) recently demonstrated the interface at a TED conference.

The product is called the g-speak spatial operating environment.

As the name suggest its an Operating System that handles interactions in space. It is a combination of gestural i/o, recombinant networking, and real-world pixels. I have tried to put some brief explanation about these 3 concepts below the video.

Here is video of Mr Underkoffler demonstrating his work:

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

Gestural I/O (input/output) : Gestural interfaces aim to bridge the human-machine gap by adding the ability (into machines) to recognize human gestures like movement of hands and facial emotions. The main aspects in the study of Gestural I/O are :

1)      devices that can take appropriate gestural input (like 3d-cameras, touch screen)

2)      creating fast algorithms to interpret these inputs

3)      building language frameworks around these algorithms

Recombinant networking:

The term recombinant networking comes from the Speakeasy project at PARC that tried to bring new approaches to interoperability.

Quoting from the abstract of one of their papers:

Users in ubiquitous computing environments need to be able to make serendipitous use of resources that they did not anticipate and of which they have no prior knowledge.

The Speakeasy recombinant computing framework is designed to support such ad hoc use of resources on a network.

I found a patent related to Replicating and recombinant networking systems and methods for wireless networks:

It says these are systems and methods allow for more efficient wireless networking.

Example of such systems include

1) Plural subscriber units form a direct network and transmit and receive without base station mediation.

2) Base stations are networked so that one base station can take advantage of the second, networked, base station.

3) High-capacity lines are connected to one base station which is then networked to a second base station. Through the network, the second base station can utilize the high-capacity lines without being directly connected to them.

4) The subscriber units can migrate between all base stations in the network.

5) Using networked base stations and unassigned time sequences or codes, calls can be dynamically reassigned between base stations to meet shifting demand.

Real world pixels:

Simply put, it is about taking the display out of the 2 dimensional screens that we are so used to. Quoting from a 1999 paper by John Underkoffler, Brygg Ullmer, Hiroshi Ishi :

Pervasive environmental output and input is one natural heir to today’s rather more limited notion of spatially-confined, output only display (the CRT) and making the output pervasive in the environment.

Luminous Rooms (http://tangible.media.mit.edu/projects/luminousroom/) is one of projects at the MIT media labs tangible media group that illustrates this concept. Mr. Underkoffler was part of this project at Media labs before he joined the minority Report team.

The term disruptive technology was coined by Clayton M. Christensen in an article in 1995.

In a Core77 article, Niti Bhan takes a look at some products that are successful at the bottom of the pyramid by being simpler to use, cheaper and offering value to the less profitable and thus having the ability to disrupt markets outside of their intended audience.

The post covers 5 case studies:

• The original 7-inch ASUS eeePC
• The Tata Group’s products like Swach
• Entry level mobile phone like the Nokia 1100
• Household appliances like Godrej’s Chotu Kool
• Affordable Alternative Power

Click here to read the compete post on Core 77.

To add to Niti’s  last point of affordable alternative energy, Selco is also a good case study. Harsh Hande set up the company Selco in Bangalore, which now supplies some 80 000 people with solar power helping improve life for many in Karnataka and Kerala.

This is a USB design that won a Seriban Design Community competition where the aim was to design a flexible USB, so it won`t break if someone accidentally hit it while it stuck out of the computer case.

Look out for the cool idea and the great presentation from serbian designer Damjan Stankovic.

I couldn’t resist posting this for its cool design and look, along with showing how much is possible with the smallest of things that we see around us everyday.

Check out the source article here

USBee

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