At the South Korean Jang-Ung Park Research Centre a team of researchers have developed a soft contact lens embedding a single pixel diode and a sensor able to analyse the eye “tears” and if a problem is detected the pixel lights up setting up a red flag that is seen by the wearer of the contact lens.

Researchers embedded a light-emitting diode into this contact lens. Credits: Jang-Ung Park Research

Apparently, the tears that are “wetting” our eyes contain a number of substances that can provide clues on the health state of that person.

This of course is a long term objective, provide a monitoring system that you can wear on your eyes, able to signal in the most seamless way that there might be problem. Researchers believe that moving from one pixel to several, thus providing more information display capability…, and at the same time provide more sensing capability and more “processing” capability. Powering may come from the chemical energy contained in tears or from light reaching the eye… Clearly, putting all this things together is going to take all of this decade so that we are not going to have this capability of looking at our “health” before next decade (although the researchers are convinced that much sooner we might start to see applications for monitoring specific issues, like high pressure for glaucoma…).

The first stepping stone, however, has been laid. The researchers have found a way to embed electronics in a normal soft contact lens by using two layers of graphene sandwiching silver wires. The dimension of each individual component is so tiny, measured in nanometers, that they remain completely transparent. One of the challenges was to layer the electronics at low temperature (normal silicon based electronics require high temperatures that would destroy a contact lens). For this they have found a method of creating the circuits using a liquid deposition.

Well actually not your car today, but your car in the next decade. At least this seems clear if you consider that the Google self driving car consumes 750MB of data per second! That is the volume of data provided by all sensors equipping the car and providing the bases for the on board computers to navigate a urban environment.

What Google Car sees…

The car is equipped with a number of cameras that feed the on board computer. Is that a ball rolling out between those two parked cars? Watch out! There might be a kid running after the ball…

In the picture above (credit: Google) there is a spatial representation of the model developed by the on board computers as the car is making a left turn. All pictures are composed into a 3D model containing the size and potential behaviour of any object. A tree occupies a given space but it stays where it is, whilst a truck can move and occupy a different space and it is better that such a space does not overlap with the one that will be occupied by the car!
So, it is not enough to see, the car has to understand and speculate…

And doing this requires an amazing amount of data and of data crunching. Just think about hundreds of cars munching data and exchanging them (one car cannot see behind a corner, or a bend, but can radio its 3D understanding of the surrounding space to any other car in the vicinity). That is real broadband!

We are generating so much information every day that we don’t even know what it is being recorded about us. I just checked on Google for my name and found 184,000 pointers. Clearly they will be many that are not about me (I just made random sampling up to the 100th page and with just few exceptions they were about me).

What struck me as funny (or is it not funny) is that a good percentage of these pointers were about something I did that I have now forgotten. Thinking about it and following the link I had to admit that, yes, I did it!

A smiling ghost making your content disappear after a little while!

I also thought that I do not know what 99% of the information linked by those pointers are actually saying….

Yes, I have the feeling that I have lost control about myself in the digital space.

Another thing that came to my mind is that the web has change the way we communicate in the sense that nothing fades away (although it gets buried in those 184,000 links…). And this thought was prompted by an article I read.

Indeed, the article points out that even for the information I generate of my own will I cannot control it once I circulate it on the web. Place a photo on Facebook, send a tweet…. it is there forever! Even those places that let you delete the information may be captured by crawlers (like the ones sent out by the WaybackMachine) and reappear in other places. I still remember British Telecom publishing a wrong information on new tariff and removing it after just few minutes. It was too late. That info had already been captured by crawlers and people could still access to it and blame BT for a breach of promise!

A new company, Snapchat, is providing you the tools to attach a time of survival for an information you place on the web and takes care of erasing it once the time goes by. There are now 100 million photos and text messages that destroy themselves, courtesy of Snapchat, every day! They are ghosts that appear for some fleeting moments (e.g. 10 seconds) and then they are gone forever.

The system is not foolproof. A person looking at your photo can make a screen capture and you no longer have control on it. Although Snapchat will let you know that the photo has been copied by xyz there is little you can do about it.

DuckDuckGo

And, of course, if instead of making a screen capture that bad guy takes a photo of your photo….well, you won’t even know he did it!

So the problem is far from being solved but I found 100 million information going through Snapchat as a clear indication that people feel the need to be somehow in control and to be able to NOT record something they do!

Similarly, the success of the DuckDuckGo search engine that makes the promise not to record what you have been looking for is another indication that people wish, from time to time, to preserve their privacy.

DuckDuckGo has already served over 400 million search requests, an average of over 1.5 million a day. Of course nothing compared to the over 3 billions search each day by Google…, but still a lot of people do not know, yet, about DuckDuckGo, and many have said by clicking on it that they do care about privacy!

Too bad that no foolproof solution is in sight!

I stumbled on a nice info graphic explaining how the Google glasses work and I would like to share it adding some considerations.

Google has announced the price: 1,500$. Not cheap in terms of mass market, amazingly chip in terms of technology.

More than the price, however, the real issue is the “wearability” of the glasses. And this goes beyond the feeling of wearing glasses (they can be worn also over normal glasses). How does it feel to have an overlaid image on reality?

Can Google glasses, or copycats, become a normal apparel people wear or will they remain a gadget? This, I think is the real question. In the second case we will see several, even many of them, but they won’t change our life. In the first case they will become part of our daily life and indeed will change our relation with the world.

If there is an innovation I am really looking forward is one that let me get rid of passwords. I have so many of them that I cannot remember. Using the same password in different contexts just weakens it since it is always the weak link that breaks it all down.

Now Google has voiced the invention of a ring that can store a mechanism for authentication. It is actually a chip that can synch with an on line authentication point. The authentication point submit a query to the ring, a sort of math test, that keeps changing and that is answered in a unique way characterising the identity of the ring that can therefore be used as an authentication procedure.

A USB key working on the same principle of Google proposed authentication

Since the question keeps changing and there is no static password involved the hacking of the answer does not compromise the security.

Well, this can be a step forward, but it looks to me not significantly different from the electronic key my bank gave me for secure on line transaction. The only advantage would derive from an agreement to use this authentication system everywhere (but that could apply to my electronic key as well).

There are already companies selling these kind of “keys”, like the one in the photo on the side, from Yubikey. They all have the problem that if you lose the key, or simply you don’t have it with you, you are stuck.

What I am really looking forward is to have a way yo use my personal body and self as the authentication means. As a matter of fact this works pretty well in my social life…

Look at the glasses, not at the lady….

Vuzix has announced an electronic pair of glasses (that is, actually, as shown in the photo on the left, a monocle…) to be available on the market next year, to compete with the also announced Google Glasses.

The monocle is able to show an image that is perceived equivalent to the one you would see on a smart phone 4″ screen seen at 14″ distance in the 16×9 size factor.

The information to be displayed arrives from a smart phone connected via BlueTooth. It is not known, at this time, what would be the life of the battery …

Clearly this can be a factor in the usability but at the same time I feel that I personally would not like to have a continuous artificial  image overlapping on the reality I see. Hence, I can assume that this device will be used only once in a while thus decreasing the need for power. In other words, the power issue is not likely to be a game breaker. What is far more important is the seamless perception that can be provided.

Ideally, this kind of devices should disappear from our conscious perception, in the same way that the earbuds connected to the cell phone have. So far, devices providing an augmented reality have either been cumbersome (and you would never move around carrying them) or gadget like, so that after a short while one stops using it.

I feel it will still take some time before we will have this kind of glasses becoming as popular as the earbuds we’ve accustomed to.

In many Countries media, be it newspaper, magazines or television, generates revenues through advertisement. And also when there is a pay per copy (magazines) or a subscription fee (magazines, television) a good portion of revenues derives from ads.

And ads revenues are declining! Just look at this latest graph representing the Ads market in the US for print media over the last 8 years …  (graph published by Statista)

Interestingly, the decline in revenue corresponds to an increase in ads revenue by Google (that can be used as the gauge for on line ads) but it is not making up for the loss or revenues in the print media (and a similar story, although it is just starting to become apparent goes for television). Don’t be misled by the graphics. The decline is showing what is happening in the USA, the growth in Google’s ads revenue is worldwide.

It is not so different to what I was brooding on yesterday, the erosion of Telecom Operators revenues by the OTT.

The question is if this erosion that will eventually force more and more publishers to move on line, shrink their staff and possibly go out of business will result in a change in the way people “consume” media.

Will we still have a television in 20 years time? Will our grand-grand children learn about newspapers, magazines and television the same way we have learnt about scrolls and minstrels?

And notice that if you are comparing scrolls with newspapers/magazines, or minstrels with television it is not just about a different “device” or format. It is about a completely different value chain, a different market and different players.

Scrolls and minstrels were targeting a very minuscule market, just a few people max. The lag time from the creation of the information to its consumption was very long, better measured in years, on the average than in months. Television and printed media have both enlarged the audience and shorten the time from the content creation (not always, a movie is usually filmed for several months before hitting the screen…) to content fruition.

Internet is changing it all! The audience is potentially the whole world but in practice it is an audience made by single viewers that can be identified and that can influence the content itself directly (by choosing it out of tons of available material) or indirectly (by content aggregators that through profiling are pushing content to that specific viewer).

As ads decline classic media move to the Web where cost are lower, but in doing so they change the relations among content producers, aggregators, distributors and viewers, killing some in the process.

New on line magazines, like Flipboard, are now widely used and yet they don’t correspond to an “editor” in a classic sense. They are tools to create specific, single user experience. I should confess that nowadays Flipboard is the first app I click every morning, to get at a glance what is likely to matter me most.

One might say that Flipboard, and Flipboard like applications only exist because the NY Times, US Today, il Corriere,…. are publishing content, but they are not the only ones. Actually there are thousands of timely content sources being published by individuals.
Again, one might object that reading a piece from a NY Times journalist is quite different in trustworthiness and style than reading the same story from a blogger or a twitter… And yet. We have just started to scratch the possibilities of the Information Society. I wouldn’t be surprised if in 10 years time advances in Big Data and in the natural language creation will enable to provide news that are as accurate (actually more accurate), as insightful and as pleasing to read than the ones we get today from a renewed newspaper.  Actually, I will be surprised if that will not happen well before 2030!

YouTube and Netflix are already showing changes in the way people look at the “screen” and this is changing television into a personalised media. But this is just a first step. I am pretty sure that the next one will be a social television clustering friends and BoF around content that is no longer produced by the Majors in the same way as it is produced today. Because today content is being produced by these Majors for the mass market where all viewers are indistinguishable from one another.
Not so in the future. Each viewer will be unique, social networks will be dynamically created, fleeting in time and space.

If this is come to pass, and I bet it will, we are going to see a tremendous change in the television value chin and in the players.  Our screen at home will be just that. A screen. A window to our world that will be shaped in some Data Centre that will have a virtual representation of me, of my social circle and of my ambient and will create (not just deliver) “content on demand”.

Have ou ever used your index finger to point at something and asked: What’s that?

Well, this is what has probably motivated a group of MIT researchers to use an (augmented) index finger to get information about the world around us.

As you can see in the photo on the left, they have developed a sort of ring to wear on your index finger. You point your finger at an object and the camera embedded in the ring transmit the image to a smartphone in you pocket where it gets identified. Through an Internet connection you can get information associated to that object, possibly contextualised to your experience.

It is really moving in the direction of the Internet WITH Things, where every object will become part of the Internet and we will be able to interact with each of them.

Clearly, this gadget looks cumbersome, although it was impossible to imagine just 20 years ago that one would be able to have a videocamera and a radio transmitter embedded in a ring, but we know that in a few years it will shrink to become almost invisible. And, besides, we will be wearing Google Goggles in two years time, probably supporting this same feature through a compass and an accelerometer embedded…

Apple has announced they will have a “best in class’ maps app coming with iOS6 and Google has just improved its own maps.

An eye catching map from Hover

But there are plenty of “mappers” out there and more will be coming as new and better devices will make maps an everyday backdrop in many of our interactions with computers and, more important, with the world. Indeed, I can easily imagine that we are going to use a map even to see the place where “we are”, because that map will provide plenty of information about the place “we are”.

And in a longer term I can imagine that we won’t even need a screen to display a map. It will be displayed directly on our eyes. and will overlap, in an augmented reality way, with what we see around us.

Maps are getting better, just look at the picture above. It is a map, even though it does not look like. It is produced by Hover, a company creating stunning 3D maps. And there are several others, like UpNext, producing 3D representations. Just read the article in Technology Review to get a feeling on what is going on.

However, an this is the reason for this post, as I was reading that article I thought that indeed the best mapping would come from photos, even better from real or quasi-real time photos. I am pretty sure that before the end of this decade we will see some companies that will create dynamic maps by integrating photos that will be taken by you and me and by millions of others around the clock.

Those maps will also contain quasi real time information, will result from mashing up a variety of information channels appropriately filtered to fit my needs at that particular time.  GPS and continuous picture taking are becoming more and more common. Already today, just bought an AW100, you take a picture with your camera and you see overlaid on the screen information about the place you focused on. The first time I saw it I was surprised; in a few days I got used to it. Now, after just one week, I am using my new camera not (only) to take pictures but to get information about what I am seeing through the lens. The bits and atoms are coming together in most unexpected ways…

One of the thousands images on Google glass project...

Last week most newspapers, and the web, got flooded with the news of the Google glass project. There are also some nice clips on YouTube you have probably already seen. So there is no need to post such a “old” news.

What I am interested in discussing is whether this is the sort of future interfaces we are looking for. On the web there have been many posts, some arguing that moving from a “concept” to a real thing is a big step, some saying that such technology will never really work (except that it already does..), some pointing out that the guy in the clip has some social relation problems… And of course there are also enthusiastic posts saying here is the future.

Personally, I think that the future will, as in the past, place the technology in the background, where you don’t see it and where you take for granted (naturally) what it delivers.

I am pretty sure that we are moving towards a seamless continuum between atoms and bits but bits cannot intrude, as well as atoms should not intrude when I focus on bits. It may become possible in some science fiction future to have all newborns with an implanted chip to “augment” the retina, but I personally think it will remain science fiction and not because technology won’t become available. We already have all the technology needed for electronically tagging ourselves, but only a marginal few have done that. So it is not, and it will be not a matter of technology availability.

I would consider much likelier to use our cell phone (or our cuffs for that matter) to explore the boundaries between atoms and bits. I can buy that in a few year most of us will be “naturally” using their cell phone as a magnifier lens to look at the bottle in front of them to see the information associated to it or look at a window through the cell phone screen to get info and pick up that info about an object displayed in the window.

Having a continuous overlapping of bits and atoms through the sort of glasses that Google has shown doesn’t ring true to me.