R2 is in negotiations with FIFA.

Yes, we are talking Star Wars communication console version of World Cup 2022.

Give me a moment. Eyes are widening. Mind reeling in disbelief. Pondering life, reality, doom, navel, etc.

Okay, all good.

First, let’s clarify: The holographic version is going to happen if the technology exists by then. If it doesn’t, I don’t care. I never thought 3-d projections on screens were very exciting for anyone except movie execs thrilled to forcibly remove another $5 to $10 from my pocket. Everything looks a little rounder? The vines in Avatar are going to poke my eye out? Yippee.

But digital ghosts running around a field while I’m blowing my black market vuvuzela?

Well now, that is something to send one’s mind into a future full of everything except one crucial element: touch.

As amazing as it would be to see shimmering light creatures chasing after a glowball, this experience is always going to fall short until I can somehow get on that field and start slide tackling some fútbol fools. Same goes for any holographic projection of an event occurring far away. Oh, I’ll still shell out my entire 401k to watch this thing, but my inner reptilian brain will always be asking, No touch? No play play soccer?

A life without touch is a life inside a Matrix body tube. Of what purpose is the flesh if it does not feel?

Tastes delicious.

It’s easy enough to think of all kinds of events and, um, activities being absorbed by this technology. And once they are, we will see a huge drop in the messy, risky, costly, resource-intensive, face-to-face interactions that have slowly been replaced by devices that eliminate the barriers created by distance.

As everyone (right?) knows, a chat over a beer with your best friend is a whole lot different than a phone call or even a Skype session. It’s not that you’re sitting there slapping each other in the face and saying, “Man, I feel you! Hit me harder!” It’s bigger than that. It’s about you taking the time, energy and money to get somewhere. It’s about being in a space that might be too loud, might be too hot. It’s about being uncomfortable, and reacting to that discomfort, and trying to manage it.

Real life is about everything not being in your control, and all of the freedom and terrifying implications of that. If you walk into a knife, it’s going to make you bleed.

Virtual reality is about everything being under your control. You can dance with helicopter blades and not feel a thing. No risk, no pain, no consequences.

Until I can pull off a Zidane on the virtual field, real life will suit me just fine. Electric ghosts will be good for watching. Nothing more.

Also warms up Poptarts.

I want all the gizmos cluttering my life to work like Stanford University’s SLR camera.
This baby has been around for a while, but now the university is releasing the code behind it and picking up $1 million from the National Science Foundation to make free Frankencameras for computational photography professors.

OK, I should be more specific: The wild and free code will work with the Nokia N900, evidently a supa-dupa smartphone. Your 5D ain’t gonna be R2D2 any time soon. But we can hope, right? Maybe the necessity of omni-programmabilty will be, ahem, properly exposed with Stanford’s latest effort.

One trick of the Frankencamera I know that I would look forward to is bending light to my will. With Linux in your cambox, there’s no more choosing between a sharp, fast but dark exposure, or a blurry, but well-lit, one. See, a Frankencamera “shoots both exposure speeds in rapid succession and then automatically combines them, resulting in a photo that is both bright and sharp.”

So you’ve got software extending the abilities of a device. Nothing new, just check out the app store for the iPhone. Same story, different tool. But why stop there? I say, “Apps for everything!”

Give me customizable beeps on my microwave, let my washer show me my percentage of a city’s water usage, make my alarm clock add a few minutes to the time if I continually push snooze … you know, make these things better.

Is it that hard? Every gizmo has important similarities. It accepts input through various means (buttons, switches, keyboards, touchscreens and so on), it displays some kind of useful information (the time of day, your location on a map, the image you just captured and so on), and it does something (heats your food, washes your clothes, wakes you up, connects you to your e-mail, snaps a photo and so on). The biggest obstacle it seems is the display and input mechanism. If these were standardized across gizmos, then so too could apps. But what screen and input mechanism could possibly work on so many sizes and types of device? I don’t know. All I can think of are those hologram communicators in Star Wars.

Sorry, you want me to what to the Vader?

Surely Google is working on this. Would you want a washing machine’s cost subsidized by ads streaming across its screen? Is Google going to pay for my house if the walls are screens full of a stream of ads? My apartment is feeling pretty small lately…

Anyway, back to the Frankencamera (Professor Marc Levoy’s name for it, not mine).

The SLR for all those cam-comp profs will be available within a year. It will gets its full introduction at the SIGGRAPH conference in Los Angeles starting July 25. The programmable-camera project began in 2006 with Nokia.

What else, what else. Ah, forget it. I’m tired. Chew on this: all da links in this post in a neat little pile:

• Stanford announcement: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/july/frankencamera-072110.html
• Frankencamera site: http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/camera-2.0/
• Frankencamera API and Paper: http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/fcam/
• About computational photography: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Computational_photography
• Professor Marc Levoy: http://graphics.stanford.edu/~levoy/
• Nokia n900: http://maemo.nokia.com/n900/
• Nokia Research Center: http://research.nokia.com/
• Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH): http://www.siggraph.org/
• The N.S.F: I never found a $1 million award, but I found this and this.

Who provided the presentation: Paul Adams, at thinkoutsidein.com, is a lead researcher for social at Google. He investigates how people use social media. He works on Buzz and YouTube. He wrote a book, Social Circles. It’s out in August.

Rumor mill: Mr. Adams’s observations could provide insight into how Google might approach its rumored competitor to Facebook, Google Me.

Get on with it: The slide show of the presentation is embedded below, and after it I’ve provided a list of 36 slides (out of 216), along with descriptions of them, that I found particularly interesting. I copied the language from the slides or slightly modified it for brevity.

15
The problem is that the social networks we’re creating online don’t match the social networks we already have offline. This creates many problems, and a few opportunities.

17
The social web is not a fad, and it’s not going away. it’s not an add-on to the web as we know it today. It’s a fundamental change, a re-architecture, and in hindsight its evolution is obvious.

19
The web was originally built to link static documents together, but evolved to incorporate social media, and now we’re seeing the web built around people, where their profiles and content are moving with them as they visit different websites.

28
People are increasingly likely to find out about products and brands from their friends rather than from your business. It means that it is much harder to control how people first come to experience your messages.

32
Almost all the sites and apps we design from now on will have embedded social features.

33
Understanding sociability will become a core requirement for designing online. Almost all of us will need to become skilled in social web design.

34
The social web, and all social media that operate within it, is a way of thinking as opposed to a new channel. It’s not about sales, or ads, or click-through rates. It’s about pursuing relationships and fostering communities of consumers. It’s about rethinking how you make plans when your customers are in the center and in control.

35
Understand behavior, not technology: The people using [technology] don’t care about [it]; they care about the communication that the technology enables.

42
A better long term strategy for business is to understand people’s motivations for using new technologies, and not the technologies themselves.

47 – 52
When we sign up, most social networks ask us to create our “friends” group, but no such group exists offline (47-48). … Offline people have multiple groups of friends that form around life stages and shared experiences (52) … Despite trying to mix them, people’s groups remain independent (68).

People create messages on their social networks for a portion of their social network, but their entire network receives the message.

84
Avoid the use of the word friend for connecting people. Understand how people describe their relationships for the behavior you’re trying to encourage.

Allow people to create custom names for groups, and allow people to rename the group if it changes over time.

Support side conversations. Allow people to fork conversation threads with a smaller number of people.

90
Though we have unique relationships with each person in a group in our social network, “all our ‘friends’ are treated equally on social networks, and all our contacts appear alphabetically and equal in our mobile phones.”

112
So much of our lives revolve around our strong ties, and we need to think about designing for them as distinct from other types of relationships. “Strong tie” relationships are our most connected, most important ones; familial relationships, for example. These relationships often involve physical proximity, are maintained over long periods of time, are interacted with very regularly.

113
Versus weak ties: People you know but don’t care much about. Characteristics: Infrequent communication, friends of friends

115
Most of us can stay up-to-date with up to 150 weak ties. This is a limitation of our brain. This number has been consistent throughout history.

Then several slides providing interesting examples of groups reaching 150 members, and then rupturing or intentionally splitting off into new groups.

123
Social networks changed weak-tie relationships by making it easier for updating ourselves on developments in them (no more phone calls, or meetings). Just check out their activity stream; “it gives us a lightweight route to get back in touch. This is a powerful route when we’re sourcing new information.”

125
But strong and weak ties are not enough when we think of relationships online. We need a new category of tie, and I call it the temporary tie. Temporary ties are people that you have no recognized relationship with, but that you temporarily interact with.

133
You don’t know these people beyond the one conversation you had, or the words they typed and whatever online profile they have. Your interaction with them is temporary. With the rise of user generated content online, temporary ties are becoming more important.

134
As designers, the biggest thing we need to think about when designing for temporary tie interaction is trust.

138
Don’t try to design something for all types of relationships. You’ll simply end up with a compromised solution for everyone. Understand which types of relationship ties are most important for what you’re creating, and design primarily for them.

141
In a world of many types of messages, four things that businesses need to consider when choosing the best communication features for their consumers:

1) The other person and their relationship
2) The content being communicated
3) The urgency of reply required
4) The level of privacy required

146
Different communication tools are better for different types of communication. Provide the one appropriate to your users’ needs.

153
We rely on others to make decisions: “If we want people to use our products, to use our website, it is important that we design in features that support our friends making decisions for us.”

155
How people influence each other is complex, and the role of “influentials” in society is over-estimated.

160
Whether someone can be influenced is as important as the strength of the influencer.

162
Two factors in understanding whether someone can be influenced: 1) What their social network looks like; 2) What they have experienced before.

164
The more people that give us an opinion, the less influenced we are by any one of those opinions.

173
Consider how to display multiple opinions, and how different versions might change people’s behavior.

179
People care deeply about how they look to others.

180
The most important thing to recognize about identity is that people don’t have one identity.

181
Online, it is hard to set things up so that one group sees you one way and another group sees you a different way. This has to, and will, change.

191
Some suggestions to enhance the ways people are allowed to represent themselves online.

204
Our systems need to be absolutely transparent and it is critical that we design this in. People need to understand the consequences of their actions, and we, as designers, need to do our best to make these things clear.

Recap: 212-216
1) Design for multiple groups (for example, true friends, family, colleagues, hobbies) in social networks.
2) Design for different relationships (strong ties, weak ties, temporary ties).
3) Design tools to give people options on how they present different online identities to different groups and individuals.

Found via Skeptic Geek