Inspiration

Augmented reality – tagging the world!

/ Susan Hendrich / 1 Comment

Augmented reality

Imagine this: You’re traveling on a desert highway out West, and you see a lone stone fort set back from the road.  The old stone structure looks interesting, and you wonder about its history.  You pull out your phone, aim it at the fort, and poof, a full description of the stone structure and its history pops up on your phone’s screen, telling you when it was built, what happened there, and who owns it today.

That’s augmented reality.

And it’s coming, soon. Check out these two glimpses into the future of storytelling, travel, and social networking:

An augmented reality application for Google Android-based phones: Wikitude AR Travel Guide

Futuristic 3D Storytelling – EyeMagicBooks
Fun, huh?

Stayin’ Alive is savin’ lives?

/ Susan Hendrich / Leave a comment

 Old Song Finds a New Purpose

In the Offbeat department, I am inspired by a disco song’s new-found purpose—saving lives:

Under most circumstances, it’s best to keep the beat of the Bee Gees song “Stayin’ Alive” out of your head, but heart specialists have come up with one good reason to remember: It could save someone’s life.

Turns out the 1977 disco hit has 103 beats per minute, a perfect number to maintain — and retain — the best rhythm for performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or CPR.

A small study by University of Illinois College of Medicine researchers in Peoria has found that 10 doctors and five medical students who listened to the “Saturday Night Fever” tune while practicing CPR not only performed perfectly, they remembered the technique five weeks later. See the rest of the story at: http://blogs.usatoday.com/betterlife/

Shake your head if you want; it’s just plain cool to see that the BeeGees served a higher purpose after all.

How does the BeeGees’ CPR thing relate to leadership and training?

Here’s what this has to do with leadership and training. As leaders and trainers, we must find a way to tie new concepts to that which is familiar. Everyone knows the song. Not everyone knows how fast to compress when doing CPR. Add Barry Gibb and POOF, you can make a decent attempt at saving a life.  Does it get more magical than that?

Ah – Ah – Ah – Ah…

Susan Hendrich

Photosynth – a reason to say, “Wow!”

/ Susan Hendrich / 2 Comments

New tool may transform the way we look at digital images

Photos – back then

I was just thinking about all the photos my family took during the 70’s, 80’s, and early 90’s. These printed photos (doubles, of course, because Happy Harry’s drugstore offered free doubles) sit in shoe boxes, stacked neatly in a closet.  Despite my mother’s careful labeling with a felt-tip pen so that we’d “always remember,” not one of these photos has been viewed in the last 15 years.  All that posing and smiling and say-cheesing at the beach and the school and the picnic, and all we’re left with is duplicate copies of fading faces in a closeted box.  Hmnn.

Digital photos – an improvement

We all know how the availability of digital photography to the everyday citizen has changed our worlds.  It seems everyone nowadays has their flickr set or ofoto album.  But still (sorry for the pun), these images often just sit in our digital collections, even with our careful tagging and sorting.

Photosynth – a breakthrough

Fast forward a step further now, where Microsoft rolls out Photosynth.  And get ready to say, “Wow” again.  I thought about trying to distill this fascinating new tool into some witty script, but realized that the Photosynth picture says far more than just a thousand words… Check out this video, where Mr. Blaise Aguera y Arcas leads a dazzling demo of Photosynth, software that could transform the way we look at digital images. Using still photos culled from the Web, Photosynth builds breathtaking dreamscapes and lets us navigate them.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/blaise_aguera_y_arcas_demos_photosynth.html

What I learned from Scooby

/ Susan Hendrich / 3 Comments

Evidence of Goodness

What I learned from Scooby James Hendrich (1990-2008)