Last week I watched papertygre  upload most of her books as she prepared to move out.

Seeing the process aroused a transhumanist sentiment in me, a glimmer of a future in which our world is gradually transformed into digital information.  It creates a sense of raw possibility and freedom, albeit tinged with a bit of emptiness.

The ability to liberate objects ( Read more... )

The 3D scanning software we built now allows for live reconstruction of the images as we scan them. We wrote this UI in the few days before Maker Faire, and got to show it off all weekend. It was very well received, but it also had a significance that goes back several years:

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In 2003 I took over 500 pictures of my room with the hope that ( Read more... )

This is the project that Dave and I have been working on:

Click to view

Our goal is to make it as easy as possible to capture 3D objects and scenes from the physical world, turning them into virtual objects for use online. We believe that making 3D capture as easy and as simple as digital photography will profoundly shift how we process and share visual ( Read more... )

After graduating from college with a computer science degree, I’ve spent most of my subsequent years not programming. However, I’ve been spending most of the day for the last couple of months programming. I am noticing that it’s starting to change how I think and interact socially at times. If I just spend a couple of hours programming, I don’t ( Read more... )

I recently attended the BIL conference, a free version of TED in which most of the speakers are from the audience. Given the crowdsourced nature of the speaker selection process, the quality of the talks is very good, which speaks to the quality of the attendees.

One interesting conversation came up that hit at something I find wrong with the ( Read more... )

Angry Birds is an iphone game where you use a slingshot to propel exploding birds (yes, really) at various structures containing pigs, which you're trying to kill by hitting directly or by causing the structures to collapse on them.

The funny thing about Angry Birds is that it's actually not a great game in one sense -- while playing the game ( Read more... )

This article spends about three lines on the benefits and several paragraphs on the drawbacks.

Let me correct that a bit:

Even as an infrequent commuter, I really love the fact that I'm no longer slowed down by 2-20 minutes just to hand someone $5.  That time doesn't benefit anyone -- it's a secondary toll, a "cost of collection" that simply ( Read more... )

This video reminded me of how a lot of our dreams about robotics over the last 50 years are coming to fruition.  Ideas that have been dreams long deferred are starting to roll out quickly in research labs.  There are of course significant barriers to deploying some of these systems for consumer use but I expect that to change quickly ( Read more... )

There's been a trend for several years now to lower the minimum effort required for social interaction.  Emailing is easier than letter-writing, blogging is easier than emailing, tweeting and texting are easier than blogging.  I predicted a couple of years back that soon services would come along and automate the horrible burden of tweeting mundane ( Read more... )

I've been working on other things with the Kinect, but I do want to keep making multiple reality videos.

I got a couple of friends who do acroyoga to come over.  Here's what we made:

Click to view

In case you haven't been following along:

I wrote some software to merge multiple 3D video streams captured by the Kinect into a single 3D space. Objects from each video ( Read more... )