Designers in the future will have to make buildings, furniture, clothing and more that are appealing not only to the human eye but to the robot eye. At least that's what London-based architect and designer Matt Jones thinks. For example, he blogged, messages might be written onto books and signs in a UV-based ink that's visible only to a specialized robot.
The idea is that as people try to integrate more robotic helpers into their lives, they'll start to add markers onto signs and furniture to help the robots navigate. This, Jones contends, will help people use robots sooner instead of waiting for research to improve to the point that a robot can see and navigate the world exactly as a human does.
"What if, instead of designing computers and robots that relate to what we can see, we meet them halfway — covering our environment with markers, codes and RFIDs, making a robot-readable world?" he wrote. (RFIDs are radio frequency identifications.)
Inspired by Jones' idea, a colleague, Timo Arnall, put together a video of feeds from GPS, security and other machine feeds. (Both Jones and Arnall work at the design firm Berg.) The video is supposed to be a look at how robots see the world. It's a long video for watching all at once, especially with its repetitive background music, but it does give a sense of how differently robots work. Better get designing:
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