Here I will write, what I need to be sure that I can find again, and far more which I probarbly don't need to find again :)

Saturday, December 1, 2007

Crossing modals, brain adaption test

A few days ago, I got an idea that it would be funny to cross modals. That is, convert visual information to audio, and vice versa, the idea for vision to audio is simple and I started working on some of the required sub-systems. Until a friend of mine, after informing him of the idea, informed me that such a system is already devoped.

The most interisting part is itthat the transormation function is working exactly as I would have done it myself, and it is reported to make it possible to make blind people see! coool.

Vision->audio explenation.

The scientific consideration is possible to find at http://www.artificialvision.com/: ( sample rate, human sensory bandwidth problems etc.).

But a simple overview is given on the figures at: (source), I am apparetly not allowed to show the image here, so you have to navigate to the adress to see the image.
To make the sound experince more smooth, I am considering if adding a gausion over the entire image would help, the referenced system is not trying to smoothin the audio representation from one image to another, but considering the very slow framerate the system seems targeted at ( around 0.5-1 sec for each image playback) , it might be a bad idea to throw away information, there seems to be a problem regaring the bandwidth of the ears, the framerates I would aim for would probably only give a headache.
anway, if you are interested, both the source, and a working windows application can be downloaded from http://www.artificialvision.com/.

Future City

We are going to have dynamic houses, not dynamic in the way you are used to think dynamic houses.

To understand the concept, think that you do not own a house, instead, you own a location, and a configuration amount. The configuration amount + your imagination is the only limit, when you want a house, you comuninicate to your configuration, that it must manifest a given house. If you have more need of a garden, a swimming pool and/or something else, you communicate the wish to your configuration and it obeys.

The idea is now introduced, you might be thinking; crazy idea, how is this possible. it is simple. you own millions of nano robots, which can attach to each other to form inanimate objets at least.
I estimate this is possible in 10-50 years from now.

But I am not sure how we can preserve nature in such a city. ofcourse there could simply be spots of nature enviroment, and small capsules and perhaps a tunneling system where the configarable robots lives, in this way the configuration can manifest where it is needed... and live in harmony with nature.