Augmented reality provides you with an information overlay for your daily life, supplying data for things you are seeing via a smart phone camera - or through special goggles that are connected to the internet.

According to Pachube's developers:

Pachube is a little like YouTube, except that, rather than sharing videos, Pachube enables people to monitor and share real time environmental data from sensors that are connected to the internet. Pachube acts between environments, able both to capture input data (from remote sensors) and serve output data (to remote actuators).

In other words, any kind of sensor you want (from CCTV to air quality monitors) can feed data to your smartphone and pop up one of those graphs. Want to avoid areas with lots of particulate matter in the air? Now you can see those invisible particles by waving your phone around. Or do you want to rent in an office in a building with a small carbon footprint? If the proper sensors are in place, Pachube lets you see the carbon footprint of buildings you enter.

But what if you want your AR without having to worry about a corporation controlling what you see? Then you need Wikitude, a completely free and open version of the kinds of AR software we showed you last week. It runs on Android, an operating system developed at Google for mobile devices. Just look at the landscape around you using the phone's camera, and Wikitude overlays map data and other useful information on top of it. As long as you are looking through the eye of your mobile, you'll never get lost again.

He wrote a program that would randomly place shapes on a black background, and decide whether the abstract pattern looked more or less like the famous painting. After almost a million tries, the program's output had evolved to the point where Alsing had the image on the far right.

How does this simple program work? Alsing explains:

The procedure of the program is quite simple:

0) Setup a random DNA string (application start)

1) Copy the current DNA sequence and mutate it slightly
2) Use the new DNA to render polygons onto a canvas
3) Compare the canvas to the source image
4) If the new painting looks more like the source image than the previous painting did, then overwrite the current DNA with the new DNA
5) repeat from 1

He also includes source code for those who wish to delve further. Though he's had some debate with commenters on his blog as to whether this counts as pure evolutionary programming, he argues that it is because the program has to mutate each time it finds an image that's closer to the Mona Lisa. Luckily Sarah Connor isn't around, because she'd have this guy's ass in a sling.

Genetic Programming: Evolution of Mona Lisa [via Roger Alsing's Blog]

Kelly writes on his blog:

I am interested in heavily mediated folks who drop out. Not partially, only once in a while, on sabbatical, but drop off the internet completely. Are they happy now? Don Knuth seems happy and productive. How do others manage? Do they become a recluse, like the Unabomber? Do they form communities with the like minded? Or, are internet drops so rare that they are simple statistical outliers?

It makes sense to me that some of the most fervent digital dropouts would be people whose livelihoods (and lives) are so deeply bound up with technology. First of all, eradicating your identity online can be tough, so some technical background will be required. But more importantly, people who spend all their time with computers are going to take their slow technical obsolescence the hardest. Watching your favorite machines become outmoded is demoralizing, as is watching your favorite computer language or operating system wither away.

I think Knuth and Stallman are probably just the bleeding edge of a trend we're going to see more of as highly plugged-in generations of people age. Some will begin to reject the technologies around them, while others will fetishize retro computers. Either way, we're going to see gadgets and computer networks come to have generational values: There will be legacy systems for the elderly, while young people claim new systems as their own.

Neo-Amish Dropouts [via The Technium]

io9: So you're talking about these social tools, and how communities can use them, but of course you're also talking about "user generated content," which is one way of saying "get people to work for you for free."

CS: Depends on your frame of reference.

io9: Are we looking at a future where getting a job means working for free for many years before you get to be a developer or producer for cash?

CS: If we think of Flickr as being like a newspaper, then yes, the content that was previously paid for is now free. But if you think of flickr as being like a bar, then what you get instead is that the user conversation now creates value for people out of earshott. No one complains that the bar marks up its booze prices because it's a place for people to get together.

io9: So the bar gets paid for your conversations?

CS: I think the whole 'you work, we collect the money' model has been over-emphasized by the fact that professional media covering these new tools will of course be biased to take the current media model as the 'correct' one. Merchants, a bar in Manhattan, charges $17 for a martini. Know what goes into a $17 martini?

io9: What?

CS: $3 of gin and $14 of "I'm in a bar where people pay $17 for a martini!"

io9: But that makes Flickr sound like an elite place where you pay to be around beautiful rich people.

CS: So the change in the price of drinking gin at home alone, or in a bar with others, is mainly a metric of social value, and we're quite used to paying the platform operator, which in this case would be the bar owner, for making a site where that value can accrue. Of course the whole 'is it a newspaper or a bar' thing is even one level too shallow. The thing Flickr is most like is Flickr. It has all kinds of novel characteristics which are exactly the things that get obscured by metaphor. So when media people look at Flickr (or Digg or YouTube) as new competitors in an existing media ecosystem, instead of a new ecosystem, they create bias towards old metrics.

Oh, and to your earlier comment, I don't mean to suggest that Flickr always equals merchants, just that we are more than used to business models where almost all of the value in the establishment comes from value the patrons create for themselves. It's just that the press doest see (or sees and doesn't like) that comparison, because its hard to argue that some injustice is being doen when viewed in the light of social life rather than media production.

io9: The problem I guess with the bar analogy is that the most "valuable" bars to be in are often valuable because they are full of elite people — which is sort of the opposite of what I think you're hoping for in this book.

CS: Well, even a $2 well drinks dive has the same economics. Consider happy hour. There is a discount on the nominal product precisely to create the necessary bit of social value.

io9: So to get back to the question of getting paid. Sounds like you're saying that we're tending toward a model where the people who make content (or art or writing) don't get paid,
but the people who make the tools that let them express themselves do.

CS: That is one part of the effect. Another part is that, on average people won't get paid, because the pool of creators has gotten too large. But significant talent will still be rewarded. Wedding photographers and stock photo people are going to get creamed. But Herb Ritts' fees may go up. When the bottleneck is not longer worth paying for (because it mostly doesn't exist) talent becomes the only differentiating metric.

io9: So the elite content producers may get more?

CS: I think so.

io9: Obviously a lot of people are decrying this idea, particularly in the media — "oh no we're losing taste makers!"

CS: We're not losing taste makers! I hate that argument — we're gaining taste makers, at an unbelivable rate. We're losing scarcity.

io9: So do you think in the end we'll get a world where more people will be compensated to do creative work? Or that creative work will become more lilke cooking, where everybody does it?

CS: More people overall, maybe, but many fewer on average. And most of the ones who do get compensated don't have it as their main source of income.

io9: Which other industries do you see this change affecting?

CS: Anything where there is a production bottleneck. So the obvious ones are non-litigation lawyering, librarians, anyone in the media distribution business, but also the info managing pieces of things like industrial design, medical decision making, etc.

io9: Are you worried at all that people might use your book to exploit users?

CS: Most of the uses of this sort of group-forming are hard to fake over any length of time (imagine a fake open source project — the coders would bail in a matter of weeks), but the uses of social tools for groups from Al Qaeda to the pro-anorexia kids seems to me to be the biggest social threat that will come from the medium.

Check out the book — although Shirky isn't a futurist, Here Comes Everybody is the best work of futurism I've read in quite a while.

Here Comes Everybody [ISBN.nu]

According to series writer Matt Fraction, the battle between Tony Stark and new bad guy Ezekiel Stane is really just an allegory for the battle Bill Gates wages against smaller software providers every single day of his life:

Zeke is a post-national business man and kind of an open source ideological terrorist... He has absolutely no loyalty to any sort of law, creed, or credo. He doesn't want to beat Tony Stark, he wants to make him obsolete. Windows wants to be on every computer desktop in the world, but Linux and Stane want to destroy the desktop. He's the open source to Stark's closed source oppressiveness.

I want to make this book bigger than Los Angeles and New York and show that business is truly international... We've got Stane, who is post-national and Stark, who has facilities all around the world; so this is going to be a globetrotting book. Flip a page and you're in Monaco. Flip a page and you're in Paris. Flip another page and you're in Tokyo.

A Stark Contrast [Comic Book Resources]

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• Victor Gonzalez, Ignacio Vargas and Angel Tena for the creation of the RealFlow software application. "RealFlow was the first widely adopted, commercially available, easy-to-use system for the simulation of realistic liquids in motion picture visual effects."
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• Jonathan Cohen, Dr. Jerry Tessendorf, Dr. Jeroen Molemaker and Michael Kowalski for the development of the system of fluid dynamics tools at Rhythm & Hues. "This system allows artists to create realistic animation of liquids and gases, using novel simulation techniques for accuracy and speed, as well as a unique scripting language for working with volumetric data."
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• Duncan Brinsmead, Jos Stam, Julia Pakalns and Martin Werner for the design and implementation of the Maya Fluid Effects system. "This system is used to create simulations of gaseous phenomena integrated into the widely available Maya tool suite, using an unconditionally stable semi-Lagrangian solver."
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• Stephan Trojansky, Thomas Ganshorn and Oliver Pilarski for the development of the Flowline fluid effects system. "Flowline is a flexible system that incorporates highly parallel computation, allowing rapid iteration and resulting in detailed, realistic fluid effects."
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• Dr. Doug Roble, Nafees Bin Zafar and Ryo Sakaguchi for the development of the fluid simulation system at Digital Domain. "This influential and flexible production-proven system incorporates innovative algorithms and refined adaptations of published methods to achieve large-scale water effects."
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• Nick Rasmussen, Ron Fedkiw and Frank Losasso Petterson for the development of the Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) fluid simulation system. "This production-proven simulation system achieves large-scale water effects within ILM's Zeno framework. It includes integrating particle level sets, parallel computation, and tools that enable the artistic direction of the results."
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