(no subject)

[vyvyanx]

Had very nice time at KSR last night - chatted much to T about cheese, bestiality and the meaning of life, and to GB about people at nCipher. G played and lost several games of pool, and went outside to talk to T; he didn't return for some time due to hassle outside the door from some unpleasant types, which upset him rather for the rest of the evening. But came back to college and drank cider and ate Quorn ham and cheese, so all was well.
The hair-dying wasn't quite as effective as we'd hoped yesterday, so I went out this morning and got more black henna, and we'll try again using larger quantities and leaving them on for longer. We _shall_ succeed!
Earlier today, in Sainsbury's, saw antinomy and N and said hi; also was accosted by random German bloke who seemed to know my name, but who I had no recollection of ever meeting before. Since he was German and studious-looking and wearing a tweedy suit, I assumed I must know him from college, so I talked about my fellowship, and that seemed to work. I wish I could have a sort of sensor attached to my glasses, that would scan people's faces as I look at them, and do pattern-matching on a database of people I've seen before. Then, if there's a match, it could project information onto the inner surface of my glasses, overlaid on my view of the world, annotating people with useful information, like when I last met them. That would be really cool.
Got Tocharian dictionary and grammar from the UL yesterday and embarked on vocab list, which I may finish later today, as the books are very helpful. Tocharian is an obscure and extinct Indo-European language (or rather, two closely-related languages) discovered just before the First World War in excavations in Chinese Turkestan - it was spoken there up until about the 8th century AD. It's thought to form a branch of IE all on its own - however, I'll see what my subgrouping program makes of it, and where it splits off from the rest of IE!

Comments

augmented reality

[surje.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, I'm really into heads up displays projected into the glasses. There's a whole field of research called augmented reality, and people think up ideas about how you could make it useful.

One cool idea is that if you could do real time voice recognition, and get babel fish working well in real time, you could display real-time subtitles for whatever it was you were listening to. If the other person had the same thing, you would have a universal translator.

The other idea is an IBM thing, where you have kind of like the internet, but each web page has a meta-tag with latitude, longitude, and height. Then, you have location information from your phone, and maybe height from an altimeter or GPS... then some kind of compass so you know which way you're looking, and sensors so that you know whether your head is pointig up or down. Now, the next step is that your personal computer works out a volume of space that you are looking at, and go to a search engine to find all web pages with the metadata that falls within that volume. So then you can overlay little "tags" in your heads up display on each object that is referenced by a web page. So you can build up an archaeological diary of all the people who have ever stood at a particular point and experienced something while looking in a specific direction.

Re: augmented reality

[vyvyan.livejournal.com]

Wow! That would be wonderful!

Re: augmented reality

[olithered.livejournal.com]

Neat.