robots and avatars

I was invited to a lunchtime discussion in London at NESTA: Robots and Avatars – our colleagues and playmates of the future organised and chaired by Ghislaine Boddington of body>data>space
The conversation was kicked off by provocateur Noel Sharkey who is Professor of AI, Robotics and Public Engagement. Lovely combination! It was an interesting and wide ranging conversation with input from people from different disciplines, including Hazel Grian who has been developing her own robot project as part of an artist's residency at the Pervasive Media Studio,
The lunchtime talk was documented and will be disseminated online as part of Robots and Avatars ongoing research. It's a great site to look at for finding out more about what's going on in the world of robots and avatars, and how these developments might affect the future of work and education.

playing with QR codes again

To find out what this is about, go and download a QR code reader to your cameraphone. The QR code reader is a piece of software that you open up on your phone and it will use the camera to take a picture of this funny square and then display what information is embedded in the pixels.

I use a reader from i-nigma.com
They have a long list of supported devices, i.e. gadgets you can use to run the QR code reader. I found it better to search for the right software on my laptop and then download it to my phone.
I have found that I tend to stop and scan QR codes now just to see what's there.

smugness and 'free' software

So, today I had to try and transcribe a sound file that was recorded on my mobile phone. Needless to say it was in a format the windows media player could not understand, so I downloaded Audacity to listen to it. I have been meaning to do this for a while because Audacity is a really useful piece of free (or make a donation) software that I like to show to groups that I work with so they don't think they have to fork out huge amounts of their budget for microsoft/apple software. I also like to show people another suite of 'free' software; Open Office, which I use instead of Microsoft Office. Open Office will open and save to most other common formats, whether it's text, spreadsheet or presentation (eg .doc, .xls, .ppt) and I use it all the time for work. you can export to .pdf from it too.

Back to sound editing: I did have to download the beta (ie not entirely predictable) version of Audacity so that it would run on windows 7 on my netbook, and with the beta version I could also download a plug in to get Audacity to recognise .amr files (the format to which my phone records sounds). This plug in will recognise various file formats that I have had trouble opening in the past, so fingers crossed, next time I have a range of sound files to work with it will be easier.

And it works, it seems. So now I am feeling pretty smug. And I had better go finish the transcription.

fashion and technology

The fashion world seems to be embracing technology more and more - loved this fashionpopcorn blog post about an Oasis launch that used quite a simple device to engage people, with specially commissioned poetry running on MP3 players for the audience. Artistically presented. I like that they also produced paper-based versions for people to take away as souvenirs.

Will be keeping an eye on this.

launch of the DCRC

Had a great time yesterday at the official launch of the Digital Cultures Research Centre. I met some interesting people and reconnected with old friends and collaborators who had come down to see what we are planning to do. It's an exciting time for all of us at the DCRC, and I am really pleased to be part of a great team of people. I even joined in with my colleagues, to draw with Tine Bech's lights, but refused the lure of the karaoke salon. I have seen the photos...............

don't forget your fiducial

I just popped out in my lunchbreak to watch some colleagues having fun playing with the Sancho Plan's new project on the BBC Big Screen outside the Pervasive Media Studio. They had to wave big cards with patterns on that triggered animated characters to appear on the screen and sing together in harmony.



Apologies for the flicker effect

Ada Lovelace Day

So here we are and it's Ada Lovelace Day again, when we are meant to blog about women we admire who are working in technology. Last year I wrote about my youngest daughter, admiring her tenaciousness at getting equal time to play with technology. This year in a spirit of shameless self-promotion I want to celebrate my two older daughters, who are now working together, and with me, developing ideas for new media/technology projects and cooking up plans for an interesting joint future