Wednesday, October 28. 2009Muscle-Bound Computer InterfaceForearm electrodes could enable new forms of hands-free computer interaction.
By Kate Greene
Now, researchers at Microsoft, the University of Washington in Seattle, and the University of Toronto in Canada have come up with another way to interact with computers: a muscle-controlled interface that allows for hands-free, gestural interaction. A band of electrodes attach to a person's forearm and read electrical activity from different arm muscles. These signals are then correlated to specific hand gestures, such as touching a finger and thumb together, or gripping an object tighter than normal. The researchers envision using the technology to change songs in an MP3 player while running or to play a game like Guitar Hero without the usual plastic controller. Muscle-based computer interaction isn't new. In fact, the muscles near an amputated or missing limb are sometimes used to control mechanical prosthetics. But, while researchers have explored muscle-computer interaction for nondisabled users before, the approach has had limited practicality. Inferring gestures reliably from muscle movement is difficult, so such interfaces have often been restricted to sensing a limited range of gestures or movements. The new muscle-sensing project is "going after healthy consumers who want richer input modalities," says Desney Tan, a researcher at Microsoft. As a result, he and his colleagues had to come up with a system that was inexpensive and unobtrusive and that reliably sensed a range of gestures. The group's most recent interface, presented at the User Interface Software and Technology conference earlier this month in Victoria, British Columbia, uses six electromyography sensors (EMG) and two ground electrodes arranged in a ring around a person's upper right forearm for sensing finger movement, and two sensors on the upper left forearm for recognizing hand squeezes. While these sensors are wired and individually placed, their orientation isn't exact--that is, specific muscles aren't targeted. This means that the results should be similar for a thin, EMG armband that an untrained person could slip on without assistance, Tan says. The research builds on previous work that involved a more expensive EMG system to sense finger gestures when a hand is laid on a flat surface. The sensors cannot accurately interpret muscle activity straight away. Software must be trained to associate the electrical signals with different gestures. The researchers used standard machine-learning algorithms, which improve their accuracy over time (the approach is similar to the one Tan uses for his brain-computer interfaces.) "We spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to get the user to calibrate the device in an appropriate way," says Tan. The software learns to recognize EMG signals produced as the user performs gestures in a specific, controlled way. The algorithms focus on three specific features from the EMG data: the magnitude of muscle activity, the rate of muscle activity, and the wave-like patterns of activity that occur across several sensors at once. These three features, says Tan, provide a fairly accurate way to identify certain types of gesture. After training, the software could accurately determine many of the participants' gestures more than 85 percent of the time, and some gestures more than 90 percent. Especially in the early stages of training, a participant's gestures need to be carefully guided to ensure that the machine-learning algorithms are trained correctly. But Tan says that even with a small amount of feedback, test subjects "would fairly naturally adapt and change postures and gestures to get drastically improved performance." He says that having users trigger the appropriate response from the system became an important part of the training process. "Most of today's computer interfaces require the user's complete attention," says Pattie Maes, professor of media arts and sciences at MIT. "We desperately need novel interfaces such as the one developed by the Microsoft team to enable a more seamless integration of digital information and applications into our busy daily lives." Tan and colleagues are now working on a prototype that uses a wireless band that can easily be slipped onto a person's arm, as well as a "very quick training system." The researchers are also testing how well the system works when people walk and run while wearing it. Ultimately, says Tan, full-body control will lead to fundamentally new ways of using computers. "We know it has something to do with gestures being mobile, always available, and natural, but we're still working on the exact paradigm," he says. Copyright Technology Review 2009. -----
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Science & technology
at
09:47
Defined tags for this entry: artificial reality, design (interactions), devices, interferences, research, science & technology
Friday, August 14. 2009Murmur StudyUn projet d’art initié par l’artiste Christopher Baker autour des processus de publication des statuts sur Twitter et Facebook. Les statuts sont imprimés grâce à 20 imprimantes thermiques pour créer une œuvre conceptuelle et collective exposée dans un centre d’art contemporain. Via Fubiz Wednesday, August 12. 2009Calvin Harris and the HumanthesizerCalvin Harris performs his latest single, Ready For The Weekend, on a giant human synthesizer made of, er, pretty ladies... Take 15 bikini-clad lovelies, paint them in special ink and put them in a dance studio with special conductive pads on the floor and, hey presto, you have the Humanthesizer. To promote Calvin Harris's new single, Sony Music creatives Phil Clandillon and Steve Milbourne (who you may remember were responsible for the AC/DC ASCII Excel video last year) decided to use Bare Conductive, a technology developed by RCA Industrial Design and Engineering masters students Bibi Nelson, Becky Pilditch, Isabel Lizardi and Matt Johnson. Bare Conductive is "skin-safe, conductive ink". When painted on the skin, it allows a current to be passed through the body without causing an electric shock. "We saw the technology on a blog initially, and then invited the RCA guys in to demo it to us," says Clandillon. "We asked if they would be up for doing a project together, and then it was a matter of waiting for the right artist / idea to come along." The Humanthesizer consists of 34 pads on the floor which have been painted with the conductive ink and connected to a computer via some custom electronics created by the RCA's Matt Johnson. The performers stand on the pads, and touch each other on the hands or body to complete a circuit and trigger a sound. Harris, his hands painted with the ink, played the main keyboard line and effects by interacting with a row of eight girls. The rhythmic portions of the track were played by seven dancers performing a carefully choreographed routine. Clandillon explains how it all works in this video
----- Via CreativeReview
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Design
at
10:06
Defined tags for this entry: clips, design, design (interactions), design (motion), materials, ressources
Monday, July 20. 2009Capacitive Bodycapacitive body from Andreas Muxel on Vimeo. "The installation „capacitive body“ reacts to the sound of its environment. Each custom built module consists of a high bright electroluminescent wire, a piezoelectric sensor and a microcontroller. For a first setup at the Tschumi Pavilion (Groningen, NL) a sensor was attached on each side of the pavilion‘s glass shell, whose vibrations are triggered by the ambient noise of its surroundings. The sensor data is transformed into the light behaviour of each wire. A dynamic light space is thereby created, which gives visual feedback of the aural activity around the installation." ----- Via File Festival Related Links:Personal comment: L'aspect interactif du projet ("transcrit l'activité alentour" -en utilisant ici aussi les vibrations-) est peut-être aujourd'hui à proscrire: on a vu en effet siffisamment de projets qui "transcrivent l'activité alentours" (y compris des projets de fabric | ch). Par contre, l'aspect visuel de la densité du mesh me fait penser un peu à quelques idées de projets que nous av(i)ons. Je pense à Electroscape 005 ou plutôt Camera & Gunshot Tracking Pavilion!
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Architecture, Design
at
10:06
Defined tags for this entry: architecture, artificial reality, design, design (environments), design (interactions), exhibitions
Monday, July 06. 2009Self-Portrait MachineMore nuggets from the RCA show. This time from Design Products' edgy and inspiring Platform 13, headed by the very talented Onkar Kular and Sebastien Noel.
Jen Hui Liao's Self-Portrait Machine is a device that takes a picture of the sitter and draws it but with the model's help. The wrists of the individual are tied to the machine and it is his or her hands that are guided to draw the lines that will eventually form the portrait. The project started with the observation that nearly everything that surrounds us has been created by machines. Our personal identities are represented by the products of the man-machine relationship. The Self-Portrait Machine encapsulates this man-machine relationship. By co-operating with the machine, a self-portrait is generated. It is self-drawn but from an external viewpoint through controlled movement and limited possibility. Our choice of how we are represented is limited to what the machine will allow.
The project aims to explore the cooperation process of human & machine. The designer explains: I found some the relationship between human and machine are amazing and could be horrible (like this one that shows how we human invent machines then put human inside to it to manufacture goods), The final object - A machine is a miniature of what I understand through the process of research, and the aim of the machine is to let people have a chance to feel the condensed process of how we generate our self identity from external point of view as from the society, which is a big machine we all in. P.S. the website of Self-Portrait Machine will be on line soon, it will show more about the background research and the building process of it. I'll update this post as soon as the website is up. Videos of the machine in action.
The Royal College of Art Show is open every day from 11amd to 8pm until July 5, 2009. This piece originally appeared in We Make Money Not Art. ----- Via WMMNA Personal comment: Dans la série (très en vogue en design) des machines à dessiner: une variation intéressante ou l'humain est l'exécutant guidé par la machine. Merce Cunningham's Dancing hands
The piece is a Cunningham dance work reconstructed from textual deconstructions of other Cunningham dance works. Each finger has an associated excerpt from an article, review, or essay on Cunningham from the last 5 decades. These texts become the "ink" with which each finger manifests its movements. Each text is dynamically typeset in 3 dimensional space along the curves traced by his fingertips. The software keeps track of various movement parameters which it uses to modulate aspects of the visualization such as letter size, camera position, angle, and zoom. Merce not only dances the dance, but becomes typesetter and cinematographer, conducting the audience's view of the dance. What, from the outside, appear to be subtle manipulations of the hands become a beautiful tangle of diving flocks and waterfalls of letters. Presenting dance in this way, we hope to get closer to the experience of the dance from the inside out. Watch the video below. Thnkx John. ----- Related Links:Personal comment: Une approche 3d-générative des "dancing hands" de Merce Cunningham.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Design, Interaction design
at
10:52
Defined tags for this entry: 3d, design, design (graphic), design (interactions), design (motion), generative, interaction design, text
Tuesday, May 12. 2009New Spatialism:? Reclaiming Social Space In Web MediaI am going to be leading a Social Media Masterclass at the Thinking Digital conference on Wednesday, as just one element of a two week trip in Europe. Last week I was in Hamburg for the Next09 conference, and Andreas Vascellari got a video of my presentation on the Open Enterprise 2009 study, and interviewed me, as well. This week, it's Thinking Digital, Futuresonic, and Somesso, in Newcastle, Manchester, and London. Yikes. But having a whirlwind tour with four very different presentations is an interesting experience, particularly since I get a chance to stare out the window and try to get down what I really believe on various topics. For Thinking Digital I will be leading a two hour masterclass on social media. I opted to go with a 'late night TV' approach, where I am the host and I have various guests that join me one by one: Dan Lyons, JP Rangaswami, and Paul Smith. Each has the option to do some schtick for a few minutes -- although most are opting to just sit down for an interview -- and I am starting off with a monologue. I just wish we could have a band. After the first hour of the show we will switch to an interactive mode, where I will wander the floor with a mike, involving the attendees very directly in a give-and-take with my guests. So I had a chance to think about what I wanted to say in my monologue to set the context for a masterclass in social media. Perhaps those attending want me to focus on the nuts-and-bolts of being a successful blogger or driving more revenue or branding your blog. I will make sure my guests and I touch on those topics later in the show, but I wanted to use my starting spot for a different purpose. Looking back on ten years of blogging, I think we have arrived at a turning point, where we have to reclaim the social space in web media.
Ten years ago, when I started blogging, it wasn't called blogging yet. I thought I was writing an 'e-zine' although it had all the characteristics of a blog: reverse chronological entries, categories, and so on. We were like pioneers, fooling around out in the wilderness, cutting crude roads, building villages. Relatively soon, however, this personal publishing by the fringe lunatics became big business and old media arrived. Now the leading 'blogs' are either run by old media giants, or bloggers who have become new media giants. Social media has been strip-malled. The funky soulfulness of the early days has been replaced by SEO, ad networks, and ersatz earnestness. The reality is that so-called social media -- even in its earlier, Birkenstock and granola days -- wasn't very social. We didn't call it that until much later, anyway. We thought of it as personal publishing, and it adopted the basic dynamics of publishing. Most notably, there was a publisher or author and then there were readers. It seemed more egalitarian since anyone could be a publisher, but still there was a broadcast media dynamic despite the fact that anyone could argue or agree with someone else's posts on their own blog. Then for a few years, we just called it blogging. Rhymes with slogging, because, in the final analysis, most people didn't blog: too hard, too much work, not rewarding enough. But the format is perfect for publishing companies, which is why the largest 'blogs' now are generally corporate media machinery. And as the blogosphere has become an increasingly corporate neighborhood, people are moving out. I noticed a few years ago that comments seemed to be moving from blogs into faster paced social tools, like Facebook and then streaming apps like Twitter. (Twitter has become so popular that most of the competitors have closed shop). People are moving to where things are more social, where the author/audience divide is less sharp, and where the scale of interaction is human-sized. This is the new loft district: social networks. Social networks are truly social, where web media isn't, very. Social networks are really about individuals and their personal relationships with others. So, if web media is to really become social -- which it isn't at present -- we need to take what we have learned from other, more social tools, and take another run at social media.
Using an analogy from city planning and architecture, we need a rethinking of the basics: something like the New Urbanism movement, that tried to reclaim shared urban space in a way that matches human needs, and moved away from gigantic and dehumanizing cityscapes of the mid and late twentieth century, where garbage trucks seemed more at home than a teenage girl walking a dog. So, we need a New Spatialism movement, to rethink web media and reclaim the social space that is supposed to be central to so-called social media. Some web media may just remain what it is, like an industrial district at the edge of town. But at least some parts of web media should be reconceptualized, and reconstructed to get back to human scale. Just as New Urbanism is about organizing streets, sidewalks, and plazas to support the growth of social capital, New Spatialism would help us channel interactions on line to increase sociality, and thereby increase the growth of social capital. New Spatialism is based on the idea that our primary motivations for being online are extra-market drivers: we are not online for money, principally. We have created the web to happen to ourselves: to shape a new culture and build a better, more resilient world. And we need better media tools than we have at present, to make that a reality. ----- Via /Message (Steve Boyd) Personal comment:
Une analogie entre urbanisme et web media / social media. Et un constat par Steve Boyd concernant l'évolution désormais fortement "corporate" du web. Les gros poissons se sont réappropriés les outils qui pendant un moment furent entre les mains des individus et participèrent à l'émergence d'une sphère publique au niveau média en ligne.
Posted by Patrick Keller
in Culture & society
at
08:29
Defined tags for this entry: blog, culture & society, design (interactions), environment, media, public, social
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fabric | rblgThis blog is the survey website of fabric | ch - studio for architecture, interaction and research. We curate and reblog articles, researches, writings, exhibitions and projects that we notice and find interesting during our everyday practice and readings. Most articles concern the intertwined fields of architecture, territory, art, interaction design, thinking and science. From time to time, we also publish documentation about our own work and research, immersed among these related resources and inspirations. This website is used by fabric | ch as archive, references and resources. It is shared with all those interested in the same topics as we are, in the hope that they will also find valuable references and content in it.
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