SxSC - the New New Things

Last Friday I gave a talk at SxSC, a day held at Southampton University to showcase new Web/'Net based technologies. My talk was on the role of hype and bubbles in the creation/destruction nature of technolgy innovation (slides are here), but to me the most interesting thing was watching all the embryo technologies on display and listening to the other talks, as - as is the wont of Universities - they tend to be doing the really new, "isn't this interesting - hmmm, what if I do that next" sort of groundbreaking stuff, which allows you to take a view of where things may go.

In a nutshell, the things demonstrated were:

Distributed Music - Enrique Tomas and Alain Renaud gave talks on using music distributed all over the Web Enrique's application mashed GPS position and movement, so he can spread music across a landscape, mapped to a (potentially shifting) territory. Alain was using high speed internet to drive real time interactive performances in a multiplicity of spaces. (Bah - its easier to watch than explain - think about a variable soundstage that follows you around - I am also certain at one stage Enrique transformed hsi internet signal into a soundscape so that the 'Net was played as an instrument. If I were Dolby et al, I'd be watching with interest.

3D Manipulation and Printing - Paul Walland demonstrated digitised 3D masks from museums collections. These 3D mapping and visualisation techniques will clearly influence where 3D printing will come in. James Miles showed how to use Reflectance Transformation Imaging on existing three dimensional datasets in a virtual environment, which allowd them to show hard-to-discern archaeological features in a landscape.

Use of Social Media: Adam Procter showed research on how we interact with social networks via “streams”, and his thoughts about the emerging "conversation economy", and a joint Tsinghua-Southampton University project that analysed how the young in the 2 countries perceived the world, using their online output and extracting and visualising it.

There was also Peter Bennett's Chronotape (see here) which is a 3D timeline, used in the example shown for family history research - but it is a 3D interface to display and control multiple-thread time sequencing very simply.

In fact I wish I had videos of all the talks because the thing I've found hard here is to describe what was actually going on - and that is probably also a sign of these times and projects - you have to see this stuff to "get" it.

Also fascinating conversations about what you can now do with holography, using 3D imaging and archaeological research to recreate 8th century Caliphate Baghdad, using agent based simulation to deduce social network interactions among others. And 3D printing - there was so much talk about what might be done with 3D printing. Not just the common or garden squirty plastic sort, but imagine much bigger ones working on composiies, sintered metals, resins etc etc...

All in all a very interesting day, its taken me a week to let everything percolate through, and I can see 3 megatrends here:

(i) The use of distributed resources - and the distribution of used rresources - on the Web/Net will continue apace, and all the discontinuities that implies.

(ii) 3D imaging and manipulation, even from a few 2D photos, will become much simpler, so when economical 3D printing arrives there will be no shortage, or huge cost, of the up-front preparation phase

(ii) And it won't just be 3D printing. Making the virtual real - sound, shape, even texture - will be a major part of the coming 3D world.

Fascinating times....

Oh, and one last thing. Open Source. makes all this possible at fractional costs vs individual "re-inventing wheels" research. Of course, you know that, but here it was tangible