A quick intro to interfacing common OLED displays to bare-metal microcontrollers.

Many modern video games may put your character inside of a virtual 3D environment, but you aren’t seeing that in three dimensions — your TV’s screen is only a 2D display, after all. 3D displays/glasses and VR goggles make it feel more like you’re in the 3D world, but it isn’t quite the same as […] The post Displaying games on a 9x9x9 LED cube appeared first on Arduino Blog.

Disruptive technologies call for rethinking product design. We must question assumptions about underlying infrastructure and mental models while acknowledging neither change overnight. For example, self-driving cars don’t need steering wheels. Users direct AI-driven vehicles by giving them a destination address. Keyboards and microphones are better controls for this use case than steering wheels and pedals. But people expect cars to have steering wheels and pedals. Without them, they feel a loss of control – especially if they don’t fully trust the new technology. It’s not just control. The entire experience can – and perhaps must — change as a result. In a self-driving car, passengers needn’t all face forward. Freed from road duties, they can focus on work or leisure during the drive. As a result, designers can rethink the cabin experience from scratch. Such changes don’t happen overnight. People are used to having agency. They expect to actively sit behind the wheel with everyone facing forward. It’ll take time for people to cede control and relax. Moreover, current infrastructure is designed around these assumptions. For example, road signs point toward oncoming traffic because that’s where drivers can see them. Roads transited by robots don’t need signals at all. But it’s going to be a while before roads are used exclusively by AI-driven vehicles. Human drivers will share roads with them for some time, and humans need signs. The presence of robots might even call for new signaling. It’s a liminal situation that a) doesn’t yet accommodate the full potential of the new reality while b) trying to accommodate previous ways of being. The result is awkward “neither fish nor fowl” experiments. My favorite example is a late 19th Century product called Horsey Horseless. Patent diagram of Horsey Horseless (1899) via Wikimedia Yes, it’s a vehicle with a wooden horse head grafted on front. When I first saw this abomination (in a presentation by my friend Andrew Hinton,) I assumed it meant to appeal to early adopters who couldn’t let go of the idea of driving behind a horse. But there was a deeper logic here. At the time, cars shared roads with horse-drawn vehicles. Horsey Horseless was meant to keep motorcars from freaking out the horses. Whether it worked or not doesn’t matter. The important thing to note is people were grappling with the implications of the new technology on the product typology given the existing context. We’re in that situation now. Horsey Horseless is a metaphor for an approach to product evolution after the introduction of a disruptive new technology. To wit, designers seek to align the new technology with existing infrastructure and mental models by “grafting a horse.” Consider how many current products are “adding AI” by including a button that opens a chatbox alongside familiar UI. Here’s Gmail: Gmail’s Gemini AI panel. In this case, the email client UI is a sort of horse’s head that lets us use the new technology without disrupting our workflows. It’s a temporary hack. New products will appear that rethink use cases from the new technology’s unique capabilities. Why have a chat panel on an email client when AI can obviate the need for email altogether? Today, email is assumed infrastructure. Other products expect users to have an email address and a client app to access it. That might not always stand. Eventually, such awkward compromises will go away. But it takes time. We’re entering that liminal period now. It’s exciting – even if it produces weird chimeras for a while.

A year ago I tried to understand how much power ChatGPT was using and if I should be outraged by it. Today I try it again.

Plus Waymo's masterplan, life on a container ship, and the one guy responsible for slowing down road building