New psychological research shows that buying 'life experiences' instead of 'material possessions' leads to more happiness for the consumer and their relations.
In the economy of the future, it’ll all be about experiences, but the products will remain very normal too. It’s just a next block in the economy. After we’ve survived the economical crisis in ten years’ time, we’ll see that especially experiences in a virtual world have risen to great heights.
Favicons, the minilogos used by companies, governments and personal brands are starting to move. Futurist Erwin Van Lun is taking the lead by putting six different creative animations on his website (=this website). This makes him the first in the world to make such a creative expression part of a personal brand strategy.
As a brand futurist he adds: “Personal brands will benefit from using their own face as logo and favicon. Furthermore this kind of development fits with the trend in which brands bring their logo to life, the brand visualisation. I hope to inspire commercial, innovative non-profit organisations as well as personal brands with this modest innovation.”
Audi is launching Australia's first ‘Holographic Virtual Assistant’. In the Audi Centre in Sydney, Rosebery, she'll appear life-size to send specific messages. Below the whole press release.
Currently it’s a speaking person, but later Audi’s brand agent will be especially good at listening. Then you’ll have met her at home first, through your computer, later the PC and even later also holographic, and the brand dialogue will continue through a brand agent like this lady. Like it’s the most normal thing in the world. This is a step in that direction.
GE is making use of augmented reality and user microphone input on its campaign site smartgrid. Anyone who visits the site can print an A4 with a so-called 'marker', a simple black and white figure. Then you hold it up to the webcam and the image that you see will change on the spot of the marker. In this case, a landscape with wind turbines appears. If you start to blow into your microphone too you'll see the turbines turn and you'll hear the wind blowing.
Currently as a campaign site, but later we can hold any product of any brand in front of the webcam (or a mobile phone cam) and a new world will open for it. A world in which we can ask questions too. Currently we can blow; that’s fun. But later the GE brand agent, an artificial character that looks like a human, will appear and we can ask any question we want. This is a step in that direction.
Using the so-called BEAM 3D mapping software developed by two students of the Engineering College of Aarhus you can determine your location in a building. The software works together with 3d sensor hung in the building. You also need a 3D map of the building.
Later on, there’ll be sensors – let me call them ‘location-IDs’, everywhere. All electricity, for example a plug connection, broadcasts a location. And you can tape a piece of tape that works on solar energy and broadcasts on location to the wall with the greatest ease. Identifiers will determine their own location based on other IDs in the building. And maps of every building, every house will be standardly available later on. We’ll truly never get lost again.
Scientists of Rice University have accidentally discovered how atoms can move individually on nanoscale. The so-called nanocards determine their own path.
That count mean that we’ll start to develop issue that, for example, folds clothes or cleans clothes (goes directly to the dirty spots), pulls away water from the sink (will you even need a kitchen?) or paints the wall. Or that envelops our body when we get cold and has exactly the right temperature. That clothing will then adapt to the environment. With friends? It’ll get very different colours, other properties then when we make music or meditate or practice a sport. After we’ve gotten used to ‘normal’ robots in our lives, everything will change exactly how we want it at that moment. Now that‘s mass-customisation.
IBM Research has registered a new patent which makes speech synthesis a little more natural. Listen to a demo. It adds in coughs automatically and there are stops and random pauses. The differences are so small they're barely noticeable. According to IBM the voices are almost impossible to separate from real voices.
Image synthesis and speech synthesis are the easiest parts of building artificial life in a virtual world. Recognising objects, people, animals is a little more complex and there are plenty of meanings in this too. Being able to understand complex human communication and the abstract concepts we talk of, that’s a whole step further. Many steps further. But it’ll come too. Once we understand this properly we can talk automatedly about the most complicated subjects in any language, in any accent. That’s coming. It’s coming.
Google is letting consumers share their location with friends and family on Google Maps for Mobile under the name Google Latitude. To use it, you first need to download the newest version of Google Maps for Mobile and activate Latitude. Then you can invite your friends to share their location with you. When they accept the invitation you can see their location on a Google Maps for Mobile map after which you're given the opportunity to call, text or email them or even chat with them.
This is how even Google can grow into a social coaching brand. From Gmail and Google Talk contact lists are created in which Google can even see whom you have more and less contact with. Those contact lists can be used to look up acquaintances fast. Furthermore, with the Android phone, Google can see who’s calling and texting you. This way Google creeps very closely to your friends’ circle and can then offer more added value there.
In the new version of Google Earth, oceans can be admired too. It's possible to look underwater, and thus look for the deepest part of the ocean, the Mariana Trench, and let yourself be guided by videos of National Geographic and the BBC or to look for shipwrecks. Furthermore it's also possible to look at the urbanization or the melting polar caps using historical images.
The framework to map the physical world in time and space completely is maturing nicely. Very soon we’ll be able to just walk through this 3D world, in the time we wish. Meet friends, make appointments, meet people, open stores, buy things. It’s all coming and it won’t take long now. Then it’ll get really exciting when this world gets projected around us. Or that we can sit on a bench and see a movie, 3D, holographic. In Google Earth, version 15.
Flickr, the popular photo hosting site, now has over 100 million photos with GPS data, so with location data.
Later every photo and every video will be standardly found on the internet, as soon as you take it, with exact location data and the direction in which you took the photo, and we can determine exactly who sees the photo. All together we’ll build up an archive with which we can reconstruct the world of the past in great detail at any moment we want.
A Japanese firm claims to have the solution for lonely elderly people and people with a long distance relationship: a robot doll that looks exactly like your beloved. The robot doll is made based on a photo of a real person. The plastic human can also talk, recognize voices, react to movements, wave and nod.
Robots too are becoming more and more real. Eventually we’ll be able to talk to robots that look exactly like our great-granddad who died a hundred years ago. We’ll be able to ask what it was like to live in that time. It’ll change the world forever, but this too goes step by step. And this is truly child’s play.
The Japanese National Weather Association offers a "rain cloud mail messaging alert service" for mobile phones. That means that you'll get a signal if it's clear there's a rain cloud you've not seen yourself yet coming your way. The Japanese pay $1 a month for this service.
We’ll slowly start to pay for services tailored to us. Here in subscription model, but I think in time you’ll start to pay per consultation and only consider a subscription when you use it regularly. Of course we’ll have to be able to pay for example $0.50 with the greatest ease, a press of a button. World-wide. And that’s coming too.
This children's TV, the Tereshibai of Konami, allows parents to record their own text based on the words that appear on the screen. Children can select fairytales and download new ones. That won this toy a prize for excellence in innovation from Japan's first Toy Grand Prix.
The virtual world isn’t something complex and complicated; it’s getting easier. So easy that there’ll soon been screens around our babies which allow them to communicate with other babies. And with which they’re already confronted with other languages, even before they can speak themselves. It’ll again lead to a totally new generation.
Neuroscientific research shows that we'd like to belong to the group. Of course we already knew that, but now we also know which processes in the brain ensure we do, even without us knowing it. A research group from Rotterdam-Nijmegen published this in the leading scientific magazine Neuron.
When we see we deviate from the group a 'wrong' signal goes off in our brain. Our 'oops-area' becomes incredibly active, the reward-area gets less so. Combined it creates such a strong signal of being wrong that we still won't make the same mistake twice a long time later, so say the researchers in Neuron.
People are and remain herd animals. Brands will continuously keep you up-to-date with what your friends are doing, even more than you already know. This’ll only lead to more group behaviour, but end up getting a counter-movement. This is how we’re undulating through the future.
Nitrogen atoms can be used in diamond to detect a magnetic field that's a ten-thousandth weaker than that of the earth. However the quantum properties of the atoms have to be 'manipulated' for this. It's the first time that the quantum properties of a material are used in practice.
If we can measure the earth’s magnetic field, we can also determine where we are. Of course we can already use GPS for that, but that doesn’t work inside our home or underground. This type of invention will eventually lead to being able to order a robot to dig a 1500 kilometer long pipeline and the robot will work on it on its own. That in turn means we can have water available anywhere in the world, that we can have power lines run everywhere, and furthermore – what I predict – that we can make an underground outpost-like network which allows us to be transported through the earth at great speeds. To be on the other side of the world in literally half an hour. This type of technology is what we can expect in 2050.
Research of the Cambridge University shows that the length of the ring finger relates to the financial situation of people. The university claims that people with a long ring finger, in comparison to the other fingers, have a greater affinity for earning money. The scientists believe that the amount of testosterone in the womb are responsible for this.
Many wisdoms from the past have been sent to the land of fables during the development of modern science: they couldn’t be proven, therefore they weren’t ‘true’. Now that we’re developing new research methods we can reexamine old wisdom to form a better opinion. This is an example of this.
An Intelligent Equivalent of the 3d world
Intelligent Autonomous Robots doing incredible jobs
Nature & technology perfectly blended