Co.Design: “Microsoft can now Turn Any Space into The Holodeck”

Last year, Microsoft Research revealed Illumiroom—which used projectors to stretch the image on your TV to take over a whole wall. Now comes the sequel. Called RoomAlive, this new system can turn every surface in a room—from the floor to the couch cushions to your own skin—into a glowing screen that reacts to your movement. It’s as if your whole analog world has been digitized. And that digital world can see where you’re looking, pointing, and touching, and adapt itself accordingly.

---

Video games are the most obvious use cases, but beyond that application, the research team is exploring RoomAlive’s potential for the business world, like advanced telepresence and augmenting conference room meetings with digital information.

Mark Wilson

Amazing concept, far better than virtual reality helmets like Oculus Rift or Google’s awkward home-made Cardboard. Now, let’s see if New Microsoft can transform this into a successful product. I distinctly recall a similar concept touch-screen-table called Surface years ago (not to be confused with the Surface tablet) that hasn’t taken off – in fact, you could say Apple delivered a much better implementation of touch screens in a compact format, the iPhone.

Time: “The Secret Language of Girls on Instagram”

Getty Images

Instagram lets users share their photos, and “like” and comment on their friends’. The competition for “likes” encourages creativity in young users, who can use filters and other devices to spruce up their images. And its simplicity – it’s just pictures, right? — comforts parents haunted by the cyberbullying they hear about on Facebook and Twitter.

But Instagram’s simplicity is also deceiving: look more closely, and you find the Rosetta Stone of girl angst: a way for tweens and teens to find out what their peers really think of them (Was that comment about my dress a joke or did she mean it?), who likes you (Why wasn’t I included in that picture?), even how many people like them (if you post and get too few likes, you might feel “Instashame”, as one young woman calls it). They can obsess over their friendships, monitoring social ups and downs in extreme detail. They can strategically post at high traffic hours when they know peers are killing time between homework assignments. “Likes”, after all, feel like a public, tangible, reassuring statement of a girl’s social status.

Rachel Simmons

Even more fascinating than the dozens of alternative uses for Twitter favs!

Some speculation about the 2015 iPhone lineup

After forecasts backed by historical data and mathematical models, I think a bit of speculation about the next iPhone models couldn’t hurt. It’s a common practice, starting basically the day after launch: “What will Apple do next?”. I’ll try to be reasonable and work with some previous trends:

• An obvious trend these past years was Apple launching a new iPhone design every two years, alternating with models keeping the same design with improved specs and features. We had the ‘same design, better specs’ in 2011 (iPhone 4S) and 2013 (iPhone 5S); and new designs in 2010 (iPhone 4), 2012 (iPhone 5) and 2014 (iPhone 6). It’s safe to assume that in 2015 we will see – again – the same design refreshed with higher specs.
• Another, more recent, pattern is to increase the number of models per launch: every year until 2012 we had one new device per year, but since then there were two: in 2013 the flagship iPhone 5S and the ‘cheaper’ 5C; and in 2014 two large-screen flagships, 6 and 6 Plus. I think it’s entirely possible to see three different models launched in 2015.

So, with this in mind, how will the next lineup look like?

Predicting Apple sales for the next year

After writing the article about the iPad and the ‘post-PC’ era, another idea came to my mind. I already gathered the data about Apple sales for the last three years from their public financial statements, why don’t I try to forecast the sales for the next year? In theory it should be pretty straightforward: sales of Apple devices follow a clear seasonal cycle, with higher sales in the first quarter (ending with the Christmas holidays) and lower sales in the following periods. There are statistical techniques for calculating the seasonal factors and trend and using these components to forecast the next quarterly sales.

Quanta Magazine: “A New Thermodynamics Theory of the Origin of Life”

If a new theory is correct, the same physics it identifies as responsible for the origin of living things could explain the formation of many other patterned structures in nature. Snowflakes, sand dunes and self-replicating vortices in the protoplanetary disk may all be examples of dissipation-driven adaptation. Wilson Bentley

From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat. Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.

You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant, England said.

England’s theory is meant to underlie, rather than replace, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, which provides a powerful description of life at the level of genes and populations. I am certainly not saying that Darwinian ideas are wrong, he explained. On the contrary, I am just saying that from the perspective of the physics, you might call Darwinian evolution a special case of a more general phenomenon.

Natalie Wolchover

In other words, life as direct consequence of one of the fundamental laws of physics! If this theory is validated, it could drastically improve the likelihood of finding life on other planets, maybe even inside our own solar system, on Europa or Titan.

The New Yorker: “The Quiet German”

The historian Fritz Stern calls the era of reunification “Germany’s second chance”—a fresh opportunity to be Europe’s preëminent power, after the catastrophic period of aggression that began a century ago. Merkel seems perfectly matched to the demands of this second chance. In a country where passionate rhetoric and macho strutting led to ruin, her analytical detachment and lack of apparent ego are political strengths. On a continent where the fear of Germany is hardly dead, Merkel’s air of ordinariness makes a resurgent Germany seem less threatening.

---

Merkel’s commitment to a united Europe is not that of an idealist. Rather, it comes from her sense of German interest—a soft form of nationalism that reflects the country’s growing confidence and strength. The historic German problem, which Henry Kissinger described as being too big for Europe, too small for the world, can be overcome only by keeping Europe together. Kurbjuweit said, She needs Europe because—this is hard to say, but it’s true—Europe makes Germany bigger.

George Packer

Great profile of Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, covering a lot, from her childhood and early life in the former East Germany, to the quiet and calculated rise inside the party and the recent years as the most powerful woman leader in the world – including the relationship with Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama. What I found most interesting was how her character was influenced by the Communist era and her work as scientist, and how she managed to transform apparent weakness into strength and strategy. Highly recommended.

Facebook Year in Review - 2014 edition

As it has done last year, at the end of 2014 Facebook offers a summary of your most important moments throughout the year. There are some interesting differences though: true to the commitment of building everything ‘mobile-first’, this time the experience is heavily optimized for mobile users. I am biased maybe because I discovered this year-in-review for 2014 in my iPhone app, but it looks considerably better on a smartphone screen (navigation by swipe-gesture, full-screen sections) than on desktop (a single, rather narrow column, overlaid on the rest of the site). On the downside though, I don’t see the year-in-review featured anywhere in the mobile app or on the web site. Maybe Facebook wants it to spread virally, from one friend to the next, but it feels a bit strange not to receive some sort of notice. If you want to build it directly, the old web address is still available: facebook.com/YearInReview.

Post by George Moga.