Waving at your Phone

Check out this patent application.

A communication device may include a lens and processing logic. The lens may receive a gesture made by a user of the mobile terminal and the processing logic may identify the gesture. The processing logic may also generate a command based on the identified gesture, where the command instructs the mobile terminal or an external device to perform a control action.

Essentially: Gesture at your phone to navigate.

(via TechCrunch)

Shoogle

Here's something else that's cool. Shoogle is a system for generating tactile and auditory feedback regarding the state of a handheld device. The user shakes the device and it feels and sounds like there are objects rattling around inside. The objects can be a metaphor for waiting messages, or battery power remaining, etc.

Bar of Soap

This is cool.

Despite being similarly to soap device talked about in class, this is something else entirely.

The basic idea is to determine a user's intent by how they hold the device. So, if the user holds it like a phone, it would go into phone mode, etc.

I can't really think of anything to elaborate on that. It sounds like a cool opportunity for some machine learning.

Daylight Savings Time

My phone automatically updated its clock for daylight savings time. A fantastic feature, and one that I expect in all my timepieces. I haven't set a clock in my life.

However, it also updated my alarm clock settings, making an 8 AM alarm wake me up at 7.

This seems to be a feature designed only to make me angry.

Keyboard vs. Mouse

We’ve done a cool $50 million of R & D on the Apple Human Interface. We discovered, among other things, two pertinent facts:

Test subjects consistently report that keyboarding is faster than mousing.
The stopwatch consistently proves mousing is faster than keyboarding.
This contradiction between user-experience and reality apparently forms the basis for many user/developers’ belief that the keyboard is faster.

People new to the mouse find the process of acquiring it every time they want to do anything other than type to be incredibly time-wasting. And therein lies the very advantage of the mouse: it is boring to find it because the two-second search does not require high-level cognitive engagement.

It takes two seconds to decide upon which special-function key to press. Deciding among abstract symbols is a high-level cognitive function. Not only is this decision not boring, the user actually experiences amnesia! Real amnesia! The time-slice spent making the decision simply ceases to exist.

--Ask Tog

Very interesting. I wonder if this could be corroborated. I certainly feel that the keyboard is faster. I wonder if I've been wasting my time.

Head Mounted Display

This looks super cool. There's a toy being sold that has a head mounted video display as a part of it. The headset can be bought as a replacement part for twenty dollars. It uses standard signals (NTSC or PAL) and can, with very little work, be hacked into a new role in a custom project.

This would make a neat little reality augmentation display or virtual reality display. Plus, there's nothing to stop a developer from buying two and making a stereoscopic display.

Obviously no commercial product would be tolerated with a black and white screen anymore, but this is a boon for hobby work and prototypes.

(via Hack-a-Day)

Casual Capture

Today in class, one of the things we talked about was the SenseCam being developed by Microsoft. This is an appealing idea to me as a photographer and obsessive data-hoarder. The idea is that you wear the camera (the example was on a lanyard, but that's not essential to the core concept) and it takes periodic photos. It also has options to take photos based on changes in sensor inputs, like accelerometers and ambient noise sensors.

I looked around and this is not a new idea. There's a CNET article from 2003 that talks about an HP project called "Casual Capture." It was based around a frame buffer that would store the last 30 seconds of visual information and, on some cue, process it and store it.

"You say, 'Something has happened, I'd like to remember that,'" said Phil Cheatle of HP Labs' digital media department. "It allows you to take part in the event instead of hiding behind the technology. The challenge is selecting what's interesting automatically."

This is a very interesting proposition. Obviously the hard part is figuring out what the most useful part of the 30 second frame buffer is to store. Simply storing all of it for later, manual processing is impractical. Having too much information is worse than not having any, in this case.

Another interesting paragraph was one that proposed more advanced automatic image processing:

The imaging software would also recognize when a sequence of shots could best be presented as a video clip, and would transform a slow movement of the head into a panoramic image, by stitching a sequence of related shots together.

The project seems to have fallen off the face of the earth without producing even a prototype. The Microsoft product is a very good successor, picking up the torch. However, the second paragraph of the CNET article describes a device that is more advanced than either the SenseCam or how the SenseCam is described in the rest of the article. Clearly, it seemed to be an impossible goal at the time, but four years later it doesn't seem so far fetched.

Casual capture is HP's term for a method of taking snapshots that involves a minimum of effort on the part of the photographer. Ideally, the consumer could don an always-on, wearable camera, visit an event such as a party, and afterwards find that the camera had automatically selected and cropped the most memorable images.

This kind of extremely smart documentation device is, I'm sure, ready to be made in the next few years. With a minimal amount of human influence, the device would automatically document and possibly share an event.

Of course, there's the same concerns that are raised whenever some kind of camera becomes ubiquitous. These tend to flair up at the introduction of a new technology and quickly dissipate as it becomes commonplace. Occasionally something will spark a controversy and cause greater attention to the use of the technology for a time, but the trend is towards acceptance.

If enough people wore one of these, it's impossible to predict how society would change. On the one hand, there would be a rich social history available at little to no cost of human time. On the other hand, it would produce a constantly surveillant and surveiled society. Everyone would be watching everyone else, and a great deal of personal information would become public knowledge.

But, with Facebook, Google street view, CCTV, and others, we're already well on the way there and most people don't seem to be alarmed, or even notice that it's happening. As privacy disappears (as is the trend), so will privacy concerns. Society will adapt to whatever new technology it is given, as long as it serves a purpose.

DIY Multitouch Interface

We talked about multitouch screens today in class, and I remembered this video from a while back.



Maybe it'd be cool to make. It doesn't seem all that complicated. I'll need to look into Core Video some more, but I think it would make the kind of video processing needed pretty straightforward.

It's not a screen, it's just a control surface, so it wouldn't be practical for a lot of the things we were talking about in class. Actually, it's a bag of water on a glass table with a camera underneath. I can't imagine it being practical for anything.

But, it's cool looking, and it's a neat idea.