Techno Babble

A project to explore Adaptive Hardware and Context Aware Interfaces is detailed by the Microsoft Applied Sciences Group at

http://www.microsoft.com/appliedsciences/content/projects/AdaptiveHardware.aspx

The article describes the history of the project from the initial notes, through various different prototypes to a device which was made available to students participating in the 2010 Student Innovation contest at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) in October 2010.

http://www.acm.org/uist/uist2010/

For the contest, Microsoft provided a number of experimental Adaptive Keyboards for students to demonstrate how the combination of display and input capabilities in a keyboard could enable users to be more productive.

The keys can display different legends and be dynamically remapped as required, for example, to display command icons rather than a character set. In addition, there is a touch sensitive display window at the top of the keyboard.

The task for students was to develop innovative applications and experiences for the keyboard

Winners of the contest are detailed at

http://www.acm.org/uist/uist2010/Student_Contest.html

and a video made by Channel 9  shows the entries

Part 1 of 2 ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvepWDFBHow )

Part 2 of 2 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYX3d5L5F0Q)

NOTE: The Adaptive Keyboard is a research prototype not an actual product and was only made available to students participating in the UIST contest.

In the fictional TV series Star Trek a replicator is used to create the food of your choice. This Science Fiction device could be closer to reality following a project by a team from the Computational Synthesis Lab at Cornell University.

http://ccsl.mae.cornell.edu/node/194

Its based on the Fab@Home 3D Printer platform, using hydrocolloids (xanthium gums and gelatin) and flavour additives as the printing materials which are loaded into syringes and placed on the printer head.

Read an interesting article on the 3D Food Printer by Designboom at

http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/16/view/12675/3d-food-printer.html

and see it in action at

http://money.cnn.com/video/technology/2011/01/21/t_tt_3d_food_printer.cnnmoney/

There’s a technical paper Hydrocolloid Printing: A Novel Platform for Customized Food Production at

http://ccsl.mae.cornell.edu/sites/default/files/SFF09_Cohen1_0.pdf

Other Links

Fab@Home is an open-source project that provides the designs and tools necessary to build your own 3D printer. The Fab@Home website  is at

http://fabathome.org/

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

Researchers from the MIT Computer Science and Artifical Intelligence Lab have designed a system that can recognise gestures made with a multi-coloured gloved hand.

You can see the accuracy and latency of the tracking in the following video

One feature of the system is an algorithm which was developed to rapidly search graphics data in a database.

A webcam is used to capture an image of the glove. The image is reduced in size to 40 x 40 pixels and used to search a database containing digital models of a gloved hand in a range of different positions. If a match is found, the corresponding hand position is determined directly, thus eliminating the need to perform complex calculations to determine the relative positions of the hand and fingers.

Calibration, for different users, has been simplified so that the user only has to place their hand on an 8.5×11 inch piece of paper on a flat surface in front of the webcam.

More details at

http://people.csail.mit.edu/rywang/hand

and from MIT news at

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/gesture-computing-0520.html

Pivot is a Microsoft Live Labs project that tries to make it easier to interact with massive amounts of data on the Internet.

http://www.getpivot.com/

At the heart of Pivot are “Collections.” Collections combine large groups of similar items on the internet, so we can begin viewing the Web as a “web” rather than a series of isolated pages. Anyone can create collections of their own.

Find out more on the Pivot Developers page, where there are tools available to assist in the generation of your own Pivot Collection

http://www.getpivot.com/developer-info

Demonstrated at Microsoft Techfest 2110 by Chunhui Zhang from Microsoft Research Asia

Mobile Surface is a novel interaction system for mobile computing. Our goal is to bring the Microsoft Surface experience to mobile scenarios and, more importantly, to enable 3-D interaction with mobile devices. We will demonstrate how to transform any surface, such as a coffee table or a piece of paper, into a Mobile Surface by using a mobile device and a camera-projector system. Besides the Surface, we will show 3-D object imaging, augmented reality, and multiple-layer 3-D information visualization. In particular, we have developed a system with the camera-projector component to scan 3-D objects in real time while doing normal projection. To visualize, 3-D data can be projected onto a surface formed by a piece of paper while maintaining the original scale as if it were printed on that paper, and a user can interact with the projected content with a hand. Mobile Surface enables you to interact with digital contents and information around you from anywhere.

http://channel9.msdn.com/blogs/larrylarsen/techfest-2010-mobile-surface

A 3D bio-printing machine has been developed by Organovo, and is intended for use in the manufacture of human tissues and organs.

“Scientists and engineers can use the 3D bio printers to enable placing cells of almost any type into a desired pattern in 3D,” said Murphy. “Researchers can place liver cells on a preformed scaffold, support kidney cells with a co-printed scaffold, or form adjacent layers of epithelial and stromal soft tissue that grow into a mature tooth. Ultimately the idea would be for surgeons to have tissue on demand for various uses, and the best way to do that is get a number of bio-printers into the hands of researchers and give them the ability to make three dimensional tissues on demand.”

http://organovo.com/news1.php

An associated video is available from the TED series

at about 10:56 in to the video you can watch a modified inkjet printer at work printing a “heart”.

Perhaps it should be known as a replicator rather than a 3D printer though …

Dr Peter Hall ( http://www.cs.bath.ac.uk/~pmh/start/home.html) and Chris Li from the Department of Computer Science (http://www.bath.ac.uk/comp-sci/) at the University of Bath in the UK have developed a system that enables the generation of lifelike animations of trees from real video footage.

Read the Press release at

http://www.bath.ac.uk/news/2010/01/25/cgi-trees/

and more details of the research work at

http://www.cs.bath.ac.uk/~pmh/Research/Animated_Foliage.html