Tuesday, May 03. 2011
Via Technology Review
-----
By Kate Greene
|
Up in the air: Using an experimental interface, a person acts as an antenna for stray electromagnetic radiation in the environment.
Credit: Microsoft Research |
Our lives are awash with ambient electromagnetic radiation, from the fields generated by power lines to the signals used to send data between Wi-Fi transmitters. Researchers at Microsoft and the University of Washington have found a way to harness this radiation for a computer interface that turns any wall in a building into a touch-sensitive surface.
The technology could allow light switches, thermostats, stereos, televisions, and security systems to be controlled from anywhere in the house, and could lead to new interfaces for games.
"There's all this electromagnetic radiation in the air," says Desney Tan, senior researcher at Microsoft (and a TR35 honoree in 2007). Radio antennas pick up some of the signals, Tan explains, but people can do this too. "It turns out that the body is a relatively good antenna," he says.
The ambient electromagnetic radiation emitted by home appliances, mobile phones, computers, and the electrical wiring within walls is usually considered noise. But the researchers chose to put it at the core of their new interface.
When a person touches a wall with electrical wiring behind it, she becomes an antenna that tunes the background radiation, producing a distinct electrical signal, depending on her body position and proximity to and location on the wall. This unique electrical signal can be collected and interpreted by a device in contact with or close to her body. When a person touches a spot on the wall behind her couch, the gesture can be recognized, and it could be used, for example, to turn down the volume on the stereo.
So far, the researchers have demonstrated only that a body can turn electromagnetic noise into a usable signal for a gesture-based interface. A paper outlining this will be presented next week at the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Vancouver, BC.
In an experiment, test subjects wore a grounding strap on their wrist—a bracelet that is normally used to prevent the buildup of static electricity in the body. A wire from the strap was connected to an analog-to-digital converter, which fed data from the strap to a laptop worn in a backpack. Machine-learning algorithms then processed the data to identify characteristic changes in the electrical signals corresponding to a person's proximity to a wall, the position of her hand on the wall, and her location within the house.
"Now we can turn any arbitrary wall surface into a touch-input surface," says Shwetak Patel, professor of computer science and engineering and electrical engineering at the University of Washington (and a TR35 honoree in 2009), who was involved with the work. The next step, he says, is to make the data analysis real-time and to make the system even smaller—with a phone or a watch instead of a laptop collecting and analyzing data.
"With Nintendo Wii and Microsoft's Kinect, people are starting to realize that these gesture interfaces can be quite compelling and useful," says Thad Starner, professor in Georgia Tech's College of Computing. "This is the sort of paper that says here is a new direction, an interesting idea; now can we refine it and make it better over time."
Refining the system to make it more user-friendly will be important, says Pattie Maes, a professor in MIT's Media Lab who specializes in computer interfaces. "Many interfaces require some visual, tangible, or auditory feedback so the user knows where to touch." While the researchers suggest using stickers or other marks to denote wall-based controls, this approach might not appeal to everyone. "I think it is intriguing," says Maes, "but may only have limited-use cases."
Joe Paradiso, another professor in MIT's Media Lab, says, "The idea is wild and different enough to attract attention," but he notes that the signal produced could vary depending on the way a person wears the device that collects the signal.
Patel has previously used a building's electrical, water, and ventilation systems to locate people indoors. Tan has worked with sensors that use human brain power for computing and muscle activity to control electronics wirelessly. The two researchers share an interest in pulling useful information out of noisy signals. With the recent joint project, Tan says, the researchers are "taking junk and making sense of it."
Tuesday, March 29. 2011
Via MIT Technology (Blogs)
-----
Bill Atkinson invented everything from the menu bar to hypercard--the program that inspired the first wiki.
The wiki is a funny thing: unlike the blog, which is a bastard child of the human need to record life's events and the exhibitionistic tendencies the Internet encourages, there is nothing all that obvious about it.
Ward Cunningham, the programmer who invented the modern wiki, has said that this is precisely what made it so compelling -- it was one of those too-obvious ideas that doesn't really make sense until you've seen it in action. To judge by the level of discourse in the average well-trafficked comment thread, to put a page on the internet and to invite all to edit it is a recipe for defacement and worse. Yet it works -- in part due to its occasionally ant-democratic nature.
Unlike the first weblogs, which were personal diaries, the very first wiki -- it still exists -- is devoted to software development. But where did its creator get the idea to create a wiki (then called a WikiWiki) in the first place?
Hypercard.
It's a name that will mean a great deal to anyone who can identify this creature:
Hypercard was the world wide web before the web even existed. Only it wasn't available across a network, and instead of hypertext, it was merely hypermedia -- in other words, different parts of the individual 'cards' one could create with it were linkable to other cards.
The most famous application ever to be built with Hypercard is the original version of the computer game Myst. (Which, like seemingly every other bit of puzzle, arcade and adventure game nostalgia, has been reconstituted on the iPhone.)
Hypercard made it easy to build "stacks" of graphically rich (for the time, anyway) "cards" that could be interlinked. Cunningham built a stack in Hypercard that documented computer programmers and their ideas, and, later, programming patterns. The web allowed him to realize an analogous "stack" in a public space; the last step was to allow anyone to add to it.
Bill Atkinson, the Apple programmer who invented Hypercard, also invented MacPaint, the QuickDraw toolbox that the original Macintosh used for graphics, and the Menu bar. He is literally one of those foundational programmers whose ideas -- or at least their expression -- have influenced millions, and have descendants on practically every computer in existence.
Which means Atkinson gave birth to a system elegant enough to presage the world wide web, inspire the first Wiki (without which Wikipedia, begun in 2001, would have been impossible) and give rise to the most haunting computer game of a generation. Both Atkinson and Cunningham are links in a long chain of inspiration and evolution stretching back to the earliest notions of hypertext.
And that's how Apple -- or specifically Bill Atkinson -- helped give birth to the wiki. Which is 16 years old today!
Monday, March 28. 2011
Via Vague Terrain
-----
by Kevin Hamilton
Richard Sumner: Often when we meet people for the first time, some physical characteristic strikes us. Now what is the first thing you notice in a person?
Bunny Watson: Whether the person is male or female.
I followed Watson's debut on Jeopardy about as much as the next guy - the story was unavoidable there for awhile. I read Richard Powers' essay on the pre-paywall version of the New York Times, watched the flashy documentary about Flashy designer Josh Davis, responsible for the avatar seen on screen.
I assumed like others that the AI software was named for Thomas Watson, IBM's founder, or perhaps even for the sidekicks to Alexander Graham Bell or Sherlock Holmes. (Though each of the latter options seemed a mismatch.)
Having finally watched the 1957 film Desk Set, starring Hepburn and Tracy, I think I have found Watson's true origins – in Hepburn's character Bunny Watson.
In the film (adapted from a play), Watson has just returned from a demonstration of the new IBM Electronic Brain (announced by Thomas J. Watson?), to find that her office at a large national television network has been occupied by an IBM "methods engineer" named Richard Sumner (played by Spencer Tracy.) 1
Sumner, who in addition to being a management science expert is an MIT-trained computer engineer, is engaged in a month-long project of studying Watson's office and staff – the Reference Section of the company. Watson and the three women she supervises are the human Google for the company – their phones constantly ring with obscure questions - some of which are so familiar to the women that they can answer without effort, others of which require access to files and books.
Sumner's job, known to us and only suspected and feared by the other main characters, is to design a computer installation for the office. As the company wants some big publicity for this event, Sumner is to keep his mission a secret, leading to greater suspicion on the part of Watson and her team of an impending disaster – would a computer replace their labor?
The film's narrative is anchored by two significant tests. At the beginning, Watson is tested by Sumner, and determined to be a superb computing agent. She is able to count, tabulate, store and recall with uncanny precision, and using counter-rational or supra-rational algorithms. Later, during the story's second big test, the finally installed computer fields some initial queries in its position as reference librarian, and fails.
EMERAC fails because of poor context awareness, something that the mere typist assigned to inputting data doesn't know to compensate for. In the end, EMERAC is only successful - and therefore of value to humanity - when operated by Watson herself, who is able to enter in the right information to makeup for the computer's poor contextual knowledge.
So the conclusion takes us to a happy marriage of computer and operator, in which both are necessary to keeping things running smoothly and efficiently, in the context of a growing world of "big data." (The final problem, and the one we see EMERAC answer correctly, is the question "What is the weight of the Earth?")
EMERAC is thus more like Wolfram Alpha than the contemporary Watson. The new Watson, named for an operator rather than for a computer, is presented to television viewers as an operator of the Jeopardy interface. (The game is, after all, a button-pushing contest.)
In the new Watson, a man - at least in popular understanding - has replaced a woman at the switch. But perhaps a new configuration of labor has emerged anyway. Consider the change from the former, in which Sumner engineers and maintains the machine in real time, while Bunny operates it, to the newer version, in which multiple sites across multiple temporalities are responsible for the resulting computing event.
Alex Trebeck is in the role of the telephone from Desk Set, merely passing along the queries originating from elsewhere. The Watson AI, dressed in Davis' cartoony dataviz rather than Charles LeMaire's fashions, fields the questions and answers them as a sort of merged operator and machine. Behind the scenes and long before the event, a small army of researchers programmed the AI and fed it data. In Desk Set, this latter job is also visible, through the work of Bunny's staff, who help deliver all the content for the machine to digest.
So with the Jeopardy Watson stunt, we see primarily two changes – a person where a phone used to be, and a machine where there used to be a machine-plus-operator. The sum total of laborers has remain unchanged, though we are less one woman, and plus one man. This cybernetic brain needs no operator, but it does need a user – and it certainly needs an audience.
(1) The whole story takes place at Rockefeller Center and bears many stylistic resemblances to the current NBC sitcom 30 Rock – including a page named Kenneth.
This post was originally published on Critical Commons.
Monday, February 21. 2011
Via nexus404
-----
While the bedside table and lamp has been a staple of our lives since there was such a thing as a bed and a table, there is now a new invention being floated around by French firm Quarks that may make it obsolete.
With Quarks’ new paint, the entire wall acts as an on and off switch meaning that you no longer need to put a lamp close enough for you to reach over and turn off. The On/Off Paint will record a single touch and carry an electric current that will turn a device on or off. The best part of the paint is that it does not take a great deal of wiring in order to make it work, simply determine the area you want to paint and as long as it is around a plug you’ll be able to touch any part of that area.
While this isn’t currently available in the United States, if the company knows what’s good for it, the On/Off Switch Paint will be here soon.
Thursday, February 17. 2011
Personal comment:
The resurgence of the old, useless and overwhelming "pop-up" style (even though this consists in windows opening) that we somehow miss since Jodi went "quiet"!
Thursday, August 26. 2010
Personal comment:
Still a bit heavy stuff to wear so to say... Not to mention that you should also wear a projector (but at one point, skin as a screen --body inks-- will certainly become possible). Interesting approach nonetheless to consider the body as a potential input device. There are many different approaches regarding this question.
But do we want to become integrated interactive people, or do we rather prefer to keep interaction and technological devices as an external "prosthesis-like" type of device btw?
Monday, August 23. 2010
Via DVice
What if you could simply run your hand across the wall to turn on embedded lighting or music? That's the thinking behind the Living Wall, an interactive wallpaper designed by a group called High-Low Tech.
In most homes you need switches for everything from controlling the lighting and audio system, to running appliances. The Living Wall is intended to take embrace that technology, while creating a much less obtrusive human interface. High-LowTech says you can even send a message to a friend with a simple swipe on the wall.
The Living Wall is on display at the Fuller Craft Museum near Boston through February 11 of next year.
Wednesday, August 18. 2010
Via Mashable
-----
by Jolie O'Dell
Here’s one for all you lovers of futuristic interfaces. An interactive hardware company called Displax has begun marketing Skin, a paper-thin, flexible film that would transform any non-metal surface into an interactive touchscreen.
You could place Skin on any surface, transparent or opaque, flat or curved, and use it to display any interactive content you like. Displax’s multi-touch technology can detect up to 16 fingers at once and can also detect air movement.
Skin is completely transparent and works on surfaces that are also transparent; you can place Skin on a glass surface and interact with content displayed under the glass.
This unique hardware operates via a grid of nanowires embedded Skin’s polymer film. Each time a user makes contact with the surface, either by blowing on it or directly touching it, “a small electrical disturbance is detected allowing the micro-processor controller to pinpoint the movement or direction of the air flow,” according to Displax.
We can imagine millions of cool use cases for such a technology — business presentations, medicine, museums, schools, and gaming to start. The possibilities are as endless as our collective and ever-growing want and need to interact with digital content through multi-touch interfaces.
What do you think of Skin? Is this a product you’d like to try or use?
More About: displax, Film, Hardware, interaction, interface, skin, touchscreen, trending
Wednesday, August 11. 2010
Via NextNature
-----
At Tokyo’s Shinagawa Station visitors can now select beverages from a 47-inch touch panel.
An embedded camera will recognize your gender and age, allowing the machine to recommend a beverage suitable to whatever stereotype is attached to your particular circumstances. It will store your purchasing history too, so you can be freaked out by tailored ads every time you use it. 500 more of these units are planned to be installed in and around Tokyo over the next two years, with operating company JR East expecting them to tally up 30 percent more sales than their analog brethren. Via engadget.com
Smart vending machines in the streets show that Big Brother is being naturally accepted in a pixel consuming society.
Tuesday, August 10. 2010
Personal comment:
Quite active in the field of architecture & interaction design, environment design, Studio Roosegaarde makes a try in the field of fashion design with this interactive garment.
|