Ólafur Andri Ragnarsson

Video games are getting more realistic. Long gone are the days of simple 16-color EGA graphics that made games like Sierra Online King’s Quest possible. Today computers have powerful graphics chips that allow processing for each pixel on the screen in real-time. As demands for virtual environments increase the challenge is to use this power to generate realistic scenes. One important feature is the weather in outdoor scenes.

Elvar Örn Unnþórsson, a student in my 2010 New technology course wrote a paper titled, The possibilities of a virtual weather engine that addresses this topic. This is the abstract:

Weather is an important feature in any virtual environment that strives to be realistic with outdoor scenes. This includes virtual environments created for computer games and 3d simulations or environments for motion pictures, music videos, advertisements, etc. So far developers have had to create their own solutions for each weather phenomenon that was desired in their environment which is time consuming and costly. By providing developers with a powerful and yet simple tool that can create different weather phenomena; much time, money and effort will be saved during the development of virtual environments. This paper takes a look at the possibilities that such a product has including features, potential market, users, impact and future. This paper will give the reader a good understanding of the possibilities that lie with such an engine.

The paper is here: The possibilities of a virtual weather engine (PDF).

The traditional way of interacting with computers is changing. The mouse and desktop metaphor was invented in the 70s and now with advances in input techniques, such as touch and motion sensing, we are seeing new types of interaction with computers. Smart phones have touch interfaces and the newly released iPad is bringing touch hand-held computers. Microsoft has released Surface and will release project Natal later this year. The field of Human-Computer Interaction or HCI is getting very interesting.

Thomas Hahn wrote a paper on HCI as part of my New Technology course. In this paper he addresses some of the current trends such as touch, motion control and speech recognition.

This is from the abstract:

Human Computer Interaction in the field of input and output techniques has developed a lot of new techniques over the last few years. With the recently released full multi-touch tablets and notebooks the way how people interact with the computer is coming to a new dimension. As humans are used to handle things with their hands the technology of multi-touch displays or touchpad’s brought much more convenience for use in daily life. But for sure the usage of human speech recognition will also play an important part in the future of human computer interaction. This paper introduces techniques and devices using the humans hand gestures for the use with multi-touch tablets and video recognition and techniques for voice interaction. Thereby the gesture and speech recognition take an important role as these are the main communication methods between humans and how they could disrupt the keyboard or mouse as we know it today.

The paper is here: Future Human Computer Interaction with special focus on input and output techniques

Social networking is a hot topic today. With the rise of Facebook and the popularity of Twitter and now Foursquare, interest in social networks and social media has risen. We are just starting to understand the meaning of social networks and the potentials.

Magnús Sigurbjörnsson wrote a paper in my New Technology course about social networks, titled Will Social Networking be Everywhere? An interesting statistics in the paper is that the average user spends 55 minutes on Facebook everyday, which would mean 4% of your life!

From the introduction:

By bringing social networking closer to your real life, your behavior with your friends might become different. With constant updates from your friends of what they are doing, will the social networks slowly ruin your normal social life? Is there an opportunity to implement something into people’s lifestyle? That is something that the largest social networks need to decide. If so, I think that social networking might even end up with becoming everywhere around us. Only of course, if you want it to.

Will Social Networking be Everywhere

After reading 43 papers as part of my New Technology course, it’s time to make some of them available. One interesting topic is the future of the web. Bergur Páll Gylfason wrote a paper on the topic of the semantic web titled, The Future Of The Web – Semantic Web.

From the introduction:

The World Wide Web is getting 22 years old this year and it has gone through a lot of changes. At first it was just documents with text and hyperlinks and then came photos, videos, search engines, social networks and so what comes next? I think the next step is that the web is getting much more Semantic. The Semantic Web is all about connecting data and making it readable by machines, we have all this useful information in different databases all over the world, medical-, Pharmaceutical -, government-, personal information and so much more and none of it is connected. What if we could connect all that information? How would we do it? We use Semantic technologies to connect the data and make machines understand it.

The Future of the Web – Semantic Web

Computer architecture as we know it has not changed very much in decades. We are still using the von Neumann architecture that was created in the 1940s. Since the invention of the integrated circuit we have seen huge increase in performance measured by the exponential Moore’s Law. People have been predicting for some time that this architectural model will break and thus end of Moore’s Law. The argument is that a new and dramatically superior model will replace the current technology and replace the integrated circuit and the von Neumann architecture.

One of the benefits of teaching a course on new technologies is I get to read lot’s of papers on new stuff. Viktor Einarsson wrote a paper titled The Computers of the Future. In the paper he looks are two types of new computer designs, quantum computers and DNA computers.

If you want to know the future read this paper: The Computers of the Future.

Papers in my New Technology class are about how technology evolves. Some papers examine technology in historic context providing insights into how the technology has changed over the years. Each new invention will bring new types of applications. A good example of this is the art of animated films. The story of the animated cartoon is more than 100 years old and provides many examples of how new technology shapes the industry.

In this paper Eva Rún Michelsen explores the evolution of the technology for making animated films.

Abstract of the paper: This paper is a research project about animated cartoons and their history for the past 100 years. It covers several techniques used in cartoon animation, early creators, early devices and current trends. The focus is on American and European animated cartoons and covers some of the early contributors of cartoon animation like James Stuart Blackton as well as today’s creators like John Lasseter. Examples of famous cartoon characters, short films and full length cartoon animated films are presented but the paper does not cover all animated films on the market today.

Animated cartoons, from the old to the new: evolution  for the past 100 years (PDF file)

Video games are getting more real all the time. Latest releases are beginning to look more like movies than the games we used to know. In particular, in action games where the characters are running or walking they don’t move like stick figures but actually make realistic moves as if their actions are choreographed.

One field that has improved this experience is the evolution of physics. In his New Technology paper, Evolution of Physics in Video Games, Bjarni Þór Árnason of Reykjavík University explains the emerging field of applying physics in games.

From the abstract: Graphics and sound have evolved dramatically in video games over the last decade and are at a point where it is getting increasingly hard to improve upon. Physics have been a part of video games since their birth, but have until recently not played a key role. Developers have therefore turned to realistic physics simulations in order to further increase the realism in their games and subsequently the importance and uses of physics in video games has boomed in the last few years. Some games have even incorporated the use of physics into the gameplay with an interesting new dimension of puzzles to solve. However, improved realism comes with the burden of increased computational complexity that needs to find itself a new place away from the main CPU in order to continue the evolution of realism.

Technology has the power of disappearing. Electricity and lights in houses are so normal that we don’t think of them as technologies. It is only when the power goes out that we remember the importance of them. Computers and the Internet are heading the same way, disappearing or becoming ubiquitous.

In the New Technology paper The third Wave of Computing, Günter Schulmeister applies a framework of theories, which helps to describe the past and forecast future of technologies, on ubiquitous computing. It gives a short overview of ubiquitous computing in the fist part and define the framework in the second part. The third and last part, uses the framework to describe the rise of ubiquitous computing. It will also mention cases of companies and products connected to ubicomp (ubiquitous computing), which shared common destiny with certain aspects of the framework.

Do science fiction writers predict the future or do they invent it? Did Arthur C. Clark predict the satellite or did he just invent it? Or moon travel? Did Jules Verne predict submarines powered with electricity or did he invent the idea? Maybe invent is a strong word – perhaps influence.

If you look at the history of science and compare with science fictions and popular movies and show you see that there is a string relationship between the storytelling and actual technology created. Maybe science fiction writers have stronger influence on technology then we though, by just creating the a powerful and believable worlds that others will build.

These ideas are the topic of one of the research papers in my New Technology class this year. Paper is written by Sunnefa Pálsdóttir and is called When Ficiton becomes reality.