The Day Hell Froze Over: Tough Guy 2010

Sunday January 31st saw the latest iteration of Tough Guy, a slightly crazy race involving a cross-country run and an obstacle course from the reassuringly rustic mind of Mr Mouse.

This was my first time (definitely signing up for next year) and it was a ball.  The initial cross-country section was about 8-10km, designed to stretch the field out, involving lots of running and a bit of cold water with tortuous but pretty funny zig-zags on a steep hill to finish it off.  This was then followed by a series of obstacles; A-frames, electric fences, concrete tunnels, burning hay, etc, but the biggest challenges for me were the water obstacles.  Kudos to the leaders who didn’t have the luxury of unbroken water to jump through/into/under, as the ice needed breaking.  There are plenty of pictures floating around of guys carrying sheets of ice over sections of the course.  The water obstacles started as ‘funny’ and  graduated through ‘kind of painful’ to general expletives.  

All in all, a great way to spend a Sunday.  About four and a half thousand completed with 600 or so not making it round, principally down to the cold.  I saw one guy on the floor apparently with a broken leg and a few lying by the side being wrapped in silver blankets by the support teams and St John’s Ambulance.  Next year: gloves, a hat and hopefully a few degrees warmer…

Love this video:

But my favourite page is this with absolutely stunning pictures here from Mike King, including this one of the eventual winner, Paul Jones:

(© Mike King)

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The Fantastic Tavern and My Special Friend

On Thursday 28th January I went along to The Fantastic Tavern organised and run by Matt Bagwell and Michelle Flynn from EMC.

The idea was ‘Trends of 2010’ and for a summary of the evening I will defer to Ioko’s Simon Gallagher and his excellent review of the night here.

On my part, I’d like to thank Matt, Michelle and EMC for organising and sponsoring the event and thanks to the crowd for going easy on the Microsoft guy speaking at the front.

My 5 minutes was called ‘My Special Friend’ on the advancement of Natural User Interface and the potential for pico-projectors on phones to bring NUI to the mobile space and finally to consider the idea of interacting with your internet buddies via real-size projection anywhere.

This was prompted by a few people, videos below, which should give a feel for the session.

Firstly, Bill Buxton, always inspirational, speaks about the future of advertising.  Part of his message is using your mobile with larger advertising canvases, linking them together to use the advert as your mobile 10-foot experience.  This is currently being done in large shopping centres; bluetooth communication and interactive advertising screens.

Project Natal is the upcoming controller-free Xbox User Interface based on 3D camera research with multiple body point recognition, facial recognition and infra-red depth analysis.  I’ve seen live demos of this and it’s pretty awesome.  What strikes me is the potential for ecommerce such as the screenshot below where two friends are talking about clothes purchases.

Pranav Mistry on Sixth Sense on ted.com shows the use of a small webcam and pico-projector to create an interactive canvas anywhere.  This is from last year and shows the progression of recognition software – take it from about 5 and half minutes in to see the main demos.

Finally this video shows the unboxing of the LG Expo Pico Projector Phone; why not experience a phone-video-projector full-size video chat with your Facebook colleagues anywhere you can find a surface?  May lead to discussions about clothes in a changing room or sob stories with a friend on a wall.  And if you don’t have real friends, why not engage with a full-size 1:1 chat with a virtual Special Friend in a shopping mall somewhere?

P.S.  This is great; the Pomegranate.  It may be a spoof but, forsaking the coffee-maker and razor, maybe we’ll get there one day :-)

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