Impressive and Frightening

This is one of the most impressive (and frightening on several levels) pieces of engineering I've ever seen. When there exists a device that can turn a living tree into logs in under 15 seconds, it is no surprise that deforestation can be a problem. Fortunately, this appears to be a tree farm... for IKEA?

The unbridled and unapologetic efficiency by which this machine performs its function leaves a visceral sensation of both awe and horror. It is distrubingly animal-like. The fact the tree is mostly debarked by the time it hits the ground makes my jaw drop.

Sensitive Object - make any surface touch sensitive

This is not extremely new technology, but not a lot of people know about it and it has evolved quite nicely in recent years. Sensitive Object is a French company that sepecializes in the use of microphones to detect touches anywhere on an arbitrary objects. With multiple mics they can determine the location of touches or even dragging (as well as multiple dragging touches - not shown in the video below).



I've had a chance to play with it in person, and it's pretty impressive stuff. It works a lot better than I would expect. It doesn't detect touch locations using a triangulation technique (i.e. see how long it takes for the sound to reach each microphone) because that would vary greatly depending on the material the object was made of (plastic, metal, wood, etc) and depend on the shape of the object. Sensitive Object can do any shape like a vase, or statue.

They accomplish this using a pattern matching technique. Each touch sound gets compared to a known table of sound-to-location mappings. Which means you have to enter this mapping during a calibration step. (i.e. give the system a couple examples of touching each location that you want to recognize, touching here sounds like this.... touching there sounds like that). This upfront calibration step is somewhat heavy, but when you are done it's quite powerful. You could turn a cardboard box, a basketball, your car, or even your friend's head into a touch sensitive surface (if it's hard enough). Though, larger objects may only be "bang sensitive" surfaces.

"He was like..."

While certainly not the technology focused topic I usually post, I definitely wasted a few minutes trying to sing the following chorus in the true spirit of procrastination. Try to sing along (if you can). If you are linguistically incapable, just reading along is amusing enough.

"he was like
she was all
he was all
they were like
we were all,

like oh my god
like totally

we were like
that was all
they were all
he was like
she was like

all totally
like oh my god"



If this was not educational enough for you, the following "anthropological introduction to YouTube" has a boring title, but is an incredibly fascinating and entertaining discussion of the cultural and social phenomena within the depths of YouTube... and relevant to the video above. Like totally. (warning: 1 hour talk, but definitely one of the better uses of 1 hour in my life).

Nice Pen-based Input Research

One of the things I enjoy to using this blog for is to share cool projects from Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research. This post highlights projects by Gonzalo Ramos (or "Gonzo" for short) and his co-authors. He has worked on several projects demonstrating how much better pen input software could be. These are just a few I like.

1. The Zlider - A pressure sensitive slider widget that adds additional navigation and control capability to standard slider interactions. Academic research video below. Quick demo montage at beginning, but the demo meat is at 3:07


2. Using a Pen to Effortlessly Bridge Displays. Using a stylus, you can simply drag documents between computer screens or mobile devices. The pen motion also implicity defines the orientation of the displays relative to one another. Academic video below. Demos at the beginning and more mobile screen scenarios at around 2:43


3. Rolling the Pen as Input Using an external tracker and a Wacom tablet, rotating the pen in your fingers can be used to control another parameter without moving the stylus. Academic video below, demo meat at 2:19


You can check more of his projects on his website.

Some great Wiimote IR tracking projects

I've decided to collect some of my favorite projects I've seen people do with my Wiimote projects, derivatives of them, or distantly inspired (through the creator's own admissions). It's a surprise, and flattering to see how many people seem happy to credit me. Thanks all! The list gets more "unusual" the further you go down.

Two Wiimote Whiteboards to make a competative relay race:


Great IR wands for the Wiimote whiteboard. I've been meaning to make these, but I haven't gotten to it yet.


Some nice two handed, two finger pinching systems:




Wiimote Wheelchair art. Unfortunately, no video but more information at this link.


Head tracking prototypes with Anime assets. The effect of the girl coming out of the screen (about half way through the video) is very nicely done with the "haze" layer. His other videos are also worth checking out. I don't know what he does for a living, but he's good at it.


Wii Theremin gallantly created/performed by Ken Moore:


Finally, a video on "chicken head tracking". It doesn't use the Wii remote, but was posted as a response to my video and I love it!

Scratch Input and Low-Cost Multi-spectral material sensor

Chris Harrison, a PhD Student at my old program at CMU, presented a couple projects of his at UIST 2008 that I really really like. The first is his "Scratch Input" device. The basic idea is that if you place a senstive microphone on the bottom of a mobile device. Any large, hard surface you put it down on can now be used as an input gesture surface. A variety of gestures can be distinctly and reliably detected with some simple machine learning. Video (academic) below include a nice demo where he turns his entire wall into an MP3 player controller:



The other project he presented was a simple, cheap multi-spectral sensor for recognizing various materials. It includes an IR LED, UV LED, RGB LED, a photoresistor, and a TSL230 TOAS optical sensor. With these, he read the reflectively under different illuminations to recognize 27 different materials with 86.9% accuracy, be this your jeans, your backpack, your desk at home, your desk at work. This means coarse location awareness of mobile devices for cheap, some opportunities for more intelligent power management, and implicit security behaviors when placed on familiar or unfamiliar surfaces. Very nice work.

SurfaceWare - sensing glasses for Surface

My colleague, Paul Dietz, in the Applied Sciences group released a video of one of his first projects he did when he joined Microsoft. These glasses use the transparent material of the glass as prisms that sense the amount of liquid in them by watching the amount of internally reflected IR light. Check out the video:



If you aren't familiar with how Surface works, it is a rear projected table that also has a bright IR emitter inside that illuminates objects placed on the surface which are then visible to an IR camera. The video does a good job explaining how the glasses work.

This is actually a revisit of an older project of Paul's called iGlassware. That one used passively powered RFID sensor tags in the base of the glass to capacitively measure the liquid level. The table had a big RFID antenna in it. Paul was also a key developer of Mitsubishi Electric Research Lab's Diamond Touch table being skillfully demonstrated by Ed Tse below.



Ed is currently at Smart Technologies, who helped push out their new touch table: