[tt] [NSG] Meeting Announcement 12/18

Mon Dec 17 19:02:25 UTC 2007

----- Forwarded message from Fred Hapgood <hapgood at pobox.com> -----

From: Fred Hapgood <hapgood at pobox.com>
Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2007 13:03:31 -0500
To: nsg at marshome.org
Subject: [NSG] Meeting Announcement  12/18
X-Mailer: MessagingEngine.com Webmail Interface
Reply-To: Nanotechnology Study Group <nsg at marshome.org>

Meeting notice: The 071218 meeting will be held at 7:30 P.M. at the
Royal East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block down from the corner of
Main St. and Mass Ave.  If you're new and can't recognize us, ask the
manager. He'll probably know where we are. More details below.

Suggested topic: Cost Trends in Display Technology

In recent years SF writers have done their best to prepare us for life
in interstellar empires, life with voting robots, worlds in which we
will live forever. All these interesting developments might well happen,
but none will appear soon.

On the other hand, I have never read an SF treatment of the consequences
of a technology that seems likely to change the look and feel of
everyday life radically in just a few years: the relentless,
precipitous, collapse in the costs of display surfaces of every kind.
(The Holodeck of Star Trek is basically an afterthought.)

For whatever reason this cost decline seems to have affected all display
technologies roughly equally: diodes, crystals, plasma, even CRTs.  We
are already beginning to see the consequences: huge televisions, video
walls, a new generation of videoconferencing (called "immersive
teleconferencing"), dynamic, even interactive, signs, and buildings with
images flowing over their exterior surfaces.  (I am writing this a mile
or so from a building with just such a feature.)

As the cost of these installations keeps falling, a new landscape,
especially a new urban landscape, will emerge from a negotiation among
advertisers, teenagers wearing "computational clothing," community
activists concerned about "the privatization of attentionspace,"  and
architects trying to strike new visual relationships between buildings
and their environments (such as showing images of what you would have
seen if the building had not been there).

Interior spaces will change even more radically.  Club owners will want
to use video walls (with fully active sound connections) to open out to
other clubs in the same time zones (thus making all clubs look more
popular), building owners will want to lower energy and construction
costs by substituting displays for windows, businesses will use
immersive teleconferencing to develop relationships among business
partners by connecting lounges and cafeterias, and so on. The profession
of interior decorating will be unrecognizable, since you can throw
almost anything onto a display and you put a display almost anywhere.

At some point, though perhaps not for a while, interior designers will
get a really powerful tool to work with: holography.  Holography is not
tomorrow's technology, since it is at least very hard, and probably
impossible, to get a photon to take a hard right without actually
bouncing it off something.  The only way to make holograms (so far) is
to paint transmitting elements over the interior of a space, like the
walls and ceiling and floor of a room, and then use those elements to
project rays that give observers the illusion of an object standing in
the interior of that space, like an actor in a theatre.  Making sure
that a number of free- standing users, including users in motion, all
see the same scene in the hologram is another hard problem.

However, nothing here is physically impossible, which means that down
the road we will have total command over all the visuals, 2D, 3D, that
appear anywhere inside a suitably treated space.

I wish Verner would take a crack at that.

<+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+>

In twenty years half the population of Europe will have visited the
moon.

                                -- Jules Verne, 1865

<+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+>

Announcement Archive: http://www.pobox.com/~fhapgood/nsgpage.html.

<+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+><+>

Legend:

"NSG" expands to Nanotechnology Study Group.  The Group meets on the
first and third Tuesdays of each month at the above address, which
refers to a restaurant located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The NSG mailing list carries announcements of these meetings and little
else. If you wish to subscribe to this list (perhaps having received a
sample via a forward) send the string 'subscribe nsg'  to
majordomo at polymathy.org.  Unsubs follow the same model.

Comments, petitions, and suggestions re list management to:
nsg at pobox.com. www.pobox.com/~fhapgood   www.pobox.com/~fhapgood

http://www.BostonScienceAndEngineeringLectures.com
http://www.pobox.com/~fhapgood

_______________________________________
Nanotechnology Study Group NSG discussion group
http://www.marshome.org/mailman/listinfo/nsg
To Reply to Everyone: NSG___no-spam at marshome.org
Questions for list admin: NSG-owner___no-spam at marshome.org
Archive: http://MarsHome.org/mailman/private/NSG
Unsubscribe: NSG-unsubscribe at marshome.org
Password or Options or Unsubscribe: http://MarsHome.org/mailman/options/NSG
More info and other e-lists:  http://MarsHome.org/about/discussion_groups.html
Hosted by CyberTeams.com and Mars Foundation(tm), http://MarsHome.org

----- End forwarded message -----
-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE