• Futurist Friday: Lend Me an Extra…Limb?

    One subset of robotics pertains to cyborgs: “cybernetic organisms” that have both organic and biomechanical parts.  The artificial limbs that enabled Oscar Pistorius to leap from the Paralympics to  able-bodied international …
  • Letting Agents Loose in the Museum

    Any experiment that overturns business as usual can give us a glimpse of alternate futures. Some of the most entrenched “usuals” in museums are related to authority and process: Who sets the agenda for what we do, and how? This week Divya …
  • Meet Watson, Your Personal Museum Learning Agent

    A recent post by Steve Hamm wrote on the IBM Smarter Planet sparked a new thought about a role for AI (artificial intelligence) in museums. Steve writes about IBM Watson’s new gig: improving the customer experience, as demonstrated in this …
  • Futurist Friday: Heads Up

    When Jeff Bezos announced last year that Amazon was going to introduce “Prime Air,” a drone delivery service, he was roundly mocked and Amazon quickly backed off the claim. But, in fact, the barriers to drone delivery are …
  • Robots for Accessibility: Help Henry Spread the Word

    AAM conference attendees were joined in Seattle by Henry Evans, accessibility advocate and  founder of Robots for Humanity.Henry joined us via a Beam Pro telepresence robot (courtesy of Suitable Technologies). Because he is quadriplegic, …
  • Bringing Battlefields to Life

    I’ve long wished there was an AR app for Civil War Battlefields that would allow me to overlay video of reenactors on the actual landscapes of Gettysburg, Antietam, etc. (Maybe with a little less gore than would be strictly accurate.)Maybe …
  • The Internet of Future Things in Seattle

    Here is a preview of part 3 of CFM’s “glimpse of the future” demo at the annual meeting in Seattle. It’s a little installation I’m calling “The Internet of Future Things,” and came about through the collision of location-aware tech with …
  • Droning On About the Annual Meeting in Seattle

    In Tuesday’s post, Henry Evans previewed the demonstration of telepresence robots (aka Remote Presence Devices) that CFM will be hosting in MuseumExpo. (If you want to sign up to “beam in” and visit the Expo via robot, …
  • Exploring Robots for Accessibility, in Seattle

    Every year CFM organizes a glimpse of the future in AAM’s own section of MuseumExpo at the annual meeting. Last year we explored 3D printing. This year we are hosting demonstrations of several technologies related to accessibility and to …
  • Coming Soon: Your Robotic Chariot

    What will be the first robot to be a part of your everyday life? OK, it may already be the Roomba–the little autonomous vacuum cleaner (80% of which are given names by their owners.) But I don’t think Roombas will radically …

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