Now we can know how you really felt about this scene.
Move aside focus groups, there’s a new way to measure how entertained we are! And surprise surprise, it involves looking at our brains. Looking at them real close. That’s right, the future of the movie industry (at least the editing and directing aspects of it) may soon involve regular MRI brain-scanning of sample audiences to help directors to tweak their films based on our emotional responses measured by brain activity. Check out the video below or article from Wired Magazine about MindSign Neuromarketing, a San Diego based company exploring this area.
It’s a cool concept that’ll raise questions about the weight we put on physiological measures versus subjective self-reporting. “I don’t care what you thought you felt – you brain was on fire during the opening scene. Lit up like a fire-cracker. You were scared straight!” That fine line that many of us like to draw between body and mind continues to blur.
"Beaches it is I guess. I mean I'm already on the way there.. "
(In honor of my first sub-zero degree day in Chicago, let’s talk about somewhere warm.) You can tell a lot about a place by its government-sanctioned signage. One of the more obscure reasons I love San Diego is because of its signs, and how they always seem to communicate more than the obvious.
Plastering the freeways are signs for “8 West – Beaches.” Everywhere. Not LA, not Palm Springs, not another town or city, but Beaches. The direction of beaches… all of them (you know, cause they’re all right next to each other). It must be tough driving to work every day past a dozen signs reminding you of a place that you’d rather be besides than your office. Cruel and unusual for commuters, helpful for tourists, and all around very telling of the culture down there. Does this not seem to hint where priorities lie in this sunny corner of America?
While many cities around the world are full of subtle cues (and small signs) that label their various urban districts, San Diego likes the massive in-your-face approach. These twenty-foot tall behemoths of signs serving as gateways between their ‘hoods. They stick out. They can’t be avoided. They glow at night, even through the thickest of fog that comes off the ocean and floods the city. They make sure you always know where you are. But I’ll tell you what else…. they also communicate confidence, and a certain pride in their neighborhoods that you don’t see everywhere. Where do you think you are? You’re in NORTH PARK – that’s where!
So next time you’re traveling and see a sign that seems out of the ordinary, look harder. Read deeper.
More interesting than your typical flower pot holder.
Walked by this the other day, had to look twice before seeing the mailbox underneath all the plants. How symbolic of the world we live in today. These things used to be superstars, the ultimate hubs for communication and information sharing all over the world. But no longer. At least in the information-sharing sense, real mail is dwindling, rapidly becoming a relic of the past.. though in this case, at least we got some nice urban decoration. Let’s make sure we’re pointing these things out to our children and grandchildren while they’re still around, before museums and junkyards will be the only places left where we’ll find them. Just sayin’.
Get excited robot junkies and futurists, this video out of Boston Dynamics showcases a new four-legged transport “dog” designed for the military. Surprisingly enough, the most illuminating part of it isn’t the technology itself – which is pretty amazing – but people’s reactions at the :35 and 1:27 marks.
Go ahead and watch.
Now did you feel yourself cringe at those parts? Did you feel even the slightest pang of feeling for the thing? That, my friends, is empathy. Empathy towards a real-life robot. Now what does that tell you?
Remember the first time you noticed that the biggest fast food chain restaurants all had red and yellow in their logos? If you’re at all like me (which you may not be..) the excitement of this discovery was quickly overcome by the realization that originality often comes at a premium in this world. And that sometimes successful business meant borrowing, and borrowing some more.
Well another similar color pattern has emerged in our consumption-driven economy. Blue and orange have seemed to end up wherever mass business transactions appear on the mighty internets, with eCommerce giants Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Sears, and Zappos all incorporating the colors into their pallets. There’s no doubt color can have a strong impact in design, but while physiological studies claim to tie the colors red to appetite, it’s not so clear that blue and orange equate to “buy” as much as this is just another game of follow the leader.
The implications of the new blue and orange internet take-over aren’t so clear. Much like restaurants and fast food, many reputable eCommerce sites don’t use these colors – but the largest ones all seem to. It would interesting to take a look at how the color coordination of fast food affected the greater restaurant and food-consumption market. (Volunteers?)
Here’s one prediction though: wearing blue and orange clothing together will become less fashionable by the day …making you look more and more like a website. Kind of like wearing red and yellow tends to make you look like a giant hotdog. Speaking of food..
This is a busy time of year for robotics. Recent research being conducted out of the University of Washington gives a glimpse into the future of assistive technology for the very organs you’re using to read this text.
Techies, biomedical people, and health professionals will find this article fascinating. They’ll be glued to their monitors as they slowly scroll down the page in disbelief, I kid you not. As for the rest of you, here are some highlights:
“These lenses don’t need to be very complex to be useful… a lens with a single pixel could aid people with impaired hearing.”
“With basic image processing and Internet access, a contact-lens display could unlock whole new worlds of visual information, unfettered by the constraints of a physical display.”
“Rabbits wore lenses containing metal circuit structures for 20 minutes at a time with no adverse effects.”
There's no "right" interpretation of the human form, right?
One night I was driving on a dark dirt road in the heart of rural Costa Rica when I came across this sign. It seemed so familiar, but something was off about it, so I hit the brakes and looked closer.
It wasn’t its beat-up condition, nor the fact that we seemed miles away from any school that caught my attention. It was the silhouettes of the figures, their heads, they were huge! Far larger than the heads on the US version (pic on the right). Was the added emphasis to help humanize the picture in an effort to get drivers to slow down? Maybe they just didn’t grasp anatomy down there the same way American sign-makers did (real people’s heads are normal-sized down there).
Later I looked back to the American version and noticed that at least on the Costa Rican sign the people had feet, let alone heads that are attached to their bodies. I cursed myself for looking too far into it, but I guess working in the design world has resulted in such observations becoming a staple of my life, wherever I go.
So for now I’ll chalk it up to different artistic interpretations of the human form. But I figured it was a note-worthy distinction none-the-less. Indeed, indeed.
(Costa Rica is an incredible place to visit by the way, with a dizzying array of attractions and some of the most accessible and well-preserved natural beauty I’ve ever seen.)
Finally, squishy robots! Now while “Cronos” is no Terminator, he is modeled after human anatomy – bones, muscles, tendons and all. So I’m calling this a significant yet inevitable step in quest to create robots as human as humans. But we’re not there quite yet. Not quite yet.
You wouldn’t build a car with a hidden door, a website with a cryptic URL, or a train station with no entrance. Yet take a look at this CVS in Porter Square in Boston. The store-front curve on this particular corner is designed to showcase the merchandise inside, but it also insinuates there’s an entrance nearby. But there’s no entrance for a block in each direction. And that’s far away enough to be an issue in the thick of a New England winter (when this photo was snapped).
The lesson here? Don’t deceive users on entry points. The gateways to the experience are as important as the experience themselves.
So get with it, CVS! And I’ll go ahead and admit that I walked into the glass window because I wasn’t quite paying attention. Darn head cold.
Posted by Infinite User 
