Clyde DeSouza's Blog, page 9

Read about it here: http://highfidelity.io/blog/

In Chapter 8 – The Nightclub scene:

He put on his Wizer, and I knew he could instantly see the mesh of speakers arranged in an umbrella pattern.

They were almost invisible to the naked eye in the darkened club ceiling. He gestured with his hand as if hurling a lightning bolt and sent a thunder clap sample to a group of speakers that were dead center over the dance floor.

The infra red error correction enhanced software running the modified FishEye interpreted his gestures with millimeter accuracy. Five of the Quads took off from the bar and hovered over the dance floor.

On cue as the music rose to a crescendo, the Quads synchronized and tilted.

Champagne rained on the crowd from bottles secured to the Quads.

There was a roar from the dance floor as people turned their heads to catch the drizzle of expensive rain that had been bottled a good many years ago. The Quads glided in formation over the floor, and as the music climaxed they flew off to their base stations at the bar.

James was like a maestro, performing with his hands, panning music around the canopy of speakers overhead. He hurled a heavy rain sample at a ring of speakers as the Quads re-appeared and poured another round of champagne on the crowds. 

And now it seems something similar might happen at the OppiKoppi fest in South Africa. http://mashable.com/2013/05/05/beer-drones/

(Image Credit: Screen grab from Youtube)

Back in 2007, Tobais Lang and Blair MacIntye brought to life a SecondLife avatar, grounding him to our world via Augmented Reality.

Now with Google Glass not quite being the killer AR hardware (yet), there is a need to ignite new sparks and seed ideas for the multitude of app developers that are going to get on the Glass wagon

To get you started here’s a (pseudo) Augmented Reality idea for Google Glass:

- Interact with a person’s Dirrogate (Digital Surrogate) in the real world – Forget Ingress… this is the future. How?

- Step 1: Optimize an android 3D viewer app for Second Life – Try Lumiya for instance

- Next… Mirror the Lumiya screen over your field of view in Google Glass, and locate your friend/mom/boss/hooker’s “Dirrogate” at the GPS location where you are.

How do you do that?

“Mod” OpenSim or hack SL to use real world co-ordinates. So if you’re in Central Park in real-life waiting to meet your date on a park-bench, you sit on the bench and wait for your “Date” to login from their home in Florida. Your date’s Dirrogate (avatar) teleports to Central Park where you can see him/her via the Lumiya viewer.

You are also logged in, so your date “sees” your Dirrogate. Now talk/gesture/or share video and pics.

Yes, your dates Dirrogate won’t be locked to the ground, because Glass does not have any AR tracking capabilty yet, so we wait for the next iteration of Glass (to rightfully say “why Google glass is the future”)

As is customary…here’s the chapter that explains this in more detail, from the novel: Memories with Maya – The Dirrogate:

 “We have plans for AI and AR integration,” Krish said. “Only we haven’t worked out scenarios yet.”

“There is one,” I said. “Let’s run the beta of our social interaction module; outside.”

Krish asked Prof to follow him to the campus ground outside the food court. They walked out of the building and approached a shaded area on the campus ground with four benches. As they were about to sit, my voice came through the phone’s speaker, “I’m on the one to your far right.”

Krish and the Prof turned, scanning the ground through the live camera view of the phone, until they saw me waving. The phone’s compass updated me on their orientation. I asked them to come closer.

“You have my full attention,” Prof said. “Explain…”

“So,” Krish said, in true geek style… “Dan knows where we are, because my phone is logged into and registered into the virtual world we created.

“We use a Digital Globe to fly to any location. We do that by using exact latitude and longitude coordinates.” Krish looked at Prof, who nodded.

“So this way we can pick any location on Earth to meet at, provided of course, I’m physically present there.”

“I understand,” said Prof, “Otherwise, it would be just a regular online social world.”

“Precisely,” Krish said. “What’s unique here, is a virtual person interacting with a real human in the real world.

“The phone is now connected via the campus wireless network.” Krish circled his hand in front of his face as though pointing out to the invisible radio waves. “But it can also use a high-speed cell data network. The phone’s GPS, gyroscope, and accelerometer is updating our position as we move.”

Krish explained the different sensor data to Professor Kumar. “We can use the phone as a sophisticated joystick to move our avatar in the virtual world that, for this demo, is a complete and accurate scale model of the real campus.”

Prof. was paying rapt attention to everything Krish had to say.

“I laser scanned the playground and the food-court. The entire campus is a low rez 3D model,” Krish said.

“Dan can see us move around in the virtual world because my phone is always updating our position. The front camera’s video stream is also mapped to my avatar’s face so he can see my expressions.”

“Now all we do, is not render the virtual buildings, but instead, keep Daniel’s avatar and replace it with the real-world view coming in through the phones camera,” explained Krish.

“hmm… so you also do away with render overhead and possibly conserve battery life?” Prof said.

“That’s correct. Using the phones GPS, camera and marker-less tracking algorithms, we can update our position in the virtual world and also render Dan’s avatar in correct registration with our world.”

“And we haven’t even talked about how AI can enhance this,” I said.

I walked a few steps away from them, counting as I went.

“We can either follow Dan, or a few steps more and contact will be broken. This way in a social scenario, Virtual people can interact with Humans in the real world.” Krish said.

I was nearing the Personal space out of range warning.

“Wait up Dan,” Krish called out.

I stopped. Krish and Prof caught up.

“Here’s how we establish contact,” he said. He touched my avatar on the screen. I raised my hand in a high-five gesture.

“So only humans can initiate contact with these Virtual people?” asked Prof

“Humans are always in control,” I said. They laughed.

“Aap Kaise ho?” Krish said

“Main theek hoo,” I answered a couple of seconds later, much to the surprise of Prof.

“The AI module can analyze voice and cross-reference it with a bank of ten languages.” Krish said. “Translation is done the moment it detects a pause in a sentence. This way multicultural communication is possible.

“I’m working on some features for the AI module. It will be based on computer vision libraries to study and recognize eyebrows and facial expressions. This data stream will then be accessible to the avatar’s operator to carry out advanced interaction with people in the real world–”

“–So a person can have a Digital version of themselves, do tasks in a location where they cannot be physically present,” Prof completed Krish’s sentence.

“Cannot or choose not to be present, and in several locations if needed,” I said. “There is no reason we can’t have or own several Digital versions of ourselves doing tasks simultaneously.”

“Each one licensed, with a unique Digital fingerprint, registered with the government or institutions offering Digital Surrogate facilities.” Krish said.

“We call them Di-rro-gates.” I said.

We don’t even need SecondLife do we? We have Google Earth with co-ordinates, landscape and 3D buildings… of the entire planet.

Cyber Skin – From Chapter 8: Memories with Maya – The Dirrogate

He went to a safe and unlocked it, taking out a transparent case and bringing it back to the desk. We leaned in to have a look. The object looked like a skin colored adhesive bandage. Only on closer inspection did we see the intricate circuitry printed on it.

“What is it?” I asked.

“All I can tell you now,” he said, “is that it’s a hybrid semiconductor and nanotechnology based design and it allows us remote tactile sensing capability.”

“Cyber Skin?” I said. My eyes must have widened, because he smiled.

“Even I don’t know its true potential, nor understand exactly how it’s created, but I do know we should investigate how it can be applied in projects such as DRONE.”

“This is amazing,” I said, “and it’s all being done right here?”

“Not all,” he said. “We work with other scientific research centers and share data. It’s my job to see how these disparate technology advances can be brought together to put us ahead of others, while benefiting mankind at the same time,” he said. “One thing I did ask the team was if it’s possible to transmit the tactile data stream from such a patch of skin to a remote location.”

“So our Drones and Dirrogates can feel?” Krish said.

“Precisely. With a Quad we could theoretically maneuver a simple armature equipped with a skin patch to send a remote feel-stream.” Prof said. “At the control center a glove covered with the same material but with the sensors touching our skin, could reproduce the sensation electrically.”

“Did they say it can be done?” I asked.

“Not yet, but it’s something they can work on. Etching a wireless antenna for remote transmission of the data stream is possible in such a hybrid design.”

Now it looks like Scientists have done exactly this by creating an “Addressable Matrix of Vertical-Nanowire Piezotronic Transistors for Active/Adaptive Tactile Imaging” or — Taxel.

Read the BBC article here: Smart Skin hope for Touch

The ScienceMag text here: TAXEL

and a detailed Georgia Tech Pdf: here :

(click to enlarge) Image: Mashabe/Flickr/Marcopaco

Taken from the first chapter of Memories with Maya:

A corporate deal was going down, and I wanted in on it.

I switched to the remote access app on my cellphone, and my laptop’s screen showed up. Thirty-five connections already.

 

I nuked them all.

 

The woman and the two men had their laptops out. I looked at the clients beginning to reconnect to the Copa Cabbana2 network.

It was the coffee shop’s network I was spoofing. I scrolled through the list of clients connected and scanned the area. There were only four people with laptops, and the other three didn’t look like a Cheryl. So the hot business woman had a name: Cheryl PC. I’d stick with only her first name. The other connections were from cellphones and digital slates.

 

I could tell laptops from slates and phones by the operating systems showing up as people clicked through the ads to access the free Internet service. I made decent money running a free wireless access point in public places, routing people through a landing page that generated advertising revenue for me.

The earnings more than made up for the monthly data package I was paying for. But that was not where the big money was. One laptop came up as Magnus HP. I looked around. The only person who looked Magnus enough was the man in the blue blazer. People like Cheryl and Magnus were my gold mines.

 

I swiped through the tabs on the app to access the key-logger. The sniffer was running fine. A stream of possible user names and passwords were filling the columns. Not everyone used encrypted traffic on public networks; it was a shame.

Learn how the threat of hacking is very real in coffee-shops, from an article titled “How You Get Hacked at Starbucks“, posted on MASHABLE, today (27th April 2013)

Injecting Digital Content into Real Life: – Digital Marketing for the Transhuman Age

As food for thought…

What if Digital Marketing agencies use such public networks to “breach” the Digital Wall that consumers have around them? In every modern mall or street, we have people walking around with headphones, smartphones etc..

In effect people are walking the real world, oblivious to their surroundings…yet simultaneously they are tethered to a digital world.

Smart AD and Marketing agencies could leverage this fact by incentivising people via limited radius wifi access, say around a vending machine or bus-stop, and thus inject digital content, even using Augmented reality and more…

image credit: Screengrab from youtube / Durexperiments.

Food for thought:

When writing the book Memories with Maya – The Dirrogate, I wasn’t aware that similar tech was already being worked on by Durex Australia. The FUNDAWEAR experiment can be found on Facebook.

An excerpt from page 18 of Memories with Maya describes the experience well:

I transferred the call to the big screen.
There she was in all her raw beauty, life-sized, smiling.
“Mmm mmm,” she said.
I followed her eyes traveling down my body. Two soapy
puddles had formed on the polished parquet floorboards,
one around my legs and another some inches in front. I
grinned. “You like?”
“Gimme now.” Her voice came over the surround speakers. Almost as if she was in the room, whispering in my ear.
“I thought you were Krish,” I said, then realized how
weird it sounded.
“Well, whatever gets your motor running!”
I stuck my tongue out at her. “No, I mean he was supposed to call.”
“We better hurry,” she said, slipping on the tight spandex triangle. I watched her hit the button on the waistband
and a blue LED lit up. Almost instantly the glove on my sidetable buzzed and moved. Not bad latency! I picked up the
glove and wore it.
She smoothed a wrinkle in the panties with her bare
hand, and the haptic pads at the center of my glove came to
life. She smiled and sat on her chair, swiveling around to face
her camera. A better angle. I sank back on the couch, feeling
the cold leather on my skin. She liked being passive in the
first round, so I slid the switch on the glove from slave to
master. I moved my finger, relishing its silicon touch on me
as I ran slow circles around my sensitive skin. A second later,
the image on the screen arched up in the chair, and her eyes
locked onto mine. She must have placed her camera right on
top of her monitor. The call was clear enough to see the rubbery spandex undulate. I watched as I created a camel-toe
masterpiece remotely.
The haptic pads did their thing and pressed into her
when I put pressure with the fingertips on myself.
Teledildonics was sci-fi only a few years ago, yet there we
were, pleasuring each other without physical contact. I
curled my fingers, forming a fist, sensing the pads of the
glove press against my skin and seeing the effect echoed in
the blue spandex triangle on-screen. Her eyes closed.
She was not looking at her screen anymore, only sitting
with her head thrown back, chin pointed at the ceiling. Her
legs were spread over the arms of the chair. I ran my hand up
and down in a slow rhythm, activating almost all those tiny
silicon nubs that covered the inner surface of that marvel of
Korean engineering.
I couldn’t resist buying it when I first saw it in a shop
window on a visit to Seoul. The center of the panties were a
shallow trough, the silicon tips no doubt extended to their
maximum. They were massaging her. There it was, her hot
overbite again. A few moments later, her eyes opened. There
were those thick lashes that I loved when she butterfly kissed
me all over. My hand was moving at a steady pace.
“Stand. I wanna see you in full view,” she said.
As I stood, she rolled her chair forward, coming closer to
the camera. Her lips and open mouth filled the screen in
front of me. Inch by inch, her tongue extended from her
mouth. I groaned. She must have heard it on her speakers…
she pushed back and watched, smiling in appreciation as another puddle appeared on my floor. I removed the glove and
collapsed on the couch.
“Flattered?” I said, blowing her a kiss.
She blew one back. “Is this how it’s going to be from now
on?”
“I wish you weren’t leaving,” I said.
“Long-distance never works out, Dan. How does this
end?”
“It doesn’t have to. It worked out fine. Does it matter if
you’re across town or the other side of the world?”
“It’s not the same. It’s not real. What happens if you meet
someone?” she asked.
“I’ll be virtually faithful to you.”
She lowered her head. I could have kicked myself…

This isn’t all about erotica and Teledildonics…

When writing the book Memories with Maya – The Dirrogate, I wasn’t aware that similar tech was already being worked on by Durex Australia. The FUNDAWEAR experiment can be found on Facebook.

An excerpt from page 18 of Memories with Maya describes the experience well:

I transferred the call to the big screen.
There she was in all her raw beauty, life-sized, smiling.
“Mmm mmm,” she said.
I followed her eyes traveling down my body. Two soapy
puddles had formed on the polished parquet floorboards,
one around my legs and another some inches in front. I
grinned. “You like?”
“Gimme now.” Her voice came over the surround speakers. Almost as if she was in the room, whispering in my ear.
“I thought you were Krish,” I said, then realized how
weird it sounded.
“Well, whatever gets your motor running!”
I stuck my tongue out at her. “No, I mean he was supposed to call.”
“We better hurry,” she said, slipping on the tight spandex triangle. I watched her hit the button on the waistband
and a blue LED lit up. Almost instantly the glove on my sidetable buzzed and moved. Not bad latency! I picked up the
glove and wore it.
She smoothed a wrinkle in the panties with her bare
hand, and the haptic pads at the center of my glove came to
life. She smiled and sat on her chair, swiveling around to face
her camera. A better angle. I sank back on the couch, feeling
the cold leather on my skin. She liked being passive in the
first round, so I slid the switch on the glove from slave to
master. I moved my finger, relishing its silicon touch on me
as I ran slow circles around my sensitive skin. A second later,
the image on the screen arched up in the chair, and her eyes
locked onto mine. She must have placed her camera right on
top of her monitor. The call was clear enough to see the rubbery spandex undulate. I watched as I created a camel-toe
masterpiece remotely.
The haptic pads did their thing and pressed into her
when I put pressure with the fingertips on myself.
Teledildonics was sci-fi only a few years ago, yet there we
were, pleasuring each other without physical contact. I
curled my fingers, forming a fist, sensing the pads of the
glove press against my skin and seeing the effect echoed in
the blue spandex triangle on-screen. Her eyes closed.
She was not looking at her screen anymore, only sitting
with her head thrown back, chin pointed at the ceiling. Her
legs were spread over the arms of the chair. I ran my hand up
and down in a slow rhythm, activating almost all those tiny
silicon nubs that covered the inner surface of that marvel of
Korean engineering.
I couldn’t resist buying it when I first saw it in a shop
window on a visit to Seoul. The center of the panties were a
shallow trough, the silicon tips no doubt extended to their
maximum. They were massaging her. There it was, her hot
overbite again. A few moments later, her eyes opened. There
were those thick lashes that I loved when she butterfly kissed
me all over. My hand was moving at a steady pace.
“Stand. I wanna see you in full view,” she said.
As I stood, she rolled her chair forward, coming closer to
the camera. Her lips and open mouth filled the screen in
front of me. Inch by inch, her tongue extended from her
mouth. I groaned. She must have heard it on her speakers…
she pushed back and watched, smiling in appreciation as another puddle appeared on my floor. I removed the glove and
collapsed on the couch.
“Flattered?” I said, blowing her a kiss.
She blew one back. “Is this how it’s going to be from now
on?”
“I wish you weren’t leaving,” I said.
“Long-distance never works out, Dan. How does this
end?”
“It doesn’t have to. It worked out fine. Does it matter if
you’re across town or the other side of the world?”
“It’s not the same. It’s not real. What happens if you meet
someone?” she asked.
“I’ll be virtually faithful to you.”
She lowered her head. I could have kicked myself…

#transhumanism #immortality #singularity

image copyright Google.com

We looked at each other, perhaps realizing that we knew the next question.

“Do you know any of the passwords?”

“No,” I said.

“Neither do I. If we could access the cloud storage, there could be some portfolio pictures.”

“Try a brute force password guess?”

We updated the dictionary to take into account different combinations of phrases and words that might have been used and let the password cracker do its job overnight.

…

In the morning, we were up at the same time. We went to the laptop. The dictionary attack was not successful at coming up with a possible password…

The above passage is from Page 166 of the book. (names and gender have been changed to the neutral word “the” to avoid spoilers.)

Google’s Inactive Account Manager:

Co-incidentally, this came up on Google’s “Public Policy Blog”:

Not many of us like thinking about death — especially our own. But making plans for what happens after you’re gone is really important for the people you leave behind. So today, we’re launching a new feature that makes it easy to tell Google what you want done with your digital assets when you die or can no longer use your account.

The feature is called Inactive Account Manager — not a great name, we know —

Read the rest of the article at the source

Screen shot taken from the Short film “True Skin”

Copyright N1on films:  www.n1on.com

https://vimeo.com/51138699#an

// I held the Wizer up to the evening sun and blew on an imaginary smudge, wiped it and flipped the slider to tint the glasses. To the average person, it looked like a pair of sunglasses with graduated lenses. The Wizer was overlaying visible red flags around the frown lines on his forehead, his pupils and his eyebrows. Krish’s own code was betraying him. //

The science behind the plot in Chapter 4 of Memories With Maya has an uncanny co-incidence to actual work being done by the SIMSENSEI project and as reported by MIT.

As the author of the story Memories with Maya, I did look at ways a depth camera combined with Computer vision [CV] libraries and Artificial intelligence could be used in unique ways and tried to weave that into the story. I did not have any access to universities or projects that were doing this. So it’s a happy co-incidence and I’m pleased that my independent (non-scientific) research and ideas were actually based on plausible science.

I’m amazed at how soon reality is catching up with fiction. It seems that we are already in a transhumanism stage of evolution… heading towards Singularity.

– Clyde DeSouza.