Several hundred fans and a team of archaeologists traveled to a New Mexico landfill to dig up thousands of buried “E.T.” cartridges, relics of the video-game industry’s collapse in the ’80s: http://nyr.kr/1mdGMAp
Photograph: Fuel Entertainment.
“Infographic as impossibility in its purest form”
They just wanna mess with your mind a little.
These 3-D Printed Houses From China Appear In Just A Few Hours
They won’t win any beauty contest, but a Chinese company has figured out how to print practical homes from waste materials—all for half the cost of conventional construction.
Read: Is the Oculus Rift sexist?
Although there was variability across the board, biological men were significantly more likely to prioritize motion parallax.Biological women relied more heavily on shape-from-shading. In other words, men are more likely to use the cues that 3D virtual reality systems relied on.
This, if broadly true, would explain why I, being a woman, vomited in the CAVE: My brain simply wasn’t picking up on signals the system was trying to send me about where objects were, and this made me disoriented.
My guess is that this has to do with the level of hormones in my system. If that’s true, someone undergoing hormone replacement therapy, like the people in the Utrecht gender clinic, would start to prioritize a different cue as their therapy progressed.
I’m not a fan of the clickbait-y headline (and I’m surprised there isn’t a huge shitshow about this on Twitter yet), but this is an amazing piece, and not just because how many cool projects have you worked on in your life, danah? JEEZ.
I didn’t read the study in detail but even at a high level, I love this line of thinking for remembering to investigate the usually invisible assumptions that lay so far at the bottom of the technological stack that we forget they were ever decisions and not simply immutable facts. A group of male computer graphics engineers casually test out a prototype amongst themselves decades ago and their skewed findings become the foundation for something as fundamental as 3D rendering. By the time something like Oculus comes along, so many layers of abstraction have been built on top of this simple assumption that the metaphorical princesses don’t even realize that it’s a pea that’s making them uncomfortable.
This is just the latest (and most personally relevant at the moment) case of this phenomenon at work. So much poor design by convenient exclusion works this way. Remember that time HP and Nikon engineers calibrated facial recognition algorithms only for white people? These design choices are very powerful and long-lasting side-effects (and sometimes enforcers!) of privilege, but they are often invisible and (if I’m being generous) unwitting.
The single most important sentence I read in my undergraduate studies was this one, from Wendy Chun: “People may deny ideology, but they don’t deny software—and they attribute to software, metaphorically, greater powers than have attributed to ideology.” These days, people are getting a lot better at denying software, but in our world of complicated dependencies that transcend nations and decades, it’s nearly impossible to grasp the entire tech tree of research and production that leads to a final product. But hey, that’s what we have academics for, right?
And you know, call me crazy, but as much as these stories are facepalm-worthy, they also make me optimistic in a weird way. Getting designers and researchers to be more aware and intentional about their choices isn’t easy but is doable. We can keep surfacing these pain points, push for awareness, and then maybe—mayyyybeee??—we can make the future a little more evenly distributed.
I wanted to see if I could create something that is emotional between people. Existing games are about killing each other or killing something together. The idea of social emotion means people need to share feelings. At that moment, the players are in sync. The problem [with many games] is there’s no chance to share emotion. Most of them are busy, [there are] explosions everywhere. So we got rid of all the background noise and we had to get rid of the guns.
I feel like jeans and a T-shirt have become Establishment … Everyone’s dressing down. So actually putting on a jacket is the anti-Establishment stance.
SCiO
This is a bit future-shock …
A small consumer-level molecular scanner lets you analyze the objects around you for relevant information, from food calories or quality, medicine, nature etc … This could be the start of the Internet of Everything
The Kickstarter was launched yesterday and made it’s $200,000 goal within 24 hours – the potential for this tech is huge. Watch the video embedded below to see the potential:
Smartphones made it easy to research facts, capture images, and navigate street maps, but they haven’t brought us closer to the physical environment in which we live – until now.
Meet SCiO. It is the world’s first affordable molecular sensor that fits in the palm of your hand. SCiO is a tiny spectrometer and allows you to get instant relevant information about the chemical make-up of just about anything around you, sent directly to your smartphone.
Out of the box, when you get your SCiO, you’ll be able to analyze food, plants, and medications.
For example, you can:
Get nutritional facts about different kinds of food: salad dressings, sauces, fruits, cheeses, and much more. See how ripe an Avocado is, through the peel! Find out the quality of your cooking oil. Know the well being of your plants. Analyze soil or hydroponic solutions. Authenticate medications or supplements. Upload and tag the spectrum of any material on Earth to our database. Even yourself !You can find out more about the product at it’s Kickstarter page here