Twitter Digest for Week Ending 2011-10-30
- Melissa Gira Grant on cam girl culture: http://t.co/CXD1Z85h #
- RT @Kurt_Vonnegut: True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country. #
- Siri meets Eliza: http://t.co/J6Qs6kTB #
- RT @rafeco: Of all of the metaphors I misuse, Schrödinger's cat is my favorite. #
OmniTouch
We present OmniTouch, a novel wearable system that enables graphical, interactive, multitouch input on arbitrary, everyday surfaces. Our shoulder-worn implementation allows users to manipulate interfaces projected onto the environment (e.g., walls, tables), held objects (e.g., notepads, books), and their own bodies (e.g., hands, lap). A key contribution is our depth-driven template matching and clustering approach to multitouch finger tracking. This enables on-the-go interactive capabilities, with no calibration, training or instrumentation of the environment or the user, creating an always-available interface.
Previously: Skinput.
SideBySide
SideBySide is a novel interactive system that allows multiple people to play and work together using handheld projectors at anytime and anyplace. The system is immediate and simple: users simply project onto a surface and their projection becomes aware and responsive to other projections nearby. Interaction can range from projector-based games, such as boxing with projected characters, to everyday tasks such as exchanging contact information by ‘dragging and dropping’ onto another user’s projection.
Importantly, SideBySide does not require any fixed sensing in the environment and can be used anywhere: at home, at the office, or even inside the car during long road trips. The system consists of a hybrid mobile projector that outputs both visible and invisible projections at the same time. The invisible projection contains tracking data that can be recognized by the device camera, allowing accurate location tracking of multiple projections and lightweight communication between devices.
Previously: MotionBeam.
Microsoft Future Vision, pt. 2
Remember Microsoft’s 2019 Future Vision montage from back in 2009? Now there’s a sequel:
The chasm between Microsoft’s concept and research work and what they actually put on the market is mildly depressing…
Good observation by Gabriel White:
Combine content-driven user interface with gestural interaction, and there’s a whole lot of implicit understanding needed to successfully interact with these systems. Some really hard design problems.
Robots of Brixton
Robots of Brixton from Kibwe Tavares on Vimeo.
Money Faces
Codify
DIY Modular Chocolate
via.
A cultural thought experiment
No one does these thought experiments better than Charlie Stross:
The diminishing marginal utility law dictates that the more money we have, the less utility we get from any additional incremental gain. And this bites the top 1% very hard indeed.
Examine the world around us from the point of view of someone with a net income of $5M/year …
Steve Jobs « The New Adventures of Stephen Fry:
As always there are those who reveal their asininity (as they did throughout his career) with ascriptions like “salesman”, “showman” or the giveaway blunder “triumph of style over substance”. The use of that last phrase, “style over substance” has always been, as Oscar Wilde observed, a marvellous and instant indicator of a fool. For those who perceive a separation between the two have either not lived, thought, read or experienced the world with any degree of insight, imagination or connective intelligence. It may have been Leclerc Buffon who first said “le style c’est l’homme – the style is the man” but it is an observation that anyone with sense had understood centuries before, Only dullards crippled into cretinism by a fear of being thought pretentious could be so dumb as to believe that there is a distinction between design and use, between form and function, between style and substance.
