Techno Babble

Recently I noted an interesting video at Channel 9: Inside MultiTouch: Team Demo, Lab Tour which shows an interview with members of the MultiTouch Research team at Microsoft Research in Cambridge UK.

Microsoft is exploring the use of IR technology over the traditional approach of using capacitive touch panels. The iPhone, for example, uses a capacitive touch panel built into the display.

Find out more about the technology used in the iPhone at

http://www.apple.com/iphone/features/index.html#technology

and

http://www.apple.com/iphone/features/index.html#touch

The Microsoft Surface Computing technology uses a rear projection / sensing system that enables a high sensing resolution but is bulky and expensive. The Microsoft MultiTouch approach, however, uses a number of small infrared transceivers mounted on the rear of LCD panels to enable a more compact solution but at a lower resolution (but still sufficient for detecting multi finger touch).

A prototype, developed at MSR Cambridge consists of an array of IR emitters and IR detectors arranged on a tile which is pressed against the back of the LCD display. IR light passes thru the LCD panel and is reflected back to the IR receivers after bouncing off objects such as fingers. The tile consists of an array of 5×7 emitters and receivers to provide effectively a 35 pixel camera element over an area covered by the size of the tile.

Multiple tiles can be combined to cover the whole screen.

The video shows how off-the-shelf LCD displays can be modified to provide the necessary proof of concept of this approach.

Watch the video (approximate 30 minutes) at

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=350838

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Tagged: , Channel 9, iPhone, Microsoft Research, Multi-Touch

The Philips Simplicity Event, from the electronics giant Royal Philips Electronics of the Netherlands, held recently at Earls Court in London is a showcase for new and innovative design concepts aimed at delivering solutions for the anticipated needs of their cutomers today and in the future and is based on their “sense and simplicity” brand.

The theme at the 2007 Simplicity Event of “caring for people’s well-being” builds on ongoing societal trends that Philips has been tracking closely: populations are getting older, healthcare is increasingly consumer-driven and business travel is now more extensive and hectic. In light of these trends, Philips employed the creativity and expertise of anthropologists, sociologists, designers, engineers and business leaders to come up with design concepts that address these converging trends. The result: Philips will present concepts that take a holistic approach to healthcare, in which health and wellbeing touch on all aspects of a person’s daily life. Focusing on relaxing, healing and providing enjoyment, design concepts at the show explore the role of simplicity in Philips three core businesses – healthcare, lighting and consumer lifestyle.

All the details are available in a press release available at

http://www.newscenter.philips.com/…simplicity_event_release.page

and further background information is available at

http://www.newscenter.philips.com/…simplicity_event_backgrounder.page

Daylight explores natural, rewarding ways for hotel guests to experience light and ambience in the comfort of their rooms. One item shown is the window where you can control the view and the amount of light that enters the room simply by moving your hand. A pattern superimposed over the window will become denser by moving your hand to the left (blocking the light), moving to the right makes the pattern less dense allowing more light to enter the room.

A collaboration with the Citizen M hotel group provides a prefabricated hotel room packed with gadgets

Also on show was the new Aurea Ambilight LCD TV.

I noticed a video recorded at the event; Episode 23 from megawhat.tv can be viewed at

http://megawhat.tv

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Tagged: Ambilight, Gadgets, Healthcare, Lifestyle, Lighting, Philips, Simplicity

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

http://www.billbuxton.com/bookFlyer.pdf

and here is a link to videos accompanying the book

http://www.mkp.com/sketching

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.

LINK: http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx PostID=312067

You can find Bill Buxtons home page at:

LINK: http://www.billbuxton.com/

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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

http://research.microsoft.com/~awilson/wand

Questions raised (but not necessarily answered by this project) include:

• What kinds of interactions do users expect? Which are they willing to learn?
• Can the wand be used to contextualize automatic speech recognition?
• How to combine multiple sources of noisy information to arrive at a single interpretation?
• Can a single set of gestures span the majority of applications?
• Is the position of the wand really needed?

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Recently came across an interesting paper which talks about creating easy instructions for users building or putting together many everyday objects.

Abstract
We present design principles for creating effective assembly instructions and a system that is based on these principles. The principles are drawn from cognitive psychology research which investigated people’s conceptual models of assembly and effective methods to visually communicate assembly information. Our system is
inspired by earlier work in robotics on assembly planning and in visualization on automated presentation design. Although other systems have considered presentation and planning independently, we believe it is necessary to address the two problems simultaneously in order to create effective assembly instructions. We describe the
algorithmic techniques used to produce assembly instructions given object geometry, orientation, and optional grouping and ordering constraints on the object’s parts. Our results demonstrate that it is possible to produce aesthetically pleasing and easy to follow instructions for many everyday objects.

If you’re interested, you can read the full paper at

• https://graphics.stanford.edu/…/assembly.pdf

or a local copy available at

• http://kf12.com/blogs/uploads/assembly.pdf

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Soap is a project from Microsoft Research aimed at developing an alternative pointing device to the mouse.

Soap is a pointing device based on hardware found in a mouse, yet works in mid-air. Soap consists of an optical sensor device moving freely inside a hull made of fabric. As the user applies pressure from the outside, the optical sensor moves independent from the hull. The optical sensor perceives this relative motion and reports it as position input. Soap offers many of the benefits of optical mice, such as high-accuracy sensing.

This is one of the projects being undertaken by Patrick Baudisch. Find out more at his web-site

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Attended the presentation of a paper entitled Interactive Decal Compositing with Discrete Exponential Maps

Abstract
A method is described for texturing surfaces using decals, images placed on the surface using local parameterizations. Decal parameterizations are generated with a novel O(N logN) discrete approximation to the exponential map which requires only a single additional step in Dijkstra’s graph-distance algorithm. Decals are dynamically composited in an interface that addresses many limitations of previous work. Tools for image processing, deformation/feature-matching, and vector graphics are implemented using direct surface interaction. Exponential map decals can contain holes and can also be combined with conformal parameterization to reduce distortion. The exponential map approximation can be computed on any point set, including meshes and sampled implicit surfaces, and is relatively stable under resampling. The decals stick to the surface as it is interactively deformed, allowing the texture to be preserved even if the surface changes topology. These properties make exponential map decals a suitable approach for texturing animated implicit surfaces.

The full paper is available here

http://kf12.com/blogs/uploads/expmapsiggraph06.pdf

About the author: Ryan Michael Schmidt is currently an Master’s student in the Computer Science Department of the Unviersity of Calgary, being supervised by Dr. Brian Wyvill. He does research in computer graphics, particularly shape modeling with Implicit Surfaces and is due to commence a PhD at the University of Toronto (Summer 06)

Other Items
Possibly of equal interest were references to

ShapeShop

ShapeShop is a tool for creating 3D models using sketches. It incorporates much recent work in interactive implicit surface modeling, implicit sweep surfaces, and sketch-based modeling.

http://unknownroad.com/shapeshop/

There is a paper available ShapeShop: Sketch-Based Solid Modeling with BlobTrees which was presented at EuroGraphics 2005. Read it here

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

and CrossY

CrossY is a crossing-based drawing application where instead of point-and-click “crossing” is used as an interaction method.

http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/crossy/

To trigger an action a target is crossed instead of being clicked on. Additional information is available in the following paper CrossY: A Crossing-Based Drawing Application

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

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One of the many courses at Siggraph 2006 was “Interactive Shape Modeling” and was intended to present the current trends in interactive shape modeling. It is based partly on the AIM@Shape Summer School on Interactive Shape Modeling held recently at the Darmstadt University of Technology.

An interesting course of presentations - have a quick browse through the topics to see if there is anything which appeals to you.

Abstract
Computer Graphics continues to battle the challenging question: “How quickly and effectively can a designer transform a mental concept into a digital shape, which is easy to refine and reuse?”

Traditional techniques of sculpting and sketching continue to be among the quickest and most expressive ways for designers to visually manifest their ideas. Many new modeling techniques successfully use these paradigms for interactive design of digital shapes. Advanced geometric modeling representations and algorithms are an essential foundation for this type of tools.

The course covers the gamut including fundamental mathematical representations of shape, efficient algorithms, interaction paradigms and specialized hardware user interface devices, with presentations unified by a strong emphasis on the use of each topic for interactive modeling applications. The audience will be presented with the properties of various implicit, explicit and hybrid shape representations and the capabilities, limitations and implementation details of current algorithms for interactive shape creation and manipulation. The goal of this course is to impart the audience with both an understanding of the big open questions as well as the skills to apply recent research in interactive shape modeling applications.

Topics and Speakers included:

Karan Singh: Introduction & Motivation — Conceptual Shape Design
Sketching and sculpting and traditional media; From standard CAGD methods to fast free-form shape design; Case study in conceptual automotive design; Hardware for shape modeling; Physical prototypes and their digital equivalents; Overview of industrial software for conceptual modeling;

Denis Zorin: Mathematical representations of shape for modeling
Introduction to shape representations; Geometric concepts of topology, resolution and surface features.

Alexis Angelidis: Global space & Free form deformations (Presenter: Karan Singh)
Space deformations & space warps, practical examples; Free-form deformations and its variants; Wires and surface-oriented deformations; Sweepers; A geometric alternative: constant volume space deformations (swirling sweepers).

Denis Zorin: Multiresolution modeling
Mesh and parametric surface editing; Multiresolution editing with subdivision surfaces and volumes

Marc Alexa: Mesh editing based on discrete Laplace and Possion models
Some remarks on discrete differential geometry; Relation to multiresolution modeling; Laplace coordinates; Shape transformation properties.

Sarah Frisken: Designing with distance fields
A history of applications and research using distance fields; Representing, editing, and rendering distance fields; Adaptively sampled Distance fields (ADFs) and implicit surfaces; Interactive concept design and detailed carving with ADFs

Marie-Paule Cani: Towards ‘virtual clay’
Local deformations & force feedback in volumetric sculpting; Physically-based virtual clay: enabling local & global deformations.

Steven Schkolne: Gesture-based shape modeling
Modeling with your hands in free space

Further details of the course are available (including tutorial Notes and Presentation slides) HERE.

Published papers on these topics are available at the same location or from My Local Store (20Mb PDF file)