Category: London
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Toxic by design
Digital, data, and technology (DDaT) are increasingly being misused to create a 24×7 surveillance society, behavioural manipulation and, in some countries, institutional discrimination and subjugation. This surveillance increasingly underpins private sector revenue and state control, online and offline. All too often, it can seem like there’s little to distinguish between governments and global businesses as they indulge in…
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‘Tales of the Riverbank’—a novel
My new novel, ‘Tales of the Riverbank’, has been published. It’s a first, tentative step back into creative writing for me—a return to the days when I regularly wrote short stories, radio drama and other fiction as a much-needed distraction from the day job. About the novel The novel’s locus is Parliament, Westminster, and Whitehall—places…
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Future Shock | After Shock
It’s 50 years since Alvin Toffler‘s ‘Future Shock‘ was published in 1970. I remember first reading it some time later, in a battered, orange-coloured paperback edition I acquired at a bargain price from one of the secondhand bookshops in the Charing Cross Road. The book made a strong impression on me. Partly, I guess, because…
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‘London Streets’ interactive app
Just a reminder, my free app London Streets is now available — for both Apple and Android devices. (Windows Phone 8x is on the way too …) The app has its roots in my time at City University in the 1980s. Whilst living at Northampton (“Notty”) Hall (RIP) in Bunhill Row, I started to explore…
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free interactive London app — London Streets
I’ve been taking some of my earlier research into techniques for interacting with the past of place and moving them into the mobile domain. The result is an app, for both Android and Apple’s iOS, named ‘London Streets’. The app is now live in Google Play — and going through the Apple review process. This…
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from Phidgets to Kinect
Some of my earlier research into user interaction with sound and images of the past of place developed a prototype interface using Phidgets — some of which can be seen in the video below. For the next stage I thought it’d be interesting to see what could be achieved with the commercial Kinect sensor and…
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augmented reality – from lab to app
Going through my research material, I stumbled across some of the prototyping I’d done with augmented reality and layers of the past of London. This video gives a flavour. I’m now at the stage of taking some of this research “into the wild” — building out early apps via our company VoeTek. Although that doesn’t…
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2005 Speaker Abbot Award
To my old stomping ground, the House of Commons, courtesy of an invitation from the Speaker and the Parliamentary Press Gallery: many thanks to Rob Gibson and Gallery News for including me on this special event. The occasion was a reception to mark the presentation of the 2005 Speaker Abbot Award: The Speaker Abbot Award was launched…
new tech observations from the UK (ntouk) 