One of the conquest of the twentieth century was the break of the geographical barriers through effective and fast transportation. Especially with the advance of high speed trains and airplanes. The all world has shrunk. The New Century is promising a new breakthrough, but this time in the virtual space.

The virtual distance is almost non-existent nowadays and it has mixed together space and time. We can be online with almost anybody, anywhere in the planet. Even beyond!

These new thresholds of communications, have been taken up really fast; they are a real breakthrough for human contacts and relations.

The interaction among services and gadgets is growing so much that they are changing our use of the mobile phones.

Clearly we will keep using them to talk but most of the time we will be using them for something else. They are becoming part of our way of living not only as a device but as a complex ecosystem of services and products. That can be seen in this Nokia Mix Reality Demo.

If in the past the velocity increase was due to better tracks, faster trains and planes, today the speed in exchanging information relays on the better quality of computer systems and faster communications links, thanks to optical fibre. In biz, but also in our daily life, communications and processing are but two sides of the same coin. Without a good connection one’s can’t fully appreciate good equipment, nor experience good service.

If the Pompeii of the past was a world surrounded by paintings and images, creating for its inhabitants aworld of imagination that was the continuity of the real world itself, the Pompeii of today is a link between an ancient time and our reality.

Since the rediscover of the Greek and Roman Classicism the western society has modeled itself on those aesthetic canons. The life and ways of the ancient times are still in many ways a mystery for us.

Historians and archeologist have attempted to recreate those long gone times. Nowadays with the technologies available it is possible to recreate digitally the reality of other times.

Not only the Scholars are using this technology, the entertaining industry has given us good examples, like the recreation of the coliseum in the film “The Gladiator”. But the difference is that the work of universities is based on serious studies and tries to give us today a real sense of the life in the different times of the human history.

Pompeii is an important source for this knowledge because of the way it was preserved. It is an instant capture in time and well representative of the period, and the new forms of representation help us to understand the way of living of our ancestors.

Some studies show how was the architecture of the city.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=necqGAYknIY&feature=related

Others try to portrait the lifestyle. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVMzp0QjCJ4

There is also an institute near the real city that shows the digital version.

http://www.virtualpompei.it/eng/

Naples itself has a site with some digital recreation of the city artwork.

http://www.italyguides.it/us/napoli/ancient_roman_city/virtual_tour_of_pompeii.htm

One can ckeck also the site National Geographic.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/04/080418-pompeii-video-ap.html

About twenty years ago Mark Weiser of Xerox PARC (1) proposed a future vision for computing in which processing power disappears and becomes pervasive, embedded into our urban environments, our clothes and even our bodies (Weiser, 1991). Mark Weiser coined the term ‘calm technology’ to imagine a technology which will not only relax the user but, by moving unneeded information to the edge of an interface, will allow more information to exist there, ready for selection when needed.

Now, when thinking about future networks, it’s quite easy to imagine them orders of magnitude more complex than today’s infrastructures. Several smart objects (with increasing processing and storage powers) will be offered to the market, with embedded communications capabilities; so, not only Users’ terminals, but also smart objects will become nodes of the networks. Moreover, these smart objects will embed also services, information and maybe ads. So future networks will have to be everywhere providing always-on (wired and wired) connectivity for enterprises, people, smart objects, sensors, etc.

Then, quoting M. Weiser (The most profound technologies are those that dissappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it), the real success of future networks is related to their ability to disappear to the view of Users (who in turn will realize their presence only when they fail or degrade).

This is a Grand Challenge which implies several problem perspectives, e.g.,: human and social implications of using future networks (and vice-versa), the development of technologies and engineering design principles allowing us to exploit successfully said networks and the development of theoretical science underpinning the two above topics (theories, models, etc. to capture the network behaviour at varying levels of abstraction).

Will future networks be able to provide the tissue of ecosystems hiding to humans the complexity of our small and ubiquitous world?

(1) Weiser, M. 1991. The computer for the 21^st century. Scientific American, September 1991, pp. 94–104.

Nanoparticles represent a bridge between bulk materials and atomic or molecular structures. Researchers at North Carolina State University developed a new technique which makes it possible to arrange magnetic nano-dots (nano-particles around six nano-meters wide) in orderly arrays, to use them to store bits of information magnetically (consider that a human hair is about 100,000 nano-meters in diameter).

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/25277/?nlid=2970&a=f

Also, there are amazing advances in developing optical circuitry at nano-scale which allows manipulating local electromagnetic field in a subwavelength domain. New techniques make it possible to distribute nanoparticles (or nano-structures) periodically in a host material; they are thus playing the role of “lumped” nanocircuit elements such as nanoinductors, nanocapacitors and nanoresistors, analogous to microelectronics components. The result is a meta-material which is an artificially structured media with unit cells much smaller than the electromagnetic wavelength. These materials have proven to possess novel electromagnetic properties, such as negative refractive index, which allow manipulating light (but also RF) at will (e.g., wave propagation with anti-parallel energy and phase velocities, resolution quality that surpasses the diffraction limit, etc). This may enable amazing applications for future Internet such as smart materials for developing devices capable of optical information processing and storage at the nanometer scale, electromagnetic energy harvesting (e.g., new concepts of solar cells), perfect optical tunnelling (e.g., superlences), optical antennas…

Not surprisingly, there has been more success in manipulating wavelengths in the longer microwave band, which can measure 1 millimeter up to 30 centimeters long, nevertheless they are making great progresses in developing meta-materials even at optical frequencies.

ftp://ftp.cordis.europa.eu/pub/fp7/ict/docs/photonics/abstract-naliu_en.pdf

Recently physicists have made designs for metamaterial optical fibers. Fibers made up of metamaterials could carry light in ways that aren’t possible using naturally existing materials. According to research published in Nano Letters, metamaterial fibers could guide light and plasmons, surface energy waves induced by photons. These fibers would be made up of nano-patterned aluminum oxide and silver. The designs were made by researchers at the University of California, San Diego, and the Institute for Integrative Nanosciences at IFW Dresden, Germany.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/23393/

Nanoplasmonics and Nanophotonics encompass those fields of physics/chemistry/materials science that study the interaction of light (electromagnetic fields) with matter (dielectric, conductors, …) at the nanoscale level. Specifically, nanoplasmonics deals with collective electron dynamics on the surface of metal nanostructures, which arises as a result of excitations called surface plasmons.

Did you know that stained glass windows in the medieval cathedrals represent a first example of nanoplasmonics application ? I was so surprised in reading that. Apparenlty, glaziers in medieval forges produced colors by using colloids of gold nano-particles.

As a matter of fact, nanotechnologies are providing us with such a variety of nanoscale components that sooner or later (but probably sooner than we expect) will enter in several applications, even into handheld devices, marrying novel bio-inspired solutions with computer and consumer technologies.

There is an interesting initiative at Berkeley (BioPOETS Lab) dealing with Nanoplasmonics and Nanophotonics. Main applications concern cellular biophysics, innovative biology and personalized medicine.

http://biopoets.berkeley.edu/projects.php

This vision has been presented and shared by several researchers at the Embedded Systems congress, recently held in San Jose.

http://www.eetimes.com/rss/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=224700112&cid=RSSfeed_eetimes_newsRSS

Imitating nature is a complex endeavour, however, if we are able to decode its designs rules, then the combination of our creativity in engineering materials and nature’s laws has an incredible potential.

Technology is ripe to deliver augmented reality to the mass market. We have posted a number of news in this blog and we will keep monitoring the evolution since it is one of the most promising area where Telecommunications Operators can provide an ecosystem fabric to grow the offer and meet, create demand.

This week ISMAR09, the International Symposium on Mixed and augmented reality taking place in Orlando, is showcasing some new advances in this area.

I briefly report on a few of them but you should take a look at the videoclips available at

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/editors/24253/?a=f to get a real feeling of them.

A key “underlying” aspect of Augmented Reality is the possibility to track reality and the interaction with it. It is obviously impossible to add information to something if a) you do not know what that “something” is and b) you do not know when and what the potential user wants.

Today GPS is the key technology to identify the user position although for many applications this is not sufficient. Most of augmented reality in the future will involve a direct manipulation of the object by the user. In this area HIT Lab is presenting a way to manipulate 3D objects. See the clip. In another research project, carried out at the Oxford University a software has been developed to support through computer vision multiple objects recognition.

Another issue of augmented reality is that the ideal would be to have the creation of a real life reality but what you have with augmented reality is a mixture of real physical environment with an overlaid virtual one. The problem is that the characteristic of the real one are completely different from the virtual one (e.g. you cannot walk through a car but you can see your hand going through the virtual driver graciously created through augmented reality).

A research carried out at the Columbia university aims at creating a more real augmented reality, a space where virtual overlaid is having similar characteristics to the real one. This has some nice applications in video games but it will have applications in many other areas as well.

Take a look at the video clip.

The complexities of rendering a virtual space onto a real one are such that in most cases the overlapping is based on a pre-formatted set of information. A research presented by the Georgia Institute of Technology Computational Perception Laboratory shows how to use real time information in the overlaid space. The example provided consists of adding dynamic, real-time information, such as traffic or weather, to aerial Earth from Google Maps or Microsoft Virtual Earths, turning these mapping applications into an impressive augmented environment.

According to news I have been reading, the current financial crisis is responsible for a change in customers’ behavior and it has slowdown consumer spending. The future retail stores need to adapt to changes that are going to define who can survive in the market in the next decade.

Providing fast and quality service along with the ability to attune to individual taste will be vital. Retailers may need to change their business models significantly.

Retailers must adapt to a number of changing factors:
1.The new generation of consumers contains more tech-savvy and more diverse groups with different values if compared to the previous generation .
2.The one-size-fits-all approach of the mass market chain store format will not be a viable one. Stores able to respond to individual tastes will become dominant.
3.The belief that bigger is better will break down—aggregation of small will be the new big. The new consumer will be more intent on quality than quantity. Mass production models will not succeed.
4. Ability to keep close contact with customers through mobile devices will be important to maintain quality of service and product as well as receive customer feedback.
5. The still large group of Baby Boomers will remain active in the economy. However, their demands will shift from goods to service and healthcare.
6. Retailers may also expand in developing economies. These growing markets have much more room to expand along traditional modes than developed nations. “

The future retailers need to react quickly to consumer trends, to treat the client as one single person (personalized services and products), make fast contact , personalised offers and be technologically updated; mobile devices are going to be one of the most important communication tools.

More at  http://www.pwc.com/en_US/us/retail-consumer/assets/retailing_2015.pdf

A Japan carrier KDDI developed a different Augmented Reality (AR), 6-Axis Real Space X-ray (sorry, the website is in Japanese…).

The core technology of 6-Axis Real Space X-ray is not image recognition. Specific mobile phone with 6-axis sensors (3 acceleration and 3 geomagnetic) and GPS are used for the different AR. With the specific mobile phones, users can acquire information to detect orientation (direction and tilt) immediately.

Another feature, KDDI’s 6-Axis Real Space X-ray application can cut out the clutter with a simple and show information in virtually. It does not only show the things in front of you, but also let users virtually “see through” their mobile phone’s screen. When users tilt the phone, from vertical to horizontal, the display incrementally zooms out from the map to display locations that are farther away. KDDI relies on the contribution of end users to make the app more worthwhile.

[DEMO Vedio]

[KDDI concept]

I have been reading a blog about a conference at the Perimeter Institute (a theoretical physics excellence centre based in Ontario, Canada). The conference, more a working task as a matter of fact since they worked from 9am into the night for four days, had the objective of analysing the way to look at the present economic crises and see if science, through modelling, can help understand what is going on and provide hints to fix it.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/post.aspx?bid=354&bpid=23499

What stroked me most is the participation to that conference of economist and quant mathematicians (not surprising) and theoretical physicists as well as evolutionary biologists.
The participation of these latter, a few from the Santa Fe Institute working on small worlds and complex systems, marks the fact that modern economy is better modelled through an ecosystem approach.
Simulations were performed through interacting agents and the Santa Fe Institute used the modelling of an Ant Farmer as the blueprint to model economic systems.
It seems like we are starting to have the tools to do some massive, quasi realistic simulation of an actual economy, and not just an isolated financial market.