What does the military see in emerging technologies? The military wants to remix technologies to allow the soldiers on the edges to communicate with those in the center. J.C. Herz looks at two specific technologies that the military is attempting to remix into a viable reapplication of code for their benefit. It's not always easily accomplished. Four misunderstood lines of code destroyed a missile during launch to the tune of $1 billion.

First Ms. Herz looks at a satellite preparing for launch called Tac-Sat. It's a photo satellite which allows anyone in the military to access its photos and annotate them. Although the process may take 24 hours, once a set of photos are accessed by one person, they become available for any military person immediately. Ms. Herz describes the satellite as the Flickr of the military. Former Marine Mike Kramer helps her show some of the needs that the military has for computer technology in their remix.

Finally she demos, with the help of Skip Stuart, a concept known as photorealistic 3D in which a 2D photo can become a 3D model. This remix of technology is already being used on a small scale by crime scene investigators and intelligence firms. She demos the creation of a 3D model of a car bumper from a surveillance photo. By using stereoscopic cameras to capture 3D from a 2D photo, we are seeing the remixing of Google Maps and imagery to create 3D buildings and scenery.

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J.C. Herz sits on the National Research Council's Committee on Creativity and Information Technology, and the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency's study group on patterns of emergent behavior in massively multiplayer persistent worlds.

After graduating from Harvard in 1993 with a B.A. in Biology and Environmental Studies, Ms. Herz authored Surfing on the Internet (Little Brown, 1994), and then Joystick Nation: How Video-games Ate Our Quarters, Won Our Hearts, and Rewired Our Minds (Little, Brown 1997). She was the New York Times first computer game critic and is now producing a documentary on the history of video games for PBS. At present Ms. Herz is the principal of Joystick Nation Inc., a research and design practice that applies the principles of game design to products, services and learning systems.

Resources:

• Space Exploration Technologies Corporation will launch TacSat in Q4 2005.
• Mike Kramer and Kirstie Bellman are affiliated with The Aerospace Corporation
• MD Robotics and OpenSceneGraph are associated with Skip Stuart's photorealistic 3D efforts

This program is from the Emerging Technology Conference: 2005 series.

For Team ITC:

• Description editor: Tim Verpoorten
• Post-production audio engineer: Stuart Hunter
• Series Producer: Cori Schlegel