Jazzmutant showed a new prototype device for computer graphics involving multi-touch control at the recent Siggraph Conference and Exhibition in San Diego.
This solution will go beyond mere finger-drawing and clearly illustrate a new way to interact and improve productivity with drawing and video editing software. Furthermore, the solution presented will be the very first multi-touch enabled Tablet PC shown to the public.
Pioneer in the multi-touch technology since 2002, Jazzmutant was one of the first companies to develop and market a product using a multi-touch surface, the award-winning Music and Media controller Lemur.
A technique for capturing and viewing “Gigapixel images” was described at the recent Siggraph 2007 Conference and exhibition. Gigapixel images are very high resolution, high dynamic range, and wide angle imagery consisting of several billion pixels each
In order to view Gigapixel images you need HD View.
HD View is a new viewer developed by Microsoft Research’s Interactive Visual Media group to aid in the display and interaction with very large images.
HD View was developed with a number of goals in mind. It should:
allow smooth panning and zooming on large images,
only download enough data to create the current view (and possibly look ahead to the next),
always display the current field of view with an appropriate projection. This means that when zoomed way in you should be presented with a standard perspective projection providing a sense of immersion, and when zoomed out you experience a curved projection so that get a full overview of the scene. In between the projection should smoothly transition.
Finally, it should be easy to create your own HD View content and present it to the world via the web.
The Autodesk File tells the history of Autodesk and its principal product AutoCAD through a collection of documents edited by the Autodesk founder and former CEO John Walker.
Tracing the history from the original idea through to 1994, the document is available in various formats from
Something that I use on a daily basis, Free Download Manager (FDM) is a powerful and easy-to-use download accelerator and manager. It is open-source software distributed under a GPL license.
Bill Buxton is a designer and a researcher concerned with human aspects of technology. His work reflects a particular interest in the use of technology to support creative activities such as design, film making and music. Buxton’s research specialties include technologies, techniques and theories of input to computers, technology mediated human-human collaboration, and ubiquitous computing.
Recently he has published his latest book which is well worth reading.
Here is a flyer to the book, which also contains a Table of Contents
Also, check out a conversation between John Udell and Bill Buxton at Channel 9
In the latest episode of my Microsoft Conversations series I got together with Bill Buxton to talk about the design philosophy set forth in his new book Sketching User Experiences. Nowadays Bill is a principal researcher with Microsoft Research, and before that he was chief scientist at Alias/Wavefront, but his involvement in the design of software and hardware user interfaces goes all the way back to Xerox PARC. Along the way he’s accumulated a fund of wisdom about what he calls design thinking — a way of producing, illustrating, and winnowing ideas about how products could work.
The XWand is, or was, a research project by Andy Wilson of Microsoft.
It is a wireless sensor package that enables styles of natural interaction with intelligent environments. For example, a user may point the wand at a device and control it using simpe gestures.
Project details (last updated April 2004) are available from the project page at Microsoft Research
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