• • Up until recently, the view of most people was that interacting with the digital world would mean “jacking in” to some sort of fully-simulated virtual reality environment. However, a recent confluence of technologies is beginning to birth a new outlook on digital interaction: Augmented Reality.
  • Current iterations of AR technology are exemplified by the iPhone 3GS. This state-of-the-art phone combines ample storage space (up to 32 Gb), GPS location, compass, video camera, impressive processing and RAM capacity (for doing complex visual recognition), and touch-screen interaction. These integrated, high-quality elements make the iPhone a good platform for writing AR applications.
  • AR interfaces overlay digital information over our analog sight system (eyes) through technological mediation of some sort. This mediation can be in the form of images projected directly on the retina, through a loupe or other viewing device (such as a phone), and maybe one day through direct ocular prostheses.
  • Augmented Reality applications include a wide range of industries, including manufacturing, military and emergency-response, prospecting, architecture and other real-world design fields, sight-seeing, collaboration (usually with the name “mixed reality”), and entertainment.
  • Some existing examples of augmented reality for iPhone include:
    • Le Bar Guide, sponsored by Stella Artois, transforms the iPhone into a loupe: hold it up and turn, and it will tell you where the nearest Stella-serving bar is located, as well as give you reviews and indications of amenities.
    • Car Finder solves a minor annoyance that many people face; namely, the “where did I park” moment that people experience upon leaving a shopping center or other location with a large parking lot. Simply ping your location upon leaving your car, and when you’re ready to return, the application will guide you on the quickest path back to where you’ve parked.

1. Telepresence of witnesses to grant the order for intervening.
2. Quick laser cutting of a ball of wood.
3. Wood-grain hashing.
4. The tube that the wooden red ball comes down is quite anachronistic.
5. Human-Computer Interaction, including the stretching for three screens, time scrubbing, wipe-to-select, and lasso-and-grab.
6. Hyper-Cross-Referencing of different databases to find out the scene of the crime.
7. Precognition, including the dichotomy between “pre-meditated” and “passion” crimes, the erasing of memory, and the displaying of thoughts on the screen.
8. Flying police car and personal jetpacks.
9. The “Halo” restraint device.
10. Omni-surface screens, used for advertising a precrime PSA.
11. Drugs, including “Clarity” and “Neuroin.”
12. Voice Activated Mood for home (“I’m Home,” “Overhead”)
13. Transparent screen technology, with auxillary screens such as “Wall screen” and 3D projection.
14. Cars with no drivers and federated decision-making and traffic flow.
15. “Absolute Metaphysics.”
16. A paper warrant. (anachronistic)
17. “Optical Tomography”
18. Rapid Eye scanning.
19. Cryostorage for Jail.
20. Personalized advertisements while walking (futuristic Spam).
21. Live-Updating digital newspaper (USA Today)

Each of these poses interesting questions for “could it happen” and “what are the consequences,” which I hope to explore in my paper/presentation.

Population evolution in different continents. The vertical axis is logarithmic and is millions of people.

Consider the different methods of making predictions that we went over in class. Pick the topic of your choice, apply them to that topic, and make some predictions about the future. You may focus on one scenario, or discuss alternative scenarios as well. You may write speculatively, or ground your discussion in facts and examples found on the Web or elsewhere. If purely speculatively without hunting down data on the Web, then more writing would make sense than if much of your time was spent finding data. A variation to a purely speculative essay would be to couch it as a short story, like a science fiction story. Alternatively, you can write a computer program that makes predictions, for example using the exponential curve equation or some other approach. In this vein, you could use Excel or another spreadsheet program to extrapolate. If you want to do something like that but aren’t sure how, let me know and we can discuss in class how to use spreadsheets this way.

• When will our species, Homo sapiens sapiens become extinct? Logically, the race must die out eventually (entropy must increase to maximum), but will that be years, centuries, millennia, or longer before that happens? And when it does, will it have been coming off a steady decline or will it happen sharply? Some (including Paul Davies and Martin Rees) think that recent advances in technology—without corresponding increases in sense of social responsibility—will be our downfall. Isaac Asimov’s The Last Question posits that the end of the race will happen at the end of the universe, when “the stars and Galaxies died and snuffed out, and space grew black after ten trillion years of running down.”
• Applying prediction methods, particularly the Plateau model, looks to work for this problem. What goes up, must come down, after all.  The included graph charts, logarithmically, the human growth rate. It looks like most (with the exception of Africa) are either trending toward evening out, or downward (Europe).  I think that the European curve is a bell-weather for the other continents, even though it may take decades for them to “catch up.” Eventually, the growth rate will trend down overall, and the human population will decrease (on Earth), peaking at around 9-10 billion humans near 2050, according to a 2006 UN World Population Prospects report.

Part 2

a)Estimate the doubling time of the software development productivity of the average programmer, if productivity increases at 6%/year.

• doubling time = 11.895 years

b)Estimate the percent per year of increases in the complexity of PC computers if this complexity doubles every 2 years. (By “complexity” we could say we’re talking about the number of transistors on a CPU chip, if you were wondering.)

• %/year = 1.4142

c)Estimate the percent per year of increases in the complexity of PC computers if complexity doubles every 18 months, as some think it is doing.

• %/year = 1.5874

d)What is the doubling time of your money if you have it in the bank making 2% interest per year?

• doubling time = 35.0016