(Motherboard) Until now, I’ve almost exclusively associated hyperbolic fish-eye visuals with the stuff of machine elves and shitty skateboarding videos. But no longer – I’ll be damned if a new hack on Google Maps isn’t already letting me ride out this balmy Friday in relative projected complacency.

Streetview Stereographic (http://notlion.github.com/streetview-stereographic/) spins Google Street View data into beautiful, bulbous stereographic images. It’s probably the easiest, trippiest time-suck this side of 2012, offering fresh inversions of drab, oppressive urban milieus. Simply enter an address or coordinate set and suddenly geometry ain’t so bad and you’re living life in the proverbial fish bowl, to boot. And what’s great is the program allows users to manipulate their desired locations: Click and hold on the left panel (pro tip: maximize to full screen) and wrap pavement patches into microcosmoses or flip street views outward into “swirling vortexes of urban fabric.” The possibilities are seemingly infinite.

If I can wage one complaint against the spate of attention showered on this hack over the past few days is that both the original fish-eye spins I’ve seen – and the program’s default projections (when I fired up Streetview Stereographic moments ago, up popped Zuccotti Park, epicenter of the Occupy movement) – have thus far been too busy, too cluttered. This can kill the stereographic effect. If anything, clean,simple locations and facades – monoliths, say – actually maximize the effect. In this case, less truly is more.

Also, the hack is finicky. With a few exceptions, it doesn’t yet seem to allow for locations that are even remotely off the beaten path. This means no Devils Tower or Ayers Rock or most any other awe-inspiring natural monoliths. Bust.

But hey, don’t get me wrong. Without question I’ll be fiddling around with this thing a whole lot more. Below are a few manmade monoliths, spires and towers that I’ve managed to dig up and contort. Some are painfully obvious. Others (maybe?) aren’t. Hit the replies if you recognize any. I’ve provided cities to help you narrow things down.

Paris

Washington, D.C.

London

Malmö

Madrid

Rome

(Neal Campbell) If you’ve watched more than a few DVDs, you’ve most likely seen this little anti-piracy video. It says,

You wouldn’t steal a car,
you wouldn’t steal a handbag,
you wouldn’t steal a television,
you wouldn’t steal a movie.

Downloading pirated films is stealing,
stealing is against the law,
PIRACY IT’S A CRIME

An organization called BREIN hired Melchior Rietveldt to score the anti-piracy video you’ve seen on DVD after DVD. According to Rietveldt, BREIN only acquired rights to use the music when playing the video at a local film festival. When he saw it included in a Harry Potter DVD, he wasn’t happy.

The video has been included on thousands of DVDS sold millions of times and Rietveldt wants to be paid. It’s estimated that he’s missed out on $1.3 Million.

The Hollywood-funded campaign has been criticized heavily by film lovers because it’s shown to those of us who pay to see films and buy DVDs. The people who actually infringe copyright aren’t influenced by the preaching to the choir message.

Geeks believe when content is available in fair ways and fair prices, people will happily pay to consume it. When Hollywood makes restrictions too restrictive, people will find a work around the limitations in exactly the same way BREIN seems to have worked around paying Melchior Rietveldt for his creation.

(Jens Martin Skibsted and Rasmus Bech Hansen, Fast Company) In 1972, U.S. President Richard Nixon asked China’s first premier, Zhou Enlai, for his assessment of the French Revolution, 183 years after the revolution’s conclusion. Zhou’s response: “It is too early to say.”

Although we believe that the democracy that resulted from the French Revolution can be judged a success, the jury’s still out on some of the major challenges we still face. We are experiencing a major paradox: While problems and issues, like the global-warming crisis and the energy-water nexus, become more complex and require longer time frames to solve, the West is becoming increasingly shortsighted. China’s main competitive advantage over Europe and the United States may be its broader perception of time. Even the present financial crisis could have been avoided had we been looking at century-long cycles rather than four-year political periods.

Part of the problem is that the quickening pace of, well, just about everything is deemed a benefit. Over time, our political attention spans have adjusted to short electoral terms, the time it takes to market products is shrinking, and myopic quarterly reports set the business horizon. Just think: Computerized flash-trading practices recognize movements in market sentiment in split seconds.

Since hairsplitting shortsightedness is driven by technological and cultural changes, the trend will be hard to circumvent. But here are three suggestions to help the West develop a longer, healthier view of time:

Reward people much, much later in life.

In most companies, it’s common to reward people with bonuses once a year. This could easily be postponed. Stocks and stock options with long expiration dates are a step in the right direction. But what if we took the Chinese perspective and civil-servant approach? We would reward people decades after they were employed. We could even let historians help figure out how to distribute bonuses. Why not let pensions be determined by a person’s long-term contribution to a company or to society as a whole?

Maximize and promote the lifetime value of products.

Most fashion, technology, and consumer-goods companies deliberately shorten the lives of their products. As the design expert Peter Fiell says: “Designers fail when they act irresponsibly at a time when we need to make less of everything and make products last longer.” In austere times, there is an opportunity to promote the long-term value—let’s call it the price per year of a product. Creating products that endure and maybe even become more valuable as they age, as well as finding new ways of doing business that would make such a model profitable, is an innovation challenge worth pursuing for long-term-thinking entrepreneurs and designers.

Bet on the way long term.

In 1961, John F. Kennedy announced the goal of sending an American to the Moon before the end of the decade. Such an outlandish aim is the benchmark for innovators all over the globe: They decide on an ambitious target and, with a strong vision, set out to reach it. Putting a man on the Moon is celebrated as an isolated event today. Kennedy had guts—what responsible politician would declare a 10-year goal?—and the West “won” the space race, but it doesn’t matter in the long run. The survival of our species does. 

In retrospect, Kennedy’s goal was perhaps too nearsighted. Space experts argue that by focusing all American (and German) expertise on one symbolic goal, the big picture got lost. In the meantime, more advanced means of propulsion could have been developed to enable us to colonize remote corners of space, and crucial geoengineering experiments could have been conducted. Even more marginal space trips, like the manned exploration of Mars, were left behind in the debris.

In other words, let’s think bolder and further into the future. Let’s, for example, bet on reaching Gliese 581c, or one of the mostviably habitable exoplanets by the end of this century. This might sound far-out, but not long ago, many Western countries had a similar long-term perspective. A few years ago, the Danish secretary of defense received a letter from a forester named Lars Toksvig informing him that the oak timber Denmark had ordered in 1807 to secure the fleet was ready for delivery. Today, this type of planning sounds preposterous. But perhaps that ability to project very, very far into the future is exactly what we need to relearn.

 (BRIAN BERGSTEIN, Technology Review) Yahoo researcher Judd Antin says that encouraging users and employees to pursue points and virtual badges may not achieve the desired results.

The trend of applying elements of computer games to nongame situations relies on two assumptions. One is that people are more likely to do something—shop for something, let’s say, or go to a bar, or share information with people at work—if they enjoy it. The other is that they’ll be more likely to enjoy anything if it’s part of a game.

But just because games can be fun doesn’t mean they are necessarily a good way to motivate someone to do something, says Judd Antin, an anthropologist and social psychologist who studies online experiences at Yahoo Research (and was one of this year’s TR35 winners). Gamification, especially in offices, can actually discourage some people, he says; understanding what works in different settings will be crucial if gamelike systems are to have any staying power. Antin spoke with Technology Review’s deputy editor, Brian Bergstein.

TR: Do you see a lot of evidence of companies that are installing gamelike programs in hopes of encouraging their workforces to do certain things?

Antin: There are lots of examples of this. I think it’s all driven by hype to a degree, and also by the idea that “what harm could it possibly do?” When I give talks about this, I have a slide with tiny print: “Why not gamify? Well, here are 50 reasons.” I can barely fit them on the slide.

What are some of the reasons?

From research in social psychology and behavioral economics, we know that the most likely thing that will happen is you’ll motivate some people, you’ll demotivate other people, and for a third group there’ll be no effect at all. And we won’t really know who are the people we’re motivating more or less, or why. And we won’t know what we’re encouraging them to do. It could be that we’re motivating shallow people who are interested in the quick serotonin reward of winning a leaderboard on a given day to [for example] post a thousand comments.

Why do some incentives actually demotivate some people?

There’s this really well-known phenomenon in behavioral economics and social psychology called crowding out. It is about the interaction between intrinsic and extrinsic rewards—if you love to do something and then I pay you to do it, it can become about the money, and not about the love, and ultimately your motivation is lower. 

Think about Google Knol [an attempt to create an expert-written encyclopedia to rival Wikipedia]. That thing was destined for failure from the beginning. Because they thought you apply the market to anything. You want people to be motivated by tangible rewards, by monetary rewards, so you give them a cut of the advertising. But what you lose is all of the intrinsic motivation. You find that when you’re in it for the money, you’re not in it for the community as much.

Are you saying there are more reasons not to install some game program in an office than there are reasons to do it?

I don’t want to come across as a wet blanket. That’s an academic shtick, right? Take something that everybody thinks is cool and then talk about why it’s not cool. That’s not me. I believe this is a promising way of motivating people to collaborate more, and what we need is to have a more nuanced view of it. We can look more carefully and say, “Well, it’s not just that we want to motivate contributions; we want to motivate specific types of people who might respond to specific types of things to do specific behaviors. And then we want to reward them appropriately for the context they’re in.”

What’s an example of someone doing that correctly?

Wikipedia. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Wikipedia barnstars. Barnstars are badges that are given from one Wikipedian to another for doing work the community values. So they have this social context. The point is, if you get a badge, you should be proud of having gotten a badge. And because they have this social context, I believe that’s more motivational.

Another advantage to the barnstars would seem to be that you can’t game the system. They’re awarded for quality work, not quantity.

Exactly—you can’t fake it. The barnstar example is great for another reason, which is that if I want to be a member of the Wikipedia community and I don’t know how, one of the things I might do is look at the list of barnstars. It tells me something about what this community values.

So you’re not down on adding a “game layer” necessarily—you just want to see it done with more sophistication?

That’s right. For example, people have different dispositions, and we can measure them. Some people are more pro-social, which means they care about my rewards and your rewards. Some people are selfish—they don’t care about mine. Some people are more competitive, meaning “it doesn’t matter about mine and yours—I want to maximize the difference.”

That’s what I mean about nuance. It’s not just this simple behaviorist-psychology idea, which is that you give people a reward just like you give a rat a piece of cheese. But what is the reward? Is it status? Is it reputation? Is it group identification, is it goal-seeking, or skill development? If you can identify those things, you can message people differently and cater to their being a pro-social or self-interested or competitive person, and maybe even get more involved and thoughtful participation out of people.

(UX Magazine) If you’ve been involved in usability tests, you’ve witnessed this scenario: a test subject is looking for a specific interface element, and even though he is looking directly at it, he can’t seem to see it. This idea of looking but not seeing is a well-known concept in psychology called inattentional blindness, or selective attention. The below video documents a study by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris that’s a great demonstration of this phenomenon.

In their research, Simons and Chabris found that only 50% of viewers saw the gorilla, even though this unexpected, strange figure was plainly visible for several seconds. Participants missed it because they focused their attention on the white shirts and the ball being passed. Selective attention made the test subjects unable to see the gorilla, and it’s the same phenomenon that contributes to usability test subjects’ inability to see certain interface elements.

Psychological research abounds in this area (I reference a couple great books at the end of this article), but there are several points related to selective attention that are particularly relevant to UX design:

1. Human visual perception is much more incomplete and inaccurate than most people realize. Our eyes are not able to process everything that comes into their field of view. Our minds simply do not have enough cognitive resources. Emily Balcetis and David Dunning discuss this in their article, Wishful Seeing: Motivational Influences on Visual Perception in a Physical Environment:
   

   The naive assumption among most laypeople is that the eye functions like a camera, in that the visual system captures everything in the environment in all its detail. However the assumption of comprehensive vision is wrong… Perception is not the cold, calculated processing of light, but is instead a result of concurrent interactions among experienced sensations, memory and thinking, and social influences.

2. More focus in one area means less attention elsewhere. Attention is a zero-sum game. If we pay more attention to one object, we consequently pay less attention to others. Difficult or important tasks require a great deal of attention, which leaves less cognitive processes left for gorilla-noticing, or observing whatever else happens to be in one’s field of view.
3. Expectations manipulate our perceptions. Because we have limited visual intake, we use our biases, expectations, and memories to fill in the gaps. As a result, what we process are highly subjective interpretations of what’s actually there—interpretations that vary drastically from person to person.
4. Motivations manipulate our perceptions. When we take an action, we do so with intent. We have some task or goal in mind and we want to take steps that bring us closer to achieving that goal or accomplishing that task. Balcetis and Dunning use the term “wishful seeing,” which means that we interpret things in a way that fits with our goals—in other words, we see what we wish to see. Again, these interpretations are highly subjective and vary drastically from person to person.

These quirks and limitations of human visual perception have some specific ramifications for UX:

1. Don’t be surprised when different users perceive your product in radically different ways, or overlook and misinterpret elements of your interface. This is simply the way that our visual perception works. Expect users to be unpredictable and inconsistent. Assume they’ll make errors and misinterpretations. Assume that different users will interact with and react to your product in very different ways. Consequently, don’t overlook the importance of effective and helpful error handling, and design your product to be clear and straight-forward, reducing the likelihood of misinterpretation or error.
2. Know users’ motivations and goals, and reinforce them using information scents. Users are goal-oriented, and will ignore anything that does not help them achieve their goals. Giving off a stronginformation scent means presenting words and actions that reassure users that they’re on the right track. This requires understanding your users and their motivations, and using the specific words and interactive elements that reinforce them.
3. Make your interface predictable. Your users have limited perceptive capabilities, and will fill in the cracks with their memories and expectations. So, align your product’s interface with those expectations by following accepted design conventions and mental models. Again, understanding your user base is crucial, and by meeting their expectations, they will more easily accomplish their goals.
4. Practice “right place, right time” design. Your users focus their attention on the task at hand and see little else, particularly if their task is difficult or important (such as an e-commerce flow, where you’re spending real money and it’s difficult to undo). Avoid cluttering your product’s interface with all possible options, just in case a slim minority of users might want them. Instead, only give users access to tasks at the right place and right time. One easy way to determine the right place and right time to include an interface element is by using analytics. It’s an invaluable tool to determine what is and isn’t being used in your interface. Be aggressive about removing elements that are infrequently used.

Most people are unaware of how limited, imperfect, and subjective human visual perception really is. Understanding these limitations is very helpful in predicting how your users will interact with your product. You can counteract these limitations with good, basic design principles:

• Have a solid understanding of your users
• Design interfaces that have focus and clarity
• Meet your users’ expectations
• Use information scent to reassure to users that they are progressing toward their goals
• Practice “right place, right time” design

So, here’s a Vision Of The Future that’s popular right now.

It’s a lot of this sort of thing.

As it happens, designing Future Interfaces For The Future used to be my line of work. I had the opportunity to design with real working prototypes, not green screens and After Effects, so there certainly are some interactions in the video which I’m a little skeptical of, given that I’ve actually tried them and the animators presumably haven’t. But that’s not my problem with the video.

My problem is the opposite, really — this vision, from an interaction perspective, is not visionary. It’s a timid increment from the status quo, and the status quo, from an interaction perspective, is actually rather terrible.

This matters, because visions matter. Visions give people a direction and inspire people to act, and a group of inspired people is the most powerful force in the world. If you’re a young person setting off to realize a vision, or an old person setting off to fund one, I really want it to be something worthwhile. Something that genuinely improves how we interact.

This little rant isn’t going to lay out any grand vision or anything. I just hope to suggest some places to look.

Before we think about how we should interact with our Tools Of The Future, let’s consider what a tool is in the first place.

I like this definition:   A tool addresses human needs by amplifying human capabilities.

That is, a tool converts what we can do into what we want to do. A great tool is designed to fit both sides.

In this rant, I’m not going to talk about human needs. Everyone talks about that; it’s the single most popular conversation topic in history.

And I’m not going to talk about about technology. That’s the easy part, in a sense, because we control it. Technology can be invented; human nature is something we’re stuck with.

I’m going to talk about that neglected third factor, human capabilities. What people can do. Because if a tool isn’t designed to be used by a person, it can’t be a very good tool, right?

Take another look at what our Future People are using to interact with their Future Technology:

Do you see what everyone is interacting with? The central component of this Interactive Future? It’s there in every photo!

That’s right! —

HANDS

And that’s great! I think hands are fantastic!

Hands do two things. They are two utterly amazing things, and you rely on them every moment of the day, and most Future Interaction Concepts completely ignore both of them.

Hands feel things, and hands manipulate things.

Go ahead and pick up a book. Open it up to some page.

Notice how you know where you are in the book by the distribution of weight in each hand, and the thickness of the page stacks between your fingers. Turn a page, and notice how you would know if you grabbed two pages together, by how they would slip apart when you rub them against each other.

Go ahead and pick up a glass of water. Take a sip.

Notice how you know how much water is left, by how the weight shifts in response to you tipping it.

Almost every object in the world offers this sort of feedback. It’s so taken for granted that we’re usually not even aware of it. Take a moment to pick up the objects around you. Use them as you normally would, and sense their tactile response — their texture, pliability, temperature; their distribution of weight; their edges, curves, and ridges; how they respond in your hand as you use them.

There’s a reason that our fingertips have some of the densest areas of nerve endings on the body. This is how we experience the world close-up. This is how our tools talk to us. The sense of touch is essential to everything that humans have called “work” for millions of years.

Now, take out your favorite Magical And Revolutionary Technology Device. Use it for a bit.

What did you feel? Did it feel glassy? Did it have no connection whatsoever with the task you were performing?

I call this technology Pictures Under Glass. Pictures Under Glass sacrifice all the tactile richness of working with our hands, offering instead a hokey visual facade.

Is that so bad, to dump the tactile for the visual? Try this: close your eyes and tie your shoelaces. No problem at all, right? Now, how well do you think you could tie your shoes if your arm was asleep? Or even if your fingers were numb? When working with our hands, touch does the driving, and vision helps out from the back seat.

Pictures Under Glass is an interaction paradigm of permanent numbness. It’s a Novocaine drip to the wrist. It denies our hands what they do best. And yet, it’s the star player in every Vision Of The Future.

To me, claiming that Pictures Under Glass is the future of interaction is like claiming that black-and-white is the future of photography. It’s obviously a transitional technology. And the sooner we transition, the better.

What can you do with a Picture Under Glass? You can slide it.

That’s the fundamental gesture in this technology. Sliding a finger along a flat surface.

There is almost nothing in the natural world that we manipulate in this way.

That’s pretty much all I can think of.

Okay then, how do we manipulate things? As it turns out, our fingers have an incredibly rich and expressive repertoire, and we improvise from it constantly without the slightest thought. In each of these pictures, pay attention to the positions of all the fingers, what’s applying pressure against what, and how the weight of the object is balanced:

Many of these are variations on the four fundamental grips. (And if you like this sort of thing, you should read John Napier’s wonderful book.)

Suppose I give you a jar to open. You actually will switch between two different grips:

You’ve made this switch with every jar you’ve ever opened. Not only without being taught, but probably without ever realizing you were doing it. How’s that for an intuitive interface?

We live in a three-dimensional world. Our hands are designed for moving and rotating objects in three dimensions, for picking up objects and placing them over, under, beside, and inside each other. No creature on earth has a dexterity that compares to ours.

The next time you make a sandwich, pay attention to your hands. Seriously! Notice the myriad little tricks your fingers have for manipulating the ingredients and the utensils and all the other objects involved in this enterprise. Then compare your experience to sliding around Pictures Under Glass.

Are we really going to accept an Interface Of The Future that is less expressive than a sandwich?

So then. What is the Future Of Interaction?

The most important thing to realize about the future is that it’s a choice. People choose which visions to pursue, people choose which research gets funded, people choose how they will spend their careers.

Despite how it appears to the culture at large, technology doesn’t just happen. It doesn’t emerge spontaneously, like mold on cheese. Revolutionary technology comes out of long research, and research is performed and funded by inspired people.

And this is my plea — be inspired by the untapped potential of human capabilities. Don’t just extrapolate yesterday’s technology and then cram people into it.

(Gizmodo) UC Berkeley scientists have developed a system to capture visual activity in human brains and reconstruct it as digital video clips. Eventually, this process will allow you to record and reconstruct your own dreams on a computer screen.

I just can’t believe this is happening for real, but according to Professor Jack Gallant—UC Berkeley neuroscientist and coauthor of the research published today in the journal Current Biology—”this is a major leap toward reconstructing internal imagery. We are opening a window into the movies in our minds.”

Indeed, it’s mindblowing. I’m simultaneously excited and terrified. This is how it works:

They used three different subjects for the experiments—incidentally, they were part of the research team because it requires being inside a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging system for hours at a time. The subjects were exposed to two different groups of Hollywood movie trailers as the fMRI system recorded the brain’s blood flow through their brains’ visual cortex.

The readings were fed into a computer program in which they were divided into three-dimensional pixels units called voxels (volumetric pixels). This process effectively decodes the brain signals generated by moving pictures, connecting the shape and motion information from the movies to specific brain actions. As the sessions progressed, the computer learned more and more about how the visual activity presented on the screen corresponded to the brain activity.

An 18-million-second picture palette

After recording this information, another group of clips was used to reconstruct the videos shown to the subjects. The computer analyzed 18 million seconds of random YouTube video, building a database of potential brain activity for each clip. From all these videos, the software picked the one hundred clips that caused a brain activity more similar to the ones the subject watched, combining them into one final movie. Although the resulting video is low resolution and blurry, it clearly matched the actual clips watched by the subjects.

Think about those 18 million seconds of random videos as a painter’s color palette. A painter sees a red rose in real life and tries to reproduce the color using the different kinds of reds available in his palette, combining them to match what he’s seeing. The software is the painter and the 18 million seconds of random video is its color palette. It analyzes how the brain reacts to certain stimuli, compares it to the brain reactions to the 18-million-second palette, and picks what more closely matches those brain reactions. Then it combines the clips into a new one that duplicates what the subject was seeing. Notice that the 18 million seconds of motion video are not what the subject is seeing. They are random bits used just to compose the brain image.

Given a big enough database of video material and enough computing power, the system would be able to re-create any images in your brain.

In this other video you can see how this process worked in the three experimental targets. On the top left square you can see the movie the subjects were watching while they were in the fMRI machine. Right below you can see the movie “extracted” from their brain activity. It shows that this technique gives consistent results independent of what’s being watched—or who’s watching. The three lines of clips next to the left column show the random movies that the computer program used to reconstruct the visual information.

Right now, the resulting quality is not good, but the potential is enormous. Lead research author—and one of the lab test bunnies—Shinji Nishimoto thinks this is the first step to tap directly into what our brain sees and imagines:

Our natural visual experience is like watching a movie. In order for this technology to have wide applicability, we must understand how the brain processes these dynamic visual experiences.

The brain recorders of the future

Imagine that. Capturing your visual memories, your dreams, the wild ramblings of your imagination into a video that you and others can watch with your own eyes.

This is the first time in history that we have been able to decode brain activity and reconstruct motion pictures in a computer screen. The path that this research opens boggles the mind. It reminds me of Brainstorm, the cult movie in which a group of scientists lead by Christopher Walken develops a machine capable of recording the five senses of a human being and then play them back into the brain itself.

This new development brings us closer to that goal which, I have no doubt, will happen at one point. Given the exponential increase in computing power and our understanding of human biology, I think this will arrive sooner than most mortals expect. Perhaps one day you would be able to go to sleep wearing a flexible band labeled Sony Dreamcam around your skull. [UC Berkeley]

(Red Ice Creations)
While walking through a forest in the winter, 7th grader Aidan Dwyer thought he saw a pattern in the way leaves and limbs grew from trees. Some photography, measurements, and investigating the work of other naturalists confirmed that plants produce new growth following a Fibonacci sequence.


Aidan Dwyer’s Experiment

This pattern, where the previous numbers are added together to make the next number in sequence (1+1=2, 2+1=3, 3+2=5, 5+3=8, etc.), and its corresponding golden ratio have been observed all over the nature world. This got Dwyer thinking about why trees grew in this way, and if there was an evolutionary advantage in doing so. He knew that trees, like all plants, use their leaves to photosynthesize and decided to make that the focus of his investigation.

 
To do so, he constructed a “tree” using the sequence of leaves found on an oak tree. Except on his tree, Dwyer placed photovoltaic cells instead of leaves. He compared the amount of energy collected by his tree against a normal, flat array of solar cells. His results may surprise you:

The Fibonacci tree design performed better than the flat-panel model. The tree design made 20% more electricity and collected 2 1/2 more hours of sunlight during the day. But the most interesting results were in December, when the Sun was at its lowest point in the sky. The tree design made 50% more electricity, and the collection time of sunlight was up to 50% longer!

Whether Dwyer’s work is actually “groundbreaking” is probably open for debate. After all, scientists have been observing and investigating plants for centuries. However, his work is certainly impressive and has attracted some attention towards using a design drawn from nature to gather energy more efficiently. As much as it captures power, it also captures the imagination. As impressive as vast solar arrays in the desert are, I would much rather walk through a powerplant forest made of Dwyer’s trees. Not bad for a 13-year old.