RocketBoom Happenings!

A couple interesting thing on my fav DIY news channel, RocketBoom. On today’s show they previewed a clip for a new video blog with John Edwards. Looks like anyone will be able to video in questions too. I think we’re about to see vlogs hit like podcasting late last year. . RocketBoom also launched a new site called Apollo Pony that has a lot of video clips from around the web.
Wow- this looks great, new Google Mapping- Google Earth. Integrated Google searches and a large number of landmarks that can be turned on and off. 3D Buildings, Public Transit, Land Rendering, Coverage, Animations, GPS, Road directions, screenshot savings and a lot more. [
As part of her Social Defense Mechanisms: Tools for Reclaiming our Personal Space research, Limor Fried (creator of the Wave Bubble and the Minty MP3) developed the Media-Sensitive Glasses that automatically darken whenever a television is in view, so as to protect the wearer from television’s “hypnotic” effect.
Gross web server. Experiments in Galvanism is the culmination of studio and gallery experiments in which a miniature computer is implanted into the dead body of a frog specimen. Akin to Damien Hirst’s bodies in formaldehyde, the frog is suspended in clear liquid contained in a glass cube, with a blue ethernet cable leading into its splayed abdomen. The computer stores a website that enables users to trigger physical movement in the corpse: the resulting movement can be seen in gallery, and through a live streaming webcamera.

Neat projects, using Macromedia Flash. InstantSOUP is a path into electronics using an approach of “learning by making”, introducing electronic prototyping in a playful, non-technical way. It was developed following the experience gained in teaching physical interaction design at Interaction-Ivrea.
iRobot and Frontline Robotics are teaching robots how to work together. The goal of iRobot’s swarm project is to coordinate the actions of groups of hundreds of individual robots. A Swarm Operating System (SwarmOS) is under development to control as many as 10,000 robots or SwarmBots.