Stumbled across this gem today, a team at the USC Institute for Creative Technology has prototyped a 3D teleconferencing system.  I really love using Cisco Telepresence but this takes things to a whole new level--instead of displaying video it actually projects the 3D map of a person's face into space.  And somehow it doesn't look unnatural, which surprised me.

They use real-time 3D face scanning along with eye tracking to achieve eye contact in 3D, which I would absolutely LOVE to try.

The display is projected onto a rotating mirror, so this is true 3D, not a Pepper's Ghost effect.  I wonder if this can ever be mass-produced in a reliable way, but either way it's a very creative way to achieve this effect.

Watch a video of this very cool project here:  http://gl.ict.usc.edu/Research/3DTeleconferencing/

P.S.  I wonder how large a display like this could practically get... I would imagine a television-size display is not unreasonable, which would mean that Star Wars-style displays are probably in the cards at some point.  I love technology.

Back in December I decided I was going to run a little experiment and try moving my blogging entirely into Wave (wavelogging?).  It was an interesting experience but there is a deal-breaker that I just can't work around at the moment.  

I thought it would make for an interesting discussion to report back on where things are at right now.  What works, what doesn't, what's awesome, and what NEEDS to be fixed.

 When I first started blogging in 2006 or so, I loved the idea of being able to have conversations with people all over the world, many of whom I didn't even know existed.  It's served me really well in that respect, I've met a ton of people and developed my most important online social network.  I have several relationships in the real world that developed because of blogs.

Then Twitter came along, and was all real-timey and stuff.  It's fun.  It feels like a cocktail party.  I can blurt out things that I think would make funny fortune cookies and there's an audience for that I guess.  But in terms of content it was a real lightweight compared to blogs, the medium is just too constraining.  At its core Twitter is a 140-character message bus, and there are lots of things lacking there for heavy-duty collaboration to happen.

Next came Facebook, which allowed me to find a lot of people but not necessarily the ones I wanted to have technical conversations with.  It's also completely ungeared towards anything longer than a sentence or two, the commenting system resembles a car with just an engine and a frame and a steering wheel.  Also not suited to hard-core collaboration of any kind.

Over time the collaboration model on blogs got better with the introduction of commenting systems like Disqus (although I still don't like the fact that I rely on them 100% to safeguard those comments).  But it never really changed much, we always had blogs and RSS to distribute and comment on meatier content.

But then, this year, came Wave.  And I fell head over heels in love with it.

As I continue to use and experiment with Wave, I keep coming up with interesting little questions and thoughts about where this is all headed.

(By the way, this is also being published as a Wave, so if you're on it you can follow along here.  The waves seem to be much more interactive so I'd highly recommend it.  If you need an invite let me know, I have a few.)

Before you get too far into this, I've also published this post to Google Wave at this link if you'd like to read along there instead.

Using Google Wave heavily over the past several weeks has really gotten my mental gears cranking, pondering all of the changes coming down the pike in the next year or so.

One of the things that I'm really trying to wrap my head around is how a medium like a wave changes the dynamic of the interaction between the publisher of a post and the observers and other participants.  In a wave it's possible for anyone to edit the original text or insert comments directly inline--this is a pretty big departure from the way most messaging platforms work.  For example in this blog post you can't edit what I've already written, and you can't insert your comments directly in the middle, but you can leave comments at the bottom.  In a wave you don't have those restrictions.

I view a major shift in technology, like the one that I see materializing right now with Google Wave (the protocol), as a huge object crashing into a an existing landscape.  There's this massive change right in the middle, a new space that has to be filled, and then all these fissures spidering out from the main event where the rest of the world is affected by that event--new spaces that must be filled with something.

One of the fun things about technology disruptions is trying to figure out what the landscape will look like after the main event.  It's those changes that nimble businesses can take advantage of to pivot into the new spaces that were created.  For example when the Web finally went mainstream it created an entirely new industry, but it then proceeded to change the way every other existing industry operated to some degree, and we're still working through that with things like hosted applications and the SaaS model.

So here's the deal with Wave:  If you deal in technology, and you get this one wrong, you'll miss the boat.  And it's a big boat.  If, on the other hand, you get this one right, you have the potential to do some incredible innovation.

In a nutshell, this is the next revolutionary leap in Internet application architecture.  Maybe the first truly revolutionary leap since HTTP itself.

I've been wanting to write this post for a while, but first I wanted to read fully thru and digest the specs and available code.  I haven't done any posts about XMPP for quite a while, but you're going to start hearing a whole lot about it, and not just from me.

As part of my recent love affair with the iPhone, I've gotten very interested in augmented reality. 
I LOVE a novel and engaging way to present data to people--it's been my job for pretty much the last 7 years, so it's really cool to see some genuine innovation in this area.

I've mentioned augmented reality once or twice before, and the buzz on it has been building lately, not many people I've talked to have heard about it yet.  So I figure I'll drop my 2 cents on the matter.

Augmented reality is simply overlaying digital displays on the real world, typically using a mobile device as the viewport.  So instead of a completely virtual world you have the real world with virtual overlays.  This video actually describes it much better than any explanation could:

Not only can this type of overlay be done on top of public areas and rooms, but you can also overlay virtual objects on well-defined spaces, such as on a piece of paper sitting on your desktop:

Augmented reality is much closer than I would have imagined even a year ago, I totally missed the significance of having direct access to a mobile video stream.  There are a few technical hurdles to application development, mostly around the speed of mobile devices, but those are being attacked and solved one by one every day.  The image processing and recognition, 3D virtual browser displays, and toolkits are now available and can be used in real applications today.

The iPhone OS isn't scheduled to support direct access to the video feed until the next release, and that's required for augmented reality apps.  (Although I understand that several of these apps are already available today on Android devices.)  I suspect that after that release hits you're going to see a flood of these applications, and I'm really looking forward to it. 

I'm looking forward to integrating the real world into my apps as well.

A couple of glasses of vino on a Sunday night and I got to thinking about what I believe will be the technologies that are going to reshape the world in 2010. After a stagnant year or two in there are some really killer things on the horizon right now.