Category: design-and-ideas

Welcome to mydreamscape.org

a inception poster

I love Inception, there’s no doubt about that….

But what really got me going was the idea of dreams.

So here’s the background

Everyone has dreams but up till now dreams have been very personal. People have them and talk about them all the time to there close friends but up till now its not been something you share socially. Well I say that but actually people do share aspects of there dreams. For example

janeygw‎: @MetsThrifty Are you serious? omg I had such horrid dreams last night too

Clodyyyy‎: You wish you can record your dreams and then watch them later. #DamnItsTrue

collinbeballin‎: I have had so many bad dreams tonight that they have left me praying. And thats some real shit.

PatRobeck1ofHis‎: Goodnight, my friends. Dream good dreams!

ohhdarylann‎: if love is a way out, then please let me in. don’t start, darling, don’t you turn my nightmares into dreams once again

stephalicious‎: Just had a dream @natbat had taken up smoking and I threatened to tell @simonw if she didn’t stop 0_o

Natbat‎: Woke at 5am with panicked dreams. can’t sleep. wonder if I should just get up and have breakfast now. hungry

…. lots more on twitter people talking about there dreams on blogs.

So we share aspects of them with friends, family and even total strangers.

The concept

mydreamscape.org to become the flickr of dreams.

Make dreams social with controls so only certain people can see the parts you don’t want to disclose. Use social tagging to add relevance and additional metadata to the dreams.

The concept in more words

Why not have a place where you can share your aspects of your dreams with other people and of course perform analysis on your dreams?

When I say aspects of your dreams, I mean just that. You should be able to add levels of privacy around aspects of your dream. Bit like how flickr.com only shows you certain photos if your a friend or family. I expect this would be quite difficult to do but it should give you the option of defining certain aspects which are public, private and of course who can see that. Hey would you want your girlfriend to find out you have dreams about a ex-girlfriend every night?

So I expect the gui for that would generate some special but simple xml (I’m thinking about using a subset of XML encryption to hide the information in plain sight) . I imagine it would look something like the modern editors such as Etherpad (colored text to indicate who can see what) but there would be levels of access to tied to the information.

Etherpad

dreams tend to have some sort of structure but its not very defined but there’s no doubt that you can say this is how it started (even if it’s just I’m in a room with no windows) and a middle (a woman talks to me in french which I seem to be able to understand) and a end (she gets up and leaves through a wall, leaving me in the room alone, then I wake up). It may not be clear how you got there or even how it ultimately ends but you could just say I don’t remember to that section.

Obviously there will be the ability to run your dreams through a dictionary of sorts (this may cost) so you can work out what your dream is about. But on top of that there will be tags/keywords will link you to other people’s dreams. So if your dream is about falling off a building, you can see who else has similar dream or even the same dream? Maybe you might find people who are having the same dream but with a unique twist. Heck, you might even find people who are in your dream who happen to be having the same dream! Of course Locations can also be tagged using geo locations, so you can see who else has been having a dream around a certain location. I’d also like to include Times, so you can say if it was night or day. Also people, so you can say I had a dream and he or she was in it. There may be others but that will do for now.

This is really interesting information but when socially put together across many people you got something extra special. Not only can you see trends across dreams but you can also spot how memes start to spread and where they end up.

The other part of this is the ability to write comments or add annotations to your dreams. So certain people (definable list) can add tags or link to other stuff. For example a dream about identity thief might lead back to the new itv tv series “identity” which you might have forgotten about but your friends remember you watched a couple of days ago. A dream about running down endless stairs could be the result of watching inception and thinking/dreaming about the architects role. Basically you can have many people adding analysis to your dream instead of just one so called expert. In actual fact your friends may know you better and where aspects of your dreams come from.

I expect we’ll make the data freely available in the same way Okcupid.com makes stats about its users available.

Hows it going to make money?

  • Pro users – Selling access to the dream dictionary (PRO users) which won’t be a static thing, it will change based on what people say about there dreams. There may also be a limit on how many dreams we hold unless your a pro user which means its endless. Maybe also only pro users can tag other people dreams?
  • Advertising – If your not a pro user, you will get adverts next to the dream your reading. We can also add advertising to the aggregated pages like the one for falling (which I expect will be quite popular)
  • Trending – Although the data will be freely available, there will be different resolutions on the dream data. So if you pay you can get much richer data (obviously depending on the users preferences). I imagine you would be able to work out how many European citizens are dreaming about a certain delegate just before an election. Not only that but if those dreams or positive or negative.
  • Product and locational placements – Maybe a lot of people are dreaming about a certain location or a certain product. If you own that location or product you may want to own that page and make it more like yours? So for example http://www.mydreamscape.org/items/buzzlightyear/ – could be a page about buzzlight year in dreams and have images and links to the item its self. This would also be true of locations too for example http://www.mydreamscape.org/location/europe/london/thamesbarrier – would obviously link to the Thames barrier in London with information taken from Wikipedia.org and other open sources. The information architecture of exactly how this would this work needs to be sorted out.

A Totem

How am I going to build this?

Well I’m not sure. I’ve been looking at things like drupal and existing services such as Facebook to see if I can adapt there system to this purpose. But it looks like it requires some serious development as there some key elements which need work. However I expect once I post this, entry people might think wow nice idea, its got legs I might be interested in either…

  1. Getting involved, so we got a team of people interested
  2. Recommend some software or a service to set it up
  3. Steal the idea and build there own version (fine, but you must give me attribution)
  4. Steal the idea and have me help out on the build process (theres a whole lot more to this idea that what I described above, ask me if you want to know more)
  5. Build a plugin for another service which could supports this

The final word

There are some elements to this idea which may not work such as will people remember there dreams, will be willing to share them, etc but honestly I think its a killer of an idea and deserves to be built. You can just imagine what a resource it could turn out to be… and imagine this scenario…

“you were dreaming about me, but I was also dreaming about you. On the same bloody night? What are the chances of that?”

That would be amazing.

dreams are still very much a unknown or under-tapped process. We all have them even if we don’t always remember them. dream diaries, etc are good but what benefits could come to a dreamers dreams if there crowd-sourced or social? There is a lot of metadata we could add to our dreams, if we had the chance. We could start to really understand our dreams a lot better through the social network of our friends, families or strangers. Heck even if all else fails, it may get people thinking about dreams a lot more and considering what they can do with them. Be it control there dreams or as far as even sharing dreams.

mydreamscape.org and mydreamscape.com could be the start of something massive, remember where you first read about it first…

So who wants to help me make it happen?

Like Instapaper, love ReaditLater

I was enjoying instapaper because it just works but then I checked out Readitlater which someone wrote a nice script in Calibre (if you have a ebook readder and are not using this, you should be) for. And I’m converted. Its not as casual but with things like the firefox plugin, its certainly a much richer experience and works how I tend to work. There API could also be very useful for my plans to do with semantic desktop logging or even to move things into a archive space like delicious.

Ada Lovelace Day: Why Do You Share?

Tara Hunt

Tara Hunt is passing around a survey which I believe is ok to share. It takes 5mins and the results are already up and worth looking through.

I also didn’t get around to posting it due to a error on my blog, Tara Hunt is my finding ada. Shes a pretty amazing lady and know not everyones favorite but you have to agree, shes always got something good to say. She’s also been a massive supporter of encouraging more ladies into the tech scene and putting her nose into areas where its not welcomed. She truly breaks down barriers and is a leading expert in her field of social media and marketing. For someone with such a massive cv and impressive background, she can certainly kick back and enjoy a drink after a long day. I was actually shocked the other day to find out Tara Hunt’s real age, she always seemed so mature that I had assumed older. There’s no edge to Tara at all, she is exactly what you see. I would love to see her talking to the next generation more often, as she as so much more to give.

This is why Tara Hunt is my Finding Ada for 2010.

11th May: Malcolm Gladwell Live in Manchester

Malcolm Gladwell

The author of What The Dog Saw, Outliers, The Tipping Point and Blink.

Described by The Observer as ‘The most influential thinker of the iPod generation’, best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell returns to the UK with a new live show to mark the publication of his new book What The Dog Saw. This is a rare live opportunity to see Malcolm’s brilliantly entertaining amalgam of storytelling and intuitive thinking, which has captivated UK audiences both in the West End and on tour.

I’m chopping at the bit to get my ticket, this is one I certainly can not miss, neither should you.

Pleo Autopsy video from Makerfaire

Pleo is one of those super hightech toys which people seem to love or hate. It draws a lot of attention because its beautifully life like. But how would you feel if you saw Pleo taken a part by a maker? There’s a manifesto which makers always quote,

If you can’t open it, you don’t own it

That might be the case, but its a little freaky watching the poor Pleo stripped of its skin. Now to be fair the Pleo was half working anyway but to see it lying there with its eyes looking out across the camera, is almost too much to bear.

I remember a long time ago when I was at an event in London and some jurk comes on stage and flying kicks a Aibo off the stage. He shouted, its not real as the crowd all held there mouths gasping. It was certainly one way to start a debate about humans putting there feelings onto objects. A very interesting debate which I can’t help remember after seeing this video. Thanks Elin Roberts for posting it.

Windows phone 7 interface

Windows phone 7

I actually like the new interface of Windows phone 7. The Zune type interface works well on a small device and to be fair it all makes a lot of sense. I’ll be honest and say its fresh and somewhat exciting to see Microsoft’s Mobile team take a total step back and attempt to redesign the whole experience of the mobile again. No icons, no chrome, no backgrounds, just a sliding scope which logically makes sense. Impressive! I can’t believe this is the same company who worked hard on version 6.5!

I’ll have to reconsider writing off Microsoft in the mobile world.

Hello 2010, welcome to the new blog

2010

So I finally decided to switch my blog to wordpress and on top of that I was able to install storytlr open source.

I’m still in the process of doing all the redirects and general cleaning up but its coming together quite nicely. Once its all stable I’m hoping to spend some time sorting out the styles and themes.

Getting the entries out of Blojsom was easy as pie but then converting them into a format which WordPress wouldn’t barf on was a big problem. In the end I wrote a throw away XSL to do it, because it WordPress didn’t like namespaced elements or generally anything over the standard RSS 2.0 elements. I did manage to push over the Categories and Tags but had to split them apart in WordPress later.

My whole thing is hosted with GoDaddy on their new European Servers and will be quite slow while it caches all requests.

I love Blojsom but I never upgraded to version 3.x which required a database to work. With the need for a database, it meant the ground between WordPress and blojsom was a less so. Then add cheap hosting, amazing plugins, themes and community. And its pretty much a no brainer. I also found that less and less blog editors are supporting Blojsom (some kind of metaweblog xmlrpc category issue). So now I’m able to use Bilbo which is a KDE editor with support for pretty much everything WordPress allows. I’m also able to use Google Gears which is useful when offline.

This was also a chance to get a little more serious about my blogging and footprint online. Hence I’m really hoping to stretch what storytlr can do for me and some of the projects I have for it.

In the meantime, let me know if you see anything very weird which I may have missed….

Software ahead of the curve: Verse Protocol

So I've been checking out the project Verse for a while now but kept it kind of quiet for the longest time. Today I broke my silence and gave a presentation at Social Media Cafe Manchester (#smc_mcr) along side other open source software. The problem with verse is its so big (jokes about the universe stand). There's a lot going on in the uni-verse, but lets get back to basics. So what is it?

Our goal is to create an open source Internet platform for multi-user, interactive, distributed, high-quality 3D graphics and audio for home, public and personal use. The platform will support high-quality 3D-graphics as well as high-quality 3D-audio and acoustic simulation.

The foundation of the platform is “Verse”, a lightweight, low latency, general-purpose network protocol for 3D data, which lets multiple applications act together as one large system by sharing data over the network.

Someone called it Google wave for 3D objects and scenes at SMC_MCR and in actually fact their not far wrong. Its not like Second Life because its very open and the client/server setup is trivial. Ok so there's no Federation but I can't even really imagine how that would work if there was. Anyway diving straight in, we have many components to verse. You have the actual protocol which makes everything work then you. One of the founers Eskil Steenberg has created many things on top of that protocol.

Love – Love is alpha game where up to 200 players cooperatively attack a connected city. The game is freely downloadable and only cost 5-10 euros a year to cover the cost of the server load. It recently was on Coop show and theres screenshots on the pages. Another reason why its worth starting with Love, is that Love is the first full implementation of the Verse for public use. Its a stunning game going by the alpha and its videos. Instead of going for super sharp edges Eskil has gone for super soft shading using some custom filters which portray a foggy landscape and steaming summers. I think the game will do well in some circles but don't get me wrong its super impressive what one guy has some up with but what excites me about Verse isn't Love but instead all the other tools Eskil built to support building Love

Quelsolaar – Eskil, cleverly built this render to make Love, Quel Solaar which is a

real time 3D engine designed to take advantage of the Verse networking protocol. It is fully dynamic and requires no pre-processing of data. It has been designed to be used for any application demanding high quality real time visuals, such as games, simulation, visualization, education and social activities. The main difference from other engines is that Quel Solaar is designed to be fully networked. This means that all data visualized in the engine comes from a Verse server and that any part of the scene can be changed at any time. This makes it ideal for collaboration and an array of new applications. For instance, in a game designed with the Verse architecture the game designers can alter the world appearance in any way while players are in the game. You can also allow the players themselves to have the ability to change the game environment.

Loq Ariou is next up which is a 3D modeler that works like a sketch pad if you have a 3 button mouse. I've actually found it almost impossible to use till recently playing with it and following the Manual and videos which explain it better. The interface is puzzling but once you get it strangely natural to use.

The last one is Co On a schematic verse scene viewer and editor.

In Co On you can inspect your data and edit it. Co On includes a curve editor and a material editor with raytraced rendering previews. Co On is the perfect tool for creating and destroying layers, methods, tags and nodes. It lets you edit and keep track over how the data is represented in the verse server format. I've not personally played too much with this yet but its pretty powerful an I love the way everything is hooked together like a semantic diagram. Funny enough, once you get over the control system, the rest seems to get a lot clearer.

Another aspect of verse outside Eskil's influence theres a number of attempts to add verse support to well known and used applications like Blender 3D, 3D Studio Max, Gimp, and many others. One of the most interesting places Verse is showing up in python.

Software well ahead of its curve I think you have to agree? I'm sure there will be more blog posts about aspects of verse in the near future.

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R&DTV episode 3 launches with a TEDxManchester feel

Episode 3 of R&DTV has finally been released. Well the the short version of Episode 3 of R&DTV has been for now. The official R&DTV site has also been updated with the new version, but no long version yet.

The assets for the video are online too as full edited talks from the TEDxManchester event. See the list below…

You can also subscribe to the whole lot via RSS or Itunes if you would like to keep a copy of all the videos for yourself. Remember all these videos are under a creative commons licence (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0) , so your welcome to share them with the world and create your own remixes of the videos. The short version we edited together is under a slightly different licence which does not allow you to remix due to some musicial copyright from Chicane – Strong in Love /images/emoticons/laugh.gifisco Citizens Mix) and Kevin Shields – Ikebana.

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