From writings of Ben Franklin …

Listen to Party into the future with @FrogDesign & @JaredRawk

Just when you thought QR Codes were dead … Jimmy Fallon uses a QR Code to promote a band. I hope it boosts Augment Reality to mainstream, like the Kinect is doing in some part these days.

Of course, NFC is coming … but it’ll be a few years before it hits in any significant #’s (RFID had some similar pain points for adoption, but I think it’ll be easier to adopt than having users to learn how, where, and why QR codes work).

I have to wonder if Japan still uses QR Codes these days in their Keitai … haven’t seen a latest handset in a while, but I imagine there’s a lot of iOS and Android over there, especially preferable voer older Keitai feature phones?

US is just now catching on to QR, but I do believe it’s been 1/2 a decade a more since the idea has been around if not more. We also have several companies with their own QR. Not sure if they gained any traction.

There’s an upcoming MAKE Developer challenge happening this week that resolves around health industry.

The Health 2.0 / MAKE Developer Challenge is happening this weekend, Feb 19th, in Boston. The day is bringing developers, designers, makers, researchers, care providers, sensor-geeks, hardware hackers, patients, and anyone else interested in improving healthcare by building new applications and tools. If you haven’t signed up already, register now, because it’s filling up fast.

Here’s a sample of a few of the speakers that will be on hand:

Vaibhav Bhandari from Microsoft’s Health Solutions Group. Vaibhav is going to be talking about HealthVault, medical ontologies, and untangling the various HealthCare IT standards.

John Brownstein from Harvard Children’s Hospital. John is an epidemiologist who has studied diseases as varied as malaria, dengue, HIV, West Nile virus, Lyme disease, RSV and influenza. He’s going to be speaking about his work with HealthMap, a site that brings together a variety of data to provide a comprehensive view of the current global state of infectious diseases and their effect on human and animal health.

Greg Borenstein from NYU’s ITP school. He’s going to be talking about how to hack the Kinect using Processing and Open Frameworks, and how it can be applied to health.

John Luciani from Wiblock. John is going to be walking through how to use the various goodies MAKE is supplying for the event: arduinos, sensor, modules, and so forth. He’s also got some code demos teams can use for their projects.

Far McKon from Bug Labs. Far is bringing some really cool gear — 5 complete bug bundles. The heart of the kit it is the ‘Bug Base’ which has built in wifi, bluetooth, and battery. Each kit has a general IO module (the Von Hippel), GPS, and a camera + accelerometer module. And sample code to use all of them, naturally.
Huge thanks to the MAKE team (particularly Dan Woods at the Maker Shed), Microsoft, and Bug Labs for their support for the event.

As a teaser, check out Greg’s demonstration code that uses OSCeleton Processing MotionCapture3D to convert data from the Kinect into 3D coordinates representing each of the joints of the body.

I found this in my travels online … it’s called The Icebook. I’m going to call it “Story Projection” rather than a Popup Book.

The Ice Book (HD) from Davy and Kristin McGuire on Vimeo.

More info:
theicebook.com