I am not sure how it happened but I stumbled across Kyle Chayka’s article “‘Farmscrapers’ could turn future cities green” over at Salon the other day. Despite the scale of architect Vincent Callebaut‘s “Asian Cairns” concept, I focused more on the (re)integration of agriculture back into our lives. In many ways, it is surprising that this re-integration is not more common: it seems to be easy, the cost of food (particularly fresh fruits and vegetables) is on the rise, and some industrial farming practices seem to incur significant environmental costs (e.g., colony collapse disorder). I walk out of this meandering thought wondering what might it look like when an ancient technology like agriculture gets more seamlessly integrated into our modern lives.

Continue reading →

Despite the numerous questions that we all had upon leaving Prometheus (perhaps best covered in this video by the guys over at Red Letter Media), the idea of mapping space in three dimensions in real time was pretty cool. The funny thing is that research in this area at MIT predated the movie, and remains active. What surprised me, though, was when I watched the video for Occipital’s Structure Sensor, which aims to bring the technology into the commercial space….and began thinking about the larger issue of augmented reality.

Continue reading →

Two articles crossed my radar screen today that I thought were interesting. The first essentially killed an article on (the perceived necessity of) smart watches that I was drafting (lesson learned: write faster) and the second, on human-robotic interaction, is spurring me to organize some thoughts about robots (beyond the Roomba) that have been swirling around for a bit. So, in case you are looking for a couple tl;dr summaries to read before calling it a day, here you go.

Continue reading →