Techno Babble

Here’s something that Harry Potter could find useful for replacing his remote control(s).

The Kymera Wand is a device that you can program to replace the remote control used by your TV, DVD player or Hi-Fi etc.

Use a gesture of the wand to send an infra-red signal to your device. It uses a 3-axis accelerometer to detect motion and can remember up to 13 gestures which are each related to a specific infra-red command.

Learn more in an article at

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1305699/Dragons-Den-panels-bidding-war-Magic-Wand-replace-remote-control.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

and visit the web-site at

http://www.thewandcompany.com/

A story from the BBC reports on a shape-shifting mannequin that has been designed to help shoppers to get the right fit/look when buying clothes online.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10687701

After entering your measurements, the mannequin takes the shape and size of your body. You can let the mannequin try different sized clothing and choose the one that fits you best.

You can try out a demonstration on the fits.me website but in this case, the robot is not performing in real-time. Instead, fits.me puts a small-sized shirt on the robot, and then runs a program where the mannequin shape-shifts into roughly 2,000 different body types, capturing an image for each one. The process is repeated with all the different shirt sizes and the result is a database of images for every shirt, and every size, that can be called up when you input your dimensions online.

http://www.fits.me/

Demonstrated at the recent Siggraph 2010 Conference and Exhibition, Meta Cookie combines augmented reality technology with olfactory display technology to create an interactive gustatory display.

Eh ?

Meta Cookie is the world’s first pseudo-gustation system which induces cross-modal effect to let humans perceive various tastes without changing chemical substances by changing only visual and olfactory information. The system evokes cross-modal effect among vision, olfaction and gustation.

What ?

The system allows users to feel that they are eating a flavored cookie even though they are eating a plain cookie with an AR marker.

Ah, I see (I think).

A 360 degree, auto-stereoscopic,  3D display prototype from Sony was showcased in the Emerging Technologies section at the recent Siggraph 2010 Conference/Exhibition.

The cylindrical unit measures 13cm in diameter and 27cm in height. It can be connected to a PC, or other device, through a digital video input port. No special glasses are needed to see the 3D image.

The display is also equipped with a gesture sensor that enables the display to be controlled interactively using hand motions.

RearType is a project from Microsoft and others, that explores a text entry system for mobile devices using normal keyboard keys that are placed on the back of the device. This approach helps to resolve the problem where a users fingers and hands occlude the touch point(s).

http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=135609

Earlier work in this area includes Lucid Touch, by Patrick Baudisch http://www.kf12.com/blogs/techno/2008/01/lucid-touch/, and the Grippity Keyboard http://www.kf12.com/blogs/techno/2009/01/grippity-keyboard/ and http://www.grippity.com/

In RearType, a standard keyboard layout is split and rotated so that hands gripping the device have the usual keys under the fingers. This allows for 10-finger, tactile, touch-typing which may be better and quicker than using an on-screen keyboard for touch devices.

The paper “RearType: Text Entry Using Keys on the Back of a Device” will be presented at Mobile HCI 2010 ( http://mobilehci2010.di.fc.ul.pt/ )

James Scott and Shahram Izadi from Microsoft Research

Leila Sadat Rezai RWTH Aachen, Germany

Dominika Ruszkowski, Xiaojun Bi and Ravin Balakrishnan from the Dept. of Computer Science,
University of Toronto, Canada

An annual showcase “Research in Action” describes Research work from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. This project was described during the last event held in November 2009.

http://web.cs.toronto.edu/research/ria.htm

Beyond is a research project by Jinha Lee (and Hiroshi Ishii) from the MIT Media Lab.

http://tangible.media.mit.edu/person.php?recid=81

The full title of the project is Beyond  - A collapsible Input device for Direct 3D Manipulation beyond the Screen.

http://tangible.media.mit.edu/project.php?recid=139

It explores a technique for drawing in 3D on a 2D surface using an input device which collapses onto itself,  giving the impression of being pushed into the screen – watch the enclosed video to get a better idea of what’s happening.

It will be interesting to see whether this technique will be of any use in 3D CAD software. Towards the end of the video ( 1:41 ) is a demonstration of how to create simple extruded shapes.

App Inventor allows you to build applications for Android if if you have no experience of programming. Instead of writing code, simply design how you want the application to look and use pre-built blocks to specify the application behaviour.

There are blocks for almost everything you can do on an Android phone as well as specific blocks for doing “programming stuff”.

Watch it in action in the following 60 second video showing an application being made.

The blocks editor uses the Open Blocks Java library ¹ for creating visual blocks programming languages. Open Blocks is distributed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Scheller Teacher Education Program and derives from thesis research ² by Ricarose Roque. We thank Eric Klopfer and Daniel Wendel of the Scheller Program for making Open Blocks available and for their help in working with it. Open Blocks visual programming is closely related to the Scratch programming language ³, a project of the MIT Media Laboratory’s Lifelong Kindergarten Group.

To find out more about App Inventor go to

http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/about/index.html

Thr 37th International Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques takes place from the 25th – 29th July at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

A video preview of Technical Papers to be presented is available

with some more details at

http://www.siggraph.org/s2010/for_attendees/technical_papers

Emerging Technologies presents interactive demonstrations of technologies applied to a wide range of applications.

Here’s a trailer

Find more information on the contributions at

http://www.siggraph.org/s2010/for_attendees/emerging_technologies

and the SIGGRAPH 2010 home page at

http://www.siggraph.org/s2010/