Schedule

• Today – NBC – Ch. 2 Technologies to Bond With• Assignment # 1 – 24 hours of technology• Colloquium – tomorrow, 3:10, Hoyt 152• Thursday– Quiz #1, NBC – Ch. 2 continued• http://www.pbs.org/saf/previous.htm

NBC – Ch. 2 Technologies to Bond With

• Black Hole in Los Alamos• Ed Groshus

Omega Church of PeaceBomb Unworship CeremonyCritical Mass Every Sunday

• Shrine & protest.

Un-transparent, In-Your-Face Technology

Transparent vs. Opaque• Technology that is so well

fitted to, & integrated with, our own lives, biological capacities, & projects as to become almost invisible in use.

• Once tool is transparent, conscious agent literally sees through tool & directly confronts real problem at hand.

• E.g., pen & paper to writer, sports equipment, musical instruments.

• May require training & practice.

• Technology that keeps tripping user up, requires skills & capacities that do not come naturally to biological organism, & thus remains focus of attention even during routine problem-solving activity.

• “highly visible in use”• Distinguish sharply &

continuously between user & tool.

Motorist trapped in traffic circle 14 hours

• April 1, 2006. Hampstead, MA. Motorist Peter Newone said he felt as if a nightmare had just ended. Newone, 53, was driving his newly purchased luxury car when he entered the traffic circle in the city center around 9 AM yesterday, Friday. The car was equipped with the latest safety features, including a new feature called Lane Keeping. “It just wouldn’t let me get out of the circle,” said Newone. “I was in the inner-most lane, and every time I tried to get out, the steering wheel refused to budge and a voice kept saying over and over, ‘warning, right lane is occupied.’ I was there until 11 at night, when it finally let me out,” Newone said from his hospital bed, his voice still shaky. “I managed to get out of the circle and to the side of the road, and then I don’t remember what happened.”

Transparent Tools

• “Today's technology imposes itself on us, making demands on our time and diminishing our control over our lives. Of all the technologies, perhaps the most disruptive for individuals is the personal computer. “ (D. Norman, The Invisible Computer)

• Progression from “technology-centered” to “human-centered” products– Exploit natural strengths of human

brains & bodies

Technology-Centered Design

• Doesn’t focus on creating products that do things fluently, reliably, & with a minimum of learning & effort from user.

• Initially difficult enough to create product that just does task. (e.g., early adopters).

• Later must expand market to users who want cheap, reliable & easy-to-use tool.

• Cultural-evolutionary pressure to better conform to physical & cognitive strengths & weakness of biological brains & bodies.– Requires wide-spread adoption by users if

product is to continue …

How do technologies simultaneously shape & adapt to cognitive profiles of

biological users?• Before “dawn of the city, the

factory, and the organized religious order, human beings used natural cycles to prompt daily activities.”

• Today … we work all hours.• Transition from natural-time

society to our present was mediated by “a long thread of technological evolution”

• Time obedience (Time keepers shout, Bell tolls) to personal timepieces time discipline

We don’t consciously know time – but it is constantly & easily available should we desire to know it.Prime characteristic of transparent technology is poise for easy use & deployment when required.

“Do you happen to know the time?”We answer YES before checking our watches.Then share our knowledge

“Do you know the meaning of the word clepsydra?”

You probably have a dictionary, but won’t respond to this question in the same way as time.

What is mind?

• “Mind-as-spirit” ?• “Mind as brain”?

• “We should not, at any rate, simply assume that it is correct to identify and locate the individual thinking system by reference to the merely metabolic frontiers of skin and skull.”

• Transparent technology is not new.• Transition to transparency often involves a

“delicate and temporally extended process of co-evolution.”

Smart Worlds & Information Appliances

• Weiser, Norman & Jeff Raskin – information appliance

1. Geared to support a specific activity & to do so via storage, reception, processing & transmission of info.

2. Form intercommunicating web (“talk” to each other)

3. Transparent technologies, designed to be easy to us and to fade into background.

Future (??) Info Appliances (Norman, Weiser)

• Cell phones with cameras• Permanent wall-mounted weather

displays• Applications embedded in walls &

furniture• Supermarkets where you pass cart

thru a sensor– Symbol

• Clothing• Eye glasses capable of retrieving

names from databases• Devices implanted in bodies to

monitor world.

Steve Mann

• www.pbs.org/22ndcentury interviews_stevemann.html

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oG0COnQk_CA • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiFtmrpuwNY

http://genesis.eecg.toronto.edu/

steveforneilg5upwithlinescc.jpg

Personal Info Appliances

• Personal IAs, functioning robustly, transparently, and constantly, will slowly usher in new social, cultural, educational, and institutional structures.”

• Development of lightweight, constantly running, personal computing appliances & new techniques to render information substantial – blurring boundaries between virtual & physical

• Can’t really off-load all computational work onto some fixed environment.

Wearable Computing (Rhodes)

• Portable while operational• Hands-free use• Sensors: E.g., wireless communications, GPS,

cameras, or microphones. • "Proactive": A wearable should be able to convey

information to its user even when not actively being used.

• Always on, always running

Wearable Keyboards

More about wearable computers

• Casren Mehring (German)– http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zr1kqL08uj4

• Google Tech talk– http://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=7iAyC1vyJ44

Wearable Remembrance Agent (Rhodes)

• “By contrast, the Remembrance Agent is a program that continuously "watches over the shoulder" of the wearer of a wearable computer and displays one-line summaries of notes-files, old email, papers, and other text information that might be relevant to the user's current context. These summaries are listed in the bottom few lines of a heads-up display, so the wearer can read the information with a quick glance. To retrieve the whole text described in a summary line, the wearer hits a quick chord on a chording keyboard .”

RA continued

• Currently using 80 x 25 character screen on glasses– Might be able to direct electronic input into V1 (main

visual processing gateway to brain)?• Twiddler keyboard (chording keyboard)• Software – Rembrance Agent

– Runs constantly– Responds to inputs by intelligently searching thru

agent’s local or distal files (your notes)• Page 47 – description of possible use of RA• Combine advantages of personal, agent-specific info,

storage & retrieval with input from variety of fixed, environmentally distributed resources providing wearable device with stream of userful context-fixing info.

Danger - Loss of Control• Opaque technologies – hard to use & control• Truly invisible, seamless, constantly running technologies

resist control in a subtler, perhaps even more dangerous, manner.

• How then can we alter and control that of which we are barely aware? E.g., alter biological memory?

• Heidegger (1927) – difference between tool’s being “ready-to-hand” (using tool) and being “present-at-hand” (observing tool)

• Tangible computing involves continual process of engagement, separation & re-engagement (Paul Dourish)

• Marble Answering Machine (D. Bishop) – example of tangible computing.– Gives familiar kind of physical presence to digital

abstraction (message) allows us to use our intuitions about physical objects to interact with virtual/informational realm.

Marble Answering Machine

• Marble Answering Machine (D. Bishop) – example of tangible computing.– Gives familiar kind of physical presence to digital

abstraction (message) allows us to use our intuitions about physical objects to interact with virtual/informational realm.

– Easier to flip between ready-to-hand and present-at-hand.

Neural tools lack flippability

• Since our neural tools lack flippability is it possible to having symmetry between neural structures & any nonbiological equipment that is ever encountered as an object?– One exception – biofeedback– More exceptions may arise as neuro-imaging

techniques become more sophisticated

Tangible Media Group at MIThttp://tangible.media.mit.edu/

• HyperCello, Yo-Yo Ma & Neil Gershenfeld

• Allows cellist to control extensive array of sounds thru performance nuance.

• Special techniques (wrist measurements, bow pressure & position sensors, left hand fingering position indicators) enable computer to measure, evaluate, & respond to many performance aspect.

• Used in different ways at different moments of piece: at times cellist's playing controls electronic transformations of own sound; at other times interrelationship is more indirect & mysterious.

•The entire sound world is conceived as an extension of the soloist -- not as a dichotomy, but as a new kind of instrument.•http://web.media.mit.edu/~joep/MPEGs/YoYo.mpg•

Sense Board

• Senseboard is one facet of our using tangible media for manipulating abstract information. It allows the user to arrange small magnetic pucks on a grid, where each puck represents a piece of information to be organized, such as a message, file, bookmark, citation, presentation slide, movie scene, or newspaper story. As the user manipulates the physical puck, the corresponding digital information is projected onto the board. Special pucks may be placed on the board to execute commands or request additional information. We seek to combine the benefits of physical manipulation (natural, fluid, rapid, two-handed, multi-person interaction) with the benefits we can get from computer augmentation (interactive commands, functions, queries, operations, importing and exporting data, and remote collaboration). We believe this type of interface is thus more effective for tasks involving organizing, grouping, and manipulating types of information that have no inherent physical representation, and it provides an example of a tangible interface for a typical "knowledge worker" task.

Jabberstamp at MIThttp://www.rafelandia.com/jabberstamp/video.html

• ‘Jabberstamp is the the first tool that allows children to synthesize their drawings and voices. To use Jabberstamp, children create drawings, collages or paintings on normal paper. They press a special rubber stamp onto the page to record sounds into their drawings. When children touch the marks of the stamp with a small trumpet, they can hear the sounds playback, retelling the stories they have created. “

Augmented Reality

• http://mashable.com/2009/12/05/augmented-reality-iphone/– Le bar guide– Virtual sky astronomy– Car finder

Image Guided Surgerywww.ai.mit.edu/projects/medical-vision/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-EQVANw6hvE

Diffusion MRI in Neurosurgery

Epilepsy Surgical Planning

Anisotropic Modeling of Brain Shift

Intracardiac Surgical Planning

Moving On

• Visions:– Invisible Computing (Weiser, Norman)– Tangible Computing (Dourish, Bishop, MIT

Tangible Media)– Wearable Computing (Rhodes, Mann)– Augmented Reality (Boeing, Scaife (snarks),

MIT, CMU)• Should not focus on which is best.• Dynamic appliances that actively work to learn

about & better fit users.– E.g., text-to-speech software

Read for next week

• http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.02/warwick_pr.html

• NBC – Ch. 3