I Know What You Did Last Errand
Here are some of the things that stores — physical, street-side stores — might know about you from your recent visit to them:
• your age
• your gender
• your mood as you travel through the store
• how long you spend in each section of the store
• which items you spend time looking at during your visit
• how long you looked at an item before purchasing it
• which of the store’s products you previously looked up on the store’s website
• your purchase history with the store
• the number of times you recently visited the store
• the average time elapsed between your visits to the storeRead more. [Image: Shutterstock/Kzenon]
This subway library has posters of books and scannable barcodes—zap ‘em with your phone to get a 10-page preview while you ride!
A cool project proposed by a group of Miami Ad School students. Commuters who scan a book’s title not only can read the first ten pages of that book, but can learn, via near-field communication (NFC) technology, which nearby library has the book. Read more about the idea on Design Taxi here.
Gotta say, this is a leading contender for bookshelf of the week.
Yvette Vickers, a former Playboy playmate and B-movie star, best known for her role in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, would have been 83 last August, but nobody knows exactly how old she was when she died. According to the Los Angeles coroner’s report, she lay dead for the better part of a year before a neighbor and fellow actress, a woman named Susan Savage, noticed cobwebs and yellowing letters in her mailbox, reached through a broken window to unlock the door, and pushed her way through the piles of junk mail and mounds of clothing that barricaded the house. Upstairs, she found Vickers’s body, mummified, near a heater that was still running. Her computer was on too, its glow permeating the empty space.
The Los Angeles Times posted a story headlined “Mummified Body of Former Playboy Playmate Yvette Vickers Found in Her Benedict Canyon Home,” which quickly went viral. Within two weeks, by Technorati’s count, Vickers’s lonesome death was already the subject of 16,057 Facebook posts and 881 tweets. She had long been a horror-movie icon, a symbol of Hollywood’s capacity to exploit our most basic fears in the silliest ways; now she was an icon of a new and different kind of horror: our growing fear of loneliness. Certainly she received much more attention in death than she did in the final years of her life. With no children, no religious group, and no immediate social circle of any kind, she had begun, as an elderly woman, to look elsewhere for companionship. Savage later told Los Angeles magazine that she had searched Vickers’s phone bills for clues about the life that led to such an end. In the months before her grotesque death, Vickers had made calls not to friends or family but to distant fans who had found her through fan conventions and Internet sites.
Vickers’s web of connections had grown broader but shallower, as has happened for many of us. We are living in an isolation that would have been unimaginable to our ancestors, and yet we have never been more accessible. Over the past three decades, technology has delivered to us a world in which we need not be out of contact for a fraction of a moment. In 2010, at a cost of $300 million, 800 miles of fiber-optic cable was laid between the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange to shave three milliseconds off trading times. Yet within this world of instant and absolute communication, unbounded by limits of time or space, we suffer from unprecedented alienation. We have never been more detached from one another, or lonelier. In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society. We live in an accelerating contradiction: the more connected we become, the lonelier we are. We were promised a global village; instead we inhabit the drab cul-de-sacs and endless freeways of a vast suburb of information.
Read more. [Image: Phillip Toledano]
QR codes used to encourage citizens to adopt neighborhood trees
The District of Columbia’s Department of Transportation has recently launched a new scheme as part of its Canopy Keepers project, which enables residents to easily adopt a newly-planted tree using QR codes. READ MORE…
Grammar-based CAPTCHAs. Yes, please.
After losing both of his legs in a climbing accident, biophysicist Hugh Herr says he became motivated to do something worthwhile with his life. Today he runs the Biomechatronics group at the MIT Media Lab and designs better prosthetic limbs for other amputees: “My biological body will degrade in time due to normal, age-related degeneration. But the artificial part of my body improves in time because I can upgrade.” [complete interview here]
Inspiring.
There are already two Augmented Reality art exhibitions (in 3 locations) using the Layar platform so far this month.
The first runs from April 7-May 1 in Philadelphia, PA as part of the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts (PIFA). This exhibition is a collaboration between Breadboard, a hybrid program at the University City Science Center dedicated to exploring the intersection of art, science and technology, and Layar Partner VPAP (Virtual Public Art Project).
VPAP@PIFA features 25 works of art placed strategically around around the city (like on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, for instance). These 3D AR models include, but are not limited to, a giant alien snake (see image, right), a deformed foot that changes color, and a giant squid.
[Mark Skwarek‘s “Occupation Forces” at the (Un)seen Sculptures exhibit in Sydney/Melbourne Australia.]
Meanwhile, another ARt exhibition called (Un)seen Sculptures kicks off on April 9 in Sydney, Australia as part of the Surry Hills Festival then reopens in Melbourne on April 30.