Monday has reared its ugly head around again, so let´s cut to the chase with some useless distractions:

Police Departments take note, instead of paying an ol´fashioned pad and pencil artist to sketch out your wanted criminal, why not just use the Wii´s Mii feature to create an avatar based on his/ her features?

That´s what Police did in Kanagawa prefecture early in Feb this year, in connection with a trashed car wanted poster.

Maybe not as hi tech as the Motion Portrait avatars we blogged about last week, but still..could work.


In other bits and pieces, you´d think that to get 83,485 Subscribers on Youtube, you´d have to put on a whole song and dance number.
Not so for 23 year old youtube sensation Magibon who just sits in front of her camera, bats her pretty eyelashes and says....nothing.
Maybe it´s because of this (and her tiny face, huge eyes and big boobs) that she´s so popular in Japan?

Magibon who spoke to Pingmag says that people say they are moved by her videos,
¨Because it’s a like a blank slate, it can be whatever you want it to be. There are a lot of other videos on YouTube — some of the most watched ones — that have a lot of arguing and negativity, and then you have my videos, with just silence, maybe just a smile, or a wave. To some people, that’s really meaningful for them, to just make everything stop for a minute, and have someone just smile at them.¨

She is actually from Pensilvania but one day picked up a camera and decided to record herself being her, and speaking Japanese because she always like Japan.

I´m confused about this girl, is she just a lucky moron? Or is she actually smarter than you and me? She´s certainly richer now thanks to her videos, and tapped into something bigger than her: a pretty blank slate all the more real because of her mundanity. Maybe she is a video artist, making her living using easily accessible and distributed technology for mass consumption. Either way she´s still going strong even after 2 years so she must be doing something right..

ZiA

Yes it´s Friday, that time of week where we look back on the week and do a round up of the stories that got us blogging:

Monday saw the onset of sever Mondayitis but we tried to cure that with a slew of robot stories like one about a Robo-monk that was made from used parts such as a washing machine motor and a cassette tape recorder.

Tuesday

NEC promised 3D monitors in the future with a teaser press release..

Wednesday

A new map of Earth was unleashed by NASA and the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. This map can measure land temperature and climatic changes so we can see just how fast climate change is happening...

Oh and ´we talked about technology that can reproduce an image from somebodies thought brainwaves!

Thursday

Brought up the topic of copyright and how one of the founders of Creative Commons is pushing for copyright law to get with the times dammit (not his exact words).

Friday we had a little look at a freaky 3d profile application that can create breathing, smiling, blinking and generally creepy looking avatars, even of your own image…

Have a great weekend!

ZiA

Fancy road testing a new moustache style virtually before you start to grow it in the real world?
Me neither, but a company called Motion Portrait who took a spin at the International Optics Fair this year has developed software that allows you to upload your photo and try various moustache styles floating by on balloons.

Not that new, I admit, but the technology behind it is, since the picture turns into a moving image that smiles, blinks and generally creeps you out while it patiently waits for you to make a move.

Motion Portrait has already been picked up for use in various companies including Unilever, Sony (Walkman), a PSP game for Namco Bandai Games and can be used as slightly creepy avatars in social networks, game avatars, on mobile phones. You can even superimpose your face on another picture or movie.

They even offer a middleware if you´re a gaming company and fancy using it, here.

The site is in Japanese but it´s monkey easy to figure out what´s going on.
Click on a moustachoed balloon, then just drag the sliders for a better fit.
Give it a try here

Also one for the ladies for hair do´s here called Virtual Preview (Japanese)
Instructions:
Press the large red button on the right hand side.
On the next screen, choose a female, male or upload your own picture.
On the following screen, click a hairdo you like on the top left.
Bingo, a new Virtual Preview of your next hairdo.

Whitts

One of the guys behind Creative Commons visited Tokyo in May and stated that copyright laws need to get with the times if they want to stay relevant says The Japan Times.

Creative Commons, who Lawrence Lessig helped develop, started a system that allowed creators more choice and control over how their creations were used. Lessig says that there needs to be more room for creative expression and experimentation if copyright laws want to keep up with the 21st century.

The developer and author was in Japan doing double duty as part of the art lecture series for the Mori Art museum and plugging his latest book ¨Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy.

Lessig also said that while audiences, for example fans of anime, re-edit videos then reload them on Youtube for an alternative view that often offers some sociological or cultural insight, the law is against the media´s evolution from one way traffic to 2 way communication.

¨... you can't go 10 minutes without triggering the application of copyright law,¨ he said.

"The legal establishment is in denial about this, saying, 'Well, you just have to make sure the law's running efficiently,' even though it's regulating wildly beyond what anybody ever expected it would regulate. I think the key is to get people to recognize the radical change and then avoid what to many kids seems the logical consequence of this, which is to scrap copyright law."

Thoughts?

ZiA

New map, the ASTER Global Digital Elevation Model (GDEM) announced yesterday that NASA and the Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) shook on.
The map details land temperatures and the changing landscape to better predict changes in the terrain and to ¨understand the consequences for life on Earth¨

(and also maybe check in on North Korea maybe)

Whitts

If I had just one superpower, as stupid and small scale as it sounds, I would want to be able to take photos just by blinking my eyes. (the other powers would include to be able to cure cancer and create world peace etc..)

I´d like to think I´d be a famous oddball photographer by now, but those dreams were shattered when someone, I like to call him ¨No way Jose¨, asked how I´d share said photos in my brain with other people. I don´t know Jose, ask a hypethetical question, get a hypothetical answer!

Ha! Science has finally caught up my friend..

Back in May this year, scientists figured out a way to reproduce an image that a person looks at by monitoring the person´s brainwaves!

The research group of Yukiyasu Kamitani, head of the Department of Neuroinformatics at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International, were the pioneers of this technology.

¨When people look at something,...neurons in the visual cortex reproduce the visual information in the shape of the image within the brain.¨say the researchers.

It works by monitoring the oxygen and blood levels in the brain after neurons are activated in the visual cortex.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) this data can reconstruct the image the person has seen.

The only drawback is that it´s kinda blurry with more complex images and hard to figure out unless you know what the image was before hand.

Dang.Foiled again..But for how long?

ZiA

Only last week I was bitching about it being 2009 and we don´t even have hoverboards yet, or the cool 3D messages used by Leia to get in contact with Obiwan via R2D2.

NEC is promising a 3D monitor version for release within a year or so. Vague? yep.

But they say they´re going to make it for medicinal purposes first on 12.1 inch screens, THEN gaming monitors and mass produced portable TV´s for grubs like you and me.

Here´s the full lowdown.

Whitts