Posted on May 4th, 2010 by Marcela.
Categories: new, Products, Technology, useful technology, more, not 24 hours, Screens, 3 d, education, corporative, events, media, Markets.
MIT Technology Review names 10 technologies that will change the World
Here we are in the Information Age. Never before has the flow of ideas, innovation and new technologies been so strong, so much so that it’s hard to imagine what the world will be like in 10, 20 or 50 years time. So which of today’s fledgling technologies will have a fundamental impact on the way we live our lives in the future? MIT’s Technology Review has turned its attention to this question with the release of its annual list of 10 emerging technologies and it makes thought provoking reading.
Technology Review 2010 TR10 - technologies likely to change the world
Solar fuel. Joule Biotechnologies’ Noubar Afeyan has created genetically engineered microorganisms that can turn sunlight into ethanol or diesel — a feat that could allow biofuels to compete with fossil fuels on both cost and scale. http://www.technologyreview.com/video/?vid=563
Mobile 3-D. Recent box-office hits like Avatar and Up have added to the growing popularity of 3-D movies. Julien Flack of Dynamic Digital Depth is leading the charge to take 3-D mainstream not only on TVs, but also smart phones and mobile devices, through a technology that can convert existing 2-D content to 3-D on the fly. http://www.technologyreview.com/video/?vid=559
Dual action antibodies.Genentech’s Germaine Fuh has found a promising way to fight conditions like cancer and AIDs through dual-action antibodies that give patients two drugs for the price of one, offering the promise of drugs that work better and cost less. http://www.technologyreview.com/video/?vid=560
Real-time search. Amit Singhal is leading Google’s quest to mine social networks for up-to-the-second search results that offer the same relevance and quality of traditional Web searches. http://www.technologyreview.com/video/?vid=556
Light-trapping photovoltaics. By depositing nanoparticles of silver on the surface of a thin-film cell, Kylie Catchpole of the Australian National University has found a way to boost the cells’ efficiency — an advance that could help make solar power more competitive with fossil fuels. http://www.technologyreview.com/video/?vid=558
Engineered stem cells. James Thomson of Cellular Dynamics and the University of Wisconsin has potentially revolutionized the way we screen drugs and study disease by providing a way to make — in the test tube — any kind of cell from patients with different diseases. http://www.technologyreview.com/article/25152/
Social TV. People are already trying to combine their social networks with TV, using laptops and smart phones to comment on live events like the Oscars or the Olympics. MIT’s Marie-José Montpetit is working on social TV — a way to seamlessly combine the active experience of social networks with the more passive experience of traditional TV viewing. http://www.technologyreview.com/video/?vid=564
Green concrete. The production of cement is responsible for about 5 percent of global carbon emissions. Novacem’s Nikolaos Vlasopoulos has created a cement that is a carbon “sink” rather than a source. His innovation could greatly reduce the global carbon emissions that result from cement production. http://www.technologyreview.com/video/?vid=562
Implantable electronics. Tufts University’s Fiorenzo Omenetto is developing implantable electronic devices that can be used to deliver drugs, stimulate nerves, monitor biomarkers, and more. And once they’ve done their job, they almost completely dissolve away. More info here or http://www.technologyreview.com/video/?vid=557
Cloud programming. At the University of California, Berkeley, Joseph Hellerstein is creating better software for building cloud applications, and this could herald a new wave of applications for social media analysis, enterprise computing, or sensor networks monitoring for earthquake warning signs. http://www.technologyreview.com/video/?vid=561
More info on each of the 2010 TR10 (and previous years) is now online and will be featured in the May/June edition of Technology Review.
Posted on April 28th, 2010 by Marcela.
Categories: new, Technology, more, not 24 hours, education, critical decisions, Markets.
The idea of tailoring architecture to the requirements of a prison is by no means new - most famously the Panopticon design by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham has been the blueprint for many prisons since the late 1800s.
A new Vertical Prison concept is not as draconian in its ambitions with its aim of rehabilitating prisoners by allowing them to remain a part of society and allow them to contribute to it, while using height as a wall to separate them from it.
The Vertical Prison was designed by Malaysian architecture students Chow Khoon Toong, Ong Tien Yee, and Beh Ssi Cze, and took first place in eVolo Magazine’s annual Skyscraper Competition. Their project examines the possibility of creating a prison-city in the sky, where the inmates would live in a “free” and productive community with agricultural fields, factories and recycling plants that would be operated by the offenders as a way to give back to the community and support the host city below them.
Recognizing that many prisons are nothing more than a school for criminals, the prison design aims to rehabilitate inmates by invoking a sense of community. In allowing the prison to become a part of the community and form a symbiotic relationship with the it, the designers also believe that the social stigma of a prison would be softened resulting in greater acceptance of inmates and a better chance they will be given another opportunity upon re-entering society after their incarceration.
The Vertical Prison employs a modular design to maximize flexibility. A girder box structure is used to house a variety of different units and form a communal space. Inmates are housed in Cell Units that themselves can be customized with different “loopholes” or openings appropriate to the behavior or level of danger of the inmate. Depending on its location within a city the prison could include Agricultural Units to grow food for the city, Industrial Units to help in the recycling of industrial waste or Juvenile Units to scare kids straight.
Transport to and from the prison is via various pods that travel along the frames supporting the prison. Transport Pods are the primary transport vehicle and can also be used for daily surveillance. Heavy Lift Pods serve as vertical lift transport for delivering cargo to market or to transport other pods to the ground. Armored Riot Control Pods are armed with both lethal and non-lethal weapons as well as airdrop capabilities for keeping prisoners in check. Medevac Pods are equipped with airlift capabilities and paramedic equipment, while the Fire Rescue Pod also has air lift capabilities and fire-fighting apparatus.
Given the cost of such a system, not to mention the difficulty any city would face in trying to convince nearby residents a prison with no walls above their neighborhood is a good idea, it’s probably not likely we’ll see any Vertical Prisons appearing on city skylines anytime soon. But kudos to the designers for giving some serious thought into an equally serious problem.
Recidivism rates among prisoners suggest the system – in the US at least and the many countries with similar systems – is not working. In California, which has the highest recidivism rate in the US, seven out of ten prisoners return to prison within three years. That translates to a tremendous burden on the taxpayer. So if the new prison concept was found to be successful, ideas like it might not be as expensive in the long run as they first appear.
Posted on April 23rd, 2010 by Marcela.
Categories: not 24 hours, Screens, plasma flat panel, rear projection, events.
Canon Neoreal ‘prism liquid’ by Akihisa Hirata and Kyota Takahashi
japanese artist kyota takahashi and architect akihisa hirata collaborated on ‘prism liquid’,
canon’s neoreal installation at milan design week 2010.
‘prism liquid’
image © designboom
the space is structured as a polyhedron, which glows in various prism-like colors.
the lights flicker and move just as if water was flowing, changing their shape several times.
two opposite concepts - static and dynamic, concrete and abstract, input and output -
coexist in one world. the polyhedral screens are arranged in a sprial that is connected three-dimensionally,
in which a world of new images comes to life through the colorful lights created by takahashi
which are projected onto the larger-than-life construction (almost 6 m high, 8 m wide, 40 m deep)
by akihisa hirata. the technical details behind the installation are possible through canon digital
imaging technologies. the images which are seen have been taken with a digital single lens reflex
camera and are projected in many colors, through 21 projectors on several polyhedral screens.
image © designboom
the idea behind the installation originated from the projectors themselves.
a bunch of light beams generated by these machines as the capacity to give birth to an ‘invisible’
pyramid-shaped space. the images break up into small pieces of bright color, similar to that of a puzzle,
becoming abstract visions. the pieces come together, assembled three-dimensionally, like an origami
sculpture, enhanced by the digital imaging technology and primitive color variations and dynamic
movement of the lights and images.
image © designboom
image © designboom
‘I wanted to express the idea of ‘input to output’ as simply and directly as possible.
without using any computer graphics, elaborating the images, the brightness, and the projection method,
I decided to try and extract the maximum appeal a picture can have. then I tried to express -
in a single world - concepts such as 2D / 3D, concrete / abstract, static / dynamic -
which are usually difficult to capture because of their binomial characteristics. these images begin
with horizontal wide screens found at the back of the space. the images in this section are projected
simultaneously with five single-lens reflect cameras which have animation shooting functions;
using these images I managed to create a panoramic world of extremely realistic, vivid, digital images,
just like an ‘emakimon’ (picture scrolls). then I installed the vision scroller* and created the conditions
for those visiting the booth to taste the sense of interactivity and liveliness by themselves,
by experiencing the images on their own.’ - KT
image © designboom
the light emitted by projectors is usually projected onto flat screen screens in which we experience them
as two-dimensional images. but actually, there is a cone-shaped light generated by the projector
in which the screen blocks the light and what we really see is the reflection. a single cord connects
the entire place while creating a spiral. this thick cord made by polyhedral range blends into the territory
of the three-dimensional lights generated by the projectors. the cord runs throughout the space,
changing in size. sometimes it creates a 6 m high space, and sometimes it cascades across,
stretching over the floor, almost resembling fines or other climbing plants intertwining with the lights.
image © designboom
‘I wanted to create a space which seems to play with the mass and the three-dimensionality of the light,
and to make it possible to experience an almost physical blending with light. the mass of these lights
is materialized and vivid color are generated, making one feel as if it is radiating. (…)
tangling… come to think of it, the living world is full of peaceful, emergent, intermingled forms of life.
from micro-proteins to forests where various plants and animals co-exist. the architectures and the
spaces created by people should also be able to connect to the peace of this intermingled life.
blending our own bodies with the world should generate a new reality, a new experience which is
realistic and original at the same time.’ - AH
image © designboom
image © designboom
image © designboom
* a vision scroller is a live image creation device made by kyota takahashi,
through the installation of a camcorder under an acrylic board which is used as a canvas.
when materials such as sand and feathers are placed on the board, the camcorder takes a picture
and the projectors connected to the camcorder project the image in real time. the materials can be
moved sideways by rolling the board’s transparent roll film, and the images can be rotated
and moved by installing the camcorder on a table. a new version of the vision scroller
was made specifically for this installation.
project details:
projector: XEED WUX10, XEED SX80 mark II, LV 7585
camera: EOS 7D
camcorder: LEGRIA HF S21
concept and composition: kyota takahashi, reiko kawaguchi
camera work: kohei matsumura
sound design: toru yamanaka
imaging system: LUFTZUG.corp
sound system: cabasse
Posted on April 19th, 2010 by Marcela.
Categories: new, Products, Technology, useful technology, more, Screens, control room, corporative, critical decisions.
Ensuring that the workplace is designed for maximum efficiency, accuracy and comfort is particularly important in command and control centres, as Ian McMurray finds out
If Wikipedia is to be believed – and it isn’t always – ergonomics have been with us for at least the past 2,500 years, with Hippocrates describing how a surgeon’s workplace should be designed and his tools arranged. It is defined as the science of ensuring that the workplace, and the tools used for work, provide the optimum characteristics for doing the job.
Given that, in many command/control installations, decision-making is often critical, it should come as no surprise to find that ergonomics play a vital role in room, system and operator interface design. Maximising operator effectiveness requires a twofold approach that not only makes relevant information as accessible as possible, but also minimises the fatigue that can be an inevitable corollary of the control room environment.
It is generally agreed that, of all the information we take in, some 80% comes through our eyes – implying that, while control room design is a complex issue involving a broad range of factors, it is the screens that receive the most attention.
“For years, the focus was on brightness and resolution,” notes Guy Van Wijmeersch, design director, control rooms at Barco, who has written an impressive white paper on the topic of control room design. “But there are limits on human perception, and by the beginning of this century, we had all the brightness and resolution we needed. That’s when our focus shifted to maximising contrast under standard ambient light conditions: contrast is something to which the human visual system is very sensitive.”
Bright future
Brighter images have an important advantage in the control room environment. “Because control rooms now have brighter displays, it means that the rooms no longer need to be operated in low-light conditions – and that’s highly beneficial for operator alertness,” points out Mike Garrido, product manager for Multiviewers at Harris Broadcast Communications.
“We have introduced new high-gain screens that are designed to deliver excellent contrast ratio, and the best possible viewing angle,” says David Griffiths, market development manager for control rooms at Christie EMEA. “They’re designed to allow information to be presented to operators in the most appropriate manner for fast, accurate decision-making.”
Another area of focus for manufacturers is colour accuracy and consistency, and creating what looks as much like a single, large display as possible. “Maintaining accurate colour and brightness performance across the entire display is key in reducing operator fatigue,” says Ron Schouwenburg, product marketing manager, visual display systems at Mitsubishi Electric Benelux. “Even small differences in performance and screen geometry mean that operators perceive the display as individual screens and this has been shown to increase fatigue.”
He goes on to note the advent of LED illumination in cube displays as being an important development, given LED’s ability to reproduce a wider colour gamut: “The difference between orange and red could mean life or death in something like a railway control room.”
Eric Hénique, director of marketing and international sales at eyevis, identifies another advantage of LED illumination. “Traditional lamp-lit systems, especially those featuring a colour wheel, are prone to flicker,” he says, “and that has been demonstrated to be a cause of operator fatigue.
LED-lit cubes have solved that problem.” And, as Griffiths notes, eliminating the colour wheel also reduces the ‘rainbow’ effect for which DLP-based systems are known, and provides higher reliability and lower cost of ownership as well as improving colour accuracy.
Seamless scenes
Colour fidelity and consistency, contrast, resolution, brightness and lack of flicker all play key roles in presenting easy-to-see information without tiring operators. Yet another contributor is to minimise perceived gaps between each cube in the wall. “The best rear-projection DLP videowall displays can now be tiled together with an image-to-image gap less than half a millimetre,” points out Steve Seminario, senior product director for Planar’s videowall products.
“That gives the wall a virtually seamless look – and means that windows can be positioned and sized with less regard for the mullions.” He goes on to point out that configuring more, larger screens in a wall rather than fewer, smaller ones is often preferred in order to minimise the appearance of mullions.
Hénique says the mullions issue is a reason why flatpanel technologies continue to struggle to find a foothold in the command/control market – together with their 16:9 aspect ratio, which does not fit well in applications such as supervisory control and data acquisition that were designed for a 4:3 aspect ratio.
The AV systems also have a key role to play in two other elements of control room design that can have a significant impact on operator effectiveness: heat and noise. A warm room – or, to counter it, the continuous background drone of fans, whether from equipment or from air-conditioning – create conditions where drowsiness will almost certainly occur.
“There are two ways of dealing with those issues,” says Quirin Stamminger, head of marketing and international relations at Hetec. “One is that products like our video and KVM extenders and our multiview KVM switch produce almost no heat, so they only need fan cooling in high-ambient temperatures,” he says. “The second is to ensure that as many of the heat-generating systems as possible are installed in a separate server room with its own air-conditioning system.”
Flexible systems
How and where information is presented on the control room wall is of vital importance. Vital information needs, of course, to have priority, and provision needs to be made for exceptions such as alarms. Because no two control rooms are the same, manufacturers have responded by designing the maximum possible flexibility into their offerings. Manufacturers such as Mitsubishi Electric have broad and adaptable product ranges. “Versatility is the most important attribute we can bring to our display products,” says Schouwenburg. “What we have done is to develop a very flexible architecture to enable a systems integrator to deliver the most appropriate solution.”
“Our job is to provide videowalls that are customisable enough to perform well in the environment,” agrees Seminario, “regardless of viewing configuration, room size, ambient lighting, video source requirements and so on.”
There can be little doubt, though, that the flexibility each end user needs in order to maximise the effectiveness of control room operators mostly lies behind the screens with the wall control system.
Wall control
“The wall controller plays a key role in a productive operating environment,” says Rainer Stiehl, vice president for marketing at Extron Europe. “The wall controller hardware and user interface should work together effectively and be capable of managing the image data efficiently, while delivering high-quality images on-screen. The operator needs to be able to concentrate on the information on-screen and not how it gets to the displays. Ideally, the wall controller will feature a simple-to-operate user interface that mirrors a normal computer operator environment.”
“The ability to resize information, reproduce imagery at full frame rate and instantly select screen presets all help to improve decision making,” says Griffiths. “Flexibility, ease of use and expandability are watch words for our controllers.”
Van Wijmeersch sounds a note of warning, however. “Data has to be shown in the right context and should be related to other elements to become useful information,” he says, “so having a very flexible way of putting content on a large wall has some danger as the information can be cluttered. As such we’ve developed wall management software that can help in organising data and video in a structured way, improving the context, the quality and the usability of the presented information.”
Are there new AV technologies that can further improve control room ergonomics? It seems unlikely, at least in the near term. The rest of the AV industry is talking about 3D, gesture recognition and multitouch – but it’s hard to see how those will find a place in command/control environments. Inevitably, though, much depends on the specifics of the application.
“If you’re talking about a creative environment in a war room context with multiple experts, for example, then touch and multitouch could be a great help,” says Van Wijmeersch. “Perhaps in the future, creating a full virtual environment rather than an overview will provide a place for 3D.”
“Yes, touch displays might be an option for command/control tables in control rooms,” says Hénique, “but touch control of a wall 5m wide by 3m high doesn’t make much sense.”
Stamminger agrees that to have someone standing in front of a wall, obscuring the view of others, isn’t appropriate. And 3D? “After watching a 3D movie, many people complain of headaches or itching eyes,” he says. “That’s hardly conducive to good decision making. The technology would need to improve significantly.” He, in common with others, makes a distinction between what might be feasible on the main wall and what would work on each operator’s individual workstation, where touch control is increasingly used.
“We launched a multitouch option for our Seventy Series cubes at ISE this year,” notes Schouwenburg, “and we feel that its intuitive nature could be useful in certain command and control applications.” He goes on to point out, though, the fundamental importance of reliability. “For that reason, I’m not sure gesture recognition yet has a role to play.”
Interactive operations
But there is one area in which control rooms certainly mirror the rest of the AV world. “The videowall is becoming the interactive wall,” points out Garrido. “With a click of a mouse, the operators in a control room can interact with all devices without having to move to a different workstation or even change screens. They can access servers to replay video streams, access a camera to move or zoom, or even call up any PC in the facility to access important information. The software and processing power in the wall controller is making the operator’s job much easier – and therefore making the operator more effective.”
The picture that emerges is that the AV industry is playing a significant role in ensuring that mission-critical installations and their staff are able to perform at the optimum level. “Control room technologies continue to evolve, including displays, switching, processing, distribution, control systems, and even furniture,” says Stiehl.
“But, while technologies have improved, the best contribution to improving ergonomics in a command and control environment is collaboration between all the companies involved – manufacturers, integrators, architects – so as manufacturers, we’re not in direct control of the many factors involved with proper control room design that has human factors at its heart, but our contribution can be significant.”
www.eyevis.de www.floria.com www.renovatiofloria.com
more info: http://renovatiofloria.com/indra.html
Posted on January 18th, 2010 by Marcela.
Categories: new, Technology, more, media, Home Theatre, Markets.
Westminster Academy, London, England.
Martin Lupton and Luke Smith-Wightman of BDP Lighting explain the art of lighting design in school environments. using their work at Westminster Academy as a case study, they emphasise the important role of daylight, the guidelines associated with it and the need to consider electric light as an holistic element of the architecture and overall visual environment.
The current UK government is a significant way along the road of its plans to invest in the order of £2 billion in building and refurbishing schools. This offers the people who are involved in their design a unique, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Schools that are performing poorly or schools that are housed in aged decrepit buildings are being identified and re-built. Many of the UK’s schools buildings are between 50 and 100 years old and it is likely that this wave of new schools will stand for the same amount of time. In 50 years time education may be delivered in a completely different way so this could be the last opportunity many of us have to design the lighting for a school building.
The City Academies programme has seen new schools designed and completed by several prominent architects including Sir Norman Foster and Wilkinson Eyre amongst others. When the Government began this programme it was on the basis that they firmly believed that better designed environments will encourage more positive behaviour and improved academic performance.
As lighting designers, we are part of a growing awareness of the power of light and its role in design and usability of spaces and places. Our craft is widely recognised in environments where the commercial cost of design and high quality luminaires are seen as valuable investments. In retail spaces the link between brand quality and customer spend is well established – lighting can play a key role in supporting the brand image.
In commercial offices the value of lighting to the workforce is starting to be understood but the power of lighting in creating the right impression in the reception is fully accepted. In urban spaces the links between lighting and crime, the perception of safety and the creation of a night-time economy are completely accepted. In fact, lighting designers are employed and allowed to practise their art and science where there is perceived commercial value. But what about spaces where there is social value but limited commercial value?
It could be argued that urban lighting embraces some social elements and has positive benefit on the community it serves. In schools and hospitals, two of the most socially important spaces, the lighting design is, more often than not, left to the electrical engineer or even electrical contractor.
Lighting Design: BDP Architect: AHMMWith daylight as the primary source of light, the artificial light needs to be developed to support this strategy and maximise the benefits. The opportunities to save energy and reduce maintenance must be embraced with automatic control. However, it must not be forgotten that most schools have a single in-house maintenance contractor – the caretaker – and his responsibilities will be both varied and numerous.
Maintenance must be as straight forward as possible. If a school can be designed with a minimum number of lamp types, that respond to daylight and operate only when required, then it will have a long life and be simple to maintain.
Schools are one of the most socially important spaces that we as designers, architects and engineers can be involved in. These are the places where the thoughts and behaviour of our children are developed and moulded. Lighting, both electric and natural, has a significant role to play in the quality of environment in a classroom. High levels of controlled daylight and good vertical illumination are the key design criteria for the creation of a successful classroom. However in the strive for innovation and creative design we must not forget the how these important buildings work, the length of time they are design to stand and the many different users that will inhabit and operate them.
Simplicity and robustness of operation is a fundamental requirement.
In many spaces we have come to realise that horizontal illuminance is a poor measure of design quality, and in schools in particular this is true.
Modern styles of kinaestic teaching rely on visual interaction between the students and teacher and therefore the visual focus is usually on the vertical rather than the horizontal. High levels of concentration are essential from the students and anything that can detract from this must be eliminated. It is essential that all lighting – natural and electric – is controlled and delivered into the space in a comfortable way.
As the physiological and biological effects of daylight become more widely understood and appreciated the reasons and justifications for high levels of daylight in schools can be enforced. Recent research indicates that high levels of daylight are a very positive contributor to academic performance and behaviour of students. Research in the USA, by the Pacific Gas and Energy Company, showed that students in classrooms with the highest daylight factors (in the order of 10%) progressed up to 20% faster on maths test and up to 26% faster on reading tests. The results of similar research in Sweden showed significant correlation between behaviour and daylight. In broad terms this research has also shown that student who attend “day lit” schools outperformed students from “none day lit schools” by 7%-14%.
