AUTHORS

Disruptomatic
Angela Natividad
Angela Natividad is a freelance copywriter, journalist and strategist based in Paris. She co-founded AdVerveBlog.com, a blog and podcast about ads and design, and writes MarketingProfs' “Get to the Point!: Social Media” newsletters. She likes people and animals, but not as much as books.
Tweet her @luckthelady.
James Martin
James Martin is the community manager of music & TV tradeshows midem & MIPTV/MIPCOM. He edits their respective industry news & trends blogs (blog.midem.com & mipblog.com) and also covers video games and technology for French cultural weekly A Nous Paris
Tweet him at @jamesmart_in
Stuart Dredge
Stuart Dredge is a freelance journalist based in the UK. He writes about digital music for Music Ally, and about apps and mobile for The Guardian, The Sunday Times and The Appside, as well as his own Apps Playground site.
Tweet him @stuartdredge

Anywhere Can Be a Keyboard.

This app turns any surface into an iPhone keyboard. Because a world in which we have one less bulky thing to carry is most definitely the world of tomorrow.

(via fastcompany)

Learn to Cook without the Burns The Tokyo Institute of Technology is producing an augmented reality cooking simulator, whose aim is, among other things, to teach you how to make the perfect steak without having to waste meat or do dishes. The frying pan is real, the utensils totally virtual. Check out the vid: The “force feedback” frying pan and spatula supposedly recreate a sense of cooking with accuracy. The pan fry interface permits 3D input, and a simulator gauges the weight of the meat and vegetables. Moving the pan aids the cooking process, just as it would in real life. You can also see visible changes caused by heating directly on your meat and vegetables. From Tokyo’s Institute of Technology: “When you move the frying pan, the actual movement is input, and you can feel the ingredients through the pan. Also, the upper part of the system is a screen. When you look into the pan, you can see what’s in it through a half-mirror. So this simulator lets you experience looking into the frying pan while you hold it.”“This technology combines a rigid-body physics engine library and a heat conduction simulator. The heat conduction state changes in line with the amount of physical contact, and the simulation is achieved by combining them.”“This system also calculates how moisture evaporates or flows as the temperature rises. It shows how protein changes color from red to brown, or how vegetables turn dark, by synthesizing textures.”“We’d like to develop this system further, so it’s helpful in actual cooking at home. It could help you make the meat you’re cooking taste even better. If it could be linked to a system that tells you, “In five minutes, your food will look like this, and in ten minutes, it will look like this. Which would you prefer?”, so this system could really help with cooking.” The only thing we can imagine lacking in this dream virtual cook-lab is the sense of smell, which is of incredible importance when gauging the readiness of food. But probably that’s the least of their problems before perfecting sensory input.Learn to Cook without the Burns The Tokyo Institute of Technology is producing an augmented reality cooking simulator, whose aim is, among other things, to teach you how to make the perfect steak without having to waste meat or do dishes. The frying pan is real, the utensils totally virtual. Check out the vid: The “force feedback” frying pan and spatula supposedly recreate a sense of cooking with accuracy. The pan fry interface permits 3D input, and a simulator gauges the weight of the meat and vegetables. Moving the pan aids the cooking process, just as it would in real life. You can also see visible changes caused by heating directly on your meat and vegetables. From Tokyo’s Institute of Technology: “When you move the frying pan, the actual movement is input, and you can feel the ingredients through the pan. Also, the upper part of the system is a screen. When you look into the pan, you can see what’s in it through a half-mirror. So this simulator lets you experience looking into the frying pan while you hold it.”“This technology combines a rigid-body physics engine library and a heat conduction simulator. The heat conduction state changes in line with the amount of physical contact, and the simulation is achieved by combining them.”“This system also calculates how moisture evaporates or flows as the temperature rises. It shows how protein changes color from red to brown, or how vegetables turn dark, by synthesizing textures.”“We’d like to develop this system further, so it’s helpful in actual cooking at home. It could help you make the meat you’re cooking taste even better. If it could be linked to a system that tells you, “In five minutes, your food will look like this, and in ten minutes, it will look like this. Which would you prefer?”, so this system could really help with cooking.” The only thing we can imagine lacking in this dream virtual cook-lab is the sense of smell, which is of incredible importance when gauging the readiness of food. But probably that’s the least of their problems before perfecting sensory input.Learn to Cook without the Burns The Tokyo Institute of Technology is producing an augmented reality cooking simulator, whose aim is, among other things, to teach you how to make the perfect steak without having to waste meat or do dishes. The frying pan is real, the utensils totally virtual. Check out the vid: The “force feedback” frying pan and spatula supposedly recreate a sense of cooking with accuracy. The pan fry interface permits 3D input, and a simulator gauges the weight of the meat and vegetables. Moving the pan aids the cooking process, just as it would in real life. You can also see visible changes caused by heating directly on your meat and vegetables. From Tokyo’s Institute of Technology: “When you move the frying pan, the actual movement is input, and you can feel the ingredients through the pan. Also, the upper part of the system is a screen. When you look into the pan, you can see what’s in it through a half-mirror. So this simulator lets you experience looking into the frying pan while you hold it.”“This technology combines a rigid-body physics engine library and a heat conduction simulator. The heat conduction state changes in line with the amount of physical contact, and the simulation is achieved by combining them.”“This system also calculates how moisture evaporates or flows as the temperature rises. It shows how protein changes color from red to brown, or how vegetables turn dark, by synthesizing textures.”“We’d like to develop this system further, so it’s helpful in actual cooking at home. It could help you make the meat you’re cooking taste even better. If it could be linked to a system that tells you, “In five minutes, your food will look like this, and in ten minutes, it will look like this. Which would you prefer?”, so this system could really help with cooking.” The only thing we can imagine lacking in this dream virtual cook-lab is the sense of smell, which is of incredible importance when gauging the readiness of food. But probably that’s the least of their problems before perfecting sensory input.

Learn to Cook without the Burns

The Tokyo Institute of Technology is producing an augmented reality cooking simulator, whose aim is, among other things, to teach you how to make the perfect steak without having to waste meat or do dishes. The frying pan is real, the utensils totally virtual.

Check out the vid:

The “force feedback” frying pan and spatula supposedly recreate a sense of cooking with accuracy. The pan fry interface permits 3D input, and a simulator gauges the weight of the meat and vegetables. Moving the pan aids the cooking process, just as it would in real life.

You can also see visible changes caused by heating directly on your meat and vegetables.

From Tokyo’s Institute of Technology:

“When you move the frying pan, the actual movement is input, and you can feel the ingredients through the pan. Also, the upper part of the system is a screen. When you look into the pan, you can see what’s in it through a half-mirror. So this simulator lets you experience looking into the frying pan while you hold it.”

“This technology combines a rigid-body physics engine library and a heat conduction simulator. The heat conduction state changes in line with the amount of physical contact, and the simulation is achieved by combining them.”

“This system also calculates how moisture evaporates or flows as the temperature rises. It shows how protein changes color from red to brown, or how vegetables turn dark, by synthesizing textures.”

“We’d like to develop this system further, so it’s helpful in actual cooking at home. It could help you make the meat you’re cooking taste even better. If it could be linked to a system that tells you, “In five minutes, your food will look like this, and in ten minutes, it will look like this. Which would you prefer?”, so this system could really help with cooking.”

The only thing we can imagine lacking in this dream virtual cook-lab is the sense of smell, which is of incredible importance when gauging the readiness of food. But probably that’s the least of their problems before perfecting sensory input.

(via thenextweb)

Sight Seeing: A trip through the mind, whenever you like

Remember when Bluetooth got cool, and we all had to mentally adjust to seeing people walking around having conversations with themselves in high-pitched voices?

The start of “Sight”, the graduation project of Bezaleal students Eran May-raz and Daniel Lazo, reminds us of that. It explores a world in which “smart” wifi-ready contact lenses are mainstream, and integration between our virtual and “actual” selves is so seamless that they inform our every activity, from gaming (awkwardly lonesome) to food preparation (deliciously gamey!) to dating (seedy and heavily profile-reliant).

The creepy lustre of the contact lenses is a little bit vampirey — that’d definitely take some getting used to — and the ending of the film is deliciously sinister. It plays with an idea we’ve flirted with for awhile: maybe the problem of tomorrow won’t be controlling our androids; it’ll be in our becoming androids. The transition won’t happen all at once or obviously; it will come, as Jesus apparently once said, “like a thief in the night.”

And just so you know, YES! — people are already working on wifi contact lenses, and they’ll be hitting the nearest cribbing college student sooner than you can say “pass those notes.”

Layar augmented reality app doing 1m monthly downloads

Layar was one of the first startups to create a buzz around mobile augmented reality, although it’s since been joined in the market by a number of rivals. Even so, Layar is pretty popular still.

“Layar now averages roughly 1 million downloads of the Layar App for iPhone and Android each month,” explains the company in a blog post. “This is a significant leap from the first quarter of 2012, when Layar downloads averaged around 500k each month.”

Layar’s AR browser app has been downloaded 23m times since it first launched. The company also says that more than 20% of its monthly downloads now come from the US, with most of the rest coming from Europe.

The company has shifted its focus a bit in recent times: whereas once it was all about pointing smartphone cameras at the real world to get data and content, now the company is doubling down on print media, working with magazines and newspapers on campaigns to attach AR content to their issues.

Disrupting Automotive: Using AR to Pick Your Next Ride

Nissan’s teamed up with the versatile and endlessly-surprising Kinect to enable people to check out its 2013 Pathfinder, inside and outside, from all angles, with a natural series of gestures. And it’s pretty specific, lending you a sense of proportion for the trunk space and even indicating where your head falls in the driver’s seat.

The idea is to give you enough sensory information via augmented reality (AR) to make an informed decision about whether the Pathfinder is right for you. (It was certainly right for my parents at least three times in their car-buying history.)

Question is, how many cars have been sold by new car smell alone? Somebody better be pumping that in from someplace.

Sony Pictures is playing with augmented reality technology for its new The Amazing Spider-Man AR app, which is out on iPhone and Android. It’s using technology from Qualcomm. The app puts Spidey into the real world. “Just locate special movie-themed AR images and scan them to unlock exclusive 3D Spider-Man interactive animations. You can see Spider-Man swing through buildings, crawl up walls, shoot his web at the screen, or engage with nefarious characters on the streets…” We’re often sceptical of AR apps as short-lived novelties, but this is marketing a blockbuster film, so it only has to be interesting for a matter of weeks. The ability to take photos of the star and share them on Facebook and Twitter may give it a flicker of virality too.

Sony Pictures is playing with augmented reality technology for its new The Amazing Spider-Man AR app, which is out on iPhone and Android. It’s using technology from Qualcomm.

The app puts Spidey into the real world. “Just locate special movie-themed AR images and scan them to unlock exclusive 3D Spider-Man interactive animations. You can see Spider-Man swing through buildings, crawl up walls, shoot his web at the screen, or engage with nefarious characters on the streets…”

We’re often sceptical of AR apps as short-lived novelties, but this is marketing a blockbuster film, so it only has to be interesting for a matter of weeks. The ability to take photos of the star and share them on Facebook and Twitter may give it a flicker of virality too.

Will AR content make people keener on the notion of buying (near-obsolete and still overpriced!) DVD’s? That’s what Universal Films is setting out to discover with specials like its Limited Edition Back to the Future collection, one of 15+ Universal films whose DVD boxes will include augmented reality easter eggs.

How it works: download the Universal 100 App, then use it to scan the cover of your spiffy new Back to the Future DVD case. AR content available will include a 3D apparition of the DeLorean, which will turn a full 360° before blasting off, somewhere in the general direction of your face.

To develop this radsauce bell-and-whistle, Universal worked with Aurasma, a tech firm that seeks to join the physical and virtual worlds via mobile. I’m just glad they’re not positioning themselves as production-level web designers, because their site looks like WordArt and GeoCities had a baby who went Wiccan. (Srsly, what is this? More importantly, who at Universal Films looked at it and said “Hey, there’s a tech startup I can finally fall in line with”?)

Charity the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has worked with mobile augmented reality startup Layar on a campaign that lets people point their smartphones at branded cards to make a 3D Earth appear, then take comedy photos of it to win a prize.

Saving the planet! Although, this being augmented reality, you’re also shagging your phone’s battery life, requiring a swifter recharge which… Oh.

Fans of AR mobile game Zombies Run will delight in the official Season 1 guide, which provides background on the outbreak, tips on what virtual supplies to scoop up, and hints on getting “hostiles” off your trail, among other things.

The document is beautifully produced and well-written. But best of all, it’s Season 1, meaning there’ll be more layers of this game to discover as everyone progresses. I can’t think of a better way to get addicted to running. And until Project Glass proves a hit, I’m hard pressed to think of a stickier marriage that’s been made between augmented reality and human ritual.

Ordering cheeseburgers will never be the same again!