And from my column this week, “a new iPhone app can give each of our ephemeral tweets a toehold in the real world.”
The app, TwittARound, peppers your iPhone’s camera view with the icons of Twitter users who may be tweeting nearby, and whose tweets are somehow connected to your current location.
The Twitter icons you’ll see show who is closest to you, but placing those on top of other icons.
via iPhone app adds tweets, audio to camera view – The Boston Globe.
Linden Lab chairman Mitch Kapor and developer Philippe Bossut today demonstrated a camera-based motion recog system that controls your avatar’s movements in Second Life. Looks good on the video, below…
With a 3D viewing headset (such as the augmented reality headset imagined here), you would have your own at-home 3DVR “cave” for exploring the metaverse.
Incredibly, we are just years, perhaps only months, away from very discreet (i.e., they won’t take over your livingroom), immersive experiences, at home.
And it will cost a fraction of what 3DVR caves, such as the one at Brown University (an elaborate mix of multiple projectors, hand and head tracking devices, and a stack of Linux servers).
Of course, the more seamless metaversal interfaces become, the more likely people will start forgetting where they really are.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2t52gkAwJq8&eurl=http://secondlife.reuters.com/stories/2008/04/11/mitch-kapor-unveils-sl-navigation-via-3d-camera/]
[digg=http://digg.com/hardware/SL_3D_hardware_near_complete_immersion]
Service leaves city’s toughest neighborhoods off the map
Not for everybody: Street views highlight downtown, business districts.
Google today added Boston to its growing list of U.S. cities featuring on-the-ground, street level views of people and places.
You can eyeball Newbury Street fashionistas dining alfresco.
But Boston’s roughest neighborhoods, in Mattapan and Dorchester, are not included in Street Views. Those are the areas in which most of the city’s homocides took place in 2007.
– Mark Baard
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Don’t bother running. You can’t hide from Google’s cameras.
The Boston Globe is jazzed about Google Maps’ new “street view” feature (see clip at the end of this post).
But I’m thinking of the chilling effect–knowing that your picture, taken on the street and posted to Google Maps, will link your identity with the locations you happen to be passing through.
I think of all the strip joints, porno shops, people pass as they walk and cycle around San Francisco, New York and Boston. (Boston street views are not yet available.)
Google’s street views sends a clear message: If value your reputation (or “if you’ve got nothing to hide,” as some “sheeple” say), you will now have to watch where you are seen.
It is also conceivable that Google’s unwitting subjects (considering that Google is using their images for profit), will flood the internet giant with lawsuits. Parents of children caught up in the dragnet, clergy and officials snapped in their cities’ red light districts, where they might be working legitimately–all might find cause to bring action against Google.
Meanwhile, be on the lookout for this van (immediately below), which is reportedly carrying the cameramen for Google…
And here’s a quick shot of my old First Avenue digs in Manhattan, courtesy of the new Google feature:
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