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February 17, 2006
February 13, 2006
Adrian David Cheok Augmented Reality Lecture at ACC
The IMD and the Annenberg Center are hosting a lecture by Adrian David Cheok, Director of the Interaction and Entertainment Research Center at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Professor Cheok will discuss his extensive experience in the field of augmented reality (AR), such as, for example, Human Pacman, which, based on the popular arcade from the 1980s, co-registers a 3D game space onto a real-world-physical, social, and wide area mobile entertainment system.
PLACE: USC Annenberg Center
734 W. Adams Blvd. between Hoover and Figueroa
street parking available
DATE: Monday, February 13th, 2006
TIME: 3:00 - 4:30 pm
Bio: Adrian David Cheok is Associate Professor in both the Schools of Computer Engineering and Art, Design, and Media. He has previously worked in real-time systems, soft computing, and embedded computing in Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (Osaka, Japan) and NUS. He has been working on research covering mixed reality, human-computer interaction, wearable computers and smart spaces, fuzzy systems, embedded systems, power electronics, and multi-modal recognition. He is currently an Associate Professor at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore where he leads a team of over 20 researchers and students. He has been a keynote and invited speaker at numerous international and local conferences and events. He is invited to exhibit for two years in the Ars Electronica Museum of the Future, launching in the Ars Electronica Festival 2003. He was IEEE Singapore Section Chairman 2003, and is presently ACM SIGCHI Chapter President.
February 3, 2006
Spin-on & the LAPD's "big new" tactical medium
Boing Boing writes about how "The Los Angeles Police Department is showing off a new GPS-enabled dart to help cops catch criminals who are speeding away. StarChase's Pursuit Management System consists of a tiny GPS receiver/cellular transmitter in a glue compound. The police officer uses an air launcher to fire the tracking device at the fleeing vehicle. The device then wirelessly transmits its location for display on a Web-based interface. From the Los Angeles Times: (LAPD Chief William J.) Bratton hailed the dart as "the big new idea"..."
While technology that originated with military training has "spun-off" to many new areas within the government and in non-military applications, some observers now how the military now often tend to absorb of "spin-on" ideas from civilian technology development. On this note, to me the GPS dart brings brings to mind an innovative hacker project, the BlueSniper, pictured here, and shown at last year's Defcon. While BlueSniper serves a quite different function than does the awkwardly named Pursuit Management System, with the former having been developed by hackers, it's not so hard to imagine the latter being presented as a proposal by radical hactivists as a technique for tagging and tracking the movements of, say, certain extaordinary rendition procedures.