The mojito-mixing contraption in this picture is Robomoji. Its 32-year-old inventor, a German man named Robert Martin.
(Credit: Jacob Appelbaum/Roboexotica.org)Over at Boing Boing this morning, I see that uber-blogger/novelist/speaker/electronic freedom fighter Cory Doctorow is planning on speaking at the Roboexotica symposium that gets under way in Vienna, Austria, tomorrow.
I hadn't heard of Roboexotica myself until I was in Austin, Texas, last month covering the Maker Faire there. At dinner one night with some of the Maker Faire folks, I Make Things video blogger Bre Petis started telling me about the event. And as often happens when smart people tell me about amazing things, my inner geek got very excited.
If you're not familiar with Roboexotica, this is how it's explained on the official Web site: "Until recently, no attempts had been made to publicly discuss the role of cocktail robotics as an index for the integration of technological innovations into the human Lebenswelt, or to document the increasing occurrence of radical hedonism in man-machine communication. Roboexotica is an attempt to fill this vacuum. It is the first and, inevitably, the leading festival concerned with cocktail robotics worldwide. A micro mechanical change of paradigm in the age of borderless capital. Alan Turing would doubtless test this out."
Starting tomorrow, a conference on cocktail-serving robots begins in Vienna, Austria.
(Credit: Roboexotica)Now, I don't know what "Lebenswelt" means but I get the gist of it. In fact, if it weren't for the fact that people I know to be serious about things like this were actually traveling to Vienna, I might have thought Roboexotica was a prank. After all, "cocktail robotics?"
But it is real, and I wish I were going.
It turns out that the topics being discussed at the symposium don't all have to do with programming robots to serve gin and tonics--though, since I don't speak German, I'm not entirely sure what much of the program is about.What I can see on the English version of the festival's site, however, looks pretty interesting. You've got Doctorow speaking about "why consciousness uploading, post-human existence and life after the Singularity are popular today, and why science fiction is always about the present," and Petis is doing his own talk on "the apocalyptic utopia."
Fun stuff.
Now all we need to do is figure out how to get the organizers to do a San Francisco edition of their event sometime in the future, and I can guarantee a rabid local response. Zombies, meet cocktail-serving robots.
If you've been playing with Google's new Street View feature--that $25 billion time suck--you may well have wondered how the heck they took those 360-degree images while driving down the street.
The camera used by Immersive Media for Google's Street View images.
(Credit: Immersive Media)Well, wonder no more. Thanks to our good friend Xeni Jardin at Boing Boing, we now know that many of the images, at least those shot outside the San Francisco Bay Area--were shot using this fairly disco-ball-esque device by the outside contractor, Immersive Media.
What's not clear just yet is if Google used the same kind of camera in the Bay Area, where the company shot its own, higher-resolution images. But it must have been something similar, though we know from this image that Google used a van, while Immersive Media seems to have used a Volkswagen New Beetle.
Enjoy. Oh, and did I say $25 billion time suck? By now, it's up to $26 billion. And counting.
When I heard about the new Street View feature Google Maps unveiled Tuesday, the first thing I thought--after I discovered that anyone in the world could see my car parked in my driveway--was that the next great craze would be people posting images from the service showing personal details from their own homes, jobs or what have you.
CNET News.com reporter Daniel Terdiman's car as seen in his driveway using the Google Maps Street View feature
(Credit: Google)Sure enough, I pop over to Boing Boing today and lo and behold, there's a posting about someone whose cat is visible through the window in such detail that you can even see that it's a tabby.
And I thought, I want to do a story, or at least a photo gallery, illustrating some of the more interesting examples of this thing that some might call spying.
So, if you have found a particularly interesting image using Street View that helps make this point, please send me the link and a brief description. You can send it to daniel.terdiman@cnet.com. Please put "Street View" in the subject line.
And within a couple days, I'll post something with the best submissions.
Thanks, and happy hunting.
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