Small electrical impulses detected by a brain-computer headset produce strange and amazing 3D printed objects in a new project by George Laskowsky of Thinker Thing. The Emotiv EPOC headset analyzes brain patterns and uses it to understand the wearer’s emotional response to certain features in visual stimuli; in this way, the wearer is able to ‘grow’ a three-dimensional model with their mind.
Laskowsky successfully created the first real physical object made with brain patterns in May, and set out to fund the project on IndieGoGo. Thinker Thing will take the invention to Chile, where children will use the technology to create fantastical creatures, which will be exhibited in a gallery.
How is it possible to create an object with the mind? “We use your brain patterns to evolve a 3D model from a genetic seed, which can then be made real with a standard 3D printer. The DNA seed defines the start point of an evolutionary chain for the object. Dinosaurs are very diverse, for example, but they can be traced back to a single common dna ancestor. We create this first DNA definition as the first building block from which all future objects evolve.The DNA of the object is then mutated over each generation, and how well that new mutations does, whether it lives or dies, is determined by the mind.”
“We are all born creative, our brain begins like an open field and can make connections in many directions, it is only later we become stuck in the ruts and troughs of the paths that our mind constantly treads, paths so deep we are sometimes unable to see that there is still an open field around us. Mistaking skill (a learned ability) with creative imagination is like believing walking in a deeper rut gives you greater freedom of movement across the field.”
One hundred years from now, will we be living on other planets, teleporting from place to place, communicating to each other telepathically, or even becoming immortal by shifting human consciousness from our biological bodies to artificial ones? These predictions for the distant future seem outrageous and virtually impossible to achieve, yet steps are being made toward them at this very moment. The seeds of the potential future wonders of the world have already been planted, and in many cases, it’s not a question of whether they’ll happen, so much as when.
As unlikely as this may sound, teleportation isn’t entirely sci-fi. Physicists have already succeeded in teleporting photons – but right now, it’s not so much about teleporting matter from one location to the next, as it is information. Quantum teleportation is a complex topic involving concepts like ‘entanglement’, the connection that links the quantum states of two particles no matter who far apart they are. Teleporting a single particle is one thing, but what about human beings, Star Trek style?
As PBS’ The Nature of Reality column explains, “Remember that we wouldn’t be moving Kirk’s molecules from one place to another. He would interact with a suite of previously-entangled particles, and when we read the quantum state we would destroy the complex quantum information that makes his molecules into him while instantly providing the information required to recreate his quantum state from other atoms in a distant location. Quantum mechanics doesn’t forbid it. The rules of quantum mechanics still apply whether you’re talking about a system of two particles or human being made of 1027 atoms.”
The verdict? Teleportation is certainly possible, and scientists may soon begin working on attempts to teleport living matter, like viruses. Physicist Michio Kaku believes that the transport of a molecule will happen within the next ten years, followed by DNA, but that teleporting an entire human is probably still centuries away.
Artificial Intelligence Surpassing Human Intelligence
How long do we have until human-level artificial intelligence is achieved? H+ Magazine surveyed experts, asking when they estimated AI would meet four major milestones: carrying on a conversation well enough to pass as a human, solving problems as well as a third grade student, performing Nobel-quality scientific work, and finally, surpassing human intelligence altogether. Robots can already see, hear, learn, solve problems and respond to questions, and some are even getting senses of smell and taste. The Eccerobot is creepily human in its movements thanks to artificial muscles and bones.
The general consensus was that we’ll have AI at the human level or beyond will happen by the middle of the century, or maybe even sooner – but may not surpass humans for a hundred years, if ever.
Applications are now open for a one-way ticket to a private space settlement on Mars. The Mars One project intends to land supplies on the red planet in 2016, and get settlers there by 2023; about 78,000 people have already applied. The company responsible, Lansdorp, insists that the technology needed to achieve this lofty goal already exists. And according to a group of astronauts, researchers and space flight firms who met in May 2013 for the first Human to Mars Summit, establishing a permanent, sustainable outpost on another planet might be a matter of saving the human species.
Supplies would be dropped off first, and then a crew of either humans or robots would construct the base. There are a lot of obstacles, not the least of which is the question of transportation between Earth and Mars, and whether Mars inhabitants could maintain their own food source, rather than relying on interplanetary deliveries.
Will it really happen? it’s hard to say. Private companies with an interest in space colonization are working with some of the same companies that have completed commercial cargo missions to the International Space Station. Lansdorp intends to make the technology developed during its mission available for sale, to fund Mars One and help speed up progress for additional colonies.
In the future, it might be possible to hack other human beings thanks to all manner of body-embeddable gadgets. Many futurists and technology experts believe the trend for future devices isn’t to go smaller, but rather to integrate them into ourselves. Scientists have already developed tiny chips that can translate tiny bodily movements into energy to power gadgets, as well as devices that can be implanted into our bodies. Everyday electronics can already be implanted into human tissue, and medical devices are paving the way for recreational. Ready or not, the bionic human is on the horizon.
Researchers have also developed the first electronic sensor that can be printed directly onto human skin, creating a sort of ‘smart tattoo’ that could theoretically enable people to communicate with each other and our environments with thought commands. The devices, which are thinner than the diameter of a human hair, can detect electrical signals linked with brain waves, communicate wirelessly and receive energy.
Put on a futuristic-looking, geometric white mask and you’ll suddenly have superhuman senses, hearing targeted sounds from long distances or applying effects to images in real-time. The ‘Eidos’ masks were developed by a group of students from the Royal College of Art in London, fitting over the mouth or ears to enhance sensory perception.
The mask that fits over the mouth and ears features a directional microphone to capture audio, which is processed by software to eliminate background noise. The sound is transmitted directly to the inner ear through bone vibrations to make it seem as if someone else’s speech is coming from inside your own head.
The second mask, which fits over the eyes, adds visual effects to the wearer’s range of vision, and can also analyze visual data. That data is sent to a computer, where software processes it and picks out patterns and movements that are invisible to the naked eye.
“Eidos has broad application in areas where live audio and video analysis is valuable. For example, sportspeople can visualise and improve technique in real time. Eidos also has healthcare benefits where it can be used to boost or refine sensory signals weakened by ageing or disability. In the arts, Eidos can augment live performance such as ballet, fashion or music concerts. It allows us to highlight previously invisible or inaudible details, opening up new and customisable experiences.”
Within five years or less, we could be chatting with the three-dimensional holograms of faraway friends, controlling our computers with mental commands, charging our phones with energy harvested from wasted ambient energy and logging into our bank accounts with facial recognition scans. These are among the technology innovations that computer giant IBM has predicted within the last few years of its annual technology forecast. Here are seven of the most intriguing prospects.
3D Hologram Chat
(image via: Star Wars 20th Century Fox screen capture)
A 3D holographic chat system called “TeleHuman” is the first example of what will likely be a flood of virtual hologram technology that lets us see faraway contacts in three dimensions. TeleHuman creates a life-sized rendering of its subject using six XBox Kinect sensors, a 3D projector and a cylindrical display; the creators say it will be available for $5,000 within five years. A similar project called the RGB+D Toolkit is making waves in the indie filmmaking community.
Of course, there are drawbacks to this inevitably invasive technology. A 2012 study found that connecting minds to machines can allow sensitive private information to ‘leak out’ along with the users’ mental commands. The information revealed included the location of their homes, faces they recognized and even their credit card PINs.
Energy-Scavenging Gadgets That Don’t Need Batteries
Power lines, data centers, televisions and even your coffee maker output waves of ambient energy that typically just dissipate in the air, going to waste. That energy could be used to power all kinds of things, including crucial wireless sensors running on batteries, which keep track of factory machinery or measure environmental pollution. MIT has developed an energy-harvesting microelectromechanical system (MEMs) that translates even tiny vibrations, light and ambient energy into a surprising amount of power, eliminating the need for batteries.
Designer Dennis Siegel shows off some of the possibilities on the consumer side of the spectrum with ‘Energy Parasite,‘ a gadget that gathers energy from home appliances and power plants, stores it in a conventional battery and allows you to use it later for cell phones, mp3 players and other devices.
Multi-Factor Biometrics Eliminate Need for Passwords
We’re not far from an era in which passwords are a thing of the past. Fingerprint scanners have been available for a range of devices for quite a while now, but they’re not ideal – burns, cuts, oil and other irregularities can interfere with scanning. In the future, a range of biometrics including voice, retina and face scanners could be used to verify our identities so we can access devices, personal accounts and private data.
Researchers are developing systems that ensure biometric data is secure, like taking a sample of a user’s voice, dividing it into similar samples, and then cryptographically protecting them before performing a comparison on the voice trying to gain access.
Computers That Can Smell, Taste & Replicate Touch Sensations
IBM predicted that within five years, computers will be able to output and recognize smells and flavors, and even replicate textures, so we can ‘feel’ fabrics before purchasing, for example. Texture data fed into a computer’s drivers can re-create vibrations and temperature on a touch screen, similar to the way some computer game controllers shake to indicate on-screen action. Digitized taste buds breaking down flavors to their molecular components can help compare them, so users can find something that tastes like a favorite food, but is healthier, or get a sense of a recipe before trying it out. Chemical sensors that enable computers to ‘smell’ could guess health problems from changes in your breath or detect environmental toxins.
Changes in the way computers ‘hear’ sound could also lead to some major breakthroughs. Hearing the ‘whole picture’ rather than isolated voices or music could allow computers to learn more about the situations in which the sounds are produced. For example, a computer could analyze the sounds of a baby crying and identify based on past experience whether the cause is need for a diaper change or food, or more serious problem. Japanese researchers are currently integrating smell technology into humanoid robots, as well.
The End of Junk Mail
(image via: Minority Report 20th Century Fox Screen Capture)
Advances in creepily targeted advertising could mean that junk mail is no longer junk. When the ads that appear in your inbox and physical mailbox are tailored specifically to your tastes and interests, you’re going to be more likely to click on them, which is exactly what marketers want. Information assembled online, through customer loyalty cards and by other means tell advertisers more than ever about your purchasing habits, your household and your income. Of course, we’re trading the annoyance of junk mail for what could be considered a serious invasion of privacy. Many consumers have no idea how much can be learned about their lives from their surfing habits.
Finely tuned junk mail filters will also help combat the constant flood of invitations to buy black market Viagra, enlarge certain body parts and claim inheritances from long-lost relatives in Nigeria.
Just like all that ambient energy, kinetic energy from movement of all sorts is a potentially rich source of power that currently goes to waste. The movement generated by trains, cars, and our own hands and feet could provide electricity to the venues in which it’s harvested. This technology is already in place at a number of human-powered gyms, dance clubs and subway stations. Treadmills, stationary bikes, roller coasters, sidewalks and handrails absorb the energy from movements and convert it into power for lights and other electrical equipment.
The chewed gum, fingernail clippings and cigarette butts you leave behind in public places could say a lot more about you than you’d like to imagine. Artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg makes this abundantly clear with her series, ‘Stranger Visions’, which reproduces people’s faces using DNA extracted from such forensic evidence collected in New York City and Brooklyn.
Dewey-Hagborg is a PhD student studying electronic arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. After extracting the DNA from her samples, she focuses on specific genomic regions, sequences them and then enters the data into a computer program, which produces a model of the face of the person who tossed that item onto the ground.
From those models, Dewey-Hagborg produces sculptures of the faces using a 3D printer. These life-sized portraits, which look similar to death masks, hang on gallery walls, often beside wooden boxes holding the original samples and showing photographs of where they were found.
The artist learned about DNA extraction from a course in molecular biology at Genspace, a do-it-yourself biology lab in Brooklyn where she does some of her work. She uses standard DNA extraction kits ordered online to analyze the DNA. The results are shockingly detailed; a mask of her own face made using the same technique shows just how accurate the results can be. However, there’s no way to tell age from DNA, so the computer produces a 25-year-old version of the person. Learn more about the process at Smithsonian.
Yet another candidate has entered the race for the world’s first 3D-printed house, with a mobile 3D printing factory in a shipping container that can produce the components on-site. Dutch studio DUS Architects plan to use the ‘KamerMaker‘ machine to print a full-size canal house in Amsterdam, one piece at a time. Work will start within the next six months.
The other two other concepts currently in the works, ProtoHouse 2.0 and Landscape House, also aim to get started on their own 3D houses by this summer. What sets the DUS Architects concept apart is the fact that its printer is mobile. The KamerMaker is 3.5 meters high and easy to transport from one place to another.
The house, which will be built in a developing area along the Buiksloter-canal, will act as a hub for 3D printed architecture. DUS aims to print the entire facade this year, as well as the first room; other rooms will come later. Once complete, the first floor will become a ‘welcoming room.’ The entire construction site will be an event space to show off the capabilities of this technology.
The KamerMaker can print structures out of recyclable materials available on location, including biodegradable plastics, giving it great potential for emergency relief architecture. DUS plans to use polypropylene as well as plastic recycled on-site to build the facade and first floor of the house. Each room in the house will be dedicated to a certain type of research, including a ‘cook room’ where researchers will experiment with 3D printing in potato starch, and a ‘policy room’ where permits for printed structures will be discussed.
The Urbee 2 is strong as steel, half the weight of a conventional vehicle, and can be manufactured in a warehouse full of plastic-spraying 3D printers. The teardrop-shaped 3D-printed car is an ecologically sound hybrid, and it looks cool, too. Aerodynamic and futuristic, this car could be a total game-changer for the automobile industry, leading to a rise of small-batch automakers.
The three-wheel, two-passenger prototype vehicle with a generously sized, curved transparent roof (also made of plastic) was constructed by Kor Ecologic at RedEye, an on-demand 3D-printing facility with a Fused Deposition Modeling printer that sprays molten polymer one microscopic layer at a time to create the desired shape. The whole car takes about 2,500 hours to manufacture, but the process is fully automated.
The Urbee 2 3D-printed car’s light weight makes it so fuel-efficient, creator Jim Kor aims to make it from San Francisco to New York City on ten gallons of gas. Kor Ecologic’s design ideals for the project include causing as little pollution as possible during manufacturing, operation and recycling of the car, using local or regional and/or recyclable materials whenever possible, and making it affordable.
You might wonder just how safe a plastic car can really be, but Kor is aiming high in that department, too. The bumpers will be just as strong as their sheet-metal equivalents. The final goal for the Urbee is not just to exceed all current automotive safety standards, but be able to pass the tech inspection required for race cars.
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A train station envisioned for the town of Sevastopol in Ukraine seems to be perpetually covered in clouds, topped with a light, helium-lifted structure inspired by airships. ‘Under the Cloud‘ consists of a passenger terminal building and a buoyant freeform canopy that hovers over the green roof of the main building.
The canopy shell has an aluminum frame with longitudinal and transverse trusses, the helium gas held inside a rigid framework in bags. With the guy lines securing it, it really does seem as if it could lift away into the sky at any moment.
Says designer Arthur Kupreychuk, “The supporting structure of the canopy is similar to the structure of an airship. The canopy strives upward by buoyancy forces, if its average density is less than the density of the atmosphere.”
What’s the purpose of this canopy? Judging by the designer’s other projects, it may just be for fun. Kupreychuk previously designed The Draft Parking Lot with the Car Service Station, another airship-inspired structure “conceived as the embodiment of the boundless creative thought of an architect, who often must try to restrict it and leave it unfulfilled.” This concept won the distinction of being “the most surreal project designed in ArchiCAD” in 2011.
In the future, will our environments constantly change around us according to the weather and our whims, without us having to lift a finger? If ‘Wallbots’ are any indication, the homes of the future might be even more adaptable than we imagined. This concept by architect and technologist Otto Ng is a mobile wall system that reconfigures itself based on real-time information.
Developed at the University of Toronto’s RAD (Responsive Architecture at Daniels), the Wallbots system is a set of ‘architectural intelligent agents’ that change spatial boundaries in a room based on weather data as well as a home’s inhabitants’ social networking and behaviors.
Each individual wallbot is equipped with electronic and kinetic systems that enable it to stretch itself from 1 meter to 1.5 meters in width by expanding its origami skin and kinetic skeleton. Free of tracks or other limitations, the walls move around the interior of a space on wheels. The Wallbots can attach to each other using electromagnetic mechanisms with infra-red positioning feedback, forming longer walls.
“Learning from scientific research in collective intelligence, WALLBOTS perform in swarm condition and communicate among themselves wirelessly. Through a feedback loop, WALLBOTS also analyze their previous experience and learn to do better configuration design for new scenarios.”
Learn more and see other projects by Otto Ng at Ottocad.net.
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Looming above the surface of the sea like a spaceship, the Water Discus Underwater Hotel is a futuristic wonder that is actually set to be constructed in Dubai. The luxurious resort features a support column connecting the upper discs to additional volumes underwater, with stairs and an elevator whisking guests up and down.
Deep Ocean Technology has released images of the planned hotel, which may be reproduced elsewhere in the Middle East. The Water Discus Underwater Hotel can work as an independent structure or be joined with additional modules to create a larger complex.
Not only does the underwater section of the hotel boast glass-walled rooms, but guests can actually manipulate a special lighting system to illuminate the water outside their windows, getting a better look at the sea life that emerges at night. For those who want to venture out into the water, there’s an underwater dive center.
Within the disc that hovers above the surface of the water is a restaurant, spa, recreation area and a lobby built inside a massive swimming pool that’s accessible from the roof. The deep pool enables guests to dive down into this disc and swim around the enclosed restaurant.
And this may just be the coolest part: if there’s any danger, like a severe weather event, the underwater disc will automatically rise to the surface. The small size of each disc also makes them easy to transport if “environmental or economic conditions” make it necessary. See more images at ArchDaily.
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