If you're one of the nation's 5 million BBC iPlayer users (or perhaps, for our US friends, one of 40 million Hulu users) the murky boundaries between 'using the internet' and 'watching TV' will be familiar. From enjoying shows online to - in the near future - reading news and catching up on e-mails on our plasma TVs, the magical process of 'convergence' is charging its way into the new decade. When you can sit on the bus and watch live TV with the rather spiffing TVCatchup, you know the days of bluntly differentiating between computing devices and TVs are numbered.

Technology firms hoping to catch such disruptive waves of change meet annually at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, boasting the wares they hope will enter our homes in coming years. It's a veritable trend-seekers paradise, and one particular trend at this year's event leapt out (almost literally). 3D TVs, capable of showing the new breed of 3D films like James Cameron's Avatar in all their splendour, will eventually find their way into our living rooms. That alone is revelatory, but in parallel with the convergence stampede presents one huge floating 3D question mark for interface design.

Experiments with 3D interfaces are not new, but have begun gaining traction with the emergence of gesture-based devices, particularly multi-touch devices like the all-conquering iPhone and Microsoft's Surface. One approach I've been watching with interest is BumpTop, revealed with an eye-opening TED talk (listen to the oohs and aahs) and now available to the public.

A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to attend i-Design, a one day conference and showcase for anyone with an interest or passion for interactive design and the digital arts. The programme certainly lived up to its aims as I came away truly inspired and entertained as well as being somewhat perplexed too!

The day kicked off with a panel debate centred around the idea of ‘Post Digital’ asking the question, 'If everything is digital, then what's next?' In a world where everything references digital media, how does our industry need to respond? This was a fascinating insight into the minds of the panel members more than anything, with the illustrious Adrian Shaughnessy leading the discussions.

This then lead the way for the first 5D interlude of the day by MOTH who beautifully showed their passion for experimental technology and for pushing the boundaries of traditional VJing. MOTH bridge the divide between video mixing and street art, generating site-specific video graffiti designed in response to the morphology, texture and ambience of the spaces and structures of the outside world.

Another presentation that particularly caught my interest was one by Lichtfaktor. You might recognise the work of these lords of luminosity from the TalkTalk television adverts (which also bookend each segment of ITV's popular X-factor). Their work in light-writing is spectacular, ranging from relatively standard incarnations of the practice, through to an amazing light-printer that allows pre-written messages to be created and captured in the same way as standard light-writing.

Augmented reality is always a hot topic of conversation here at Cogapp towers. If it's not Joe being envious of Boffswana's green monster then it's Tristan pointing his eyes to the skies for a bit of virtual stargazing. The topic garnered my own particular interest recently thanks to the demonstrations at this years E3 - the big expo in the world of video-gaming - of the latest computer game control systems from Sony and Microsoft. Having spent many a wasted evening in front of my (much mourned) Mega Drive when I should have been out practicing my hockey or socialising with my friends (quite why I should have been doing this I don't know - none of my friends were blue-supersonic hedgehogs) as a boy, I tend to keep one ear to the ground for the latest developments in the video-game sphere. It seems impossible to avoid the success of the Nintendo Wii, both commercially and in opening up video-gaming to new demographics. This success has prompted Nintendo's rival console manufacturers to look into expanding into this new broadened market with innovative interfaces of their own. Sony's as-of-yet unnamed effort involves combining the existing Playstation Eye with what can only be described as a wand to allow the player to interact with the game in new and even more immersive ways. The idea clearly borrows heavily from the concept introduced by the Wii, but the combination of handheld device and camera will allow the interaction to be even more detailed than that of the Wii remote - even with the new Wii MotionPlus ... or at least Sony hopes.

Augmented Reality (AR) is the practice of adding computer-generated information to something you are experiencing already. Often, this involves injecting computer-generated images into a live video feed, and there's some very impressive stuff out there which sees computers spotting special tokens (fiduciary markers is the jargon name) and overlaying images or videos.

However, it turns out that there is another, simpler way of letting the computer know what you are looking at: if you can specify the exact location of the camera in relation to what it is viewing, then you can go ahead and enhance things to your heart's delight, without having to go around tagging everything with markers.

As an example of this, I've found that augmented reality has become a lot more, err, real, thanks to my new phone, an HTC Dream. It contains some handy embedded hardware that means it knows exactly where it is and where it's pointing (the GPS tells it where it is on Earth, the accelerometer tells it which angle it is pointing relative to the surface, and the compass tells it which direction it is facing relative to the poles).

One application that takes advantage of this is Wikitude AR - it will search publicly available sources of information, and then overlay their position on top of the camera feed from the phone, as you can see from these screenshots taken while I was looking out of our office windows:

Then, there's the truly amazing Google Sky Map: you simply point your phone at the area of sky that you are interested in, and it will overlay constellation information. You can also type in a search term (e.g. Venus), and it will give you a handy arrow and target, helping you to swing your phone round until you are pointing right at it. This is extremely useful for any other parent who has been pestered by their child wanting to know what that bright star is called...

MEGA is my favourite word of the moment, and completely coincidentally (unless he's spying on me), our old mate Jakob Nielsen is feeling the vibe too in this article about mega dropdowns.

What he's saying is that you can cut out the need for landing pages by having a mega dropdown like this:

The virtual drum kit that won this month's Codeo challenge looks like it might have to be installed somewhere in the Cogapp office on a more permanent basis, considering how much fun we're having with it.

Enjoyable as it is to flail away on the Wii's invisible instruments, the fun we're having also highlights how little flailing our working day normally contains.

Women past and present have made countless valuable contributions to technology, but how often do we hear about it? Probably not enough. Hoping to help change this state of affairs, this post is written in honour of Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of blogging to draw more attention to women excelling in technology.

The Internal Blog continues to provide Cogappers with a distillation of the somewhat crude and slippery substance that we know as the World Wide Web.

At the end of last year I went up to London to see Sanky from AllofUs do a president’s lecture for D&AD. A self described veteran of the digital era, previously from the agency Digit, his talk was engaging and entertaining from start to finish. Entitled ‘How Big is Your World?’ (a quote from Doris Lessing,) he kicked things off by asking everyone to shut their eyes and hum. Everyone in the auditorium did. It sounded great!