Hear a recording Alexander Graham Bell made in 1885

The National Museum of American History has released a totally cool reconstruction of an 1885 recording of Alexander Graham Bell reading his handwritten notes.

This video shows the notes scrolling slowly as Bell reads. (Be patient -- the very first part is hard to understand).



The noninvasive optical technique used to scan and recover the recording was invented at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 2002 with assistance from the Library of Congress. They have used it to reconstruct even older recordings than this one.

I love this sort of thing because it illustrates how we are able to start with very crude proof-of-concept prototypes and refine them over time. There are tons of examples in and out of IT, for example, the Wright brother’s first plane, early automobiles and Doug Engelbart demonstrating WYSIWG word processing, windows, the mouse and many other things at The Demo in 1968.

Doug Engelbart, The Demo

Google Glass -- why just capture reality when you can mediate and improve it?

There is a lot of hype surrounding wearable computing these days and Google Glass gets a lot of that attention with demonstrations of video and image capture and augmented reality, as shown in this video, which has been viewed over 16 million times.

But University of Toronto professor Steve Mann has been wearing electronic glasses and working with mediated reality for over 30 years. Mann differentiates between "augmented reality," where text or graphics are displayed over your normal vision and more general "mediated reality," in which vision is improved -- for example, detecting infrared radiation to see temperature differences, zooming in on distant objects, or extending the dynamic range of a photographic image by combining various exposures. He discussed these applications and more in an recent Techwise Conversations podcast interview.

Mann has pioneered mediated reality, but he is not alone in the field. For example, professor Gabby Sarusi and his colleagues at the at Ben Gurion University of the Negev are working on a nano layer coating for detecting infrared radiation in night vision goggles. Work on high dynamic range photography has also been with us for some time.

Journalists are beginning to report on initial experience with Google Glass prototypes and Google is fishing around for a killer app, but I suspect that Google Glass will turn out to be a niche product. We will not be wearing them 24-7, but some of us may put them on for special tasks -- like a surgeon entering the operating room.

That being said, research prototypes and high-value niche applications have a way of turning into ubiquitous, game-changing products, but it takes a while -- as you see in this photograph of Ivan Sutherland, inventor Sketchpad, the first object oriented computer graphics program, which he developed more than twenty years before MacDraw came out. (Ditto, any early prototype).

What about fifty years from now? Will Google Glass 2063 interface directly with the retina?

Concept videos guide new products like the Apple tablet

The long rumored Apple tablet computer is expected to be announced tomorrow.

People have high hopes for the Apple tablet, speculating about its features and applications like watching video, reading full color books with dynamic illustrations, and playing multi-player games.

We will know the details tomorrow (if it is announced), but we might get insight into the hardware, applications, and design goals from concept videos like this clip showing how one might one day read a magazine on a tablet.

Concept videos are similar to the futuristic concept cars displayed at auto shows. They offer a concrete, long run vision and provide general goals and direction.

Perhaps the most famous concept video was Apple's Knowledge Navigator, which was created in 1987, and foreshadowed networked communications in support of collaborative work. The future developments shown in these 1993 AT&T ads have pretty well been realized. Here's one on a possible future of the cell phone.

How much would you be willing to pay for content like movies, TV programs, books, periodicals and games downloaded to a tablet computer like the one shown above?

Which of today's applications and capabilities were predicted in the Knowledge Navigator video? Which are not in today's products?