As we commented earlier, printing — and imaging in general — does not need to happen in regular surfaces. Any kind of media, like food, is possible, like in the following interesting video where the authors have built a latte art printer:

It is amazing the number of custom devices to build custom objects that people built. We are smoothly advancing towards personal fabrication…

Watch out this cool video on designing furniture on the fly. A nice combination of 3D capture, rapid prototyping and great sales video — from inventorspot.

A very nice way to start personal fabrication…

As frontiers among disciplines and devices fade out, we are more likely to see natural interactions arising from many more different objects than we expect. The following example has little to do with technology (well, besides the relationship with customized toast images proposed by boldlentil), but I think it is very mind-opening:

Yammy!

In the path of making computer interfaces more natural, the Publicis & Hal Riney website proposes a very interesting method: navigate throught their website only with the webcam, without the need of a mouse. It suffices to stand at a certain distance of the camera and wave your arms to select the right and left directions.

Check it out, soon computers will be able to understand our signs, speech, body language…

In the information society we live in, sometimes we loose original names and concepts by dehumanized incomprehensible codings. In this line, the post “An online color thesaurus” permits to specify colors in natural language and to find out which is the corresponding RGB webcolor.

And you can also collaborate enlarging their database!

Oh, my God… It looks like BS is severely spreading to video resumées!!

Check out Esquire’s post on The Worst Video Resumes Ever for some pearls. You can’t miss it!

For some reason, engineers tend to value more complex solutions than simple ones.

You might have probably read the rumor of the space pen. In short, NASA developed a pen that could write in zero gravity, spending $12M and thousands of hours of work, while Russians used pencils instead. Although the story is simply a hoax, it well illustrates a principle seen in many engineering decisions: simple solutions are undervalued. High-tech, high-complexity solutions are seen as the correct ones by whole communities of experts, even if simple solutions might be just better.

I have heard in professional contexts: “Solution A is the one that works the best, but… it is too simple. We’d have a hard time justifying our job.”. Seriously. Sad but true. Simple ideas can save millions of dollars, not only because they are cheaper, more robust and perform better, but also because you can get rid of personnel that complicates things…

So here’s an history of my own. In a robot contest, which goal was to get out of a maze, we presented a radically simple design. It turns out that the kind of maze proposed can be solved by always going to the right. This was our proposal: a single wheel robot, that would turn in circles if left alone, but that sticked to the wall in its presence, and would just follow it straight ahead. Whenever there was a right turn, it would do the right turn as it turned in circles in absence of wall. A small curved arm was set to the front so that when it found a wall in the front, it would do a left turn. The results? Five times faster than any of the other competitors. And we were disqualified, of course. That was not a robot. It didn’t have chips, nor LEDs, nor IR sensors. And yet it solved the problem better than anyone else…

So, which are the stories of your own? Which are the pencils that can be used instead of pens?

Well, if we are about to talk about the future, let’s define web 4.0…

Here’s my definition: Web 4.0 = “The network owns you”.

But, which is yours?

Some people ask what is web 3.0.

Here is a simple definition: web 3.0 = “The network understands you”.

Web 3.0 is based on the concept of semantic web. Content is tagged, it can be transferred across websites. Today, if a search agent looks for information, it needs to parse the text of the webpages that provide the information. In web 3.0, websites will be able to transact information, as if it was a huge database.

So, what is in it for users? Basically, this structure will enable to provide you the contents you are looking for. When you google a restaurant address, you will no longer searching a text string but an actual address. Supposedly, you’ll get better and faster results, and a bunch of added functionality — e.g. when your browser knows what are you dealing with, it might propose a map, a cab or to make a reservation.

You could start your own web 3.0 right now…

Logitech just launched MX Air, a mouse that operates in the air… You just point the screen, leaning back in your sofa, and the cursor follows…

Who knows if you will be able to command also the air conditioning and the blinds. And why not neighbour’s tv volume, that would be a nice feature…

A great move towards natural user interfaces. The future is closer!