The University of Arizona published a paper in November describing the fantastic work they are doing in the field of holography. Previously, holograms could only display static 3D images. Now, thanks to a new rewritable polymer, the Arizona team have managed to create the first moving 3D holograms. The aim is to be able to produce smooth real-time holographic footage, perhaps for use in long-distance communications. At the moment the frame rate is only at two seconds per frame, but since this has come down from four minutes in the last two years we can afford to be cautiously optimistic.
Light Touch is an exciting new product, released by Light Blue Optics earlier this year. It uses holographic laser projection to create bright high-quality moving images on everyday surfaces. That would be impressive enough on its own, but Light Touch doesn’t just project images, it projects multi-touch touchscreens. Infrared sensors allow users to interact with the projections in the same way that they would a touchscreen computer.
There have been quite a few interesting posts online recently which we thought would be good to share with you:
Jessica Kerr reviews the new takes on web form design in Fashionable Web Forms: Traps and Tips. In this article, she cautions against taking a too novel approach to web forms and reminds us that there is a reason why certain from- design techniques are well established.
A very interesting post by Stefana Broadbent on why private communication from the office upsets colleagues in which she analyses the effect of making calls on a mobile phone from the office and compares this to the usage of personal e-mail and IM.
You may have already seen this article on An App That Makes Android Smarter Than Ever. The Tasker seems to address the time/ contact management issues that people are faced with more and more these days. It is a shame that you require quite a lot of time/ technical thinking to actually configure the app to anything usable.
Rumours abound that Google is developing a new social network to rival Facebook – Google Me. No hard evidence as yet, but it’ll be interesting to see how Google plan to persuade users to migrate their existing social graphs.
Top 50 Branded Facebook Pages
Ignite’s updated ranking of the top 50 branded Facebook pages shows no change at the top of the table: Facebook, Starbucks, Coca Cola, YouTube, and Skittles hold the top five positions. Strong growth across all the top pages shows just how fierce competition is: “Each of the Top 5 grew by at least 100,000 fans this past weekend alone.”
The Rise of Fake PR
What started with @BPglobalPR could be blossoming into a new satirical trend. Thanks to Newsvetter for bringing @HeishmanFlill to my attention: the account spoofs traditional PR’s efforts to embrace social media. Visit the website for tasty new buzzwords and satisfyingly impenetrable jargon.
Instant Oil Spill
Giving BP a taste of their own medicine, the instant oil spill does exactly what it says on the tin. Stick the URL in front of any website, and an inky stain spreads across the browser. It’s a clever gimmick to raise awareness, developed by A Cleaner Future. Love the tag line: “That’s right, now you can have all the same disregard for the environment (albeit virtual) that big oil does every day! Why should they get to have all the fun?”
RSA Animate
It’s lovely to see an august institution like the RSA doing something innovative online: RSA Animate is a beautiful fusion of intelligent thought and amusing illustration. Well done to Cognitive Media.
Blogger has long been plagued by low-tech spam comments.
Given the recent firm stance on unearned links, it is refreshing to see that this is finally being addressed.
Anyone with a Blogspot blog will know that comment spam is rife within Blogger.
Whilst commenters’ names and any links in the comments had the attribute rel="nofollow, any blog which allowed anonymous commenting (which is a huge proportion of the blogs in the Blogger community) could easily be spammed.
Simply posting a comment and electing to use the ‘Nickname’ method of identifying themselves allowed spammers to enter a nickname such as <a href="http://blog.netrank.co.uk/">Search Engine Optimisation</a>, which would then be displayed as a clean, followable, PageRank passing link, thus: Search Engine Optimisation
As of this weekend this has been changed so that the nickname is displayed in full in plain text, for example: <a href="http://blog.netrank.co.uk/">Search Engine Optimisation</a>. Additionally this change has been implemented retroactively, so that existing spam links have also become plain text.
Whilst this is an excellent piece of news for ethical search professionals, I was going to write a nice post about the dual standards of Google today, based largely on this bug, and now I shall have to think of something else to write about.
