Where are the flying cars?

 Its 2012, where he heck are the flying cars?  I remember as a kid that flying cars were something definitely in our near future, but it does not seem to be happening at the pace everyone thought.  While flying cars do indeed exist, the price tag makes them out of reach for most.  

If I were to determine the reasons why flying cars were not around, the Delphi research method would yield the best results.  Automotive giants must have considered this, so they would be some of the experts involved.  Federal regulators have made rules for the current flying cars, so they would be involved too.  Current companies producing flying cars would be another group of experts.  Through these experts we would be able to see why there is a slow adoption and what it will take to get the infrastructure up and the price down. 

While everyone wants flying cars for convenience, there are many factors to consider.  Some positive factors:

·         Getting to your destination faster is one of the main reasons for the use of the flying car, from a consumer’s perspective

·         Saving money since we don’t need physical highways is a money saver for the government. 

Some negative factors:

·         Mass amounts of aircraft on the road increases the chance of collision, causing a projectile to fall on cities

·         Vehicles could be used as flying missiles by terrorists  wanting to blow up something

Keeping all parties anonymous ensures the opinions are not given based on any peer pressure.  Given the stature and high visibility each participant would have, making them anonymous ensures they can give a non-politically based opinion on the subject matter. 

You Tube. Why we don't have flying cars. Retrieved January 27, 2012 from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKqow8jzUDc&feature=related

Make Data More Human (Jer Thorp)

In the TED video, “Make Data More Human”, Jer Thorp, a NY Times Data Artist, outlines the importance of fitting data into a human context to give it meaning. 

Reading pure data is boring to most people.  Seeing tables of information laid out in series after series often makes seeing relationships and trends near impossible.  By taking that information and laying it out graphically we make better sense of the information.  Since we think in pictures it only makes sense that the graphical representation of information is more pleasing than the information itself. 

Two innovative ideas stemmed from this concepts of making data more human.  The first was a project called Cascade, which is an exploratory tool created for social networking.  The basic premise was to track the initial release of a piece of information and follow it through its sharing with social networking tools such as Twitter.  Comparing the number of people involved and the time taken to share, a better view of how social networking happens emerges. 

The second project was called OpenPaths.cc, which used iPhone data from participating users to map their locations.  The iPhone tracks the cell tower being used and what time it was in use.  From this information, vendors can gather your location data, should you grant it to them.  From this data, this particular application can map out where you have gone visually overlaid on a map of the world.  So rather than seeing lat/long coordinates, you can visually see where and when you were at specific places. 

Jer makes a very interesting case for the intelligent use of data for understanding.  Through these techniques, we can continue to visualize, construct and share meaningful information about the data we rely on. 

Thorp, J. (2012, March).  TED Talks. Make Data More Human.  Podcast retrieved from http://www.ted.com/talks/jer_thorp_make_data_more_human.html.

2011 Horizon Report - Augmented Reality

The Horizon Report seeks to understand and forecast technologies coming to fruition in the next five years (Johnson, 2011).  Of these technologies, one I see as promising is Augmented Reality (AR). 

The basic concept of AR is to overlay the world around us with a computer generated layer giving additional information.  The technology is broken down into 2 basic categories, visual metaphors and position based. 

An example the visual metaphor can be seen with one of the many sky applications on the iPhone.  By holding your phone up to the nighttime sky, the stars are sampled and named on the phone.  The program knows the star’s layout/relative positions and with a little math, the ratios of distances between the stars can be calculated giving the location in the sky.  Through a visual metaphor, information can be obtained from a background software based service to enhance what is being observed. 

A position based system we are all used to is the GPS mapping used for navigation.  We see the same streets we are driving on in a computer screen that is intelligent enough to tell us where to go.  A newer technology developed by Microsoft, the Kinect, allows the user to perform gestures to play a game.  Having a sword fight in this environment is much more realistic than using a simple controller—although it does get tiring a lot faster. 

Augmented Reality has been in use and will continue to evolve making our world and the virtual overlay interlaced through technology to such a degree that we will come to take it for granted, much like many of us do with the internet today.  

References

Johnson, L., Smith, R., Willis, H., Levine, A., and Haywood, K., (2011). The 2011 Horizon Report.

Austin, Texas: The New Media Consortium.