Techno Babble

Recently noticed a project which explores how to create a multi-touch whiteboard using a Wiimote (The remote input device that is supplied with the Wii game console).

Essentially you create an LED flashlight that you use as a pen and this is detected by the infrared camera in the wiimote. The wiimote is positioned so that it can see the pen tip at all times and when used in conjunction with a projector it is possible to turn any surface, such as a table-top or even an LCD screen, into a "touch" tablet surface.

The wiimote can be used to track up to 4 devices at the same time so 2 "light pens" can be used to simulate a multi-touch device.

Although the tracking resolution will never be as good as a commercially available device, this system is sure to find an enthusiastic group of users.

More details at

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii/

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A fingertip-mounted haptic sensing digitizer that captures physical phenomena at the fingertip during a user’s tactile activities. The complex biomechanical characteristics of the finger can achieve delicate input actions in art, medicine, and industry.

Researchers from the Virtual Reality Lab at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York say their “Fingertip Digitizer,” which users wear on the tip of the index finger, can transfer to the virtual world the meaning and intent of common hand gestures, such as pointing, wagging the finger, tapping in the air or other movements that can be used to direct the actions of an electronic device.

They expect the Fingertip Digitizer and related software to be market-ready within three years.

Touch Painter and Touch Canvas software is being developed to accompany the Fingertip Digitizer. Using this software and the Fingertip Digitizer, the user will be able to apply digital paint to a computer-screen canvas with a few flicks or taps of the index finger.

Related articles can be found at:

• Whats next in Science and Technology
• The University at Buffalo News Center
• Emerging Technology Trends - ZDnet Blog

Other activities from the Virtual Reality Lab at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, can be found at

http://www.vrlab.buffalo.edu

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Recently announced Photosynth, from Microsoft Live Labs, takes a collection of photos of a place or object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed 3-Dimensional space.

The first prototype to come out of Microsoft Live Labs, Photosynth is based on a research paper entitled “Photo Tourism: Exploring Photo Collections in 3D”.

It doesn’t appear to be something which attempts to re-construct a 3D model from photographs in the way that some packages do, such as PhotoModeler, rather it seems to present a new mechanism for displaying and browsing photographs.

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VoodooIO is a project from the Embedded Interactive Systems group at the Lancaster University Computing department in the UK.

It adopts a novel approach for designing User Interfaces using a set of “pin” components that can be positioned and moved on a flexible active material.

Voodoo pins are realized as embedded computers that can communicate with a desktop PC via a planar networking substrate, using Pin&Play technology. The Pin&Play infrastructure involves a substrate with embedded conductive layers and custom-designed coaxial connectors that allow the pin computers to affix to the substrate, providing both physical attachment and digital connectivity.

Ad hoc networking techniques allow any combination of pins to be dynamically brought in and out of play from the substrate network. A communications protocol provides automatic discovery of network pins, as well as bi-directional communication between pins and the computer. A high-level programming API, configuration tool, and application hooks allow VoodooIO to interface with existing applications.

VoodooIO adopts a vision of the physical interface as a malleable material that can be shaped and adapted, rather than a device with a predetermined form or prescribed use. The intention is to overcome the obstacles that prevent hardware interfaces from being as easily appropriable by users as graphical user interfaces (and software applications in general) have become, blurring the boundaries between interface developers, interaction designers and end-users.

The concept is based on deconstructing the interface into atomic units of control – such as buttons, switches, knobs, sliders and lights – and a substrate material that allows individual units to be aggregated and spatially organized into control surfaces distributed across the environment.

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While browsing papers that are scheduled for presentation at Siggraph 2006, came across an interesting link to the Graphics Research Group in the School of Computer Science at the University of Central Florida.

http://graphics.cs.ucf.edu/

From the Realtime Caustics project

Topics under research include:

• realtime rendering
• Real-time Caustics Rendering
• Interval Mapping: A Fast per-pixel displacement rendering technique.
• GPU assisted Global Illumination
• Beyond Triangles: GPU Ray Caster
• Material Design Interface
• BRDF-Shop: An Artistic Tool for Creating Physically Correct BRDFs
• Maya-PBRT
• realistic rendering
• Radiance Caching
• Real-time Rendering of Dynamic Objects in Dynamic, Low-frequency Lighting Environments
• Non-Iterative, Robust Monte Carlo Noise Reduction
• A Novel Hemispherical Basis for Accurate and Efficient Rendering
• Perceptually Based Efficient Rendering
• Global Illumination Computation
• HDR imaging
• mixed and augmented reality
• Image completion
• color

Another topic which caught my eye is BRDF-Shop …

abstract
We present an interface for quick and intuitive development of arbitrary, but physically correct, Bi-directional Reflectance Distribution Functions, or BRDFs. Our interface, referred to as BRDF-Shop, provides artists the ability to create a BRDF through positioning and manipulating highlights on a spherical canvas. We develop a novel mapping between painted highlights and specular lobes of an extended Ward BRDF model. The implementation of BRDF-Shop utilizes programmable graphics hardware to provide a real-time visualization of the material on a complex object in environment lighting.

Read more about BRDF-Shop in the attached document

http://kf12.com/blogs/uploads/brdfshop.pdf

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“Visualising integrated information on buried assets to reduce streetworks” (Vista).

The project, funded by the Department of Trade and Industry (UK) and being undertaken by researchers from Leeds and Nottingham Universities, is aimed at producing a 3D model of the pipes and cables which are buried under the streets in the UK and will look at constructing a unified database combining data available from the various Utility companies.

You can read more in an article at the BBC - Pipe Network to be mapped in 3D

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4831238.stm

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