Cirque du Soleil’s KA. One of several Control Rooms

Originally uploaded by JoeDuck

KA by Cirque du Soleil is Las Vegas’ most technically advanced stage production. No small order in a city known for many of the world’s most innovative and technically sophisticated shows.

Although there are about 80 performers in the show, there are even more people behind the scenes at KA in roles that vary from computer “dead switch” operators who will stop the show in the event of danger or malfunction (both very rare) to the “cork ranglers” who manage the tons of chopped natural cork that form the “sand” on the huge rotating stage.

As with all the Cirque shows, KA is remarkable in creating the appearance of death defying leaps, dives, and spectacular aerial performances. KA adds to this fireballs, archery battles, hand combat on a stage rotating in the air, and more. All this happens while an army of invisible support staff maintain an extremely high standard of safety for both performers and the audience.

Note: Aria Resort, Vdara Hotel, and Crystals are sponsors of Technology Report’s 2010 CES Coverage.  We appreciated that these remarkable properties – which rank among the world’s most technically advanced hotels and retail center – helped us bring you our live CES 2010 coverage.

HOLGER FÖRTERER is KA’s Interactive projections designer.    Unlike usual light work,  KÀ dancers and acrobats do not control what happens to the projection through their own movements.  KA’s scenery can actually react to the performers.

This creates very realistic illusions – such as falling underwater with a trail of bubbles – that play out in real time as the performers interact with the computerized part of KA’s world.

This innovation happens using infrared cameras which help track the performers and feed that data to computers in the control room pictured above.   This integrates with a remarkable system that maps the massive rotating stage, effectively turning the KA stage into an massive touch-screen that knows the precise position of each actor, dancer and acrobat.

“In essence, what we have is an intelligent set,” said Förterer in an earlier interview. “And everything the audience sees is created by the computer.”

Las Vegas, Science & Technology, technology

We’ve profiled two of the world’s most promising AI efforts here at Technology Report.     Blue Brain in Switzerland and DARPA SyNAPSE here in the USA, a newer project that appears to be getting better funding thanks to backing from the US Defense Department.   Both of these projects rely on IBM supercomputers for their simulations of neurons and their interactions, and both are optimistic about the potential to develop thinking machines within the next decade.

The project leader of Blue Brain, Dr. Henry Markram, has been very vocal and very critical of claims by  the IBM team leader Dr. Dharmendra S. Modha.    Markram’s concerns are expressed here in his Technology Report guest post about the IBM project claims.

We asked Dr. Modha for a response but didn’t hear back, so I’d like to refer folks to the Modha blog here, especially to the post called ‘The Cat is Out of the bag and BlueMatter”, which details progress in the SyNAPSE project and explains the claims made that they are simulating brain activity that is roughly equivalent to that we’d see from a cat.  Here’s an excerpt from that post:

Towards this end, we are announcing two major milestones.

First, using Dawn Blue Gene / P supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Lab with 147,456 processors and 144 TB of main memory, we achieved a simulation with 1 billion spiking neurons and 10 trillion individual learning synapses. This is equivalent to 1,000 cognitive computing chips each with 1 million neurons and 10 billion synapses, and exceeds the scale of cat cerebral cortex. The simulation ran 100 to 1,000 times slower than real-time.

Second, we have developed a new algorithm, BlueMatter, that exploits the Blue Gene supercomputing architecture to noninvasively measure and map the connections between all cortical and sub-cortical locations within the human brain using magnetic resonance diffusion weighted imaging. Mapping the wiring diagram of the brain is crucial to untangling its vast communication network and understanding how it represents and processes information.

Finally, here is an excellent presentation by Dr. Modha that outlines in simple terms what they are trying to do with DARPA SyNAPSE, which is build a human scale brain by 2018.

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A new initiative to develop something of a “strong AI” computer has begun in Europe, coordinated by this group:  brain-i-nets.eu

Strong AI is, for many, the “holy grail” of computing and in general terms means the development of a machine that thinks as well or better than a human.    Computers already have surpassed humans in most very focused intelligence tasks such as mathematical calculations, game playing, most forms of data analysis, and many more of the tasks we often use to define  ”intelligence”.     However no machine comes close to the capabilities of a full human brain at this time, our remarkable three pound package that includes a high level of consciousness and self-awareness, adaptive mechanisms, deep creativity, and more.

With a fairly modest budget compared to the DARPA SyNAPSE,  Brain-i-nets goals appear more modest.   Science Daily suggests the goal as:

The scientists want to design a new generation of neuro-computers based on the principles of calculation and learning mechanisms found in the brain, and at the same time gain new knowledge about the brain’s learning mechanisms.

The Brain-i-nets website puts this …. somewhat differently, leading one to wonder if they were writing for public understanding or a science fiction movie script:

The goal of this project is to produce a set of rules for synaptic plasticity and network reorganisation that describe the actual adaptive processes that take place in the living brain during learning and to port these rules into current and next-generation neuromorphic hardware.

“Future Emerging Technologies” (FET) is the key agency behind   “Brain-i-Nets” which appears to have a budget of about 2.6 million Euros (though I’m not clear if this is just the matching partner funding or the entire budget).

The research partnership includes the University College London, the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg und the University of Zurich.

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When I first read about this I thought it was some kind of hoax article, but it’s true – Bionic eyesight via contact lenses with specialized circuits and LEDs are now being tested in animals and may be ready for humans soon:  Read the original article at Spectrum IEEE and see the details of the Lens here.

Babak Parviz of the University of Washington writes:

These visions (if I may) might seem far-fetched, but a contact lens with simple built-in electronics is already within reach; in fact, my students and I are already producing such devices in small numbers in my laboratory at the University of Washington, in Seattle …

In this lens concept, an antenna at the periphery collects incoming RF energy from a separate portable transmitter. Power-conversion circuitry provides DC power to other parts of the system and sends instructions to the display control circuit. The display, at the center, might consist of LEDs, which would turn on and off, or LCD-like elements, whose transparency would be modulated by the control circuit. An energy-storage module, perhaps a large capacitor, is connected to a solar cell, which could provide a boost to the lens. A biosensor samples the surface of the cornea, performs an analysis, and provides data to the telecommunication module to transmit to an external computer.

As a contact lens wearer I can only say “Sign me up!” because this would be amazing and probably not even uncomfortable.   Although these initial prototypes don’t yet do the most amazing things such as “eagle eye” quality vision, that technical leap should happen as soon as the innovative energy and money start flowing to a project that may be another step in the direction of human/technological convergence.   Cochlear implants, which allow some deaf folks to hear, are a great example of a mainstream technology that is even more “invasive” than the contact lenses would be.

Medical Devices, health, medical technology bionics, cochlear implants, contact lenses

Google labs is testing a very interesting new feature within the Google search results which lists and ranks content from people that have connections to your own social networks, websites, blogs, etc.   It’s called Google Social Circle and I think this approach has a lot of potential.

Google labs writes:

We’ve taken steps to improve the relevance of our search results with personalization, but today’s launch takes that one step further. With Social Search, Google finds relevant public content from your friends and contacts and highlights it for you at the bottom of your search results. When I do a simple query for [new york], Google Social Search includes my friend’s blog on the results page …

Filtering the massive oceans of content is what Google has been doing so effectively for some time, but the social media explosion has created a new kind of relevance Google’s basic ranking system has not been taking into account.    The content of trusted friends and associates is often going to be more relevant to us than that of, say, internet marketeers in a foreign country.     If, for example, my pal has travelled to Morrocco I’m going to trust his stuff – and probably be more interested in it – than information from strangers.    Google Social Circle will incorporate that relevance into the search results, and I think by doing this they may succeed where Facebook and Twitter have pretty dramatically failed.    Facebook’s search system and layout – in my experience – makes it very hard to search for information.  It can even be difficult to find a person you know, let alone find content they have created that is relevant to your search.    Twitter lists are something of a step in the right direction of targeting for relevant information, but Twitter search is severely lacking and I don’t even know if they they are particularly interested in providing the kind of contextual content mapping Google is testing with Social Circle.

Another interesting – some would say sinister – aspect of this approach by Google is to create internet environments filled with “trusted online information sources” that have been endorsed by different networks of friends.    Clever use of the data flowing in will allow Google to better screen sites based on human input, which is much harder to spoof than manipulations commonly done as part of aggressive “Search Engine Optimization” tactics.

The Social Circle reminds me of an advanced version of “del.icio.us”, a tagging and bookmarking service aquired (and largely abandoned?) by Yahoo a few years ago.  Delicious allowed users to tag and label sites and content, creating link lists of things relevant to them and giving them the ability to share these links with others.    By automating that process and using their brilliant search algorithm to slice and dice individual information, Google has pushed us one step closer to the holy grail of search – a system that shows us exactly what we want/need to see even if we cannot clearly state exactly what we want or need.

Google, SEO, Social Networks, Social media, internet, search del.icio.us, Google, google social circle, search, yahoo

Update: Well, the reviews seem a bit mixed from the tech crowd even as the TV news stories are about the best thing Apple could have hoped for – breathless anchors telling us how much they want an iPad.

Wall Street Journal has a good summary of the early buzz. My take so far is that these are the key features in play:

“low price” “giant iPhone” “many applications” “high quality” “no still or video camera” “potential typing challenges”

This morning Apple launched what is almost certain to become the new tablet computing standard, the Apple iPad. Reviews will be coming in at a lightning pace today and we’ll try to summarize them later, but in the meantime here’s a great “Everything you need to know about the iPad” piece from the Gizmodo people.

Apple iPAD launches

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We didn’t do a list of our top ten CES gadgets  at Technology Report so we are going to bring you ten lists from others who were a little more thorough in their coverage of CES 2010.    One of the great things about the CES show is the sheer number of press and bloggers who attend – some 4000+ each year.      Larger blogs like Endgadget and Gizmodo have something of an army of writers fanning out over the show bringing coverage of the huge numbers of new and nearly-new consumer electronic items from the show.

CNETs Best of CES and  FWIW I thought Drew Carey was the best of CNET at CES!

Telegraph UK:  The Top Ten Gadgets

Tech Cocktail:   Best of CES

…. more lists coming soon ….

technology

During CES Las Vegas  Technology Report joined a small group of fellow CES bloggers for a backstage tour of Cirque du Soleil’s KA theater at the MGM Grand.

Cirque’s media and technical staff are as extraordinary as their performers and we were joined by KA’s Technical Director Erik Walstad, Cirque’s  Social Media Manager Jessica Berlin, and Cirque Publicist Jeff Lovari.

This remarkable show – one of seven permanent Cirque productions in Las Vegas – is the most technically advanced production in the Western Hemisphere and perhaps the world (I could find no other shows that compare).

KA has several extraordinary and unique technologies, but the most imposing and amazing were the massive moving stages that lift, move, tilt, and spin during the performance, providing everything from an empty abyss when the stages are lowered to a sandy beach (using thousands of pounds of tiny pieces of cork as the sand!) to a massive sheer cliff when one is rotated 90 degrees and flipped into a vertical position, with several performers perched precariously on the edge of the deck.

As we toured the massive “basement” of the KA theater, many stories below the seating area, Walstad explained that the production required a massive retrofit of the existing building, with special support structures required to anchor the gigantic gantry crane that moves the huge deck with extraordinary precision and agility using hydraulics that use vegetable oil as an environmentally friendly alternative to more toxic oils.

Two decks appear and disappear during the performance:

The Sand Cliff Deck weighs in at about *40 tons* and measures 25×50 feet with a six-foot depth.   It is supported and controlled by an inverted gantry crane attached to four 75-foot long hydraulic cylinders running along massive support columns.   Together the crane and deck weigh in at about *175 tons*!    The crane is powered using five pumps and about 3500 gallons of vegetable oil.

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Chihuly Glass Gallery at CITYCENTER

Originally uploaded by JoeDuck

Note: Aria Resort, Vdara Hotel, and Crystals are sponsors of Technology Report’s CES Coverage.

Next to the ARIA at CITYCENTER Las Vegas are two spectacular art galleries – one with Chihuly Glass Sculptures.  Chihuly glass is also in the incomparable Bellagio Lobby ceiling.  However the glass “flowers” are backlighted at the Bellagio – against the artist’s wishes I understand – making the glass less striking than in the CITYCENTER gallery where the special lighting effects blend with the colors and glass to make spectacular pieces.

technology

ASUS at CES

Originally uploaded by JoeDuck

There are more different types, sizes, and brands of computers at CES than you can shake a stick at, though Apple is always conspicuously absent. In fact the Apple Tablet somewhat overshadowed much of the innovations of the Las Vegas show because clearly the Apple Tablet is going to be the “one to beat”, especially given the lack of any clearly “superb” tablet offering at CES.

Although I have not done enough research to generalize much about the best new PCs I think it’s clear that the mainsteam trend is towards smaller laptops and netbooks with robust features. Costs are going down – features that would have been unheard of at any cost 5 years ago are now standard on even a modest PC. Battery life is impressive and getting better – one of the ASUS PCs shown here had a battery that lasted something like 10 hours.

ASUS also has a new interesting line of *very large* laptops with high quality speakers built into the sides of the chassis to the left and right of the screen. Although heavy, these will offer huge power and a “desktop” feel for your mobile computing. Still, I think weight is the key factor driving down PC size and predict it’ll be the netbooks that dominate the market for the next few years.

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