There are a lot of mind control projects around at the moment. This concept being my favourite:
Which was recently made a reality by our friends at Neurosky.
In the last year we have done a fair bit of research into this area ourselves. We've not been able to talk about it until now as we were working towards a specific client project, but as that's not happening now, we can share some of what we found.
The headsets work by detecting the electrical activity of the brain, the millions of tiny electrical signals generated by your neurons as they fire. The brain reading itself is called an Electroencephalogram or EEG. We chose to partner with Neurosky to provide the headsets and some of the software for the project. The headsets we chose are able to detect all kinds of brainwaves, but the software provided by Neurosky single out brainwaves associated with concentration and meditation (relaxation). So we used these.
The idea was to make a mind control film. Most other applications and films we had seen used EEG as a kind of switch. i.e. "Concentrate now to switch to state B, then relax again". However, we thought that it would be better to permanently connect the state of the film to the user's mental state. We wanted the user to feel connected to the fim and eventually forget about the interface itself.
We had two parallel films; one with a conventional narrative and a more surreal second film. If you concentrated you could literally see through the main film to the second film, if you lost concentration the second film would disappear. We likened this to the way that concentrating on something in your mind, say mental arithmetic, enables you to grab it and see it clearly, if you lose concentration you lose your grasp on it and can feel it slipping away. We wanted the second film to feel like that.
Another important element was that we wanted this to be closer to a cinema experience than a game experience. We didn't want dials and graphs and things designed to make it look techie. We wanted this to be pure art. Anything that would have looked out of place in the cinema was not allowed.
Firstly though, as this was uncharted waters, we started with a load of research. What does it feel like? How sensitive is it? How do we calibrate it? What's the minimum interface we need? There is no agreed wisdom on any pf these things.
We made a test suite with some configurable settings. It was an Air App connected to Neurosky's socket server.
This is a fairly uneventful video of mind control Rasta Mouse.
First we wanted to gauge the level of concentration required by different people to show the second film. From this we could gauge how much variance there is which gave us clues as to how to calibrate the system on the fly. For this we measured people's ability to bring in a single second film at a variety of difficulty levels.
Second, we tested how people reacted to having to show multiple films over time. Was it possible? Did people fatigue? Was it unpleasant? etc.
We started with a brief called "Anti-Shyness Clothing". Could we make clothes that help you to socialise? We decided to answer this by making a t-shirt that could connect to other similar t-shirts and visually change based on data about the other person.
First we worked on the display. There are many displays used in smart clothing, mostly based around LEDs, electroluminescent thread or flexible screens. These can look amazing and are good for quick changes, complex information and grabbing attention, but we thought we'd go for a calmer approach. Nanda is influenced by Mark Weiser who promoted the idea of "calm technology". We wanted our display to be less of a replacement for a screen and more of an extension of the body, closer to a human blushing or a cat's fur rising. A slow, calm, natural feeling display. So a requirement was, no LEDs.
Nanda came up with the ingenius idea of using dye that goes transparent when warmed and conductive thread that warms when you put a current through it. Brilliantly, if you mix the dye with another normal dye to create a third colour, the heat sensitive dye will still vanish from the mix when heated. So if you mix heat sensitive blue, to normal yellow to create green, it will turn yellow when you heat it as the blue will go transparent. This way you can produce any colour.
So with our pattern of conductive thread sewn into the shirt, and painted dye pattern over the top, we had a calm natural feeling display.
Second, we wanted to enable the shirts to be able to identify each other. We wanted any shirt to explicitly recognise a specific other shirt. We opted for an RFID approach to solve this. We put and RFID transmitter and receiver in the sleeve of the shirts. So when you shake hands with someone the chips are at close enough range to connect. We actually had a pretty tricky problem to solve that had actually foxed everyone we spoke to online. In the end we solved it with a switching technique we invented, but we have to keep it quiet until a technical paper is published. Anyway, with this working, any shirt could recognise any other shirt.
The whole system was controlled by the Arduio Lillypad and a mini regular Arduino. Ok it's not pretty, its a prototype.
Thirdly, we needed data to compare between users. The eventual aim was to connect to the cloud and use live social network data. Actually this is a pretty trivial step. We made the prototype connect via Bluetooth to an Android device and exchange data. From there it's quite simple to connect to the web.
As it was though, we uploaded all the data required onto the Arduino itself. This was workable with a small group to prove the concept, but future versions will have to use live data.
So we have created t-shirts that can identify each other, change their display and connect to an internet connected mobile device.
Finally, Nanda had to test the original hypothesis that these shirts would help shy people socialise in an experiment at Queen Mary's. We had 4 volunteers and made 4 identical shirts. We represented each person's personality as a list of numbers that represented their preferences on a range of subjects, we then rated people's compatibility comparing these numbers, rather like a dating agency. The display then showed the level of compatibility when they shook hands. Green for good, red for bad. Although either way it was a talking point and a social lubricant, so had the desired effect.
Gianfranco Cialini is a retired 60 year-old man who lives in a village of 1000 souls, called “Sant’Arcangelo sul Trasimeno”, in Perugia, Italy.
Actually there are 999 souls, as one of them, me, has recently moved to U.K.
One day, while he was tidying up the Library in the University of Perugia, he discovered something amazing, something that no one else has spotted before, something that you need a good eye and great intuition to discern from all the other thousands of books: 50 Hebrew Manuscripts.
That day, April 13th 2005, Gianfranco Cialini “simply” found some dialogues between the Vatican and Israel, six double folios from a beautiful Hebrew Bible and some copies of a book destroyed by the Church during the Inquisition.
When the print came out, the value of the manuscripts collapsed the book market and typographers started to buy manuscripts at kilos and reuse them to create book covers. So on that day, the belief that such historic thoughts were lost, was revisited.
Gianfranco has made a lot of discoveries in his career but whats more, a few years earlier he found the first Italian musical score dating back to the year 1300 and Italian history of music was rewritten. In particular, the birth of the musical style Ars Nova Italiana was pushed back several years. Quite a lucky guy!
London, 13 April 3013
Gianfranco Xialiny XBF is 60 years old and he can also be 43 years in his Facebook timeline.
He is retired but through the Xmironex process he looks like his 20 year-old nephew for few hours a day. It allows him to work and continue his pursuing passions all his life.
He lives in a small building of 1000 residents, called London in the city of Liverpool.
One sunny, snowy and also rainy day with temperatures between 43 and 48 degrees, Gianfranc Xialiny XBF while tiding up the invisible screen at the British Library, found a unusual microchip, hidden between hundreds of other microchips.
That day, April 13th 3113, something amazing was discovered, something that has never seen before, something that you need a good UVA eye to spot. Gianfranc Xialiny XBF spotted the first form of Arcade Game applied in Finance, forgotten and lost between thousand and thousands of data. At the beginning was difficult to read, part of the binary code went lost but through persevering researches he got it!
That day his life changed: He has since been recognised by the Digital Preservation Society (born by the merger of Microsoft with Google), and discovery contributed to the rewriting of the story of gamification.
Digital preservation pioneers such as Jerry McDonough or David Kirsh, who lived in the region of USA 1000 years ago and spent their life in the preservation of digital worlds, would have been proud of him.
Since the beginning of the Internet, researchers, scientists and their avatars have been interested in the conservation and preservation of digital data such as audio or movie content, keen to conserve our stories, preserve our traces.
Well, it is true that if some data of some silly politicians was lost it might not be the end of the day.
London, 18 April 3012
It’s 12.54, and I am writing on the Lean Mean fighting machine blog.
I had a weird dream last tonight that the city of London was squeezed in a building and bankers where playing Donkey Kong in the basement to lift a country out of crisis. But no one had any memory of it.
Since then I am plagued by a continuous thought:
What will the children of my children’s children’s children find at the Brick Lane Vintage market about me in 3012? Would they buy my vintage Facebook profile picture of?
What about the guy in Memento? Will he be continuously rearranging his social media profile on his digital skin according to the information he scans while surfing the net in 3012?
Tough questions. Hard to give you an answer and I am not the right person. The only thing I know is that I will think twice before I bring my G4 iPhone to the charity shop when I’ll be 99 years old.
Pts. … Google… I am pleased with this article. Can you make me a backup on a stone please?
"Make sure you save that picture so Annie will see it when she’ll grow up”! Can we consider it a form of preservation?
On Tuesday the conference was in transition between interactive and music, with the gaunt, goth looking hipsters flooding into the bars of the sixth street just as the Google Village packed up and the final hack-a-thon was resolved. So the schedulers put all the music panels when the two tribes overlapped. I checked out Spotify and Turntable.fm. Disclaimer - I am a junkie of the first and have never used the second.
The key quote that stuck with me from the Spotify talk (key speaker was their 'Chief Content Officer', Ken Parks) was that more money is made in Macau each year than the music industry globally. I now that Macau is pretty hot on gambling and that a fair high rollers must pass through their tables, but we're talking about music. Everyone must listen to music in some form every day, even if
not by choice. It is utterly pervasive, and it has become utterly terrible at making money.
Easy answer would be to look at Spotify and point the finger. It has been well documented that the amount of money an artist gets per play is pitifully small. But the longer the talk went on, the more I came to the opinion that at least they're trying. They give 65-70% of all revenue straight to rights holders and had generated $250m up to the point of the conference. Now you can cut that number down to a per play figure, but that money didn't exist before Spotify generated it, so on balance they're a force for good. The problem I would augur is with the labels and right managers, who I imagine have large, convuluted systems of trickling money down. It is a convenient position to take, particularly given the other panel member was an artist, but one that makes sense. They have all the power. They have the rights for the music, they can cut any deal they want.
This was further compounded by the founders of Turntable.fm who turned up next. They gleefully announced that they were now licensed with all four majors. They took the approach that they would build an excellent product first and "ask for forgiveness later". All of which are positive statements about the health of their business. But the point they kept returning to was that you have to
take any offer a label puts in front of you. They can walk away, you can't.
And this struck me as a paradox. The labels complain about not making enough money (or at least artist's managers do), but then will hold start-ups eager to create new music experiences to ransom. Fair enough, they want the best deal and they can collective bargain on behalf of talent, but they are clearly hungry for more cash, they just don't want to give rights away unless you can prove you will make them money.
I think this is a gap for brands. Whilst many brands try and associate themselves with music properties or acts, often it is little more than sponsorship or part of product distribution. It seldom has any tangible benefit for the music industry. It brands took the approach of "what can we do for music" rather than "what can music do for us", they will likely to find a very receptive label marketer more than happy to cut a deal. So long as you don't ask for too much in the way of rights.
Oh. Turntable.fm is excellent, if a little for the music geek rather than the music everyman. You can get someone else to DJ your house party remotely. Which could be awful if it wasn't for the fact that once A-Trak turned up for a session and an increasing amount of headline DJs are going into partnership with the site.
It was a staight fight on Saturday afternoon. Frank Abagnale Jr. vs. Dennis Crowley. The man who was portrayed on film by Leonardo DiCaprio vs. the man rated 19 out 49 most influential men 2010 by AskMen.com. It wasn't a hard decision...
Sadly it wasn't a hard decision for everyone else at the conference. Catch me if you can was closed half an hour before it was due to begin. Frank Abagnale received a 15 minutes standing ovation twitter told me later.
I was stuck in a Q&A with Dennis.
And to be fair to him, he's an interesting man. You have to be to run a start up that has millions of claimed users. He sees Foursquare as the smallest of the big players when it comes to "social". Which I took to be code for "I'm not selling any time soon".
There were two key pillars of what Crowley talked about - data and radar. The former will be Foursqaure's play to make some cash, the latter their new service that makes the app more useful every day.
Crowley talked about levels of Foursquare user, about how you can track a user's development through stages. First they're into checking in, wanting to be mayor, wanting as many points as they can get. Then they're all about deals, how can they get money off at their favourite places. From that they start to use lists, tapping into recommendations of the world around them, being able to know the best place for coffee/pizza/late night saunas wherever you are. It is clear that Crowley sees this intimate almost symbiotic connection with the world as the key to the future success of Foursquare. He wants discovery of what is around you to become "serendipitous" (a much overused word at the Conference).
Radar should be akin to your best friend in a town you've never visited before. He wants the phone to reproduce how you would talk to your mates, rather than you spending your time head down in your phone.
Question is, can a phone's battery life support that? Its a noble ambition, but if the app is continually making calls based on your location, your phone is going to slow down considerably. The US is probably ready for this feature, the UK and Europe, where there isn't a swarm in sight, may just need to start rolling out deals and selling foursquare to local businesses rather than trying to make take the role of your new best friend.
And it can make this case through the other of Crowley's hot topics - data. Foursquare has millions of data points, and despite the relatively small sample size of its user base, should be able to provide meaningful insights to businesses. Crowley is staking the future of Foursquare on the ability to tell a coffee shop that the next location their consumer checks into is their work/a bar/a cafe... Is their value in this for individual retailers, enough for them to pay? I'd like to think that this data can help smaller businesses rather than giving more insights to bigger box retailers to help them undercut their local competitors, but I'm not sure. The other way of looking at it is that Foursquare will sell personal data about customers to retailers. Here is the name, likely address and workplace of your top 50 customers. I'm sure it won't do this, but I know a business that might, and if they get bought it is a real danger.
Data, privacy and battery life. All problems Foursquare needs to solve, none of which seem to have a simple answer that they're ready to implement. If I were them I'd put all my money in mobile payments.
