Lunch Talk. Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life and New Worlds.

"Jeremy Bailenson [of Stanford University] shares his research on virtual reality, avatars, transformed social interaction, and related communication and psychological theories, as well as implications for citizens living in the digital age."

tags: information, entertainment, virtual, environment

The beginning of the real green revolution.

Electric cars and less expensive batteries begin playing the role of dynamic storage that can respond to variations in supply of local solar or intermittent wind energy. It's far from a breakthrough, but it's a good first step.

The system uses the Leaf charging station to draw from the car's lithium ion batteries and feed current into a home's electricity distribution panel. The 24 kilowatt-hours of energy storage in the Leaf is enough to power an average Japanese home, which uses about half the energy of an average U.S. household, for about two days.

If a person pays a higher price for electricity during peak times, it's possible that charging a battery at night and drawing on it during peak times could save consumers money. That's the vision of many battery companies which envision home energy storage as a way to store energy from the grid or solar panels.

The problem with Nissan's proposed setup is that after the car battery is drained, e.g. during a blackout, it becomes useless for transportation too. Not good. They need a source of cheap and/or intermittent energy that would be wasted if not stored in the battery.

In system terms, they have to solve a synthesis problem, not just graft Leaf onto an existent grid. Maybe they should make a deal with Google to build distributed local storage infrastructure.


tags: innovation, synthesis, storage, s-curve, source, control, energy, 4q diagram, environment, trade-off, breakthrough, example

An article in NYT about how market for electronic chips evolved toward ARM, a company that today rules the world of low-power processors for mobile and other devices:

“Apple and the Newton made the company exist,” said Mike Muller, one of the founders of ARM and its chief technology officer. “The Newton never went anywhere, but it got ARM started and gave us some credibility.”

Dealing with hand-held devices and cellphones forced ARM to operate under severe power restrictions. It chased milliwatts, while Intel chased horsepower.

Mr. East and other ARM executives point to the difference in the companies’ business models. Intel designs and manufactures its own PC and computer server products, commanding about $50 to $1,000 for each chip. ARM chips, by contrast, are made by a handful of contract chip manufacturers and cost 65 cents to $20 each. ARM earns pennies or fractions of a penny off each chip through its licensing deals.

tags: 10x, 3x3, evolution, environment, mobile, niche construction

Cloud computing: the gossip of virtual crops

Each day, Facebook game developer and FarmVille creator Zynga delivers about a petabyte of data — that’s 1 million gigabytes, or more than six Libraries of Congress — for its array of social games, chief technology officer Cadir Lee said.

The challenge for Zynga is unique compared to other large sites that are “read-only” or “input-only,” such as photo-sharing sites like Flickr or e-commerce sites like Amazon.com, Lee said. Zynga instead faces an environment that is constantly updating, with each new crop planted or fertilized and each message left on a friend’s farm.

In many ways today's gaming environments create a ubiquitous communications fabric reminiscent of the planet Pandora from James Cameron's movie Avatar; environments where virtual plants and animals communicate to real people, generating enormous streams of information, connecting experiences bordering on magic, giving players a feeling of being a part of a growing social organism.
It would be an interesting experiment to use these messages to drive Leo Villareal's LED art mentioned in my previous post. Some incredible light patterns may emerge from the gossip of virtual crops.

tags: games, cloud, information, communications, environment, virtual, art, 10x, content, synthesis

Discovery Channel: Top ten discoveries of the decade

Here's the link to the entry page: click me.

In terms of impact on future innovation, I think the more important ones are #4 (Stem cells), #2 (Human genome map), and #1 (Global warming).

From a purely psychological perspective, items on the list satisfy the criteria for objects that traditionally inspire awe: they are either extremely large or infinitesimally small.

tags: science, greatest, psychology, health, environment, discovery, technology

The imminent death of printing is a really good news for trees.