BCT

Air pollution and global warming issues  are one of the big problem around the world. Nikolas Bentel is a designer from New York. He has designed a type of clothing that can change its pattern by the environmental quality of its surrounding. It is the first clothe that use environmentally-sensitive dyes. He named it Aerochromics. Bentel has designed three different clothes that react to different pollutant - carbon monoxide, particle pollution and radioactivity.

“The carbon monoxide shirt contains a carbon monoxide spot detector that turns black when exposed to the toxic gas

The Particle Pollution shirt changes colour through a thermo-reactive dye. Dust, smog and soot are picked up by small sensors which in turn trigger circular heat pads to warm up

The Radioactivity shirt changes from black to white depending upon what gamma rays or electron beam radiation it is exposed to“ （Barrat, 2016).

This is an interesting project that combined fashion and environmental issues. I am also thinking how can I implement my idea to solve problems in the world and at the same time bring beauty to the world.

Reference

Barrat, G. (2016, August 1). WATCH: Amazing high-tech shirt changes its colour and pattern depending on the air pollution. Retrieved March 20, 2019, from https://www.mirror.co.uk/tech/watch-amazing-high-tech-shirt-8539091

It is not only the starting of the semester but also my final semester of Bachelor of Creative Technologies. I have come up with five different ideas that I might be doing in the final round.

1. An App about furniture that allows people to choose according to their preference like people who buy cars that has options for buyers to choose a higher standard version such as luxury leather and gears.

2. An E-Book that user can actually flip around the pages.

3. Developed more about the shoe project from last semester.

4. Clothe that have different patterns that user can switch them around.

A fresh beginning of the second semester. We had a guest speaker from Dow Goodfolk. She talked about a theme of packaging. There is an interesting thing to know about is the most expensive part of glass packaging is the label of it, because the printing process of it is different from the normal one. They can only print one color at a time so that price of it increased.

About Packaging theme, I was thinking to use the product itself for the packaging materials. For instance, Coco-cola could use coke itself as packaging by solid it, using soap itself for packaging of soap products instead of paper.

I have to other brief, one is the shoe idea and another one is the clothe idea.

About the shoe, I had this idea seven years ago when I had a pair of shoes that is hard to put them on and I have brought this idea to my Entrepreneurship and Innovation paper in my second year and now I want to take the idea further. The is idea is to create a pair of shoes that allow people to wear their shoes without bowing their body, the only step the user do to wear it is by stepping on it and the shoes will do the rest.

It’s good to see Anki has moved a step forward for there social robots. Cozmo was previously made as an introduction to a social robotic world by setting their target market to children and the purpose of it is to teach children how to code in a fun and interactive way. All the lacking features from Cozmo has been added to Vector in my sight of view such as:

1. Drop Sensors that can measure depth at the back of its bottom that will prevent it fall on the ground if it goes over the edge of a desk or surface by moving backward.

For Cozmo, it only has two drop sensors at the front of its bottom, which can prevent it fall off when it is moving forward, but when it gets too excited it will move backward and fall off from the edge.    

2. Array Beam Microphones at the sides of Touch sensor located at his head.

3. Petting system by adding Touch sensor on top of its head.

I have shown Cozmo to Sammy in Studio and he found Cozmo is a very cute robot and he wanted to pet it by tapping on its head, but unfortunately, Cozmo doesn’t have that feature yet. Good news is this feature has been added to its next generation —- Vector.

4. Be able to connect to the Wi-Fi and search on the internet.

5. Be able to recognize his charger and goes to the charger by itself.

6. Build in Neural Network.

7. Smoother Lever movement.

I choose “Cozmo”

Cozmo is a small A.I. robots created by Anki. This is not only a robot, it got its own personally and emotions. In order to show it, it uses its sound and eyes showing on its screen. Users have to download an app on their smartphone or tablet to start Cozmo. Cozmo got his own personal network so users are going to connect to its WiFi so that they can interact with it. The app itself got a relaxing and fun music on its background. It can recognize human’s face and can calls out their names if people telling it who they are. Users can play games and do other interaction with Cozmo by using three cubes.

There is an interesting question to think about.

Why should we create robots to play game or interact with when we can creat an app instead?

There are many technologies stuff around us nowadays as tools to improve our living qualities, increase productivities, bring conveniency, giving supports, and so on. When people use them in correct ways or benevolent ways, the world will become better and better, but if someone uses it in malevolent ways for hurting people, then it will just bring disaster to the world. According to Brooks, people need to encourage others to use technologies for benevolent purposes (Brooks, 2017). “Us humans do this all the time for small children and for the very elderly. We are wired to be accommodating to other intelligences that we think of as less than us. Most of our AI technology is very much less than us, so we accommodate”(Brooks,2017) said Brooks in his blog. In my point of view, AI should be good at many things that can help human out but at the same time they also need to have some weaknesses so that people will think it in some point of view AI is less than them so they can accommodate. 

AI is still an emerging technology that is worth to develop on. There are still many things can be discovered, so it is good to start things early before everything has been completed then is to late to get involved with. 

Reference

The Hide - It's Not The End of The World

Connected, but alone? | Sherry Turkle

Goldilocks effect.