About the Talk
You gaze into the Cloud Mirror, and it gazes deep into you. It will violate your privacy, especially if you carelessly litter the Internet with sensitive personal details.

The Cloud Mirror is an art piece which temporarily merges visitors’ online identities with their physical selves. It uses augmented reality, computer vision, and Internet web services to identify visitors by name; mine the Internet for photographs and facts (dirt) about them; and superimpose that data in an on-screen comic book thought bubble that follows the visitor’s motion.

About the Speaker
Eric Gradman is an interactive artist in Los Angeles, CA. His work often features computer vision, large-scale projections, unusual sensors, and custom electronics to produce fun environments that compel people to interact.

Past Talks
BIL 2009 – The Perils of Robotics
BIL 2009 – Demo: Brainwave Controlled iPhone App

About the Talk
This talk will focus on a project in Wellington New Zealand entitled Sentimental Plastics. As part of the IntensCity Urban Design Week artist residency in 2007, Morgan Barnard and Robert Appierdo used a shipping container in the busy Courtenay Place entertainment district in Wellington as studio space and live urban screen. During the month-long residency, Barnard and Appierdo conducted workshops where they interviewed Wellington residents and gathered plastic bags to serve as raw material for the culminating Live Cinema performance and installation. These workshops focused on looking at ways to creatively reuse and up-cycle plastic bags. Bags were transformed into reusable material using a widely known heating method. The material was then used to create practical items and projection screens for the installation. The shipping container was transformed at night into an urban screen, evolving from and responding to the surrounding urban and data environment. The project culminated in a Live Cinema performance, projecting interviews and data-mined content onto screens made from up-cycled plastic bags. This talk will review Sentimental Plastics and look at Live Cinema and Urban Screens as a space for community entertainment and engagement.

About the Speaker
Morgan Barnard is a new media designer, filmmaker, and lecturer living in Los Angeles, California. For the past 12 years digital media and new technologies have been a core element that has informed his practice as an innovative artist and designer. From the early days of interactive digital media production at the California College of the Arts to film & video industry experience in Los Angeles and New York, he has worked with media through digital technologies to tell stories, create experiences, and engage audiences. In 2005 he received a master’s degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program in New York University creating a thesis that explored interactive storytelling and immersive narrative experiences. After graduating from NYU ITP, Morgan stayed on as an adjunct faculty member teaching courses in new media production video and interactive media. In 2006 he was awarded a Production fellowship at Eyebeam Atelier where he worked with artists creating documentaries and designed interfaces for live video performance. His background in documentary, music video, motion graphics, and post-production informs his academic practice. He is currently working on interactive installations, locative narrative, live video mixing and the creation of custom hardware and software for live visual performance.

About the Talk
Rock Band and Wii gave players a taste of live, role-based gaming. The next step is immersive play. The wired world provides a rich set of tools for simulated stories and puzzles. Cheap sensors, networked players and augmented video combine for a choose-your-own adventure story that will some day rival Michael Douglas’ Game.

About the Speaker
Brent Bushnell is an engineer and entrepreneur creating interactive technology and art for public venues. He likes novel games, artistic graffiti, and Brazilian jiu-jitsu. More @brentbushnell.

About the Talk
The North Paw is a compass anklet: it vibrates on your ankle to tell you which way is north. Because the stimulus is persistent, your brain adapts to the device, and you acquire an intuitive sense of north.

Sensebridge is a company I have started (with some friends) that aims to explore the space of wearable electronic senses. We bridge the world you can’t feel into the senses you already have: sensebridge. The North Paw bridges a magnetic sense, we also have projects to bridge ultrasonic sound (and thereby echolocation), heart beat, and “eyes in the back of your back”: feeling when things are coming up behind you.

Our approach is not visual: although vision is the most powerful of our senses, it’s also the most over-burdened already, and is actively used. We feel that the sense of touch offers the most possibilities for augmentation of new sensory stimulus.

If you’re interested in wearable electronics or sensory augmentation (aka augmented reality), come to my talk. I’ll give a short talk on wearable electronic senses, and then I’ll moderate a group discussion / Q & A session. I’ll also have a variety of devices on hand that you can try on! Check out our website

About the Speaker
Eric is an engineer and hacker, transhumanist and environmentalist. Lately he’s been building wearable electronic devices which augment his senses. Please join the noisebridge cyborg group: 1pm Sundays at Noisebridge (a San Francisco hackerspace), till the hacking stops.

About the Talk
Scott Beibin (Lost Film Fest) presents a preview from his newest project, the multimedia narrative SCIENTISTS ARE THE NEW ROCKSTARS — a spoken word, video curation, and gadget show-and-tell that spans generations of scientific tinkerers, with an emphasis on sustainable technologies. Says Beibin, “A rockstar scientist is a person who researches and creates with regards to where things come from and go to with consideration for their environmental and social impact.”

www.scientistsarethenewrockstars.com

About the Speaker
Scott Beibin is the director of the Lost Film Fest and co-founder of the Evil Twin Booking Agency.

About the Talk
There are many goals that the BIL community has, but if you wanted to find a common thread, it would be that we want to be awesome. Awesome is combination of being smart, kind, fit, ethical, and expert at an area of general interest. Being awesome means meeting someone, telling them who you are and what you do, and having them say, “Wow!” or the equivalent. This talk will tell you how to authentically elicit this reaction more often, from more people.

About the Speaker
Alex Lightman is the Executive Director of Humanity+ (formerly the World Transhumanist Association), author of over 800,000 words mainly about science, technology, science fiction, and the future including Brave New Unwired World: The Digital Big Bang and the Infinite Internet. He is a graduate of MIT and attended graduate school at MIT and Harvard. He completed Army Airborne paratrooper training, Navy Cold Weather Survival School, and over 25 road races including six marathons in the last 18 months. He got support from 40 countries for his government policy recommendations for IPv6.

Past Talks
BIL2009 – How to Do Cool Things Around the World

About the Talk
It’s 2010 and it’s time to make the Primer learning game a reality. If Wikipedia and open courseware gives kids the sum of human knowledge, why are kids too busy playing games to become self-educated polymaths? What if games aren’t the problem but actually the key to making learning addictively fun? At its best, learning is playful, and games can bridge the gap between what we’d like to learn and what we actually do for fun: play. Everything worth learning deserves a game experience worth playing! Last year we showed a roadmap for an open learning game platform. Now we’re demonstrating the first 3D Primer game up and running! We’ll demo two very different forms of the OpenPrimer.org platform: The Open Primer epic learning game platform in 3D on iPhone & iPad simulator. and the Young Afghan’s Primer, a version designed to help young geeks in the making bootstrap from 3rd world to global citizenship.

About the Talk
As we all drift off into the Cloud, what exactly is Web 3.0? Does the web co enable a mushrooming Culture of Narcissism? I’ve recently been collaborating with Don Marti on a social game that integrates with Twitter, called Heist. I’ve been closely observing the behaviour and demographics of web gamers (and other web users) and have found some interesting things. Where is the web headed and what can we do to stake our claims and make our statements? How does this relate to conferences such as BIL and TED?

About the Speaker
I’ve been involved with computers since 1976, when I wrote my first program in BASIC on an HP minicomputer. Since then, I’ve watched with fascination as the technology has continually evolved on an increasing trajectory. My role in the industry has varied, from mainframe operations, to real time control systems, to technical writing and training and developing specialized software and system infrastructure for Fortune 500 clients. I’ve written articles for the O’Reilly Network and in 2007 had the privilege of presenting at OSCON. Most of my work in recent years has been a strange combination of management consulting and developing database driven web sites of the LAMP stack variety. Like most of us, I’m enamored with the social impact of the web and have been doing a lot of web watching along with development of some custom web analytics.

About the Talk
This talk will address our need to find balance amongst the ever increasing desire to be constantly connected to our highly addictive shiny technology thingies. I will discuss how to find time in the day to meditate, bring up some breathing techniques, and propose how the simplicity of tea drinking can help us achieve mindfulness. I’ll also be touching upon some of the mental and physical disorders technologists suffer from, and what common sense wisdom we can all conjure to overcome them.

Mighty Leaf Tea has sponsored this talk and will supply attendees with free tea samplers, and I will provide as much hot water and cups as I can carry.

About the Speaker
Natalie Villalobos is a self proclaimed “teaist” who has explored numerous cultures and their ceremonies around tea. She consults for tea companies in the Bay Area where she provides consumer insights and adoption trends of tea culture through social media and technology. Her meditation focus is founded on Non-Violent Communication, Zazen, Native American principles, and the gift of a good hug. You can find her meditating and meeting strangers at Om Shan Tea Teahouse, Samovar Tea Lounge, and the Imperial Tea Court in San Francisco.

She works full-time at Google as the Community Manager for Sidewiki – a product that allows users to annotate any webpage on the internet.

You can find out more about Natalie’s feats and discoveries at natalievillalobos.com and on Twitter as @nataliaenvy.