Over the last months, Google has been doing a full house clean. That’s meant leave behind a bunch of products like Aardvark, Notebook, Wave and more. On the other hand, it that’s also meant updating its look and the user experience.

Starting from the first page published in 1997, Google started a long work of increase the number and the variety of services. This comes with a growing difficulty to keep consistency and continuity between different products. As Google announces, they are working on a project to improve the user experience, and this will last for the next months.

Three days ago Google published on the official blog what will be the next stage. The black toolbar will be replaced by a new gray bar with a “drop-down Google logo” with links to Google+, Image Search, Maps, and other products. If you think about it, this logo propose the metaphor already used by operating systems. There are no longer static links for Google Calendar or Docs. The Google+ become a share button integrated across all Google properties. The new bar already started rolling out for users and should be complete during the next few days.

This solution save valuable space given to the content and it reduces the number of horizontal bands on the screen making an easier perception of the UI.

One last thing. Do you remember the original Google page in 1997? Well, that’s it:

According to the South Korean news agency Yonhap, starting from March there will be robotic guards in a South Korea jail.

We already spoke about progress of the use of robots in Chinese manufacturing environments. These new prototypes will show up in a jail in the city of Pohang the next spring. Although their friendly look, they will be useful to monitor the inmates during the night, as declared by the leaders of the country’s prisons. South Korea is not new to this kind of use of robotic technology. Since 2010 they are testing robot towers that can sense heat and motion, along the North/South border.

According to the BBC, these three robotic guards will monitor detainees for abnormal behavior like prisoner violence and even attempts at suicide. Researchers say that this will help reduce human guards’ workload. The robots will help prisoners connect with officers, mostly during the night, via cameras mounted on their torsos.

The project will cost about $864,000.

Following the post about future productivity visions of Microsoft, here there are 4 other concepts of technology that we could possibly see in our everyday activities in the near future. Like in the Microsoft concept, there is nothing in these video that isn’t possible already. It is just innovative design of physical objects, user experience and, obviously, optimization.

The first two videos come from Artefact and they are about a printer and a camera.

SWYP: See What You Print from Artefact on Vimeo.

Concept Camera: The WVIL from Artefact on Vimeo.

The third video is about a fridge and it is realized by Fabian Kreuzer. As you can see in the last part of the video, they also create a prototype of this fridge door.

In MY Fridge from fabian kreuzer on Vimeo.

The fourth video from Cisco show us what a Kinect-like technology could change the shopping habits.

Microsoft has just released a new envisioning about the future productivity and connectivity capabilities. According to Microsoft official page we expect to see these technologies in about 5 to 10 years and this will let us make a better use of our time, focus our attention, and strengthen our relationships.

We can recognize actual Microsoft Research products as well as other interesting concepts shown in recent months.

This work comes as always with good ideas  and above all it aims to inspire future technologies design.

This is the new Future Productivity Vision.

The next one is the 2009 Future Productivity Vision.

In the last days Microsoft Research presented 3 new interesting technologies for human interaction: OmniTouch, PocketTouch and Holodesk.

Microsoft has been really fervent in these years researching about new forms of human computer interaction. If Kinect is already an innovation, adding a tiny projector to it can open to a wide set of new applications. OmniTouch let you use any surface like a touchscreen. You can imagine that something like inside a smartphone could really enhance the user experience driving to a new step forward in mobile applications.

What if the rear of a smartphone could be touch sensitive? PocketTouch allows just that. Integrating such technology in the cover of a smartphone will let the user interact with it under particular conditions. One of that could be to operate with simple touches while having your smartphone in the pocket.

Holodesk is a holographic interface that allows you to interact with a virtual three-dimensional world. Kinect recognizes faces and tracks bodies, the hologram creates three-dimensional images while you have the sensation of actually being touching and moving intangible objects.

Isaac Asimov outlined nearly 50 years ago the increasing use of robots in industrial chains and the birth of humanoid robots like Aibo , Parrot orAsimo. What we had not seen yet is a real attempt of replacement of man … until now.

In the last hours two news announce us this fact. The first one is about Foxconn. In 2010 the Chinese factory endured the controversy about the mysterious suicide of employees working on the assembly of electronic products intended for the main brands sold around the world. Some days ago Foxconn announced a massive reorganization plan with the aim of replacing human workers with those made of metal and electronic circuits. The company is going to increase exponentially the number of robots-workers currently in use in the factory, taking it from the current 10 thousand to 300 thousand for the next year, and adding another million by 2014. If we consider that the number of human workers currently used by Foxconn reach 1.2 million, it means that in about three years the factory will be almost entirely populated by robots.

In the same hours the swiss robotics giant ABB unveiled a new concept robot that showcases how the company is aiming to have humanoid machines work side by side with people in manufacturing environments or eventually replace them. Being the reproduction of anthropomorphic manipulation capabilities and having roughly the size of a small human, FRIDA (Friendly Robot for Industrial Dual-arm Assembly) can perform many of the same tasks as a two-armed person.

I’m still thinking whether to be excited about this great innovation or scared of its likely social consequences.

Who among us, as a child, has never drawn on a fogged window? Those who did not play with the shapes in the passing scenery outside the car?

What if the window could be interactive and respond to our actions? This question lead Toyota to present the Window to the World concept at the ACEA “Our Future Mobility Now” exhibition. The project born from the collaboration between the the kansei design team (an R&D group of toyota motors europe) and consultants at the copenhagen institute of interaction design (CIID). This concept thinks the backseat windows of the cars as an interface for young passengers to learn and be creative. It replaces windows with transparent touch screens, providing users with games and educational tools as well as information about landmarks and other objects visible from outside.

As reported in the official news, the concept is composed of five parts:

• Drawing in Motion: using the car window as a canvas, passengers can draw, using their fingers, and see the images integrating with the outside world as the vehicle moves along;
• Zooming into captured moments in time: the window becomes a screen for passengers to zoom-in on outside objects to see it in a brand new perspective.
• Translating the world in a local language: passengers are exposed to new languages and cultures as they can select elements outside the window and receive a real-time translation in a local language.
• Augmented Distances: pinpoint landmarks in the distance and the window will augment the relative distance to the car on the window surface.
• Virtual Constellations: the car’s panoramic roof displays virtual constellations and information about them with the actual sky as a background.

Often you need an inspiration in the initial stage of a project. I would like to share some quotations that have been sources of inspiration to me. I hope they will be inspiration for your projects too … and not only.

Everyone know the question: “the glass is half empty or half full?”

I once heard a student of the university’s IT department say that the glass is twice as big as it needs to be!

But speaking about that, watch out this drawing:

Google joked about it on April 1st, presenting a funny Motion Gmail.

In his video Google showed how this hypothetical instrument could let you send email, attach files, read e-mail, and so on just moving awkwardly in front of the screen.

A few days later, however, all come true: a developer used the unofficial tool for development for Kinect and created the Gmail Motion inspired tool. In the video the developer show how you can drive the email software with arms and legs, moving in front of the Kinect camera and leaving Microsoft to translate the movements into commands.

This demonstrates that with innovation is not a joke: to transform the impossible into reality a few lines of code are sufficient.