Tom Adams

Augmented AR

Forget baseball cards with 3D holograms on them, TED yet again delivers with this extraordinary vision into the near future of augmented reality from the Fluid Interfaces Group at MIT. A genuine journey into the '6th sense' where every physical perceptual experience can be augmented by the Internet - from looking at a physical book and seeing its Amazon rating projected onto the cover, to meeting a person for the first time and seeing their metadata.

From MTV to CCTV

You have to admire the inventiveness of this music video created entirely from CCTV footage of the band in public places:

Air penguins

Pointless and utterly beguiling floating penguin robots. An avian airship solution looking for a problem. Silent ops aerial photography in ToyTown perhaps?

It's been a while

I can't believe how long it's been since I posted here. Twitter has been invented and gone worldwide for goodness sake. But I'm back and rambling again. First things first: microblogging. One simple truth needs asserting: it's not good because of what I say, it's good because of what everyone is saying. And it gets even better when clever people like this man do things like this for Vodafone. Yet again proving that if you turn your back for 5 minutes, the Internets changes beyond recognition.  

And two years on... Big hairy 2.0 goals.

Tim O'Reilly throws down the gauntlet for the potential of web 2.0. From changing government to ending disease and ending Brazilian deforestation. All based on the original core idea: 'Harnessing network effects to build applications that get better the more people use them"...

Web 2.0 summit introduction - from 2006!

Always a pleasure to hear it from the source, and interesting to see how much has changed in two years. A rich series of tidbits on web 2.0 from O'Reilly:

yes, I'm blogging from my iPhone

It was just a matter of time. Just as I checked in to my most recent BA flight on THE device, so too am I pointlessly proving that I can Blog on the move. Does it make the post more interesting? Absolutely not. Further proof that it's not the tech but the person behind it. And breathe and relax...

Reasons to fall in love with the Internet (again)

Have you ever wondered how 'big' World of Warcraft is? Well, you'll probably be surprised to hear it's around the same size as the London Borough of Hillingdon. Don't believe me? Here is the evidence from a talk by James Wallis at Interesting. And in the spirit of aimlessly link hopping, what about this hilarious (and naughty) spoof of BBC news sign language by Adam Buxton from Adam and Joe. I know, I know, these are just links to videos, and not particularly insightful revelations about the next generation Internet place. However, together, they show how a MMOG can provoke a scientist to think about virtual worlds as real places; how TV is never safe from re-versioning on the Internet; and that a comedian knows that he can reach a bigger audience and build his brand faster on YouTube than anywhere else. A perfect illustration of what those boffins over at the Cultural Convergence Consortium are talking about in their research into the collision of 'transmedia entertainment', 'participatory culture' and 'experiential marketing'. So there, I did make a sensible point after all...

WIKIs made simple

Social Networking for beginners

What a lovely video this is from some clever people at Common Craft. If you ever needed a simple explanation of social networking, this is it. There's something peculiar about the resurgence of pieces of paper to represent web pages in YouTube videos at the moment. For some reason, the smarter people are, the more likely they are to draw something and move it around on a table. Why are we waiting so long for Microsoft Surface?