The World's First and Oldest Cyborg

I just noticed recently that Steve Mann, formerly of MIT and now a professor at the University of Toronto, has been actively involved in some of the things I am interested in, for quite a while. Not just wearable computers, which I am waiting impatiently for, but image processing and interpreting. He has developed a program - Video Orbits - for stitching together video into stills. One property of note: If the video zooms, then the image formed in that region has higher resolution. If the exposure changes, then the dynamic range of the image increases. It's like layering data upon data.
Professor Mann has been wearing a computer for almost 30 years, as shown in the above illustration. Of most interest to me is the idea of augmented reality, wherein the computer looks at and interprets what you are looking at, and simultaneously overlays helpful information on the scene. This information could include directions to a destination ("follow the yellow line"), a name tag for someone you run into whose name you should remember but don't, or any other sort of context-relevant information.
The sensing/display device that is being studied and (hopefully) developed is called the EyeTap. Within its tiny-enough-to-wear eyeglass frame is both a camera and a display. A beam splitter sends light to the camera, and also beam-combines the image from a micro-display into your field of view.
I'm not sure how far anyone has gotten with the tough problem of image understanding, but a quick Google search lists several links to universities involved with it. It involves face and object recognition, 3D perception and probably a lot more.

Arduino

I've been playing around with a neat little micro- controller develop- ment board called Arduino. It has built in I/O for sensing and controlling the outside world. A great development environment too; it only takes moments to set up the software under Linux or Windows.
So far I've lit up LEDs, generated a waveform for display on an oscilloscope, and run a DC motor using pulse width modulation. And it has all been very easy to learn the C-based programming language.
I'm working a laser display project right now for a friend. Soon I will be working on some "Mad Scientist" display ideas for Halloween.

More Spatio-Temporal Warping

Here are a couple more demo clips from the team that brought you Spatio-Temporal Warping.
In these clips, a video pan of a scene is converted to a panorama with all activity occuring at the same time.
To really enjoy it, be sure to watch both the before and the after video. Link is in the title, above.

2D Video to VR Environment and Characters

For the last few months, I've been thinking a lot about what I would ultimately do with the hours of video I have taken over the course of my children's lives so far. I can't imagine actually watching all of that video, or even trying to edit it down. I don't really want to experience it in a linear fashion. After all, I was there. And while I may have experienced it through the viewfinder of a camera, still - I was there.

I've concluded that what would be useful would be to have a computer watch the video for me!
The computer would interpret the video, identifying the time and place, capturing the environment, and digitizing the people, creating photo-realistic 3D avatars of them.
In the long run, these videos will eventually be incorporated into my own (augmented) memory. The people's behaviors would be catalogued and pattern-recognized to the point that realistic simulations of the people - at various ages - could be made. I could have conversations and interactions with those who were no longer with me.

I can see that, ultimately, the computer's AI will be sufficient to really interpret the videos as well as I could if I were watching them. It would generate new memories, very similarly to what would happen to me - my memory "refreshed" - if I were to watch them.

Of course the computers of today aren't quite there yet. They are only now able to recognize the environment well enough to drive at about 14 miles an hour.

I would really like to see this technology developed, and I would like to know as much about it as I can. I have started (in my mid-life now) reading up on projective geometry, C++ programming and so on so that I can do some hobbyist-level playing around with this technology. I look forward to the day when the tools start to exist that would enable me to begin tackling these piles of videos I have here at home.

Thanks to a fellow named Augusto Roman (thanks for the link!), I now have a tool that will get me started. It's called Voodoo. It's camera tracking software that will "watch" a video clip and create both a point cloud of what is in the video, and a camera path. Both of these things can be exported to Blender, a free (and quite powerful) 3D animation package. I am now planning to try this with a few video clips. Of course, the package assumes a static scene with just the camera moving (if I understand it correctly), so I know it (by itself) isn't going to get me to the goal of separating out the moving objects from the environment. But it is a start.

Voodoo Camera Tracker is at: http://www.digilab.uni-hannover.de/docs/manual.html

Lunar - Hybrid Awaken

I have been listening to some wonderful music by an artist known as "Lunar". His whole album is available FREE for download, or you can buy a CD for 12 bucks. You can stream the music right from the website (link is in title, above).
If you like the music, you will want to make a contribution to the artist. I did!

Spatio-Temporal Video Warping

Check out the videos on this academic page (link in title).
These investigators are inventing new tools for navigating the 3 dimensional data cube of a video stream, and rearranging it spatio-temporally. You will see a demonstration of several time-warping effects. In one, a panoramic video is created out of a pan of a waterfall. In the panorama, the water falls at the same time, even though the imagery was taken at different times! In another demo, the demolition of a coliseum is shown, and in different versions of the demolition, different parts of the structure give way in different sequences. In yet another, the investigators can choose who wins in a swim meet. Check it out!

Sentient Rights in Accelerando

Here's an interesting quote from Charles Stross's book, "Accelerando."

"How you got here:
The center of the solar system - Mercury, Venus, Earth's Moon, Mars, the asteroid belt, and Jupiter - have been dismantled, or are being dismantled, by weakly godlike intelligences. [NB: Monotheistic clergy and Europeans who remember living prior to 1600, see alternative memeplex "in the beginning."] A weakly godlike intelligence is not a supernatural agency, but the product of a highly advanced society that learned how to artificially create souls [late 20th century: software] and translate human minds into souls and vice versa. [Core concepts: Human beings all have souls. Souls are software objects. Software is not immortal.]
Some of the weakly godlike intelligences appear to cultivate an interest in their human antecedents - for whatever reason is not known. (Possibilities include the study of history through horticulture, entertainment through live-action role-playing, revenge, and economic forgery.) While no definitive analysis is possible, all the resimulated persons to date exhibit certain common characteristics: They are all based on well-documented historical persons, their memories show suspicious gaps [see: smoke and mirrors], and they are ignorant of or predate the singularity [see: Turing Oracle, Vinge catastrophe].
It is believed that the weakly godlike agencies have created you as a vehicle for the introspective study of your historical antecedent by backward- chaining from your corpus of documented works, and the back-projected genome derived from your collateral descendants, to generate an abstract description of your computational state vector. This technique is extremely intensive [see: expTime-complete algorithms, Turing Oracle, time travel, industrial magic] but marginally plausible in the absence of supernatural explanations.
After experiencing your life, the weakly godlike agencies have expelled you. For reasons unknown, they chose to do this by transmitting your upload state and genome/proteome complex to receivers owned and operated by a consortium of charities based on Saturn. These charities have provided for your basic needs, including the body you now occupy.
In summary: You are a reconstruction of someone who lived and died a long time ago, not a reincarnation. You have no intrinsic moral right to the identity you believe to be your own, and an extensive body of case law states that you do not inherit your antecedent's possessions. Other than that, you are a free individual.
Note that fictional resimulation is strictly forbidden. If you have reason to believe that you may be a fictional character, you must contact the city immediately. [ See: James Bond, Spider Jerusalem.] Failure to comply is a felony."

I like the idea of a future AI that mines all historical documents, and recreates people based on them. As I have said, I'm hoping for a day when, either through augmentation, or in the course of being uploaded, my own mind can be fully mined (get it? my mind mined) for trace memories that can form the framework of a fully interactive memory space that allows me to revisit my parents, childhood friends, and family members as they were in those times. The AI will collate and index the memories, and may use logical processes to fill in my memory gaps.
In "Accelerando" though, something else is going on. The AI creates people for whom no neural structure is available. It's mining external documents - birth records, publications, the paper trail an entire life leaves behind - and recreating personality from those traces. There's even concern that some of these people might be fictional characters. These constructs believe they are the actual people they are modeled on. The society receiving these people, in the form of data packets, feel morally compelled to instantiate them, rather than just filing them in a memory store.
In today's world there are people reaching the end of their natural lifetimes who elect to have their heads - or even their whole bodies - held in stasis against decay in a bath of liquid nitrogen. Assuming that they can be reconstructed from this material - and I, for one, am almost certain they can - whose responsibility will it be to bring them back? Do they have a claim to a savings policy if one was set up for them? For they have just gone through a period in which they had no property rights whatsoever. This may be a moral question for us in the not-too- distant future.