Way too many people still think 3d printing is an anomoly, a waste of time, a hobby. I would tender the view that this is the repsonse of dinosaurs viewing the mammal, or of "serious computing" specialists considered the early micro computer enthusiasts.
In any case, it was a pleasure to come across this TED talk by Lisa Harouni that gives a great update of all the different elements of 3d printing as it stands today, and points to the rapidly emerging personal manufacturing future.
This TED talk provides a meta-pattern to understand the rise of China/India, etc as being associated with the East accumulating some of the 'killer apps' or patterns from the West, and thus regaining their historical productivity balance with the West. It's the great re-convergence.
At the end of the talk Niall Ferguson makes the case that the current Western fiscal crises are mainly epiphenomenon and have been accelerated by the underlying shift or rebalancing of power.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/niall_ferguson_the_6_killer_apps_of_prosperi...
The Xybot turns an ordinary iPhone into a mobile avatar. A phone docked into the robot streams video of the person controlling it using an app running on another iPhone.
Xybotyx of Littleton, Colorado, which makes the robot, was founded by two engineers who met while working on NASA’s Phoenix Mars rover. The Xybot will be released in March at a price of $111.11.
Helluva lot cheaper than a presence bot. Another example of the ubiquity of the SmartPhone making computing / networking / etc effectively free.
in a population of a million agents over time period of a billion iterations and more.
The results make interesting reading. It turns out that a crucial factor is the speed at which buyers and sellers react to the market. When buyers react quickest, sellers are forced to match the best possible value for money and prices tend to drop.
By contrast, when sellers react quickest, they are quick to copy others offering poor value for money. This reduces the number of sellers offering good value for money in a vicious cycle that drives prices as high as possible.
This is the emergence of a cartel and it happens in these guys' model without any collusion between sellers. Instead, it is an emergent property of the market place that happens when the sellers outperform buyers in the way they react to market conditions.
Cool result from computational economics. I wonder if similar things occur throughout the dynamics of new product adoption.
take out your favorite Magical And Revolutionary Technology Device. Use it for a bit.
What did you feel? Did it feel glassy? Did it have no connection whatsoever with the task you were performing?
I call this technology Pictures Under Glass. Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade.
Is that so bad, to dump the tactile for the visual? Try this: close your eyes and tie your shoelaces. No problem at all, right? Now, how well do you think you could tie your shoes if your arm was asleep? Or even if your fingers were numb? When working with our hands, touch does the driving, and vision helps out from the back seat.
Pictures Under Glass is an interaction paradigm of permanent numbness. It's a Novocaine drip to the wrist. It denies our hands what they do best. And yet, it's the star player in every Vision Of The Future.
To me, claiming that Pictures Under Glass is the future of interaction is like claiming that black-and-white is the future of photography. It's obviously a transitional technology. And the sooner we transition, the better.
HANDS MANIPULATE THINGS
Excellent points on limitations of our current magical devices. Highly recommend that you read the original rant from Bret Victor. http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesign/
The reality is that there is no more embodied approach for devices extant as yet, with possible exceptions of robotics homebrew/arduino/etc. However these certainly don't have anything like the levels of 'magic' interaction that we're enjoying today with the 'pictures under glass'.
I'm not holding my breath for new approaches any time soon, but longer term ...
What will you build?
Augmented Reality (AR) overlays information, images, 3D objects, audio and video onto your view of the real world around you.
Create your own mobile AR projects easily with no development required & link your content to the real world!
Steps to technology ubiquity - virtualizing the underlying complexity ... Looking forward to seeing more from these guys.
TO SEE how profoundly the book business is changing, watch the shelves. Next month IKEA will introduce a new, deeper version of its ubiquitous “BILLY” bookcase. The flat-pack furniture giant is already promoting glass doors for its bookshelves. The firm reckons customers will increasingly use them for ornaments, tchotchkes and the odd coffee-table tome—anything, that is, except books that are actually read.
In the first five months of this year sales of consumer e-books in America overtook those from adult hardback books. Just a year earlier hardbacks had been worth more than three times as much as e-books, according to the Association of American Publishers. Amazon now sells more copies of e-books than paper books. The drift to digits will speed up as bookshops close. Borders, once a retail behemoth, is liquidating all of its American stores.
Ongoing sad times for the local bookstore.
Isn't this part of a larger trend, building 'cloud' / or ubiquitous connectivity and information into all of our lives. The same trend impacting IT across the board. Bringing both disruption of our comfortable ways of doing things, and radical new capabilities?
