FutureGrinder: RealityFlythrough w/Neil McCurdy

This conversation was originally posted in June, 2005 as part of my catch-all blog The RoBlog, the podcast portion of which is called The RobCast.

I recently saw an article on Roland Piquepaille's web site about a project called RealityFlythrough. The project aligned so well with where I see pervasive cameras taking us that I just had to talk to Neil McCurdy, whose doctoral candidate project this was.

Fortunately, Neil was gracious enough to spend 45 minutes to talk with me via Skype about what RealityFlythrough is all about, and to touch a bit on where it may be taking us.

Here's a link to the audio interview (~45 mins, ~21MB). Be warned, I noticed at least one drop out at the very end, and there may be more. If you find a significant one, let me know and I'll see if I can recover it from the raw audio.

Here are links to some of the things discussed in the interview:

• Neil's Web Site


• The link to the RSS feed for his site


• Neil mentions the Human Pacman game developed at the National University of Singapore (hmm, I'm getting a DNS error on my original link to the project, so if you find it broken, try this link instead and scroll down)


• I mentioned an augmented reality project concerned with projecting virtual objects into real space. I was probably talking about this, although here I mention something that seems in the ballpark as well (the destination link on this page also goes to the Singapore server that I can't see at the moment).


• Neil mentioned an Intel research project called Place Lab which is an effort to provide location data both inside and outside, and in a privacy-aware manner. Very interesting.
  

As an aside, Neil brought up privacy as a potential hurdle to enabling ubiquitous cameras to perform interesting and useful functions. Certainly we'll be running in to this issue of the creeping loss of what we have traditionally seen as "privacy". I think this warrants a series of discussions all on its own. I'd love to hear any opinions out there.

And while you're giving me your opinions, I'd also love to hear about any other cool, forward-looking, potentially tranformative projects going on out there, and also where you think they might be taking us in the future. Feel free to leave a comment below, or drop me an email.