Technology Gets More Personal?

This is the last of my end of summer highlights of interesting tech news.  Aside from being interesting, perhaps they also illustrate how technology is getting more personal now.

  • The creative, Munich-based augmented reality company, Metaio, showed off a way it can turn any surface into an augmented reality touchscreen.  The company notes that this is their:

vision of the near future for wearable computing user interfaces. By fusing information from an infrared and standard camera, nearly any surface can be transformed into a touch screen.

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  • Also from Germany, the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits announced a few days ago an app for Google Glass that analyzes what its camera sees and assesses the emotional state of the person in front of the Glass wearer.  It even takes a guess at the person’s age.  It’s an extension of their previous work, offered as SHORE technology.  There’s a video demonstrating this at http://youtu.be/Suc5B79qjfE

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  • As part of its RISE basketball tour in China, Nike unveiled the LED basketball court to train athletes.  This new facility in Shanghai, called the House of Mamba, has motion sensors capturing the actions of the players and LED displays providing direction on the floor.  There’s a picture below, but to see it at work, you should watch the video at http://youtu.be/u2YhDQtncK8

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  • In another example of the blending of the virtual and physical in urban environments, there’s Soofa’s urban hub.  As they describe it:

a solar-powered bench that provides you with free outdoor charging and location-based information like air quality and noise levels by uploading environmental sensor data to soofa.co. The smart urban furniture was developed by Changing Environments, a MIT Media Lab spin-off.

  • Toshiba Corporation announced that it will add a new dimension to its healthcare business by starting production of pesticide-free, long-life vegetables in a closed-type plant factory that operates under almost aseptic conditions … and will start shipping lettuce, baby leaf greens, spinach, mizuna and other vegetables in the second quarter of FY2014.  http://www.toshiba.co.jp/about/press/2014_05/pr1501.htm

That’s it for reports from around the globe.  Next week back to analysis and questions about where we’re headed.

© 2014 Norman Jacknis

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Large County Innovation Summit

The National Association of Counties’ Large Urban County Caucus – LUCC, as it is known – represents the largest counties in the country, where a significant percentage of Americans live.   LUCC held its 2013 County Innovation Symposium in New York City last week from Wednesday through Friday. 

(I was invited in my new role as the first Senior NACo Fellow.)

Although Thursday’s schedule included sessions on health care, criminal justice and resilience, the meeting on the other two days focused on economic development.  Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program and co-author of the recent book, “The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy” kicked off Friday morning.

He and other panelists noted the evolving role of counties and NACo itself, as the old suburban vs. urban disputes are overtaken by important socio-economic trends. 

First, there is an increased understanding and recognition among public officials now of the metropolitan, really regional, nature of economies.  The old game of providing incentives to companies to move within a metropolitan area, resulting in no new jobs in the region, is wearing thin.

Second, the global nature of the economy implies that regions are now competing with each other, not localities.  And only a regional scale can generate the funds necessary to compete on a global basis.

Third, the demographic differences that used to separate suburban and urban areas are diminishing.  The two are beginning to look a lot alike.  Brookings’ research indicates that today there are more poor people in suburbs than in cities. 

Along with this discussion of economic strategy, there was a strong interest in encouraging innovation and in learning how to get good innovations to diffuse quickly.  This interest is one reason why NACo has appointed Dr. Bert Jarreau as its first Chief Innovation Officer.

With that in mind, the group went to visit Google’s New York labs.  (It is interesting to see Google’s entry into the sub-national arena over the last year or so, as more traditional IT companies have withdrawn somewhat from this market.)

A predictable big hit was the demonstration of Google Glass and a discussion of Glass apps, called GlassWare, that might be of value in the public sector.

There were also presentations of two applications that were extensions of Google’s search and other tools.  One was for integrated predictive policing, with heavy use of video cams (both public and private) and unstructured, narrative data.  Similarly, Macomb County, MI (population 900,000) showed how it uses a search tool, called SuperIndex, for text and images of land records.  The latter, by the way, is financially self-supporting.

By the end of the meeting, NACo LUCC decided they will make this innovation symposium an annual event.  It is often these kinds of unexpected, under-the-radar, developments that surprise people later.  County governments has not had a reputation for innovation, but keep your eyes open for what develops with this group.

©2013 Norman Jacknis

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Geekwear?

There are some news items about eyes on the frontiers of technology that caught my eye.  I suppose, like any pioneering outpost, some of these will be soon lost to history and some will flourish.

So consider Google Glass.  While it has been making headway, there are already many competitors, which you can read about here and here and here.

For more serious medical purposes, there is the eSight system, which does for your eyes what hearing aids can do for your ears.  The system modifies what its built-in camera sees so that it becomes clear enough and understandable enough for the low-vision, although not truly blind, user.  (Here’s a video explaining the eSight system.)  At nearly ten thousand dollars, of course, that user will also need some free cash or a generous health plan.

In what it describes as the next generation version of Google Glass, Neurowear makes products that read your mood and then adjust various things in your world, like the music you’ll hear.  Their Neurocam senses what you find interesting and only records bits of that. There’s a video at http://youtu.be/CDgkX-JY_wM  My guess is that this will have to be shrunk in size before anyone but flamboyant geeks would wear it, but who knows – Google may make geekwear fashionable.

But in case people feel awkward wearing geekwear, perhaps they just need to wait a few years.  A team led by scientists at the University of Washington have been developing a contact lens that is wirelessly connected to the Internet and has a built-in display.  It’s being developed and tested on rabbits since there will be a big hurdle getting approvals to use this on humans, but something less obvious than glasses is bound to being created sooner or later.

© 2013 Norman Jacknis

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