In photography, bokeh is the aesthetic quality of the blur produced in the out-of-focus parts of an image produced by a lens. Bokeh has been defined as "the way the lens renders out-of-focus points of light". Differences in lens aberrations and aperture shape cause some lens designs to blur the image in a way that is pleasing to the eye, while others produce blurring that is unpleasant or distracting . Bokeh occurs for parts of the scene that lie outside the depth of field. Photographers sometimes deliberately use a shallow focus technique to create images with prominent out-of-focus regions.
The MIT Media Lab is an interdisciplinary research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, growing out of MIT's Architecture Machine Group in the School of Architecture. Its research does not restrict to fixed academic disciplines, but draws from technology, media, science, art and design. As of 2014, Media Lab's research groups include neurobiology, biologically inspired fabrication, socially engaging robots, emotive computing, bionics, and hyperinstruments.
Electronic article surveillance is a technological method for preventing shoplifting from retail stores, pilferage of books from libraries or removal of properties from office buildings. Special tags are fixed to merchandise or books. These tags are removed or deactivated by the clerks when the item is properly bought or checked out. At the exits of the store, a detection system sounds an alarm or otherwise alerts the staff when it senses active tags. Some stores also have detection systems at the entrance to the restrooms that sound an alarm if someone tries to take unpaid merchandise with them into the restroom. For high-value goods that are to be manipulated by the patrons, wired alarm clips called spider wrap may be used instead of tags.
Object hyperlinking, or simply 'phylinking', is a neologism that usually refers to extending the Internet to objects and locations in the real world. The current Internet does not extend beyond the electronic realm. Object hyperlinking aims to extend the Internet to the physical world by attaching tags with URLs to tangible objects or locations. These object tags can then be read by a wireless mobile device and information about objects and locations retrieved and displayed.
Locative media or location-based media (LBM) are media of communication functionally bound to a location. The physical implementation of locative media, however, is not bound to the same location to which the content refers.
Intermec is a manufacturer and supplier of automated identification and data capture equipment, including barcode scanners, barcode printers, mobile computers, RFID systems, voice recognition systems, and life cycle services.
Smart Label, also called Smart Tag, is an extremely flat configured transponder under a conventional print-coded label, which includes chip, antenna and bonding wires as a so-called inlay. The labels, made of paper, fabric or plastics, are prepared as a paper roll with the inlays laminated between the rolled carrier and the label media for use in specially-designed printer units.
Mobile tagging is the process of providing data read from tags for display on mobile devices, commonly encoded in a two-dimensional barcode, using the camera of a camera phone as the reader device. The contents of the tag code is usually a URL for information addressed and accessible through Internet.
A wireless identification and sensing platform (WISP) is an RFID device that supports sensing and computing: a microcontroller powered by radio-frequency energy. That is, like a passive RFID tag, WISP is powered and read by a standard off-the-shelf RFID reader, harvesting the power it uses from the reader's emitted radio signals. To an RFID reader, a WISP is just a normal EPC gen1 or gen2 tag; but inside the WISP, the harvested energy is operating a 16-bit general purpose microcontroller. The microcontroller can perform a variety of computing tasks, including sampling sensors, and reporting that sensor data back to the RFID reader. WISPs have been built with light sensors, temperature sensors, and strain gauges. Some contain accelerometers. WISPs can write to flash and perform cryptographic computations. The WISP was originally developed by Intel Research Seattle, but after their closure development work has continued at the Sensor Systems Laboratory at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Asset tracking refers to the method of tracking physical assets, either by scanning barcode labels attached to the assets or by using tags using GPS, BLE or RFID which broadcast their location. These technologies can also be used for indoor tracking of persons wearing a tag.
Phase-jitter modulation (PJM) is a modulation method specifically designed to meet the unique requirements of passive RFID tags. It has been adopted by the high-frequency RFID Air Interface Standard ISO/IEC 18000-3 MODE 2 for high-speed bulk conveyor-fed item-level identification because of its demonstrably higher data rates. The MODE 2 PJM data rate is 423,75 kbit/s; 16 times faster than the alternative MODE 1 system ISO/IEC 18000-3 MODE 1 and the legacy HF system ISO/IEC 15693.
ISO/IEC 18000-3 is an international standard for passive RFID item level identification and describes the parameters for air interface communications at 13.56 MHz. The target markets for MODE 2 are in tagging systems for manufacturing, logistics, retail, transport and airline baggage. MODE 2 is especially suitable for high speed bulk conveyor fed applications.
Ramesh Srinivasan studies the relationship between technology, politics and society. He is an associate professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has been a faculty member at UCLA since 2005 in the Information Studies and Design Media Arts departments. He is the founder of the UC-wide Digital Cultures Lab, exploring the meaning of technology worldwide as it spreads to the far reaches of our world. He is also the author of the books: “Whose Global Village? Rethinking How Technology Impacts Our World” with NYU Press, and “After the Internet” on Polity Press to be released in December 2017. Srinivasan earned his Ph.D. in design studies at Harvard; his master's degree in media arts and science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and his bachelor's degree in industrial engineering at Stanford. He has served fellowships in MIT’s Media Laboratory in Cambridge and the MIT Media Lab Asia. He has also been a teaching fellow at the Graduate School of Design and Department of Visual and Environmental Design at Harvard. Srinivasan is a regular speaker for TEDx Talks, and makes regular media appearances on NPR, Al Jazeera, “The Young Turks,” MSNBC, and Public Radio International. His writings have been widely published by Al Jazeera English, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, Quartz, and CNN.
NETRA is a mobile eye diagnostic device developed at MIT Media Lab consisting of a clip-on eyepiece and a software app for smart phones. The co-inventors include Ramesh Raskar and Vitor Pamplona. It can be seen as the inverse of expensive Shack-Hartmann sensors. NETRA allows for the early, low-cost diagnosis of the most common refractive Refractive Disorders. The subject looks into the device and aligns patterns on the display. By repeating this procedure for eight meridians, the required refractive correction is computed. NETRA exploits the fact that aberrations are expressed using only a few parameters to create an easier user interaction approach. Leveraging mobile connectivity, the system can transmit test data to appropriate facilities for immediate action, aggregate data for use in analysis, or instruct a separate machine for automatic dispensing of spectacles.
Femto-photography is a technique for recording the propagation of ultrashort pulses of light through a scene at a very high speed. A femto-photograph is equivalent to an optical impulse response of a scene and has also been denoted by terms such as a light-in-flight recording or transient image. Femto-photography of macroscopic objects was first demonstrated using a holographic process in the 1970s by Nils Abramsson at the Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden). A research team at the MIT Media Lab led by Ramesh Raskar, together with contributors from the Graphics and Imaging Lab at the Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain, more recently achieved a significant increase in image quality using a streak camera synchronized to a pulsed laser and modified to obtain 2D images instead of just a single scanline.
Chipless RFID tags are RFID tags that do not require a microchip in the transponder.
John Werner is the founder of Ideas in Action, Inc. (IIA) and Managing Director at Link Ventures and Chief Network Officer, SVP of Corporate Development at Cogo Labs in Cambridge Ma, Prior he was a Vice President at an augmented reality company. He is also founding Managing Director for MIT Media Lab's Emerging Worlds Special Interest Group (SIG), and former Head of Innovation and New Ventures for the Camera Culture Group at the MIT Media Lab for Ramesh Raskar, director of the Camera Culture Group at MIT Media Lab. He is one of the founding members of the non-profit organization Citizen Schools and the curator of TEDxBeaconStreet, an independent event licensed by TED as part of TEDx. He started first ever AR-in-Action Augmented Reality Conference "ARIA" at MIT Media Lab in January 2017 and Blockchain+AI+Human = Magic Summit at MIT and Davos.
