Headline, December09, 2013

''' TECHNOLOGY ::: = 

! INJURY TIME ^ '''

With loving caring dedication, to all of you studying  ''Technology''. When you get to face up, you will have to squawk : ''Lost Procedures''.

Any bets? 

And did somebody whisper : ''Self Accutalization!!'' So, see ya all on !WOW!

A bunch of trends are colliding to bring on the injury time. Body-mapping software has reached that futuristic Minority Report stage whereby a mere wave of your arm lets you zoom into a map or change a TV channel.

Face-recognition technology will not only estimate your age and ethnic origin, it also seeks to predict your mood. EEG-based brainwave electrodes are starting to let disabled people use thought to control wheelchairs.

Then there's voice recognition, which even today ensures that any Google Nexus One Phone can pretty accurately transcribe as you talk  -before instantly translating whole sentences instantly into Chinese or German and then reading out those sentences    -think Dr Stephen Hawking in a Mandarin accent.

When a highly respected journalist visited Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California some time ago, Sergey Brin disclosed that within the next 20 years or so, Google will have mastered    ''artificial intelligence''   to the extent that you won't know if you're talking to a person or a bot.

Eradicating the game handset is just a small part of that revolution   -but one which starts to suggest how we'll be interacting with all sorts of devices. ''All interfaces will become much more naturalistic and intuitive, and it's not just gaming.'' says Ashley Highfield, Microsoft's UK MD.

''It's the ability to control TV through gestures such as hand-waving with the system knowing that because there are two of you on the sofa you'll want different EPGs. Once a device recognizes you, puts you into the event, then everything changes. It's pretty profound.''

You can get a sense of what's already possible by searching YouTube for a video demonstration of Milo,  an interactive  on-screen character being developed for Natal by British game creator Lionhead Studios. 

Milo talks back intelligently to a real-life woman chatting to him through the TV screen, he even reads her facial expression to detect her mood.

And although there's a certain online scepticism about the veracity of the demo's real-time action, Peter Molyneux, the Lionhead Studios boss whose team is leading much of the Project Natal work, sees the potential as vast. 

''It's not just motion control, it's vision. It's recognizing you. It's hearing you,'' he says. 

''For me as a designer, I'm having to go back to school. One thing that will created by Natal, and I'll bet money on it, is a whole new genres of games  -not- defined by controllers.''

So why does this matter if you don't play games? Because all the tech is bridging the gap between our digital lives and the real world  -and in a way that needs no handset. Remember the Minority Report scene in which Tom Cruise waves his hands through the air to interrogate a computer data base?

Two MIT students, Tony Hyun Kim and Nevada Sanchez, have just developed augmented reality gloves that let you navigate and manipulate a map simply by waving your hands   -at a cost of just £65. 

Nearby at MIT's Media Lab, researcher Pranav Mistry has bolted together a webcam, a battery-powered projector and a mirror to track gestures.

Turn your fingers into a picture frame and the camera takes a photo. Hold an airline boarding pass and you'll be directed to the departure gate. Draw an   ''@''   in the air and up flashes e-mail.

Mistry calls his device    ''SixthSense'' .   Sure, sure that's one more than humans are meant to have.  But if it helps our other five senses interact more effectively with the outside world,

who wouldn't want an upgrade?

Yes, we are, quiet simply, entering a new era of sentient devices, with intelligent technologies responding reliably to our physical movements, our spoken commands, even our brain patterns before we start to move. 

And that rewrites all the rules about how man relates to machine.

With respectful dedication to the Students, Professors and Teachers of Japan. See Ya all on !WOW! the World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless:

''' Get More Out Of Life '''

Good Night & God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless