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Electric sidemen: a look at Microsoft Songsmith: Page 1
arstechnica.com/reviews/apps/microsoft-songsmith-r... Electric sidemen: a look at Microsoft SongsmithBy Erica Sadun | Published: January 18, 2009 - 11:30PM CT Musical sketchbook
Product: Songsmith Microsoft Songsmith lets users create music in a novel way, by attaching a microphone to a Windows PC and singing into the mic. The Songsmith software automatically builds an accompaniment that matches the rhythm and tonality of the voice input, so that instantly, the vocals are augmented and transformed into a music composition. Reviewers around the Web are calling it "reverse karaoke," but a much better phrase would be a "musical sketchbook." You start with a tune in your head and Microsoft Songsmith helps craft that tune into a defined product, complete with chord progressions. Don't go into Songsmith expecting Bach-like counterpoint melodies or highly complex accompaniments, though. Songsmith creates backdrops to your tune, typically with the kind of chord strumming you might add on a piano or guitar, and a percussion track for good measure. Most importantly, it does this without human intervention, and without having to sit down and figure out the chord sequences by hand. After spending some time evaluating it, I found that the program works better than I expected. Here is the backing track it built as I sang from a Google News article on Fiji. (Google News is a great source of lorem ipsum placeholder lyrics.) As you can hear, the software automatically spaced out the progressions and included a couple of measures at the end that finished out the accompaniment. By building this music to match my melody, Songsmith was able to take a single musical idea and expand it into a fuller, richer audio experience. My tune transformed from a bare outline into a performance. Backing track (take 2) from Ars Technica on Vimeo Creating SongsIf you watch this Microsoft Songsmith ad, it's a little misleading. The ad suggests that you record while listening to pre-existing background tracks, the way you would with Apple's Garage Band. Yes, you sort of can do that, and I'll tell you how in a bit, but that's not the typical way in which you use the software. In Songsmith's default mode of operation, you record the song that's in your head while listening to a percussive beat. Only once you're finished recording does Songsmith come up with chords to match your melody. Song StarterSongsmith's default procedure for building songs starts by asking you to make several choices before you even start singing. You load what's called the "Song Starter," which is an interactive dialog. This dialog lets you choose the overall style and tempo for your new piece. You can choose from genres such as California Soft Rock, Dance Pop, or Funk. By default, Songsmith plays a sample track to give you a flavor of how the style works. Listening to these clips may make you think that you're supposed to improvise around a set chord progression, but the clips are there just to give you an idea of how your song will be styled. Once you make a selection, you are prompted to set a tempo and then the interface goes completely quiet. 
After selecting the style and tempo, you enter the recording session. Here, you can click the record button and start creating your song. Songsmith provides the beat and you basically sing to that. By default, you're given two measures as a lead in, although you can adjust this in the program options. The style you've already chosen determines the rhythm and time signature that you'll be using. Once recording starts, you just perform your song, however you like, and then click the stop button when you're done. Songsmith then calculates your accompaniment and instantly plays it back. When I tested this, there were no perceptible time lags to speak of; the algorithm was fast enough to be unnoticeable. I pressed record, sang, pressed stop and boom, there were the results. Bring Your Own Data: Google Opens Up Visualization API - ReadWriteWeb
www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_opens_visuali... Bring Your Own Data: Google Opens Up Visualization API
Written by Frederic Lardinois / November 3, 2008 11:55 AM
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According to Itai Raz from the Visualization API team, Google also created and documented an open-source Python library that will allow developers to start using the API quickly and which runs on Google's AppEngine. SalesforceToday, Salesforce.com also announced that it has created a number of tools that will make using the Visualization API easier for Salesforce's own customers and developers. These tools include code snippets and API harnesses and will allow Salesforce customers to create custom reporting and analysis applications for Salesforce's CRM solution or on top of Saleforce's newly announced Force.com platform.
Reporting in the CloudAs Google points out, more and more companies are storing their data in the cloud, so being able to visualize this data and creating good reporting tools is becoming increasingly important. Creating these reports in the cloud as well seems like a logical step, and we expect that quite a few new applications will be created on top of the Visualization API.
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User Experience: Learning from the Pros - ReadWriteWeb
www.readwriteweb.com/archives/user_experience_lear... User Experience: Learning from the Pros
Written by Marshall Kirkpatrick / September 9, 2008 12:41 PM
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What's a company to do? Luckily, there are people who specialize in the field of User Experience (UX) and many of them share their best practices freely. We see applications all the time that are based on a great idea but are poorly designed in a way that leaves us frustrated and unlikely to return as users. Below are some of our favorite resources for companies that want to smarten-up quickly about User Experience. Joshua Porter, Bokardo Joshua Porter's three-part series from last summer is the best overview of UX design focused on social websites that we've seen. It's framed in terms of things not to do, but there's great advice here like don't focus on too many different features, don't overfocus on the social value without delivering direct personal value (what Porter calls the "Del.icio.us Lesson" - personal value precedes network value) and don't fail to archive knowledge for re-use so your community manager doesn't have to spend all their time answering the same elementary questions from every new user. This series is a great place to start and it alone should give any company a lot to think about and implement. Trevor van Gorp, Boxes and Arrows Trevor van Gorp wrote an article in this month's issue of Boxes and Arrows about "flow." We're most familiar with this concept from Kathy Sierra's discussion of it. Van Gorp defines flow as an experience charecterized by users feeling: That's what we want from the apps we use! That kind of experience will keep us engaged for long enough to invest time and other resources that we'll want to come back to and it will give us the emotional incentive to do so, as well. How can you help your users get into such a mode? Check out van Gorp's post and the conversation in comments. Steve Psomas, UXMatters The above tips and perspectives are a great start, but if you can swing it it's a good idea to hire someone who specializes in UX work. Whether you're interested in evaluating prospects for that hire more intelligently or looking for more information about the field for yourself, Steve Psomas article on UX competencies really helps the reader understand the details of the field. Read this one and you'll be much better informed about the world of UX. Also worth reading for anyone is Luke Wroblewski's October post on UXMatters titled Scalable Design, where you can find tips on planning your product and site design today to enable easier growth and change in the future. Who wouldn't want to do that? Next StepsCase studies are a great way to learn about anything. After an initial exposure to the resources above, we recommend checking out the following:
Conclusion: UX MattersThe above are some of our favorite UX resources and we can't emphasize enough how important this kind of thing is for new startups. You can have the most wonderful idea in the world and if your site suffers usability or user experience problems then your odds of survival are not good. We want you, friends with startups, to survive and thrive. Let us know about your favorite User Experience resources in comments below. Image: "Forever Flowing" Creative Commons licensed by Lisa Ruokis Emotional robot has empathy, understands your frustration - Engadget
www.engadget.com/2008/07/18/emotional-robot-has-em... Emotional robot has empathy, understands your frustrationby Darren Murph, posted Jul 18th 2008 at 8:21AM  Not that robots with emotions are anything new, but a project going on in Europe could perfect the art of crafting mechanical people that can "learn when a person is sad, happy or angry." The Feelix Growing project is getting even more advanced with software that gives robots the power to understand how a person is feeling based on feedback from cameras and sensors. The bots look at a human's facial expression and key in on their voice and proximity to determine what kind of mood they're in. As with the recently announced UMass Mobile Manipulator, this creature too learns from experience, and there's a video explaining just what we mean waiting for you in the read link.[Via Physorg] Filed under: Robots Tags: emotion, emotional, Emotional robot, EmotionalRobot, europe, Feelix Growing, FeelixGrowing, learn, learning, research, software Linden Labs and IBM Break the Metaverse Barrier, Teleport Across Virtual Worlds - ReadWriteWeb
www.readwriteweb.com/archives/virtual_world_intero... Linden Labs and IBM Break the Metaverse Barrier, Teleport Across Virtual Worlds
Written by Marshall Kirkpatrick / July 8, 2008 8:44 AM
/ 3 Comments
While unaffiliated parties have created versions of this process before, Linden says theirs is the first effort to achieve trans-world teleportation without logging out of one world and logging in to the other. No virtual goods were transported across the barrier, a major concern for Second Lifers concerned with virtual property theft and rapid depreciation of their assets' value. We wrote about initial interoperability discussions when they began in October. Author Nick Carr brought up then, only partly tongue in cheek, the concern that World of Warcraft avatars could attack and conquer parts of Second Life if they were allowed to pass from world to world. All concerns aside for the moment, the possibilities are very exciting. Below is a corny but appropriate video produced about the event. (Removed until autoplay issue resolved, but available in the original announcement.) Linden faces widespread user dissatisfaction about its platform's stability, intellectual property protection and other concerns. A lively discussion in comments on the announcement is a good place to get a look at the public mood. Interoperability across virtual worlds could be an important step in maintaining the viability of Second Life. As an increasing number of virtual worlds proliferate, user and digital asset data portability is as likely to be essential for Second Life as it will be for other platforms online. Walled gardens will face increasing competition from the open world at large, so taking a leadership role in enabling that openness is a good way to thrive in the coming era of openness and portability. You can laugh at Second Life and you can complain about it if you want, but we are excited about this news. Cynicism may have its place, but we'd argue that today isn't the time for it. We congratulate Linden and IBM for their achievement and are excited to see what will come of this big step. Watch for news about the general availability of this functionality - once policy concerns are dealt with or once outside parties figure out how to achieve the same thing.
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Google Ventures Into Virtual Reality With ‘Lively’ - NYTimes.com
www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-TEC-Google-Vi... Google Ventures Into Virtual Reality With ‘Lively’By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: July 8, 2008
Filed at 7:03 p.m. ET SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- In the latest expansion beyond its main mission of organizing the world's information, Internet search leader Google Inc. hopes to orchestrate more fantasizing on the Web. The Mountain View-based company unveiled a free service Tuesday in which three-dimensional software enables people to congregate in electronic rooms and other computer-manufactured versions of real life. The service, called ''Lively,'' represents Google's answer to a 5-year-old site, Second Life, where people deploy animated alter egos known as avatars to navigate through virtual reality. Google thinks Lively will encourage even more people to dive into alternate realities because it isn't tethered to one Web site like Second Life, and it doesn't cost anything to use. After installing a small packet of software, a user can enter Lively from other Web sites, like social networking sites and blogs. The Lively application already works on Facebook, one of the Web's hottest hangouts, and Google is working on a version suitable for an even larger online social network, News Corp.'s MySpace. ''We know people already spend a lot of time online socializing, so we just want to try to make it more enjoyable,'' said Niniane Wang, a Google engineering manager who oversaw Lively's creation over the past year. Although Google is best known for the search engine that generates most of its profits, the company has introduced other services that are widely used without making much, if any, money. Google's peripheral products include its 3-D ''Earth'' software, Picasa for sharing photos and programs for word processing, calendars and spreadsheets. Google has no plans to sell advertising in Lively, Wang said. But the service could still indirectly help the company if it encourages people to remain online longer. Google's management reasons that more frequent Web surfing ultimately will lead to more moneymaking clicks on the ads it shows alongside its search results and millions of other Web sites. Lively's users will be able to sculpt an avatar that can be male, female or even a different species. An avatar can assume a new identity, change clothes or convey emotions with a few clicks of the mouse. The service also enables users to create different digital dimensions to roam, from a coffeehouse to an exotic island. The settings can be decorated with a wide variety of furniture, including large-screen televisions that can be set up to play different clips from YouTube.com, Google's video-sharing service. Lively users can then invite their friends and family into their virtual realities, where they can chat, hug, cry, laugh and interact as if they were characters in a video game. As a precaution, Google is requiring Lively's users to be at least 13 years old -- a constraint that hasn't been enough to prevent young children from running into trouble on other social spots on the Web. Google spent several months testing Lively among a group of Arizona State University students before opening the service to the public through its ''Labs'' section -- a technology sandbox set up for the company's experimental products. ------ On The Net: Drupal and The Future of News - O'Reilly XML Blog
www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2008/05/drupal_and_the...
Is Drupal on your IT map yet? Chances are pretty good that either you are shaking your head vigorously in the affirmative, or you have no idea what I’m talking about. Drupal is an open source web content management system … though this is actually a little like saying that a Jaguar is a car; it’s true as far as it goes, but the description doesn’t really do Drupal justice. Drupal started out in 2000 as a community project in Belgium originally called Druppel. The creator, Dries Buytaert, planned originally on calling it Dorp (which means Village in Dutch), but he introduced a typo when filling out the domain registration, and liked the way that it sounded. The idea behind it was simple - build a CMS system that promoted the concept of community rather than simply being a way to store content. To do this, Drupal was build early on around the idea of content nodes (think of them as very simple documents with a title and body) and the heavy use of syndication. Drupal has long been just underneath the radar. My first encounter with it was in 2003, when I became involved with a group of programmers supporting the Howard Dean campaign, where we settled upon Drupal as a good foundation for an easy to roll out web CMS that could support local grassroot groups. Part of the ability of the Dean campaign to raise funds on what amounted to a shoestring budget could be effectively attributed to the Druapl implementation, at the time dubbed DeanSpace. After the election, the developers submitted the extensions back into the Drupal code base as CivicSpace, and this is still one of the most widely used open source political sites to date. Drupal gained further clout with the rise of blogging in 2004-2005, and much of the functionality that has been added to Drupal has served only to strengthen this blogging capability. The company Bryght was founded in Vancouver in 2004 to sell hosted Drupal services, and along the way significantly pushed Drupal into the spotlight as one of the premier blogging and social networking platforms (Bryght was recently acquired by sibling Vancouver company Raincity Studios, combining a cutting edge web design company with the hosting services Bryght itself provides. Drupal has gone through a number of iterations, and just recently released its Version 6.0 release. Having worked with it myself in its beta incarnation, I have to commend the many open source developers who put in countless hours in this version - Drupal is finally coming into its own as perhaps one of the best web platforms out there … and the irony is that blogging, while still an integral part of its underlying system, has taken a back seat to its extensive use of taxonomies, feed manipulations and effective use of AJAX systems. The Power of Classified SyndicationOne of the more intriguing sites I’ve seen recently is the just released Eureka! Science News site. I’m something of a science junkie, and regularly monitor feeds from Scientific American, the National Science Foundation, Discovery, and many other sites. The idea behind Eureka! is relatively simple - they subscribe to the same data feeds and a host of others, but use a processing algorithm on all incoming content to apply classications to them automatically. Michael Imbeault, the brains behind Eureka, described his own frustrations with existing tools that motivated his search for a new solution:
One of the most important innovations within Drupal is the use of Taxonomies and Views as the basis for nearly everything. Most people, especially those in the XML and data modeling community, see a taxonomy as a collection of names - the tags used in a given XML document; database people have a similar definition. The concept behind Drupal taxonomies is considerably more robust - a taxonomy is a collection of terms within a given vocabulary (something aking to a namespace), each term of which can in turn be attached to one or more nodes of content. For instance, suppose that I have two articles - one about the successful mission in getting the Mars Lander to the red planet, the other about the collision of the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxies - that I wish to add to the site. The first could be classified with the terms “Mars,Mars Lander,Robot,Astronomy,Planets,Science” and the second “Milky Way, Andromeda, Galaxy,Astronomy,Science”. In this particular case, the two stories “intersect” at the terms “Astronomy” and “Science” - meaning that if I selected either of these terms, I could have the system create a list of both of these stories, whereas “Galaxy” would in turn collect only a single entry. These collections are analogous to the collections of news feeds (indeed, there’s a DEEP connection here that I’ll explore in a subsequent article), meaning that I could actually syndicate collections of items based solely upon the categorization terms. Intriguingly, this kind of process can be throught of as the creation of virtual (parametric) folders of content. Now, if you take the taxonomy and define relationships between terms, then this analogy becomes even stronger. For instance, you could create the relationship: + Science
+ Astronomy
+ Planets
- Mars
+ Galaxies
- Milky Way
- Andromeda
+ Technology
+ Robot
- Mars Lander
This relationship basically means that if you click on science, you’ll get both of the stories, while clicking on Planets will only yield (”contain”) one story. In other words, you have the containment capabilites of folders without having to specifically store content within those folders - you’re only storing the relationships of the corresponding taxonomic terms. The challenge with such tagging is that it is both unpredictable and time consuming, especially when trying to tag with multiple terms. This in fact has often been the Achilles Heel of most folksonomy collections - the process of categorization is comparatively expensive unless you’re disciplined to do it or are passionate about the topic in question. What this means is that folksonomies work well in some areas, but if you’re trying to get free taxonomies implemented in a business or research environment, getting people beyond the creators to tag content becomes untenable fairly quickly. This is why the approach Imbeault has taken should be looked at very closely by other organizations. He recognized that the best approach that he could take was not to attempt to manually tag the content himself, but rather to analyse the content via Bayse filters to determine which terms in a previously defined vocabulary most closely matched the topics, perhaps with a separate set of terms in a free taxonomy that matched unique or near unique terms in each of the articles found in a syndication feed. This way, rather than creating a wholesale text-index system for each article, he only needed to keep the links and the corresponding keyword terms in one or two vocabulary sets Wholesale text-indexing of content for any given sector is in general not cost-effective unless you have the ability to handle large (even massive) server farms; search engine optimizations can help, but realistically, relevance at an affordable price involves using Baysian methods and stochastic (probabilistic) tools that can be tailored to your specific audience, by performing the analysis and assignation of articles to vocabularies which work best for you. Content Creation, Content SyndicationThe manual version of this process is in fact one of the major roles that an editor brings to the table; most content falls into one of two types of formats. The first kind consists of articles that fall into specific topical buckets - biology, physics, sports, finance, and so forth. These topics perform the same role as the taxonomic terms described above, save that in most print media, very few articles will be in more than one such bucket at any given time. On the web, where it’s trivial to assign such vocabulary terms to a given article, you can instead have the same article appear in several different buckets at once. This fact alone is forcing the editor to become more of a formal taxonomist than he or she was in the past. The second type of article is the “column” which today is basically synonymous with the blog. In this case, it is the authority of the content creator that provides the terms of a vocabulary. However, even here, there’s usually a secondary taxonomy at work that is topical in nature - what the blogger is talking about in this particular issue. Editors of online content understand that this “reputation taxonomy” is a major organizing principle of “opinion content”, but also recognize that much of this opinion content also holds topical interest to readers beyond the reputation of the author. Stochastic analysis of content introduces something new to this mix, however; it provides a very inexpensive semantic layer that doesn’t necessarily require human intervention. In this sense, a stochastic analyser begins to look increasingly like a compiler - something that will apply a set of rules to determine the abstract “keyword space” of an article. Interestingly, most early compilers were often seen as tools that would get you started, but a programmer may very well have to go back in and “tweak” the results with special assembly language code in order to get better performance. Today, however, most compilers are so sophisticated that there are almost no tweaks that can be made afterwards that won’t in fact degrade the quality or performance of the final application. We’re probably some ways from the point where hand-tweaking of stochastic analysers will be counterproductive, but the trend will be towards that - computers become better at abstracting information from an article than people are, at least for those processes that are relevant to classification or navigation. The effect of this upon news and related factual content will be (is already) profound. The role of editor as arbiter and gate keeper is increasingly becoming automated because the taxonomy systems are becoming too complex for any one person to keep abreast of. However, this is also important because taxonomy is the new navigation, something which I believe Drupal does inordinately well. Most news sites have transcended the level where a human being can reasonably serve to build navigation, search engines face a problem of geometric expansion of content in the long term, and thus its likely that taxonomic navigation will be the dominant face of finding news moving forward. Watch the space of stochastic taxonomic analyzers; I suspect it will be a significant growth industry in the comparatively near term. The irony of course is that in building the initial web, the metaphor most commonly used was that of the magazine, but as with any new technology, the metaphors that drove the initial adoption eventually fade away as the capabilities of the new technology shape the parameters of what can be done in that medium. Whether the existing news providers will in fact survive that transition remains to be seen. Kurt Cagle is the managing editor of XML.com. He lives in Victoria, British Columbia, and is beginning to wonder what happened to summer. This notebook contains a collection of Web site snippets that may be used as starting points for student presentations in my User-Centered Design and Human-Computer Interaction classes. They are arranged by topics, but unfortunately the "public" view is not very flexible, and a bit tedious to use. They were also added as I happen to encounter them, and are not necessarily arranged in a meaningful manner within the broad topic categories.
If you know of a better repository, let me know. For me, critical criteria are: - easy to collect (select + right-click to save) - maintain formatting and "hidden" content (URLs, Javascript, tags, ...) - hierarchical organization (e.g. according to the topics of the course) - easy labeling with keywords (for more flexible retrieval, in addition to the hierarchical scheme) - flexible display (e.g. based on hierarchy, keywords, time added, time last viewed, possibly via RSS) - (semi-) automatic categorization (suggestions for categories, keywords, related other items) - open for collaborative approaches (multiple contributors) There are several tools available that provide some of the functionality, but so far, I haven't found anything that satisfies all or at least most of the above requirements. Wikis and blog editors are probably closest, but they seem mostly intended for authoring, while I'm looking for something that makes collecting and annotating existing material easier. Usability Evaluation Methods
Wizard of Oz experiment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizard_of_Oz_experiment Wizard of Oz experimentFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaJump to: navigation, search
In the field of human-computer interaction, a Wizard of Oz experiment is a research experiment in which subjects interact with a computer system that subjects believe to be autonomous, but which is actually being operated or partially operated by an unseen human being. The name of the experiment comes from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz story, in which an ordinary man hides behind a curtain and pretends, through the use of "amplifying" technology, to be a powerful wizard.
[edit] ConceptThe term Wizard of Oz (originally OZ Paradigm) has come into common usage in the fields of experimental psychology, human factors, ergonomics, linguistics, and usability engineering to describe a testing or iterative design methodology wherein an experimenter (the "wizard"), in a laboratory setting, simulates the behavior of a theoretical intelligent computer application (often by going into another room and intercepting all communications between participant and system). Sometimes this is done with the participant's a-priori knowledge and sometimes it is a low-level deceit employed to manage the participant's expectations and encourage natural behaviors (though always, one would hope, with appropriate disclosure during the debriefing part of the experiments). For example, a test participant may think he or she is communicating with a computer using a speech interface, when the participant's words are actually being secretly entered into the computer by a person in another room (the "wizard") and processed as a text stream, rather than as an audio stream. The missing system functionality that the wizard provides may be implemented in later versions of the system (or may even be speculative capabilities that current-day systems do not have), but its precise details are generally considered irrevelant to the study. In testing situations, the goal of such experiments may be to observe the use and effectiveness of a proposed user interface by the test participants, rather than to measure the quality of an entire system. [edit] EtymologyJohn F. ("Jeff") Kelley coined the terms "Wizard of OZ" and "OZ Paradigm" for this purpose circa 1980 to describe the method he developed during his dissertation work at The Johns Hopkins University (his dissertation advisor was Professor Alphonse Chapanis, the "Godfather of Human Factors and Engineering Psychology"). Amusingly enough, in addition to some one-way mirrors and such, there literally was a curtain separating Jeff, as the "Wizard", from view by the participant during the study. An unpublished fact about the etymology of the term in this context: Dr. Kelley did originally have a definition for the "OZ" acronym (aside from the obvious parallels with the 1900 book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum). "Offline Zero" was a reference to the fact that an experimenter (the "Wizard") was interpreting the users' inputs in real time during the simulation phase. Colleagues considered this acronym to be contrived and he eventually dropped it. [edit] SignificanceThe Wizard of OZ method (unlike the eponymous "wizard" in the book) is very powerful. In its original application, Dr. Kelley was able to create a simple keyboard-input natural language recognition system that far exceeded the recognition rates of any of the far more complex systems of the day. The thinking current among many computer scientists and linguists at the time was that, in order for a computer to be able to "understand" natural language enough to be able to assist in useful tasks, the software would have to be attached to a formidable "dictionary" having a large number of categories for each word. The categories would enable a very complex parsing algorithm to unravel the ambiguities inherent in naturally produced language. The daunting task of creating such a dictionary led many to believe that computers simply would never truly "understand" language until they could be "raised" and "experience life" as humans, since humans seem to apply a life's worth of experiences to the interpretation of language. The key enabling factor for the first use of the OZ method was that the system was designed to work in a single context (calendar-keeping), which constrained the complexity of language encountered from users to the extent where a simple language processing model was sufficient to meet the goals of the application. The processing model was a two-pass keyword/keyphrase matching approach, based loosely on the algorithms employed in Weizenbaum's famous Eliza program. By inducing participants to generate language samples in the context of solving an actual task (using a computer that they believed actually understood what they were typing), the variety and complexity of the lexical structures gathered was greatly reduced and simple keyword matching algorithms could be developed to address the actual language collected. This first use of OZ was in the context of an Iterative design approach. In the early development sessions, the experimenter simulated the system in toto, performing all the database queries and composing all the responses to the participants by hand. As the process matured, the experimenter was able to replace human interventions, piece by piece, with newly-created developed code (which, at each phase, was designed to accurately process all the inputs that were generated in preceding steps). By the end of the process, the experimenter was able to observe the sessions in a "hands-off" mode (and measure the recognition rates of the completed program). OZ was important because it addressed the obvious criticism:
The answer turned out to be:
In the 23 years that followed initial publication, the OZ method has been employed in a wide variety of settings, notably in the prototyping and usability testing of proposed user interface designs in advance of having actual application software in place. [edit] ReferencesHere are some of the original (and subsequent) references on the subject (the method has been picked up in many research domains, and there are numerous subsequent references, only a few of which are listed here). Summary of the technical aspects of the work: Kelley, J.F., "CAL - A Natural Language program developed with the OZ Paradigm: Implications for Supercomputing Systems". First International Conference on Supercomputing Systems (St. Petersburg, Florida, 16-20 December 1985), New York: ACM, pp. 238-248 Brief description of the method: Kelley, J.F., "An empirical methodology for writing user-friendly natural language computer applications". Proceedings of ACM SIG-CHI '83 Human Factors in Computing systems (Boston, 12-15 December 1983), New York: ACM, pp. 193-196. [1] The best description of the method: Kelley, J.F., "An iterative design methodology for user-friendly natural language office information applications". ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, March 1984, 2:1, pp. 26-41. [2] The unpublished dissertation itself: Kelley, J.F., "Natural Language and computers: Six empirical steps for writing an easy-to-use computer application". Unpublished doctoral dissertation, The Johns Hopkins University, 1983. (Item 8321592 can be obtained from University Microfilms International; 300 North Zeeb Road; Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106.) Subsequent References and implementations (a sampling of 20+ years of citations): Akers, D. 2006. Wizard of Oz for participatory design: inventing a gestural interface for 3D selection of neural pathway estimates. In CHI '06 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Montréal, Québec, Canada, April 22 - 27, 2006). CHI '06. ACM Press, New York, NY, 454-459. [3] Höysniemi, J., Hämäläinen, P., and Turkki, L. 2004. Wizard of Oz prototyping of computer vision based action games for children. In Proceeding of the 2004 Conference on interaction Design and Children: Building A Community (Maryland, June 01 - 03, 2004). IDC '04. ACM Press, New York, NY, 27-34. [4] Molin, L. 2004. Wizard-of-Oz prototyping for co-operative interaction design of graphical user interfaces. In Proceedings of the Third Nordic Conference on Human-Computer interaction (Tampere, Finland, October 23 - 27, 2004). NordiCHI '04, vol. 82. ACM Press, New York, NY, 425-428. [5] Lai, J. and Yankelovich, N. 2003. Conversational speech interfaces. In the Human-Computer interaction Handbook: Fundamentals, Evolving Technologies and Emerging Applications, J. A. Jacko and A. Sears, Eds. Human Factors And Ergonomics. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ, 698-713. Gleicher, M. L., Heck, R. M., and Wallick, M. N. 2002. A framework for virtual videography. In Proceedings of the 2nd international Symposium on Smart Graphics (Hawthorne, New York, June 11 - 13, 2002). SMARTGRAPH '02, vol. 24. ACM Press, New York, NY, 9-16. [6] Klemmer, S. R., Sinha, A. K., Chen, J., Landay, J. A., Aboobaker, N., and Wang, A. 2000. Suede: a Wizard of Oz prototyping tool for speech user interfaces. In Proceedings of the 13th Annual ACM Symposium on User interface Software and Technology (San Diego, California, United States, November 06 - 08, 2000). UIST '00. ACM Press, New York, NY, 1-10. [7] Hewett, Thomas T. (et al), "Curricula for Human-Computer Interaction", ACM SIGCHI, 1992, 1996, Chapter 2. [8] Piernot, P. P., Felciano, R. M., Stancel, R., Marsh, J., and Yvon, M. 1995. Designing the PenPal: blending hardware and software in a user-interface for children. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Denver, Colorado, United States, May 07 - 11, 1995). I. R. Katz, R. Mack, L. Marks, M. B. Rosson, and J. Nielsen, Eds. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM Press/Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., New York, NY, 511-518. [9] Prager, J. M., Lamberti, D. M., Gardner, D. L., and Balzac, S. R. 1990. REASON: an intelligent user assistant for interactive environments. IBM Syst. J. 29, 1 (Jan. 1990), 141-164. Dahlbäck, N. and Jönsson, A. 1989. Empirical studies of discourse representations for natural language interfaces. In Proceedings of the Fourth Conference on European Chapter of the Association For Computational Linguistics (Manchester, England, April 10 - 12, 1989). European Chapter Meeting of the ACL. Association for Computational Linguistics, Morristown, NJ, 291-298. [10] Carroll, J. and Aaronson, A. 1988. Learning by doing with simulated intelligent help. Commun. ACM 31, 9 (Aug. 1988), 1064-1079. [11] Gould, J. D. and Lewis, C. 1985. Designing for usability: key principles and what designers think. Commun. ACM 28, 3 (Mar. 1985), 300-311. [12] Embley, D. W. and Kimbrell, R. E. 1985. A scheme-driven natural language query translator. In Proceedings of the 1985 ACM Thirteenth Annual Conference on Computer Science (New Orleans, Louisiana, United States). CSC '85. ACM Press, New York, NY, 292-297. [13] Good, M. D., Whiteside, J. A., Wixon, D. R., and Jones, S. J. 1984. Building a user-derived interface. Commun. ACM 27, 10 (Oct. 1984), 1032-1043. [14]
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizard_of_Oz_experiment"
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J.F. Kelley's Professional BioWhere did the usability term Wizard of Oz come from?[ Wikipedia article on this topic | Jeff's Personal Page | Jeff's Professional Bio ]
The term Wizard of Oz (originally OZ Paradigm) has come into common usage in the fields of Experimental Psychology, Human Factors, Ergonomics and Usability Engineering to describe a testing or iterative design methodology wherein an experimenter (the "Wizard"), in a laboratory setting, simulates the behavior of a theoretical intelligent computer application (often by going into another room and intercepting all communications between participant and system). Sometimes this is done with the participant's a-priori knowledge and sometimes it is a low-level deceit employed to manage the participant's expectations and encourage natural behaviors (though always, I would hope, with appropriate disclosure during the debriefing part of the experiments).
I coined that term around 1980 to describe the methodology I developed during my dissertation work at The Johns Hopkins University (my dissertation advisor was Professor Alphonse Chapanis, the "Godfather of Human Factors and Engineering Psychology"). Amusingly enough, in addition to some one-way mirrors and such, there literally was a curtain separating me, as the "Wizard", from view by the participant during the study.
Here's an interesting tidbit that you may not find in the literature: I did originally have a definition for the "OZ" acronym (aside from the obvious parallels with the1900 book by L. Frank Baum). "Offline Zero" was a reference to the fact that an experimenter (the "Wizard") was interpreting the users' inputs in real time during the simulation phase. Folks laughed at this lily-gilding as an expression of my acronymophillia and I eventually dropped it.
The OZ methodology is very powerful. In its original application, I was able to create a simple keyboard-input natural language recognition system that far exceeded the recognition rates of any of the far more complex systems of the day. The key enabling factor was that the system was designed to work in a single context (calendar-keeping), which constrained the complexity of language encountered from users to the extent where a simple language processing model was sufficient to meet the goals of the application. (The processing model was a two-pass keyword/keyphrase matching approach, based loosely on the algorithms employed in Weizenbaum's famous Eliza program).
OZ was important because it addressed the obvious criticism:
Who can afford to use an iterative methodology to build a separate natural language system (dictionaries, syntax) for each new context?
The answer turned out to be:
By using an empirical approach like OZ, anyone can afford to do this; my dictionary and syntax growth reached asymptote (better than 90% recognition) after only 16 experimental trials and my resulting program, with dictionaries, was less than 300k of code.
Here are some of the original references on the subject (the methodology has been picked up in may research areas, and there are numerous subsequent references).
Summary of the technical aspects of the work: Kelley, J.F., "CAL - A Natural Language program developed with the OZ Paradigm: Implications for Supercomputing Systems". First International Conference on Supercomputing Systems (St. Petersburg, Florida, 16-20 December 1985), New York: ACM, pp. 238-248
Brief desciption of the methodology: Kelley, J.F., "An empirical methodology for writing user-friendly natural language computer applications". . Proceedings of ACM SIG-CHI '83 Human Factors in Computing systems (Boston, 12-15 December 1983), New York: ACM, pp. 193-196.
**The BEST DESCRIPTION of the methodology: Kelley, J.F., "An iterative design methodology for user-friendly natural language office information applications" . ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, March 1984, 2:1, pp. 26-41.
Another tidbit: in the above-referenced article, I published one of my two life-time-best puns: I refer to the fact that during one of the early phases of the OZ methodology, the experimenter simulates the system in toto. ("in toto" is Latin for "altogether"; Toto was also the name of Dorothy's dog in the 1900 story.)
The unpublished dissertation itself: Kelley, J.F., "Natural Language and computers: Six empirical steps for writing an easy-to-use computer application". Unpublished doctoral dissertation, The Johns Hopkins University, 1983. (Can be obtained from University Microfilms International; 300 North Zeeb Road; Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106.)
A separate task-analysis study, done in preparation for the application design: Kelley, J.F. & Chapanis, A., "How professional persons keep their calendars: Implications for computerization". Journal of Occupational Psychology, 1982, 55, 241-256.
 User Interaction Methods
Technology Review: Less-Invasive Brain Interfaces
www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article.... Friday, November 21, 2008
Less-Invasive Brain Interfaces
Electrical activity from the surface of the brain may be precise enough to control prostheses, research shows.
By Emily Singer
Using neural activity recorded from a sheet of electrodes laid directly on the surface of a patient's brain, scientists can predict the movement of fingers, as well as which of several sounds the patient is imagining. Eventually, researchers hope to use the findings to develop intuitive neural prostheses, such as a robotic hand that moves its fingers with as little mental effort as it takes to move real ones, or a computer interface that detects imagined words. To realize this vision, scientists are also developing smaller, more flexible technology, which could be more easily implanted and make better contact with the brain. Details of the latest brain-computer interface technology were presented this week at the Society for Neurosciences conference in Washington, DC. "It could create the basis for a brain-computer interface that is very intuitive, and a recording platform that is very robust," says Gerwin Schalk, a research scientist at the Wadsworth Center, in Albany, NY, who led one of the projects. Schalk and his colleagues studied epilepsy patients undergoing a procedure known as electrocorticography (ECoG), in which a flat array of electrodes is laid over an exposed section of cortex to record electrical activity. Normally, surgeons use this information to pinpoint the source of seizures and to map the location of specific brain functions, which must be avoided during surgery. The technique generates a better spatial resolution than electroencephalography (EEG), a noninvasive approach that records activity through the scalp. ECoG is now being explored for use in brain-computer interfaces. "There's a growing interest in use of ECoG signals because nothing penetrates into the brain, and that appeals to people more than penetrating electrodes," says Marc Schieber, a physician and scientist at the University of Rochester Medical School, who was not involved in the research. Schalk and his collaborators recorded electrical activity from the motor cortex and Broca's area, a part of the brain involved in speech, in five patients as they moved their hands and fingers in specific ways and vocalized or imagined specific sounds. The researchers then used specially developed algorithms to search the neural activity for patterns relating to a certain movement or sound. "We can tell you how they are flexing each of their fingers," says Schalk. What's more, the researchers could determine in real time which of two sounds a patient was imagining. This kind of information could be used to control a brain-computer interface, providing a lifeline for people with severe paralysis, such as that associated with end-stage amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a neurodegenerative disease, or locked-in syndrome, the result of a specific kind of stroke that leaves the patient unable to move or communicate. "If you're paralyzed and can't speak but your cortex is still okay, the ability to transmit a few words like 'yes' or 'no,' 'food' and 'water,' could be very useful," says Schieber. "But the question is, will we be able to decode all the phonemes of human language from ECoG signals? Can you get enough specific information to distinguish different kinds of grasps, like a pinch versus how you hold a hammer?" In order to use the information to control a prosthesis or computer, scientists will also need to be able to extract the relevant information in real time. (In the current project, the analysis was done after the neural recording.) Schalk and others are studying ECoG as a possible alternative to electrodes implanted into brain tissue. Scientists have made rapid progress using the latter as an interface for prosthetic devices, recently showing that monkeys can feed themselves with a robotic arm controlled by a brain-computer interface, and paralyzed patients can move a cursor on a computer screen using similar equipment. It's not yet clear that ECoG, which records extracellular electrical activity and thus averages information coming from different cells, will be able to provide the same accuracy as implanted electrodes, which record activity from single cells. "As far as limb control, I think it will be somewhat basic," says Andrew Schwartz, a neuroscientist at the University of Pittsburgh. However, ECoG possesses some significant advantages. With implanted electrodes, the quality of the recorded signals degrades over time, and the stiff electrodes can sometimes move within the squishy brain, thus requiring recalibration of the system. ECoG devices are less sensitive to movement. And because they lie on the surface of the brain, they may be less susceptible to the immune reaction thought to impair implanted electrodes. "Surface electrodes are more likely to be fit for long-term use," says Schalk. Miniaturized ECoG devices now under development may make this technology even more appealing. With the current procedure, a surgeon must remove a large piece of skull to insert the electrode array. But Justin Williams, a biological engineer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is developing a miniature ECoG device that could be fed through a small hole in the skull and then unfurl to cover a larger area of the cortical surface. Made of platinum wires embedded in a flexible polymer called polyimide, which is frequently used in electronics, the electrode array is flexible and sticks to the wet brain. That means it moves as the brain moves, capturing a better signal. "It acts like Saran wrap on a Jell-O mold," says Williams. Copyright Technology Review 2008. 3D Display Offers Glimpse of Future Mediaby Lisa Zyga, Electronic Devices / Hardware
The 3D display system, developed by researchers at the University of Southern California, uses a spinning mirror to reflect images in all directions. Image credit: Graphics Lab at USC.
But the overall 3D display system, developed by researchers at the Graphics Lab at the University of Southern California, is real technology that could one day transform visual entertainment.
The 3D display can project both virtual as well as real images from a recorded movie. The researchers, Professor Paul Debevec and his colleagues, hope that the display´s advantages will overcome many of the challenges faced by 3D technology. For instance, their 3D display is autosterescopic, meaning viewers don´t need to wear special viewing glasses to see the 3D effects. The display is also omnidirectional, so that multiple viewers can watch the display from all directions and heights. To achieve the high quality, the researchers modified a video projector to project images at more than 4,000 frames per second. Also, the display is interactive, as demonstrated in this video showing a user controlling the 3D human head with a remote control. It can update content at 200 Hz, or 200 times per second. The video projector projects high-speed video onto the rapidly spinning mirror, and the projector and mirror are synchronized so that, as the mirror turns, it reflects a different image to viewers in all directions. As the mirror rotates up to 20 times per second, a viewer´s vision creates the illusion of a floating object at the center of the mirror. The image is enclosed in a glass box, to protect anything (such as a hand) from touching the spinning mirrors. "While flat electronic displays represent a majority of user experiences, it is important to realize that flat surfaces represent only a small portion of our physical world," the team explains on its Web site. "Our real world is made of objects, in all their three-dimensional glory. The next generation of displays will begin to represent the physical world around us, but this progression will not succeed unless it is completely invisible to the user: no special glasses, no fuzzy pictures, and no small viewing zones." The Graphics Lab has also been involved with creating films, computer animations, and other graphics projects. More information: 3D Display Research Page © 2008 PhysOrg.com Brain Scanners, Fingercams Take Computer Interfaces Beyond Multitouch | Gadget Lab from Wired.com
blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/09/brain-scanners.html Brain Scanners, Fingercams Take Computer Interfaces Beyond Multitouch
With their easy-to-use touch screens, Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch are driving home the idea that computing can be more than just tapping away at a keyboard and clicking a mouse. So it's no surprise that multitouch displays (screens that are sensitive to the pressure of more than one finger) are capturing the imaginations of other manufacturers, including Samsung, Palm and Hewlett-Packard. But multitouch is merely the first step of a coming revolution in the way people interact with computers. That future may include using neurotransmitters to help translate thoughts into computing actions, face detection combined with eye tracking and speech recognition, and haptics technology that uses the sense of touch to communicate with the user. "Computing of today is primarily designed for seated individuals doing office work in the developed world," says Scott Klemmer, co-director of the Human Computer Interaction Group at Stanford University. "If you flip any one of those bits -- look at mobile users, or users outside of the developed world or social computing instead of individual computing -- then the future is wide open." Neurotransmitters Play on Thought Users are increasingly looking for richer experiences from the digital world and want more seamless interaction with computing devices, says Klemmer. That's particularly true in entertainment, one area where advancements in interface design are booming. For instance, the Nintendo Wii made popular the idea of using natural, gestural actions and translating them into movements on screen. The Wii controller takes the swinging motion made by a user and translates it into a golf swing, or it takes a thrust with a remote and turns it into a punch on the screen. At Drexel University's RePlay Lab, students are working on taking that idea to the next level. They are trying to measure the level of neurotransmitters in a subject's brain to create games where mere thought controls gameplay. The lab created a 3-D game called Lazybrains that connects a neuro-monitoring device and a gaming engine. The game uses feedback from the players' brains as an additional method of input. At its core is the Functional Near-Infrared Imaging Device, which shines infrared light into the user's forehead. It then records the amount of light that gets transmitted back and looks for changes to deduce information about the amount of oxygen in the blood. When a user concentrates, his or her frontal lobe needs more oxygen and the device can detect the change. That means a gamer's concentration level can be used to manipulate the height of platforms in the game, slow down the motion of objects, or even change the color of virtual puzzle pieces. The technology is in a very experimental stage, says Paul Diefenbach, assistant professor of digital media at Drexel University, who is supervising the project. Researchers have yet to fully understand the human brain and how to correlate the data measured from its activity and map it to an application, he says. "How do you map brain activity to, say, speed in an application, and how does this translate into the user interface?" says Diefenbach. Diefenbach believes limitations of brain interface devices and our understanding of how the brain works will mean other technologies such as eye tracking and speech recognition will be combined with it to create a computing experience that will mimic actions in real life. Meanwhile companies such as Panasonic and Sony are reportedly taking steps to bring alternative interfaces to the world of entertainment, says a Gartner analyst in a recent BBC report. These include bringing face recognition technology to televisions and making entertainment systems that will respond to gestures. Remote Control Will Rule While multitouch requires contact between the user and the device, the future will have a lot more remote control, meaning people will be able to manipulate objects and perform traditional computing actions from a distance, say researchers. An example is FingerSight, a technology labeled by the researchers working on the project as a "new concept in sensory substitution and remote control for the visually impaired, as well as for those who simply want to wave their hands and have things happen." FingerSight has a miniature camera attached to the fingertip (shown below) along with a device that will offer feedback such as a vibration. As you wave your finger, software in your computer will recognize graphical controls on the screen and deduce your motion relative to those controls, enabling you to turn a dial, for instance, without actually touching it, says John Galeotti, a postdoctoral fellow at the Robotics Institute of the Carnegie Mellon University, who has been working on the system. "The camera tells how much the finger has moved and it becomes the equivalent of being able to use your fingers to turn a knob," says Galeotti.
Before the system can take off, we have to see a more ubiquitous computing environment with chips embedded in objects everywhere and the development of smart homes so the use of these technologies is seamless and widespread, says Galeotti. Advancements in human computer interaction will also come from users looking to improve their personal experience by hacking, mashing and modifying devices, says Klemmer. "Users will soon be tailoring, customizing and hacking the technology out there to suit their own needs," he says. "By gluing a few things together, users will find they can get an experience that is radically different from using things off the shelf." Still, the keyboard and the mouse aren't going to disappear completely. For word processing, the keyboard remains the most efficient method of input, say researchers. The developers of these futuristic interfaces will also need patience, as it took nearly 25 years for multitouch to take hold. In 1982, Nimish Mehta at the University of Toronto showed what he called the "Flexible Machine Interface," one of the first demonstrations of a multitouch interface. Nearly 25 years later, Apple released the iPhone. It takes a long time to go from research to reality," says Klemmer. Top photo: Researcher working with RePlay Labs' Brain Interface Device. Courtesy Drexel University Tongue-driven wheelchair interface gives new flavor to HCI
arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080826-tounge-driv... Tongue-driven wheelchair interface gives new flavor to HCIBy Joel Hruska | Published: August 26, 2008 - 12:58PM CT
Many of the companies presenting at this year's NVISION are discussing human-computer interfaces (HCI) in one form or another. Any discussion of
"visual" computing must ultimately address how the presentation of content in space (and the mode in which it's presented) impacts how we
perceive and interact with it. The mouse+keyboard approached has served us well for the past 40 years or so, as have game controllers (albeit
for not quite so long), but Nintendo's Wii has conclusively demonstrated that consumers are interested in moving past traditional control
schemes.
Actually developing those control systems, however, is a difficult, complex, process. Many of the hardware components that are needed are still in their infancy (or haven't been invented yet), and programmers will need time to find the best ways to take advantage of what the hardware can actually do. Despite these difficulties, interface technology is a hot topic for NVIDIA's first expo—though ironically, one of the most interesting interface projects I'm aware of isn't on the table. Researchers have been attempting to improve the tools available to quadriplegics for decades, but with limited success. Sip/puff systems are available, and relatively inexpensive, but are limited to just four commands, while the sophisticated eye-tracking sensors available on the market are often slow, prone to error, and extremely expensive. Other options, such as equipment that can translate head movement into mouse movement are available, but users of such devices tend to tire quickly. Research in all of these areas is still ongoing, but there's a new approach in development. Dr. Maysam Ghovanloo is an assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and head of that school's GT-Bionics Lab. He's working on a control system that could give quadriplegics a much wider range of movement than they currently enjoy, by using their tongue. Since the tongue connects directly to the brain, it's not effected by neck injury, and typically remains fully operational, even in patients that have lost all ability to move.
Prototype systems have already been built—a video of one in action is available here—and it functions through use of a virtual keyboard. A permanent magnet is attached to the tongue, with a control unit underneath and various sensors attached to the teeth, bracer-fashion. These sensors detect movement of the tongue inside the mouth, and transmit this data wirelessly to a control module, which then reacts appropriately, depending on what the wearer has signaled. The prototype unit pictured here was built from off-the-shelf technology and is obviously a few years old—there's no word yet on whether newer, more sophisticated designs are currently in the works.
Currently, the device requires one to wear a rather bulky set of headgear, and the mouthpiece on the prototype has been described by at least one graduate student familiar with the project as "grotesque." Currently, the device is limited to six commands, but there are plans to introduce more sophisticated sensors capable of tracking a higher number of movements as well as determining subtle differences between movements. The research team hopes to create a commercially viable product with a price point between that of the suck-n-blow systems at one end, and the expensive eye-tracking systems at the other. The vast majority of us might have precious little interest in a tongue-driven interface, but this type of research indirectly benefits from the hardware and software being developed commercially. I wouldn't go so far as to say that the mouse and keyboard are going to go away, but signs point to a not-so-distant future in which we interact with a computer in ways significantly different than what are available now. Adopting and adjusting to new interface technologies will undoubtedly take awhile, but for certain people, this type of sea change could reopen their ability to explore the world in ways that are currently impossible. Further reading:
Koreans develop smelly, blushing penguin-droid | The Register
www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/16/eggy_korean_bot_c... Koreans develop smelly, blushing penguin-droidBot-chuff bot has interface that gets into your facePublished Monday 16th June 2008 13:43 GMT Government boffins in Korea have perfected a cutting-edge robot which is able to give off smells as part of a panoply of human-style interaction technologies. Apparently the aroma interface kit is now ready for commercialisation. The revelations come courtesy of the Korea Times, which reported on "Pomi" (Penguin rObot for Multimodal Interaction) last Friday. Pomi can waggle its eyebrows, and has a simulated heartbeat. But the killer app is Pomi's other means of expressing itself: it can "emit smells", as AFP notes. Needless to say, You Tube vid is available - though sadly in Korean. (You'll need Flash and suitable firewall privileges to see it.) As far as we can make out, Pomi can also express emotion by blushing, using red lights in its cheeks. Which would obviously be useful in the event of any inopportune mishap involving the smell-cast fragrance communications system. We also like the roguish robot wink. The Korean gov-boffins who developed Pomi reckon its tech could become widespread. The Korea Times quotes them as saying: "Technologies of emotional expressions and user-interactive functions used in Pomi will contribute to the upgrading of robotic companions, and also to the manufacturing of more intelligent service robots". The paper names Samsung as the lucky company which will bring Pomi to market. ® Sinnliche Technik Was Forscher und Ingenieure für das Sehen, Hören, Riechen, Schmecken und Fühlen tun. Von Katja Barthels Hören: Flüsternde Autos Bremsen quietschen, Motoren röhren, Triebwerke donnern über unsere Köpfe – Fortbewegungsmittel wie Auto, Bahn und Flugzeug machen das Leben nicht nur leichter, sondern auch lauter. Laut einer Studie des Fraunhofer Instituts für Betriebsfestigkeit (LBF) in Duisburg sind mehr als hundert Millionen Menschen europaweit von Lärm betroffen, vor allem durch den Straßenverkehr. Er belastet das Herz-Kreislauf-System, fördert Krebserkrankungen und wirkt sich negativ auf die Psyche aus. Holger Hanselka, Maschinenbauingenieur und Leiter des LBF, forscht deshalb an Intelligenten Materialien, die Transportmittel leiser machen. Ein Auto zum Beispiel wäre ruhiger, wenn die Ölwanne durch die Motorenbewegung nicht so ins Schwingen geriete. Ähnlich einem Weinglas, das beim Anstoßen zu klirren beginnt, gibt auch das leichte Material der Ölwanne unter Bewegung Geräusche ab. Bringt man jedoch ein Intelligentes Material wie Piezokeramik auf die Wanne aus, kann man die störenden Frequenzen ebenso unterbrechen wie bei einem Weinglas, das von einer Hand umschlossen wird. Intelligente Materialien lassen sich auch in Fensterscheiben einbauen, sodass sie den Schall von Flugzeugen dämpfen. Die Forschungsarbeit wird von der Industrie mitfinanziert: Die Unternehmen wollen vorbereitet sein, wenn neue Lärmschutzbestimmungen in Kraft treten – das Thema steht auf der Agenda der Europäischen Kommission weit oben. Riechen: Geruchsdetektive Ein Kassenschlager von der Konkurrenz bereitet Parfümeuren schlaflose Nächte – jedenfalls so lange, bis sie das Rezept entschlüsselt haben. Dabei helfen könnte der sogenannte OlfactoryDetectorPort (ODP) – ein Gerät der Firma Gerstel, die analytische Systeme für Wissenschaft und Industrie herstellt. Der ODP identifiziert jede einzelne Komponente einer Duftprobe: In einem Gaschromatografen wird sie zunächst stark erhitzt, verdampft und gelangt in ein Kapillarrohr mit einer Substanz, die mit den einzelnen Probeninhalten reagiert. Anhand der Reaktionen kann ein Detektor dann sämtliche chemische Strukturen entschlüsseln – das Geheimnis ist gelüftet. Dirk Bremer, Entwicklungsleiter bei Gerstel, nutzt den ODP aber in der Regel für anderes: Wenn das Shampoo eines Kunden nicht nach Himbeer riecht wie geplant, kann er die Störfaktoren entlarven und filtern. Wenn es im Kaufhaus nach Rosen duften soll, kann er das Aroma mit Substanzen nachbauen, die billiger sind als der echte Rohstoff. Gemeinsam mit seinem Team aus Maschinenbau- und Elektroingenieuren, Verfahrenstechnikern und Chemikern konstruiert Bremer auch noch andere Analysegeräte: zum Beispiel den Twister, ein beschichtetes Rührstäbchen, das müffelndes Leitungswasser aufschlüsselt – um zu sehen, ob die üblen Gerüche von der hauseigenen Leitung herrühren oder ob das Werk schuld daran ist. Schmecken: Geschmacksexplosionen Heißes Eis, Lachs mit Lakritz und Nudeln aus Tee stehen auf dem Speiseplan von Andreas Borngräber, Projektleiter am Technologie-Transfer-Zentrum (ttz) Bremerhaven. Der Ingenieur für Lebensmitteltechnologie liebt es, zu experimentieren: Weil er die Siede- und Schmelzpunkte seiner kulinarischen Werkstoffe kennt und weiß, wie sie miteinander reagieren und wann sie ihre Konsistenzen ändern, kreiert er Menüs der etwas anderen Art: Statt mit Kirschtomaten reichert er Mozzarella mit Alginatkugeln an, die im Mund platzen und süße Kokosmilch freigeben. Olivenöl verwandelt er im Sprühtrockner zu Pulver. Und Gemüse serviert er in Geleeform oder macht einen Lolli draus. Was ursprünglich Köchen die biochemischen Prozesse begreifbar machen sollte, hat sich zu einem Trend in der Gastronomie entwickelt: Die Molekularküche bricht mit gewohnten Strukturen und überrascht mit neuen Geschmackserlebnissen – um den Gast zu verblüffen und dem Gastronomen mehr Einnahmen zu bescheren. Inzwischen existieren etliche Restaurants, die molekulare Gerichte in ihre Speisekarte integriert haben, und Eventagenturen punkten mit ungewöhnlichem Catering. Das Wissen der Food-Ingenieure dient aber auch anderen Zwecken: So kann Andreas Borngräber die Rezeptur von Industrieprodukten verbessern, indem er ungewollte Zusatzstoffe ersetzt, ohne Geschmack oder Haltbarkeit zu beeinflussen – Clean Labeling nennt man das. Oder er steigert den Mehrwert von Lebensmitteln, indem er sie mit Ballaststoffen oder Vitaminen anreichert. Sehen: Zauberbrillen Nicht mehr sehen zu können bedeutet für viele den Verlust des kostbarsten menschlichen Sinnes. Deshalb arbeiten Forscher seit Jahren an einer Augenprothese, die die Arbeit der Zellen bei einer unheilbaren Netzhauterkrankung übernehmen soll. Eine winzige Kamera, die in eine handelsübliche Brille eingebaut ist, zeichnet alle Sehinformationen aus der Perspektive des Trägers auf. Durch einen Prozessor, den man in der Tasche trägt, werden die Bilder dann in elektrische Impulse umgerechnet und auf eine hauchdünne Elektrodenfolie übertragen, die in die Netzhaut implantiert wurde. Die Elektroden stimulieren die dahinter liegenden noch intakten Nervenzellen, sodass alle wichtigen Informationen ans Gehirn weitergeleitet werden können. So weit der optimistische Plan von Wilfried Mokwa, Leiter des Instituts für Werkstoffe der Elektrotechnik an der Rheinisch-Westfälischen Technischen Hochschule Aachen. In ersten Versuchen konnten allerdings erst 25 Elektroden implantiert werden – 200 bis 400 brauchte man, um wieder einigermaßen sehen zu können. Die damit verbundene Energiemenge würde derzeit aber noch zu viel Hitze erzeugen und das Auge verletzen. Deshalb arbeiten Mokwa und seine Ingenieurkollegen weiter an neuen Trägerfolien, Mikrospulen und Techniken zur Energieübertragung, bei denen die Elektroden nicht zu heiß werden. In drei bis vier Jahren sollen Patienten mit Hilfe von 100 Elektroden immerhin Licht von Dunkel unterscheiden können. Fühlen: Spürhände Wie fühlt sich der Pullover an, den ich bei eBay ersteigern will? Wie schwer ist die Schatzkiste, die mein zweites Ich im Computerspiel gefunden hat? Fragen, die Internetnutzer bislang nur in ihrer Fantasie beantworten konnten. Weil es mittlerweile zwar möglich ist, in 3-D-Welten einzutauchen, aber nicht, die virtuelle Realität zu ertasten. Franz-Erich Wolter und sein Team vom hannoverschen Institut für Mensch-Maschine- Kommunikation wollen das ändern: Am Computer simulieren sie zum Beispiel Textilien, die sie über das Haptex-System virtuell berühren können. Dafür steckt man die Hand in Fingerhüte, spürt die Vibration kleiner Drahtenden und bekommt über elektrische Schwingungen einen Eindruck, ob das Gewebe kitzelt oder kratzt, wärmt oder kühlt. Um die Interaktion der Finger in Echtzeit zu imitieren, bedarf es enormer Rechnerleistungen. Denn unser Tastsinn nimmt etwa tausend Informationen pro Sekunde wahr. Hinzu kommen Eindrücke, die durch Kraftanstrengungen entstehen: Wie fühlt es sich an, wenn wir Knete eindrücken, eine Tür öffnen, jemanden festhalten wollen? Um diese Mechanik nachzuahmen, müssen unterschiedlich starke Widerstände von den Fingerhüten ausgehen. Im Idealfall wird es in einigen Jahren Handschuhe geben, die diesen umfassenden Fühleindruck ermöglichen. Und die nicht nur Einkäufe und Actionspiele um einen entscheidenden Sinn bereichern, sondern auch die Erotikbranche… DIE ZEIT, 21.02.2008 Nr. 09 The MathWorks News & Notes - January 2006 - The Brain-Computer Interface
www.mathworks.com/company/newsletters/news_notes/j... The Brain-Computer InterfaceUsing MATLAB and Simulink for Biosignal Acquisition and ProcessingBy Günter Edlinger and Christoph Guger, g.tec Medical Engineering GmbH Beethoven was only 27 when he began to lose his hearing. While music historians assert that his deafness made him an even greater composer by isolating him and driving his creativity, this profound sensory loss brought a naturally sociable musician to the brink of despair. What if Beethoven had been able to communicate directly with an electronic piano that could interpret his brain signals and record his compositions? A brain-computer interface (BCI) provides an alternative communication channel between the human brain and a computer by using pattern recognition methods to convert brain waves into control signals. BCI researchers hope to improve quality of life for people who are paralyzed or sensory-impaired. Using improved measurement devices, computer power, and software, multidisciplinary research teams in medicine, psychophysiology, medical engineering, and information technology are investigating and realizing new noninvasive methods to monitor and even control human physical functions. g.tec Medical Engineering GmbH, an Austrian company, has developed a real-time biosignal processing platform and several devices that support noninvasive and minimally invasive monitoring of eye movements and brain, heart, and muscle activity. These futuristic tools are built on a foundation that combines the multipurpose data processing functionality of MATLAB and the real-time system development capabilities of Simulink. Real-Time Brain Signal ClassificationA BCI must be flexible to adapt to specific patient needs and also to execute in real time. The g.tec BCI, called g.BCIsys, based on the rapid prototyping capabilities of MATLAB and Simulink, supports rapid iteration and adaptation of software components, implementation of signal processing algorithms for online biosignal analysis and signal conditioning for a range of biomedical signals, and fast, accurate data acquisition. Online biosignal analysis enables researchers to compute, present, and store signal parameters during recording with minimal time delay. g.BCIsys includes g.USBamp, a DSP-based biosignal acquisition system with 24-bit resolution that provides signal-conditioning functionality to amplify, filter, and convert electrode outputs into digital values. Its user-selectable, multichannel modules allow the simultaneous recording of electroencephalogram (EEG), electromyograph (EMG), electrooculogram (EOG), and electrocardiogram (ECG) data. Add-on g.BCIsys modules perform real-time analysis in conjunction with data acquisition. The BCI control signals can then be used for psychological and physiological experiments, and for rehabilitation engineering applications, such as orthotic and prosthetic device control. (See The Musical Brain Cap to learn about a musical BCI application.) How the g.tec BCI WorksThe g.tec BCI measures brain activity using data captured from specific regions of the head. For example, to measure an EEG, the researcher attaches small gold, silver, or silver chloride electrodes to the test subject's scalp. Researchers then use g.BCIsys to amplify the microvolt-level brain signals, perform the analog-to-digital conversion, and transfer the acquired EEG via a USB 2.0 interface to a PC or notebook for analysis. g.BCIsys includes modules, running in Simulink, that recognize and classify specific EEG patterns in real time or high-speed mode to convert the raw EEG data into control signals. To more easily implement different signal processing procedures and control strategies for BCI implementations, the biosignal data acquired by g.USBamp is accessible in MATLAB using the Data Acquisition Toolbox (Figure 1) or in Simulink via a Simulink S-function block. Signal sampling rates can range from 1 Hz up to 38k Hz, with digital high-pass and low-pass filtering, and support for signals ranging from microvolts up to +/-250 mV.
Thought Control: Moving a CursorA stimulation unit (g.STIMunit) extends the g.BCIsys by presenting the classification result to the subject or sending control commands to external devices (such as orthotics). Using the g.STIMunit, a test subject can learn to use the g.BCIsys BCI to move a cursor (represented by a horizontal bar) on a computer display by imagining hand or foot movements. This approach is based on the fact that imagery of the movement of different limbs causes changes in oscillatory EEG activity over sensorimotor areas of the cerebral cortex. These signal changes can be classified by weighting spectral parameters of different frequency bands for different electrode positions. To control a cursor, the EEG is measured on the surface of the scalp via electrodes overlaying the central brain regions. If the test subject imagines a right-hand movement, there is a change in the EEG over the left hemisphere (measured at an electrode position called C3). If the subject imagines a left-hand movement, the EEG over the right hemisphere changes (at electrode position C4). Using g.STIMunit, a test subject can practice changing these specific EEG patterns during a pretest training phase. g.STIMunit shows a horizontal bar on the screen. When the subject imagines a right-hand movement, causing a change in the C3 electrode pattern, the g.STIMunit software extends the horizontal bar to the right side of the screen. When the subject imagines a left-hand movement, causing a change in the C4 electrode pattern, then the horizontal bar is extended to the left side of the screen. While the subject learns how to change the EEG signal through mental imagery, the BCI must also be trained to recognize the relevant changes in the electrode signals. The diagram in Figure 2 shows the BCI implementation for this experiment.
Signal Processing and Rapid PrototypingTo train the BCI, researchers must extract features from the EEG signals by estimating the power distribution of the EEG in predefined frequency bands. The g.BCIsys BCI implements two band-power estimation methods:
In this example, the Simulink BandPower block performs online signal analysis to classify the EEG data in two distinct classes: RIGHT and LEFT. The BCI practice software then uses this classification to extend the horizontal bar (Figure 3). The direction in which the bar moves indicates the signal classification RIGHT or LEFT. The length of the bar indicates the reliability of the classification.
BCI AccuracyThe BCI was field-tested on 300 subjects ranging in age from 15 to 65 years. The subjects trained the computer and then tried to control the cursor bar on the computer screen (Figure 4). Each subject repeated the movement imageries 40 times before the error rate was computed. Nearly 93% of subjects controlled the BCI with about 60% accuracy, while 7% of subjects operated the BCI with more than 90% accuracy. Laboratory and hospital research scientists worldwide use the g.tec biosignal processing platform for biosignal acquisition and processing. The software and hardware meet stringent medical requirements, and the flexible, customizable development platform makes it useful for many research and development applications.
The Musical Brain Cap
The musical brain cap uses the g.tec BCI to extract EEG features from test subjects. Band power from different frequency bands controls a generative system that composes music on the fly based on rules of musical grammar. The Simulink Hjorth block extracts EEG signal complexity and uses it to control the tempo of the musical piece (the more complex the signal, the faster the music) (Figure A). The generative system composes sequences comprising short sections of music, generated using one of four grammatical rules selected based on the subject's mental activity. For example, if the subject is in a state of deep relaxation, rule 1 is selected; if the subject is in relaxed wakefulness, rule 2 is selected; and so on (Figure B). The musical generative system output is then connected via a MIDI interface to a mechanical piano that plays the composed musical piece.
Resources:
Hands-On (Or Brains-On) With NeuroSky Thought Control System | Gadget Lab from Wired.com
blog.wired.com/gadgets/2007/10/hands-on-or-bra.htm... Hands-On (Or Brains-On) With NeuroSky Thought Control System
Destroying people with a thought has never been so easy. The other inhabitant of NeuroSky's game-like 3D world collapses, dead, flattened by my psychic powers. O.K., so it isn't psychic, exactly. It is merely a count of electrical activity in my brain, output by the company's head-mounted brainwave measurer, then translated into virtual physical action. Having taken my turn at the console and wandering for a few minutes nudging cars and sending watermelons flying, I encountered the other "player," who was doing much the same. "Hey, you can kill her if you like," says Johnny Liu, NeuroSky's Manager of System Applications. "Crush her with a desk." Feat accomplished, and her avatar respawns at the other end of the map. I go back to flipping, dragging and pushing objects around the game world like a drunken Jedi.
The prototype headgear is hacked into pairs of headphones, and measures baseline brainwave activity, said to provide an insight into states of relaxation and anxiety. The demo setup uses Valve Software's Source Engine--my character is one of the black-clad riot police from Half-Life 2--and the only thing measured by the NeuroSky gear is my level of calmness. Liu continually tells me to remain calm, to calm my thoughts, to think of calm, but all I want to do is crush enemies with desks.
It's hard to describe the experience. I was able to maintain a high level of whatever it actually measured but it didn't seem to be calmness. It was a deliberated mental emptiness that did the trick, such as might be experienced while listening to talk radio. Active concentration, like the kids from Akira, was useless. "It's like flexing a muscle you didn't know you had," Liu said. The first toys using the technology will be available soon. Unfortunately, there are no computer game controllers planned: it's a shame, because it made an awesome alternative to Half-Life 2's gravity gun. "Most physical games are really mental games," NeuroSky Founder Koo Hyoung Lee recently said in an AP interview. "You must maintain attention at very high levels to succeed. This technology makes toys and video games more lifelike." It's easy to imagine it as a treatment for attention-deficit kids or as a more involved human interface device, but in person, it felt limited, the amazing science behind it notwithstanding. With just a single axis of measurement, for instance, it could only ever be an auxiliary input for a video game. On the other hand, it's obviously the best thing ever, because I crushed my enemy with my mind. All that is left to do is learn to make an appropriately claw-like grasping gesture when I do so in future. Health & Medical News - Thought control under your hat - 08/12/2004
www.abc.net.au/science/news/health/HealthRepublish... Thought control under your hat
An electrode-covered hat can translate brain waves into computer commands, according to a new study. Related Stories'Thought-Control' Prostheses - Soon a Reality | May 2005 - The O&P EDGE - oandp.com
www.oandp.com/edge/issues/articles/2005-05_03.asp
Date: 9 October 2004
Source: The Boston Globe
Brain Control Headset for Gamers
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wednesday February 20, @08:44AM
from the get-out-of-my-brain dept. 
gbjbaanb writes "Gamers will soon be able to interact with the virtual world using their thoughts and emotions alone.
Headsets which read neural activity are not new, but Ms Le [president of US/Australian firm Emotiv] said the Epoc was the first consumer device that can be used for gaming. 'This is the first headset that doesn't require a large net of electrodes, or a technician to calibrate or operate it and does require gel on the scalp,' she said. 'It also doesn't cost tens of thousands of dollars.'" Wait until the government can get warrantless wiretaps on the logs of those things.
Feng-GUI: "Visual Attention" Heatmaps - ReadWriteWeb
www.readwriteweb.com/archives/feng-gui_visual_atte... Feng-GUI: "Visual Attention" Heatmaps
Written by Josh Catone / February 11, 2008 3:42 PM
/ 6 Comments
According to Feng-GUI, their ViewFinder algorithm is based on research from the field of robotics into how humans see and what sort of physiologic and neurological processes go on in our brains when we look at things. The algorithm than creates a saliency map. Saliency is a neuroscience term that describes how much an object stands out relative to its neighbors. Feng-GUI has been around for awhile -- it was pitched on the TechCrunch forums to little reaction over a year ago -- but just recently the company released the results of a test that it says proves the accuracy of its algorithm. According to the company, Feng-GUI attention maps capture 70% of what traditional eye and mouse tracking report -- or, in other words, they are 70% as accurate. Because the work is being done by a computer rather than humans, one has to assume that it is cheaper.
The visual results of the test are impressive -- Feng-GUI does indeed seem to stack up well to traditional eye tracking. But because the methodology of the study, who did it, and how it was conducted wasn't released, it is hard to trust it. There is, however, one major problem with Feng-GUI: I couldn't get it to work. The heat map generator on the Feng-GUI page timed out on every attempt to generate a map for ReadWriteWeb (it supposedly times out after 30 seconds, but RWW has loaded quickly all day), or any other web site I tried. Nor could I get it generate a map for a screenshot of ReadWriteWeb that I uploaded.
Regardless, I do like the idea of Feng-GUI. If the algorithm can be trusted, it has a lot of useful applications for designers and web site owners. The service could theoretically be used for testing early stage prototypes of new designs without having to pay people to perform usability studies or exposing half-baked new ideas to beta testers. Or it could be used by advertisers to figure out which display ad would attract the most attention on a specific web site before making an ad buy. Theoretically, sites could even use data from the service to charge more for a specific ad spot based on visual attention rather than higher click-thru rates (though selling advertisers on a robot's opinion might be a bit of a tall order). What do you think of the idea of eye tracking vs. click tracking? What about algorithmic pseudo-eye tracking? Could you get Feng-GUI to work for you? Leave your thoughts in the comments below. Leave a comment or trackback on ReadWriteWeb and be in to win a daily $30 Amazon gift voucher! 
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Geek to Live: ETech Highlights, part I - Lifehacker
lifehacker.com/software/etech/geek-to-live-etech-h... Multi-touch screen interface demonstrationNYU Researcher Jeff Han gets the award for most riveting demo with his multi-touch screen interface. Using both hands and sometimes the tips of all 10 fingers, Jeff manipulated photos, text and swirling objects on an enormous touchscreen, zooming, dragging, dropping and resizing objects that reacted to his movements the way they would in the physical world. He manipulated stacks of photos, lava bubbles, spun a few virtual records, navigated across world maps and even typed on a resizable keyboard on the touchscreen. Words don't do this justice; but this YouTube video (which made the rounds on the Interweb recently) comes close. "Continuous partial attention" leaves us overstimulated, overwhelmed and unfulfilled
This state of things, Stone asserts, makes opportunities for products, marketing, leadership and corporate culture that fulfills today's human need and desire: for protection, trust, connection, belonging, meaning, and filtering of the noise to get more signal. (Photo by James Duncan Davidson/O'Reilly Media.)
http://www.csc.calpoly.edu/~erogers/HRI/
Virtual reality gaming system tests for telepathy | Science Blog
www.scienceblog.com/cms/virtual-reality-gaming-sys...
Apple Ponders a Touchless iPod BBC NEWS | Programmes | Click | Searching for a mobile interface
newsvote.bbc.co.uk/mpapps/pagetools/print/news.bbc...
Hack Attack: More on mouseless navigation - Lifehacker
lifehacker.com/software/mouser/hack-attack-more-on... Hack Attack: More on mouseless navigation
by Adam Pash A couple of weeks back, I published a program that allows you to navigate your Windows mouse cursor from the comfort of your keyboard. Several readers jumped in with suggestions for improving the script, so I sat back down and got to work. Today I'm releasing an improved version of my Mouser app with an eye for customization, and I'll point out a few other great mouseless gems (including one reader-created tool that satisfies the most-asked-for feature that's just outside of the scope of my Mouser app). A new and improved MouserIn case you've forgotten what Mouser was all about, check out this video: This week I'm releasing a new Mouser with the following improvements: 
So that's that. All you gamers/vi/Numpad lovers can customize shortcuts to your familiar favorites. Escape still exits the script, Enter still left-clicks, and the arrow keys still work. You can customize pretty much everything else, so snag it below and make it your own: Download MouserDivide and Conquer your monitorThe one popular request that I did not deliver was navigating by grid. That's because before I had a chance to even think about it, one intrepid reader decided to do it himself. The result is Divide and Conquer, a beautiful little program that lets you narrow down your mouse click with a grid of 9 sectors that continue to redraw as you choose a new one. I don't have a video for Divide and Conquer, but it works exactly like this video of Mousergrid (new in Vista!) minus the voice activation (around 0:54) After activating Divide and Conquer, you use your Numpad to select sectors until you've got the mouse where you want it. I love this little guy, and maybe with encouragement Vorkroner will add a few more options for all of you who like a little more customization. AutoHotkey + Lifehacker = Not enough sleep :) [Bits and Bytes]More Mouseless goodies
Adam Pash is an associate editor for Lifehacker with an unnatural love for the keyboard. His special feature Hack Attack appears every Tuesday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Hack Attack RSS feed to get new installments in your newsreader. TED: Jeff Han, A Year Later Â  Wired News on the Go Sync up, head out, read Wired News on your handheld at your leisure.
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When Google 
There are more startup tech companies launching this week than almost anyone can keep track of, but any time a new service launches - one thing is key to its survival. The initial User Experience has to be compelling or any new application is going to be passed up in favor of whatever shiny object is next in line. 
Staff of Linden Labs, the creators of virtual world 
Brainwaves controlling a video game
The headset could be used to improve the realism of emotional responses of AI characters in games
Bored with the home entertainment PC? Dump URGE and head for real-time 3D music creation, a bit like what would happen if Pro Tools' developers got replaced by an advanced alien race from deep space. The creators of Fijuu imagine a world where you sculpt sounds in gorgeous, morphing 3D landscapes, all using a PlayStation controller. The project is open source, built in Linux, so it could be the first of many new attempts at the idea. For now, if you want to see it in person, it's at the cutting-edge Cybersonica sound art show in London.
We've been hearing threats of smell-o-vision for decades now, but it looks like engineers at the Tokyo Institute of Technology are getting serious about an odor recorder that can analyze scents and reproduce them by combining the 96 chemicals packed inside the device. Not only will it be able to approximate the smells of the finer things of life such as freshly-baked bread or apple pie, but it could also help doctors to diagnose remote patients by whipping up a hell of a stench with smells of urine, bile and rotten egg farts.
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In April, Apple filed an updated 52-page application for a patent on an extensive multi-touch interface for a full Mac OS X-based system. The illustrations that accompany the application look like the 
"This idea came from my own experience with inaccessible Web sites," IBM researcher (who also happens to be blind) Chieko Asakawa told 
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IBM Accessibility ODF Coding Challenge
Overview
Overview Contest rules Student Union FAQs Resources Professors' Corner
Overview Prizes Rules and eligibility Key dates
Want to change the world? Start with the code.
College is about finding the intersection between your dreams and making a difference. It's a chance to turn the things you're passionate about into practical applications that can seriously impact people's lives. This fall, IBM is searching for innovative student developers willing to put their coding skills to the test to potentially change the way people use and interact with technology.
The IBM Accessibility ODF Coding Challenge 2006 is an opportunity to showcase your own unique brand of creative genius. Get some excellent experience. Score some cool prizes. And maybe use what interests you most—technology—to improve the IT experience of a wide range of users, including people with disabilities, older users, and users who speak another language.
The contest is divided into two phases and will require you to do a little homework on open standards, open source, and accessibility. But if you're willing to put in the time, you could end up with a Lenovo ThinkPad or an Apple iPod Nano for your efforts.
Learn more about the contest.
Back to top
Prizes
OK, now we're getting to the good stuff. Here's what you can win during each phase of the contest:
Phase 1 prizes
T-shirt — The first 200 students in each region that successfully complete Phase 1 and pass the online quiz will receive a seriously cool t-shirt.
Phase 2 prizes
Runner-up prizes — Apple iPod Nano — Not everyone can score the big prize, but we want to give credit where credit is due. So the 10 student developers in each region whose projects reflect genuine creativity and innovation and demonstrate a thorough understanding of accessibility and ODF will be awarded an iPod Nano.
Grand prizes — Lenovo ThinkPad and a trip to CSUN 2007 — The best of the best... in this case the top two student developers in each region... will win a Lenovo ThinkPad laptop and a trip to Los Angeles in March 2007 for the 22nd Annual International Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference. 5 There you'll have the opportunity to make top-notch contacts and demo your application for international organizations and executives from a variety of industries.
arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080717-tweaking-us...
lifehacker.com/5074532/brain+only-computer-interfa...
A Sad Fact: The iPod's Clickwheel Must Die
As tomorrow's Apple event looms, rumors of new iPods grow louder. And it's tough not to be at least a little excited. Ever since the original iPod was unveiled in 2001, Apple has wowed us time and time again by presenting the next piece of design evolution—an iPod that will be better than the last in every way—style, form and function. In a world when technological improvements can be hard for the naked eye to appreciate, Apple has given us the most simple metric of man's capabilities: A pocket music player.
But Apple has plateaued with the traditional iPod. In fact, each subsequent firmware update has added features that come with more confusing menus and extra clicks; meanwhile the iPhone and iPod touch seem to be able to take added features more easily in stride. And while every iPod has gotten a little bit bigger in storage and smaller in size, it has become a software-bulky device, an overweight ghost of its former understated brilliance. So whether or not we see the iPod touch nano tomorrow or not, it needs to happen soon.
If in 2001 the iPod was a lightbulb, today it's a tangled string of blinking Christmas lights.
If in 2001 the iPod was a hot fudge sundae, today it's a Blizzard loaded with a mixture of Runtz and Pop Rocks.
If in 2001 the iPod was an Apple product, today it's something we'd expect from Microsoft's business server department.
Here is the original iPod with the latest firmware available; underneath that is the latest iPod with its latest firmware. (Keep in mind that the original iPod was even simpler at launch.) 
To put this eyeball cacophony into perspective, the new menu system has over 60 places to click—nearly triple that of the original iPod version (and that's not including Nike+ integration on nanos). Plus, the new system has five screens just for settings, all of which are unrelated to the main "Settings" menu.
How did things become so complicated? The iPod went from doing one thing really well to doing a bunch of things pretty well. But the UI was never redesigned to accommodate the functionality.
To be fair, the original iPod could do less than it can now. Sure, it played music, but pictures, movies and Nike exercise programs were barely a gleam in Jonathan Ive's eye when the iPod's base user interface was designed. If Apple provides advanced functionality to every user, they should accommodate these functions in their infrastructure properly.
Right now Apple's sending city traffic down a one-lane, unpaved road.
The thing is, Apple can solve this UI mess. They have, in fact, in their iPhone/iPod touch interface. There's unarguably more functionality in an iPhone than an iPod classic, but Apple has made the content manageable by putting you almost anywhere you'd like to go with one button press from the main screen.
On the iPhone, you can check email or send a text message with one button press and make a call or listen to music with two button presses. On the iPod, it takes a minimum of three just to listen to music—I should say, any music where you'd actually like to choose who you're listening to as my music from yesterday in "Now Playing" and music from who knows when in "Shuffle Songs" doesn't really count to me. And of course, I'm not even touching on the difficulty of scanning long lists of text compared to spotting pretty icons.
Is this progress? Really?
It should be noted that Apple has taken some provisions to accommodate the list menu system. You can search, TiVo-style, letter by letter, for songs, artists and albums. And Repeat and Shuffle can now be accessed from the Now Playing screen, whereas they used to require going back to the main page of settings to activate.
Most importantly, users can—and have long been able to—choose which options appear on their main and music menus, eliminating choices for photos and video and shortening the long lists of text into the digestible interface we see on the original iPod. But since when should users have to eliminate functions to make UI usable? We shouldn't have to turn off video to make the music work better, especially when Apple has proven themselves that the iPhone/iPod touch can balance streamlining and heavy duty functionality.
Quite simply, the clickwheel hasn't scaled to handle the long, modern day menus in powerful iPods. And that's why, either tomorrow or sometime in the very near future, the clickwheel must die to make room for products like the iPod touch nano.
Illustrations by Logan Lape.
arstechnica.com/articles/culture/wii-motion-sensor...
Of gyroscopes and gaming: the tech behind the Wii MotionPlus
By Frank Caron | Published: August 25, 2008 - 11:50PM CT
Motion and gaming collide
Nintendo's white wonder, the Wii, is doing huge business, and more people than ever are picking up a controller these days to flail their arms in a game of Wii Sports or do their morning stretches with Wii Fit. Everywhere you look, there are girls and grannies playing the Wii just as much as, if not more than, teenage boys. But for all the money that the system has been raking in, there are still some flaws with Nintendo's console: the most prominent of which has to be "Waggle" syndrome.
Even though the Wii is the most advanced motion-controlled gaming console ever released, the technology inside the remote is surprisingly basic and already dated. As a result, motion-controlled elements of most games have involved little more than "waggling": minimal gameplay actions that respond to loosely-defined movements and really don't function as effectively as they could. Small motions and big motions are hard to differentiate, and the remote isn't capable of tracking where it is in 3D space. Complicated 1:1 control—when the remote directly relates to its digital equivalent in 3D space—has proved too much for the standard Wii remote. Look no further than "Lazy Wii Sports" for proof at hand.
This being the case, it seems logical that Nintendo's next step towards improving the Wii would be to fix its limited motion control, and offer gamers and developers a much more accurate 1:1 correspondence between controller motions and on-screen actions. That very evolution was unveiled at this year's E3 convention in Los Angeles in the form of the "MotionPlus," a small controller add-on that vastly improves the remote's ability to recognize motion and, ultimately, to power more involving and immersive games.
1:1 sword-fighting is one gameplay possibility that just can't be done with the stock Wii remote.
The announcement of MotionPlus came and went with little fanfare in the hardcore community, though the early preview of the follow-up to Wii Sports, Wii Sports Resort did showcase some genuinely more advanced games. These games, which included the likes of frisbee and sword-fighting, have been made possible only by MotionPlus. Much ado was made about how little information was given to developers prior to the E3 unveil, but little attention was given to the actual tech inside of the new add-on and to the effect it could have not only on the Wii but on the way motion control is used for gaming as a whole.
Technically speaking, the MotionPlus isn't a stand-alone device that trumps the original Wii remote, but rather a crucial piece in the ever-evolving puzzle of Nintendo's motion-control strategy. The new device adds a gyroscope to the equation, but what exactly does that do for the remote and for motion-controlled gaming at large? To answer that question, we have to turn to InvenSense, a third-party motion technology company specializing in motion-sensing solutions, and the brains behind the gyroscope at heart of the MotionPlus. Ars had the chance to speak with Joe Virginia, Vice President of Wireless Business & Corporate Communications at InvenSense, and he dished the dirt about the new add-on and what this technology means for the future of motion-controlled gaming.
From the outset, InvenSense worked diligently to provide Nintendo with a solution designed to solve the "waggle" problem. The company and Nintendo came together thanks to "a 'disruptive MEMS (Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems) technology," explained Virginia. "This value proposition was embraced by Nintendo. We don't manufacture the [MotionPlus] accessory—there's been some confusion about that—but we offer a multi-axis MEMS gyroscope to Nintendo that, when combined with the other sensors and the sensor bar, offers a true six-axis motion controller experience."
The tech it takes to swordfight
That six axis motion controller experience is exactly what Nintendo was after with the deal, which has had InvenSense providing millions of the chips in preparation for the spring launch of the peripheral.
The original Wii remote features a single accelerometer chipset: the ADXL330, with three-axis filtering caps and a power decoupling cap. The chip gives three-axis sensing in a small, low-profile package (4×4×1.45mm), and it draws very little power with 180µA at 1.8V and single-supply operation of 1.8 to 3.6V with a shock survival capacity of 10,000g. As tight a package as its offers, though, the accelerometer is only capable of measuring movement velocity along the X, Y, and Z axes—only linear acceleration without rotation. The problem is that acceleration due to gravity can easily be confused with linear motion when using the device. And though the accelerometer can track gravity, it can't measure horizontal rotation. This results in a jittery representation of the interpreted data which, when combined with subtle hand movements, makes for an oft-inaccurate picture of what is going on with the remote. This is why basic attempts at 1:1 representation with the original Wii remote, such as the baseball bat in Wii Sports, tend to be limited at best.
A diagram of the IDG-600, the InvenSense chip used in the MotionPlus.
Gyroscopes, on the other hand, measure rotation directly. These sensors are very responsive and don't amplify hand jitter, but cannot respond to the linear movement that accelerometers specialize in. When a gyroscope and an accelerometer are combined, though, the pair of sensors affords the ability for highly accurate representation of the control device in 3D space. The technology isn't flawless—hardware and software smoothing will still be a factor in true 1:1 representation—but it's more than good enough for a certain developer to finally make that certain long-awaited sword fighting game involving sabers of light.
The IDG-600 gyro, which is the particular chip that InvenSense has provided to Nintendo for the MotionPlus, uses two sensor elements with novel vibrating dual-mass bulk silicon configurations that sense the rate of rotation about the X- and Y-axis. This results in a unique, integrated dual-axis gyro with "guaranteed-by-design vibration rejection and high cross-axis isolation." The chip also has an integrated means to "eliminate the need for external active components and end-user calibration."
Gyroscopes have long been used in various applications. Getting that technology shrunk down and cost-effective, though, was the real battle for InvenSense. "When you think of gyroscopes today, though, especially with regard to heading information, they're around $300,000 and are capable of accuracy of ten-thousandths of a degree per hour so that a 747 after an eleven hour flight can land where it's supposed to land," explained Virginia. "Game controllers, such as what Nintendo has selected, don't need that kind of accuracy. What they were looking for something in the area of one-tenth of a degree per second. [The IDG-600 gryo in the MotionPlus] measure up to 1500 degrees per second; it offers accuracy and full-range motion. We worked towards [a cost of] $1 per axis."
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7508842.stm
Say goodbye to the computer mouse |
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It's nearly 40 years old but one leading research company says the days of the computer mouse are numbered. A Gartner analyst predicts the demise of the computer mouse in the next three to five years. Taking over will be so called gestural computer mechanisms like touch screens and facial recognition devices. "The mouse works fine in the desktop environment but for home entertainment or working on a notebook it's over," declared analyst Steve Prentice. He told BBC News that his prediction is driven by the efforts of consumer electronics firm which are making products with new interactive interfaces inspired by the world of gaming .
"You've got Panasonic showing forward facing video in the home entertainment environment. Instead of using a conventional remote control you hold up your hand and it recognises you have done that," he said. "It also recognises your face and that you are you and it will display on your TV screen your menu. You can move your hand to move around and select what you want," he added. "Sony and Canon and other video and photographic manufacturers are using face recognition that recognises your face in real time," he said. "And it recognises even when you smile." "You even have emotive systems where you can wear a headset and control a computer by simply thinking and that's a device set to hit the market in September." "This" Mr Prentice said, "is all about using computer power to do things smarter." Greatly exaggerated Naturally enough those in the business of making mice are not wholly in agreement that the end is nigh. "The death of the mouse is greatly exaggerated," said Rory Dooley senior vice president and general manager of Logitech's control devices unit.
Logitech is the world's biggest manufacturer of mice and keyboards and has sold more than 500 million mice over the last 20 years. "This just proves how important a device the mouse is," said Mr Dooley. But he also agreed that the number of ways people can interact with a computers were rising and that his own company was manufacturing many of them. "People have been talking about convergence for years," he said. "Today's TV works as a computer and today's computer works as a TV. "The devices we use have been modified for our changing lifestyles but it doesn't negate the value of the mouse," Mr Dooley explained. Popularity The mouse was invented by Dr Douglas Engelbart while working for the Stanford Research Institute. He never received any royalties for the invention partly because his patent ran out in 1987 before the PC revolution made the mouse indispensible. With a 40 year anniversary planned for later in the year, Mr Dooley said Gartner's prediction for the mouse was too gloomy given that the developing world has still to get online.
"The mouse will be even more popular than it is today as a result," he suggested. "Bringing technology, education and information to these parts of the world will be done by accessing web browsers and doing that in the ways that we are familiar with today and that is using a mouse. "There are around one billion people online but the world's population is over five billion," he said. Gesturing So just how ready are people to wave their hands in the air or make faces at devices with embedded video readers? Gartner's Mr Prentice says millions are already doing it thanks to machines like Nintendo's Wii and smartphones like the iPhone. "With the Wii you point and shake and it vibrates back at you so you have a two-way relationship there. "The new generation of smart phones like the iPhone all now have tilting mechanisms or you can shake the device to do one or more things. "Even the multi-touch interface is so much more powerful and flexible than in the past allowing you to zoom in, scroll quickly or contract images." For those who lament the demise of such tried and tested pieces of hardware, Mr Prentice did concede that the keyboard was here to stay for the foreseeable future. "For all its faults, the keyboard will remain the primary text input device," he said. "Nothing is easily going to replace it. But the idea of a keyboard with a mouse as a control interface is the paradigm that I am talking about breaking down." | |||||
www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/technology/06novelties....
Electronic Papyrus: The Digital Book, Unfurled
CONSUMERS like large displays on the mobile devices they use for reading an e-mail message or an e-book, but they also like to tuck those devices into their pockets. But the bigger the screen on a cellphone or an e-reader, the sooner it outgrows pocket size.
Now a hallmark feature of these screens — their rigidity — is changing. New technologies are developing that make displays flexible, foldable or even as rollable as papyrus, so that large screens can be unfurled from small containers.
One new mobile device, the Readius, designed mainly for reading books, magazines, newspapers and mail, is the size of a standard cellphone. Flip it open, though, and a screen tucked within the housing opens to a 5-inch diagonal display. The screen looks just like a liquid crystal display, but can bend so flexibly that it can wrap around a finger.
Because the Readius is pocket-sized, but has a generous, supple screen, people with five minutes to spare in a taxi, bus or subway can use the dead time to open it, read a page or two of a book and then return the device to a shirt pocket, said Karl McGoldrick, the chief executive of Polymer Vision, the company in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, that created the device.
The Readius may even help stop people from obsessing over their e-mail: with the device, spare moments for reading may be put to a possibly better use — say, a novel by Stendhal. But if their good intentions fail, the device has a wireless connection to download e-mail as well as books.
The black-and-white display holds about 22 lines of a book page, depending on the font, all shown in the crisp black type provided by technology from E Ink, also used in Amazon’s Kindle and other e-readers. The screen changes from one page to the next in about half a second, at the touch of a thumb.
The Readius will be introduced in England, Italy and Germany this fall, and in the United States early in 2009, Mr. McGoldrick said. Its battery lasts for about 30 hours of reading — long enough to get through “The Red and the Black,” and possibly a chunk of “War and Peace.” Pages can be read under a variety of lighting conditions, even including full sunlight, he said. The price is not yet set, but Thomas van der Zijden, vice president for marketing and sales, said the Readius would be more expensive than the Kindle, which now is selling for $359.
The Readius is not the only entry in the area of flexible displays. “It’s an exciting example, but there are going to be a slew of other devices coming soon, too,” said Shawn O’Rourke, director of engineering at the Flexible Display Center at Arizona State University at Tempe, which focuses on the technology’s future commercialization.
Mr. O’Rourke defined flexible displays as “different than a BlackBerry or notebook,” with their traditional glass backings. “These displays are thin, lightweight and rugged — and they bend,” he said. The underlying substrates that support the display are typically either plastic or metal foil.
The market for flexible displays is likely to grow rapidly, said Jennifer Colegrove, an analyst at the iSuppli Corporation, a market research firm in El Segundo, Calif. “Flexible displays are the crucial enabling technology for a new generation of portable devices that are mobile, but also have compelling user interfaces,” she said.
Flexible displays offer the advantages of easy, relatively inexpensive and safe shipping and handling, compared with conventional rigid screens, she said. Her firm forecasts that the total market for flexible displays will grow to $2.8 billion by 2013.
Paul Semenza, vice president for display research at iSuppli, says that flexible displays are not entirely new on the market, but that previous ones have been relatively low-resolution applications — like those in smart cards and point-of-purchase signs — “not high-resolution ones that have the kind of image quality that users expect.”
The Readius images have this potential, he said, because the displays are powered by what is called an active matrix — transistors behind each pixel that can potentially provide fast switching and high performance.
“Polymer Vision’s technology is unusual,” Mr. Semenza said. “It’s hard to make an active matrix on something other than glass.”
If Polymer Vision succeeds in “making these transistor arrays,” he said, “you’ll have the ability to make high-performance displays on flexible substrates that look as good as a notebook display on any high-performance L.C.D.”
THE Readius, which so far displays 16 shades of gray on its screen, is not at that state yet, but Polymer Vision is hoping to add color and video capability in the future, Mr. McGoldrick said. A prototype for a color model was demonstrated at a trade show in May.
Mr. O’Rourke of the Flexible Display Center likes the look of the new generation of supple screens, but he also likes their toughness. “Some of them we’ve beaten with hammers, and they still run,” he said. “No one could do that with a BlackBerry.”
E-mail: novelties@nytimes.com.
www.technologyreview.com/printer_friendly_article....
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Friday, June 20, 2008
A Display That Tracks Your Movements
Samsung and Reactrix move beyond touch screens and try to make hand waving the next big computer interface.
By Kate Greene
There could be a revolution brewing in billboard advertising. Instead of simply presenting a static image, why not let people interact with the advertisement? This is the vision of electronics giant Samsung and interactive advertising company Reactrix Systems. The two companies have partnered to bring 57-inch interactive displays to Hilton hotel lobbies by the end of the year. These displays can "see" people standing up to 15 feet away from the screen as they wave their hands to play games, navigate menus, and use maps. With the buzz surrounding the Wii, the iPhone, and Microsoft's Surface, "people are more open and ready to interact using their hands and gestures," says Matt Bell, chief scientist and founder of Reactrix. It's easy to see how a gesture-based interface might work well for video games and virtual worlds, and certainly companies such as Belgian startup Softkinetic make systems for those very needs. But Reactrix is aiming for the out-of-home advertising market, traditionally dominated by large static displays like billboards. Founded in 2001, Reactrix has some experience already: today, its interactive floor displays attract crowds in shopping centers across the country. The basic idea behind Reactrix's system, and even low-end gesture-based technologies such as the Sony PlayStation Eye, is to use a camera to detect a person's body, and then use computer vision algorithms to make sense of the images. Reactrix and Softkinetic systems differ from the PlayStation Eye, however, in that they record 3-D information as opposed to just two-dimensional information. There are many types of cameras that can capture 3-D scenes, says Bell, but in its current models made with Samsung, the company is using a stereoscopic camera with two lenses. Next to the camera is an infrared light that projects an invisible pattern onto the people in front of the screen. Each lens captures a slightly different view of what's going on, and, based on the disparity in the images, the system can distinguish distance down to a fraction of an inch. Bell adds that the projected light pattern helps the system's accuracy in uneven lighting. When the camera collects the information, it automatically dumps it into a specialized processor to analyze the depth data, bypassing software that wouldn't be able to compute fast enough. "Once that's done, we have a full-depth image showing the distance to every object," Bell says. At this point, Reactrix's unique algorithms take over. One of the differentiating factors between Softkinetic and Reactrix is that the former focuses on the detailed motion of parts of a single body, whereas the latter strives to disambiguate people and objects. Bell doesn't provide details, but he says that the code is designed to figure out scenarios such as when people are holding hands, or if people are standing shoulder to shoulder. On top of the hardware and algorithms, Bell says, Reactrix is also thinking about the best design for the user interface. As with touch-screen technology, gesture-based interactions have been toyed around with before, but it's still unclear what sort of interface would work best for most people. There are a few interactions that lend themselves well to a gesture interface, such as a boxing game or sliding pictures across a screen. However, engineers still haven't figured out the best way for people to interact with a virtual button, for instance. It may seem trivial, but it's unclear how to press a button when there's nothing to touch. "There's an exciting opportunity here to create the standard gestural interaction with displays," says Bell. "We want to be at the forefront of creating that." Regarding the forthcoming Hilton displays, Bell says he expects that travelers will be able to play games that relate to local attractions and navigate menus for more information. In this way, he says, people have fun interacting with advertisements, instead of just passively flipping through a brochure. With its floor displays already available in U.S. shopping centers, "Reactrix has proven the value of interactive marketing solutions for use in public spaces and, specifically, in use with crowds, for which it is difficult to track individual people's body movements," says Michel Tombroff, CEO of Softkinetic. He suspects that the market for gesture-based technology will grow in the coming years, thanks in part to the falling price of 3-D cameras. The engineers who build these cameras and computer vision systems have made great strides in recent years, says Scott Klemmer, a computer-science professor at Stanford University. "Cheap cameras and sensing [systems] are going to usher in a new genre of user interfaces," he says. Bell says that the falling price and shrinking size of these cameras is one of the main reasons that his company partnered with Samsung. The display company, he says, should be able to find a compact and cost-effective way to integrate the camera technologies, Reactrix processors, and algorithms into commercial displays that can have a home outside a Hilton hotel lobby. Copyright Technology Review 2008 |
gizmodo.com/375055/att-stores-the-first-to-get-mic...
AT&T Stores the First to Get Microsoft's Surface Table
It looks like AT&T will be the first retailer to plunk down the coin for Microsoft's fancy-pants Surface table, installing them in its stores on April 17th.
The tables will be set up so that when you place a phone on it, it'll automagically pull up info on that particular model. You'll also be able to buy crap like ringtones, graphics and videos by slapping your phone on it. It's not coming to every AT&T store, however; only residents of NYC, SF, Atlanta and San Antonio will have the privilege of using Microsoft's $10,000 toy to buy that ironic Mister Mister ringtone you've been thinking about getting. [Tech Digest]
gizmodo.com/373042/microsoft-surface-in-your-house...
Microsoft Surface in Your House in 2011
For Microsoft, full speed-ahead on a cheaper consumer version of Surface, its multi-touch computer table, means 2011. Tom Gibbons, VP of Microsoft specialized apps and devices group says that "In the three-year time window, we absolutely see how to get there. If we can beat that, we'll try to beat that." Alas, it's Microsoft, so they're already running late on the initial launch to companies waving around a lot more money than you. Expect to hang onto your Ikea coffee table until 2012, to be safe. [Fortune]
Consumer-Level Haptics On the Way
from the can-you-touch-me-now dept.
Microsoft unveils table computer
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Designed to do away with the need for a traditional mouse and keyboard, users can instead use their fingers to operate the computer. Also designed to interact with mobile phones placed on the surface, Microsoft says it will initially sell the unit to corporate customers. These will include hotels, casinos, phone stores and restaurants. 'Multi-touch' So-called "multi-touch" interfaces - which allow the user to move several fingers on a screen to manipulate data, rather than relying on a mouse and menus - have been making waves in tech circles for some time.
One of the most hotly-awaited examples is Apple's iPhone, which is scheduled to be released in June. Hewlett-Packard has also been looking at expanding multi-touch technology, in addition to leading research scientists such as Jeff Han of New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. With a 30-inch screen, Surface will initially sell for between $5,000 and $10,000 (£2,525-£5,050). However, Microsoft said it aimed to produce cheaper versions for homes within three to five years. 'Multi-billion dollar' "We see this as a multi-billion dollar category, and we envision a time when surface computing technologies will be pervasive, from tabletops and counters to the hallway mirror," said Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer. Microsoft says small groups of people will be able to use each Surface machine simultaneously. They will be first deployed in November in Sheraton hotels, Harrah's casinos, T-Mobile stores, and numerous restaurants. The computer giant has had a mixed record recently with new consumer products.
While its Xbox games console has been a success, its Zune music player continues to lag far behind Apple's iPod.
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Inventing Modern America: From the Microwave to the Mouse
Play Now | 
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MODERATOR:
Christopher Lydon
MODERATOR: Christopher Lydon
More on Chrisotpher Lydon
PANELISTS:
Doug Engelbart: Computer visionary, inventor of the computer mouse
More on Doug Englebart
Brian Hubert: Inventor of the world's first universal "pick-and-place" nano-assembly machine
2001 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize Winner
Robert Langer: Pioneering biomedical engineer whose innovations have revolutionized drug delivery systems
1998 Lemelson-MIT Prize Winner
Steve Wozniak: Inventor of the Apple personal computer, and co-founder of Apple Computer
Steve Wozniak's Homepage
ABOUT THE PANEL DISCUSSION:
"Inventing Modern America: From the Microwave to the Mouse" celebrates the best of American ingenuity and inventiveness. Through in-depth profiles of 35 inventors, "Inventing Modern America" tells the often-surprising stories of how every day objects and technologies were created. Each profile is illustrated with historical photographs, diagrams, and patent drawings that illuminate the inventor's life, inventive process, and creations.The book was developed by the Lemelson-MIT Program for Invention and Innovation, whose misssion is to inspire a new generation of American scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs.
Inventing Modern America: From the Microwave to the Mouse
MIT Press, 2001
The information on this page was accurate as of the day the video was added to MIT World. This video was added to MIT World on 2001-11-27.
The Long Pen in the Wild
[Remote book signing device]
Editor John went to BookExpo America last week and all he saw was Dr. Ruth looking like someone's small, lost grandmother. However, he should have checked out the Long Pen, the tool Margaret Atwood invented to sign her books remotely.
Atwood dreamed up the device when signing a UPS delivery tablet and got together some ubergeeks to help her build it. The result is an amalgam of high-tech and a rusty Erector Set, but it allows Maggie to "send" signatures to her fans and interact with them in real time.
Product Page [UnotChit]
Tracey, Meet Margaret... [BookMaven]
www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/05/24/honda_brain_machi...
Japanese boffins build breakthrough brain-machine interface
By Tony Smith 24th May 2006 09:42 GMT Honda scientists have created a system that will translate thoughts into electrical signals that can be used to control machinery. The technique doesn't require the user to undergo surgery or extensive training - a major advance over past thought-controlled technologies, the company said.
Researchers at the Honda Research Institute in co-operation with boffins from Japan's Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute dub the system the "Brain Machine Interface". Details of the rig itself remain sketchy, but the system reads "natural brain activity... for the near real-time operation of a robot".
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The scientists found that while monitoring brains to find the right signals for commands like 'yes', 'no', 'move forward' and so on is hard - at least not without considerable training on the part of the user or without electrodes implanted in the brain - it's much easier to detect the neural activity triggered when someone moves their hands. Using a simple command system based on the 'scissors-paper-stone' game, the boffins built a non-invasive detector with, they claim, a decoding accuracy of 85 per cent. The detector monitors the flow of blood around the brain rather than neural impulses per se.
There's one snag: there's a seven-second lag between the subject commanding his or her hand to form a scissor pattern and the robotic arm mimicking the human action. The system also requires some sophisticated computing to translate the brain's haemodynamics into robot-control signals, and of course the subje
Add Touchscreen To Existing LCDs with USB Touchscreen
Want a touch screen, but don't want to give up your Dell LCD? Compromise, with this USB touchscreen. Plug the screen into your USB port, mount the screen onto your existing 15 or 17" LCD, and your monitor is now touchable.
The USB touchscreen is velcro based and compatible with Windows 98SE through XP. You can either use your finger or the included stylus.
As always, remember to wash your hands before using, lest you have to stare through a thin film of grease when composing your quarterly earnings report.
Available in June.
GameTrak control system and Real World Golf
By Ben Kuchera
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
Introduction
GameTrak control system and Real World Golf
Developer: Aqua Pacific
Publisher: Mad Catz
Platform: PC, PlayStation 2 (reviewed), and Xbox
Price: US$69.99 (shop for this title)
Lambda Table— a high-resolution tiled LCD table and interaction device. You can find this device at the Electronic Visualization Lab (University of Illinois at Chicago).
Bridgestone E-Paper
Bridgestone doesn't just make tires that explode. They also make e-paper that looks absolutely killer. It has a Fresnel surface that lets it bend and twist and it's only two colors right now, but it looks to be the thinnest solution yet.
What I'm really wondering is when all these good e-papers are going to start hitting the streets. Strangely enough, I suspect Nintendo will drop the first e-paper handheld gaming solution, although their young audience might gum the display a little too much. I'd love to read the paper on this, though. – John Biggs
Oakley/Motorola O ROKR Reviewed (Verdict: Good, But Has Issues)
Similar in design to the Thump 2, this O ROKR combines a pretty decent set of shades with the Bluetooth-enabled headphones which allow you to stream music from an iPod or a Bluetooth-enabled phone straight to your listen-holes. To make this work with your iPod, you'll need to buy a NaviPlay Bluetooth iPod Adapter, and to make it work with Bluetooth phones you will need a phone with A2DP support.
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5056434.stm
Science reporter, BBC News
A device which may pave the way for robotic hands that can replicate the human sense of touch has been unveiled.
Particles in the device emit light to show changes in textureUS scientists have created a sensor that can "feel" the texture of objects to the same degree of sensitivity as a human fingertip.
The team says the tactile sensor could, in the future, aid minimally invasive surgical techniques by giving surgeons a "touch-sensation".
www.theregister.com/2006/06/13/blind_to_see/print....
MIT builds seeing machine for the blind
Published Tuesday 13th June 2006 08:59 GMTA researcher at MIT has developed a working prototype of a machine that will help legally blind people to see, Reuters reports.
The inventor, Senior Fellow Elizabeth Goldring, says that the device will help people to read, to see pictures of friends and study other useful documents, such as the layout of buildings.
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The prototype, which MIT says will cost around $4000 to manufacture, plugs into a PC and uses light emitting diodes to project images directly onto the retina.
Traditional sight aids work by projecting a video image onto a pair of goggles or onto a video screen. "The advantage of this kind of display is there's no extraneous stuff in your peripheral vision that gets in the way," Goldring, told the Reuters news agency.
The so-called seeing machine was inspired by a scanning laser ophthalmoscope, a $100,000 medical device used to examine the eye. The technology involved in the ophthalmoscope is too expensive to make a device suitable for personal use, so Goldring and her research team spent a decade working on ways to reduce the cost.
The device is a still a long way from being a Geordi La Forge-style visor. At 12 inches by 6 inches by 6 inches, even the generous would not describe it as wearable, and it couldn't be used to navigate an unfamiliar space. But as long as the user has some living retinal cells, he or she should be able to use the machine to see a clear colour image, such as the layout of a room they plan to visit.
Tests on 10 legally blind volunteers found that most could see images and read words when using the device. Goldring now plans to develop a commercial version. ®
Wearable Gaze Detector
Scientists from NTT DoCoMo in Japan dreamed up this pair of headphones with cameras attached that can detect what you're gazing at within 20 degrees. The two cameras record the scene in front of you, while a cursor superimposed over that image indicates where you're looking. It works using EOG (Electro-oculography) sensors that can pick up small changes in electrical impulses when you move your eyes from one place to another.
Let's hope the researchers are working on a more aesthetically-pleasing implementation of this technology. It's not exactly something that will make you über attractive to the ladies, guys. Even so, this is quite a technological feat, and one that might be used in research, or perhaps even have military implications. However, all this technology may not even be necessary in some circumstances—for example, most large-breasted women can immediately tell exactly where you're looking without any such paraphernalia. – Charlie White
Full-time wearable headphone gaze detector presented by DoCoMo [InC innovative communication, via SciFi Tech]
Samsung's Braille Cellphone Wins Gold Award At IDEA
Designed for visually impaired phone users, the 12 button handset acts as two braille keypads to enter in text for text messaging to other cellphones. Incoming messages are displayed using braille on the bottom half of the phone.
Samsung only has this as a prototype for now, but if they want to commercialize it, the seriously under-served market would be most grateful.
hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/06/0082...
Handheld Device Reads Printed Words to the Blind
Posted by samzenpus on Thursday July 06, @12:50AM
from the too-busy-to-read dept.
geekotourist writes ""3,000 people in Dallas this week for the National Federation of the Blind convention are getting a demonstration of what life is like when you can read printed menus, mail, business cards and memos" reports the Dallas Morning News. The NFB spent two million dollars developing the $3,495 Kurzweil-National Federation of the Blind Reader, which weighs 15 ounces and combines text-to-speech with sophisticated OCR. The device "gives the user an initial 'situation report', describing what it can see. The user then makes a decision about whether to take a picture. After a few seconds to process the image, the contents of the document are read aloud." Beta testers describe the joys of reading receipts, CDs, food labels, bulletin boards, conference printouts, or of simply reading books with privacy, without another person's help. "
SmartRetina Computer Controller Prototype
No, that's not a picture of Johnny 5's head you're looking at, but the SmartRetina, a computer interface that tracks your movements to interact with a PC. With the SmartRetina hooked up to a PC, you can navigate the complex environs of your PC's GUI without so much as touching a mouse. It's supposed to bridge the language and age gap since anyone can point to an object while sitting in a chair.
The SmartRetina's designers, Yaniv Steiner and Ofer Luft, have a video of the SmartRetina on their Web site showing a well-dressed user circumnavigating the globe using GoogleEarth. Should this protype go into production, we'll let you know. – Nicholas Deleon
SmartRetina [Prototype via The Red Ferret Journal]
Maltron Ergonomic 3D Keyboard
Maltron makes ergonomic keyboards, and has been accommodating people who only have use of one hand for a while. The company also offers its Ergonomic 3D Keyboard, an expensive proposition that claims to fit the shape of the hands and accommodate the different lengths of fingers, reducing movement and tension.
There's no wrist twisting involved, and the tilted keys make it so you don't need to move your hands very far to get the job done. The number keys are centrally located for either hand to use.
The only downside of this keyboard is that you must be a touch typist to enjoy its benefits, and then, well, there's that hefty $490 price. – Charlie White
Product Page [Maltron Keyboards, via Coolest Gadgets]
HyperPen 1200U Desktop Writing Tablet
The Aiptek HyperPen 1200U is a USB device that's designed to be plugged into your hulking desktop machine, giving you the ability to input text with a special, wireless pen. (Yes, just like a Wacom , but cooler. Honest.) The writing surface can detect up to 512 levels of pressure and has a 3,048 LPI resolution, so that should be enough to accurately capture your digital pen strokes. Should you want, you can ever set up the HyperPen to function as a replacement for your trusty mouse.
The tablet measures 12 x 9-inches and has 24 keys "for quick and easy access," nine of which are customizable. It's compatible with both Windows and Mac. You can find the HyperPen 1200U online for around $100. – Nicholas Deleon
Product Page [Aiptek via Ubergizmo]
3-D TV That Actually Works
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See AlsoBy Seán Captain
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Also by this reporter
02:00 AM Aug, 22, 2006I entered a conference room in Manhattan and a woman on the TV tossed a handful of rose petals out of the screen, where they floated in the air before my eyes.
At least, that's what I saw. In truth, the image resided on a perfectly flat, 42-inch LCD screen. But the 3-D illusion was fully believable, and I didn't have to wear a dorky set of polarizing glasses.
A new line of 3-D televisions by Philips uses the familiar trick of sending slightly different images to the left and right eyes -- mimicking our stereoscopic view of the real world. But where old-fashioned 3-D movies rely on the special glasses to block images meant for the other eye, Philips' WOWvx technology places tiny lenses over each of the millions of red, green and blue sub pixels that make up an LCD or plasma screen. The lenses cause each sub pixel to project light at one of nine angles fanning out in front of the display.
A processor in the TV generates nine slightly different views corresponding to the different angles. From almost any location, a viewer catches a different image in each eye.
Providing so many views is key to the dramatic results. Sharp Electronics makes an LCD display that projects just two views, requiring an audience to sit perfectly still in front of the screen. With the Philips technology, viewers can move around without losing much of the effect -- one set of left/right views slips into another, with just a slight double-vision effect in the transitions.
The TV can also display standard two-dimensional images, close to HD quality.
The uncanny 3-D illusion stops people in their tracks, as it's meant to. Philips is initially selling the 42-inch screens -- which debuted at the Society for Information Displays conference in June -- to retailers who will create 3-D ads to grab the attention of passing shoppers.
Casinos are interesting in the screens -- the mesmerizing effects may help patrons part with more of their money. Holland Casino just announced plans to install the screens throughout its locations in the Netherlands.
Finding content for home users is more of a challenge.
One nearly ready-made source of content is modern video games, which actually generate three-dimensional objects internally, then flatten the images into 2-D representations for standard monitors. Philips has developed hardware and software that can extract the original depth information from the game engine and use it to create 3-D images on a WOWvx display.
In New York, the company demonstrated the technique with the first-person shooter Call of Duty. It looked almost perfect, except for a little shimmering around the edges of objects, which Philips says will be fixed in the coming months.
The company also has plans for video. The ultimate hope is that studios will produce more 3-D content, like the recent 3-D version of Sony Pictures' Monster House that screened in 162 U.S. theaters. But Philips is developing software to convert standard video to 3-D by analyzing movement to determine the original depth position of people and objects.
A standard laptop running Philips' software was able to convert the DVD The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King into 3-D in real time and display it on Philips's new 20-inch "3D 4YOU" LCD monitor -- a retail-kiosk implementation of the 3-D screen.
The result looked vaguely 3-D, though it was marred by some blurriness and double images.
"I think for consumers this is simply not good enough," said Philips executive Rob de Vogel. "But the progress in the past year is amazing." He expects the company to show a better version of the conversion software to the public in the coming months -- possibly at the next Consumer Electronics Show in January 2007.
EZ-Canvas Turns Monitors into Doodle Pads
Here's another DIY for today. Although not as hands on as our last.
The EZ-Canvas is an acryl panel that clips onto your CRT or LCD and
turns it into a touchscreen display. It has dual sensors up top that
allow it to detect a pen/stylus' movement and latches on to screens
sizes 17" and up. This is a pretty cool idea and a quick way to turn
your widescreen monitor into a giant tablet. You'd probably want to
make sure your LCD is of the sturdy kind, however, otherwise the pen
pressure might push your entire display back a few inches on your desk,
which would be annoying. Click through for some extra pics of the
device in action. – Louis Ramirez
Navisis EZ-Canvas [via AVING]
blackboard.calpoly.edu/bin/common/control_panel.pl...
http://gonzo.uni-weimar.de/~bimber/Pub/SmartProjector.pdf
Television played a central role in shaping the
20thcentury and remains the primary entertainment
medium for most of us today. TV
continues to evolve as innovative display
technologies change its look and capabilities
at an accelerating rate. The popularity of today’s
flat-panel liquid-crystal and plasma displays shows
that emerging trends favor large-screen displays.
Simultaneously, falling prices have led to a booming
market for home entertainment technology. However,
the physical limitations inherent in these technologies
place constraints on maximum screen size,
display size, refresh rate, and power consumption.
Another display type may soon conquer the
entertainment market, however: Video projectors
have experienced an enormous metamorphosis during
the past decade. The cost reductions and performance
increases made in these devices compare
favorably with those personal computer manufacturers
achieved decades earlier. Video projectors
also offer a vital advantage over other display technologies.
They can generate images much larger
than the devices themselves without being constrained
by a traditional TV screen’s limitations.
This ability comes at a price, however: The artificial
canvas requires a space equal to the size of the
image we want displayed. A home theater, for
example, might require an entire room. In many situations,
the temporary or stationary canvases that
projector-based multimedia presentations require
also harm the ambience of environments such as a
living room or historic site.
Smart projectors, however, do not require an artificial
canvas. Instead, they allow a correct projection
onto many arbitrary existing surfaces, such as
papered walls or curtained windows.
SMART PROJECTORS
Essentially video projectors enhanced with sensors
to gain information about the environment,
smart projectors primarily use cameras to sense
their environment. However, other information
gathering devices such as tilt sensors are also available.
Completely calibrated and mounted as a single
camera projector unit, or realized with separated
components, some smart projectors allow dynamic
elimination of shadows the user casts,1 automatic
keystone correction on planar screens,2 or manually
aligned shape-adaptive projection on secondorder
quadric display surfaces3 such as cylinders,
domes, ellipsoids, or paraboloids.
For projection planes, cameras can help to automatically
register multiple projector units based on
homographic relationships.4 In this case, camera
feedback also provides the data for intensity blending
and color matching5 of multiple projector contributions.
Combining calibrated stereo cameras
with projectors allows direct scanning of an arbitrary
display surface’s 3D geometry, enabling undistorted
projection for a known head-tracked
observer position.6
All these approaches require the calibration of
cameras and projectors to determine their intrinsic
position—the focal length, principal point, skew
Essentially video projectors enhanced with sensors to gain information
about the environment, smart projectors do not require artificial canvases
and allow correct projection of images onto many arbitrary existing
surfaces, such as papered walls or curtained windows.
Oliver
Bimber
Andreas
Emmerling
Thomas
Klemmer
Bauhaus University
Weimar
January 2005 49
angle, aspect ratio, and field of view—as well as
their extrinsic position and orientation parameters.
Although some systems can project geometrically
predistorted images for a known observer position
onto scanned or modeled nonplanar surfaces
beforehand, these surfaces are still fairly simple,
such as adjacent even walls. Surfaces with fine geometric
details represent overkill for the real-time
predistortion realized by processing a high-resolution
3D model.
Until now, all projection surfaces, both planar
and nonplanar, have required a uniform white texture.
Per-pixel color correction, however, becomes
feasible with the enhanced capabilities of recent
graphics chips. A projection onto arbitrarily textured
surfaces has been achieved, for example, with
the aid of a special transparent film material that
reflects a portion of the incident light.7
Although this technique allows superimposing
flat paintings onto projected multimedia content,
it cannot be employed to display images onto everyday
surfaces for two reasons. The technique
• still requires an artificial transparent canvas
that can be applied to a plain surface; and
• it needs a precise, manual pixel-to-pigment
registration.
The too-low resolution of today’s cameras prevents
the implementation of an automated calibration
process for this special case.
Color- and geometry-corrected projection onto
arbitrarily shaped and textured surfaces is possible
in real time, with fully automatic, fast, and robust
calibration. A compact device, such as that depicted
in Figure 1, has yet to be built, however. Instead,
the first proof-of-concept prototypes are a combination
of off-the-shelf components—such as a consumer
LCD video beamer, a CCD camcorder, and
a personal computer with a TV card and a pixelshading-
capable graphics board.
Even PS3 Racing Wheels Don't Have Force Feedback
Thanks
to the fact that the standard SIXAXIS controller doesn't have
vibration, most game developers aren't going to program in vibration
functions to their games on the odd hope that someone will pick up a
PS3 Racing Wheel. In turn, PS3 racing wheels—like this one from
Logitech—won't have vibration functions either. Oh joy.
Hit the jump to hear what we think about this (warning, self-playing audio)
www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/02/05/wii_remote_contro...
Sword-wielding robot smites by Wii Remote
By Tony Smith [More by this author] 5th February 2007 12:16 GMT Someone has adapted an industrial robot to allow it to be controlled using the remote controller that ships with Nintendo's Wii games console. A neat example of Wii Remote hackery, to be sure, but what'll happen when the robot gets to hold its own controller?
The guys at the USB Mechatronics website used the robot, a Kuka KR16, to wield a sword, linking the mechanical arm to a laptop capable of reading the signals sent out by the Wii Remote. Software running on the notebook converts the input to KR16 control codes, effectively duplicating the Remote's movements as robotic sword thrusts, strokes and parries.
The team also got the robot swinging a tennis racket.
But think about the possibilities for recursion are, well, endless... what if the robot has a Wii Remote in its metal mitts? Playing a Wii game by controlling a WiiMote-wielding robot would make for an interesting test of the code's responsiveness. Or how about using a Wii Remote to control a robot to control a robot to control a robot to control...
Scary stuff, particularly if a hundred of the things, mounted on caterpillar tracks, come speeding toward you over the sand dunes all in a line and waving scimitars in unison. Please notify 2000AD, the ABC Warriors have arrived...
Related stories
Nintendo denounces Wii Remote lawsuit (22 December 2006)
Nintendo faces Wii Remote wrist-strap class action lawsuit (20 December 2006)
Re-enact great Jedi, Sith battles with... a Nintendo Wii Remote (12 December 2006)
Nintendo sued over alleged Wii Remote patent violation (11 December 2006)
Re-enact great Jedi, Sith battles with... an Apple MacBook (22 May 2006)
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Nintendo console has officially gone geriatricWii goes where no video game has gone before - Image courtesy Chicago Tribune
Nintendo is off to an incredible start with the Wii. With continued demand and leading sales even after the holiday season, Nintendo couldn’t be happier with the system’s early success. The Wii’s innovative controller design has opened up video gaming to a previously untapped market—non-gamers.
The marketing minds behind Nintendo looked beyond the traditional gamer mediums and advertised its innovations at targets as far from gaming as you can imagine, such as retirees. Nintendo even went against the current and took the Wii to an AARP convention. “The AARP thing was a little bit tough at first. They were like, ‘We don't really want to talk to you because we're all grandparents and we already buy stuff for our kids,’ and so we said, ‘No we want to talk to you about you,’” said Perrin Kaplan, VP Marketing & Corporate Affairs for Nintendo of America. “It took several attempts for them to finally say, ‘So why do you want to talk to us?’ And it's because we have products for them as well now.”
Nintendo’s efforts seemed to have paid off. The Chicago Tribune is reporting that the Wii is now the latest rage at the Sedgebrook retirement community in Lincolnshire, where the average age is 77. In particular, the Wii Bowling component of Wii Sports has members of the retirement community hooked on playing the Wii installed inside the Sedgebrooks’s clubhouse lounge.
“I've never been into video games, but this is addictive,” said 72-year-old Flora Dierbach. “They come in after dinner and play. Sometimes, on Saturday afternoons, their grandkids come play with them … A lot of grandparents are being taught by their grandkids. But, now, some grandparents are instead teaching their grandkids.”
Wii Bowling has become so well received that more than 20 residents signed up to participate in a virtual bowling tournament without the need to leave the clubhouse lounge. Sedgebrook's entertainment committee said that they even have a fan for people to dry their hands before they bowl, just like at a real bowling alley.
Although Wii Sports features cartoon-like graphics and characters—imagery normally aimed at children—the retirees are absolutely taken with the realism offered by the Wii Remote.
“This is pretty realistic. You can even put English on the ball,” said Don Hahn, 76, a veteran of numerous real-life bowling competitions. “I used to play Pac-Man a little bit, but with this you're actually moving around and doing something. You're not just sitting there pushing buttons and getting carpal tunnel.”
hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/05/1492...
Levitating Haptics Joystick Gives Good Feedback
from the well-isn't-that-special dept.
www.macrumors.com/2008/11/07/apple-researching-vir...
Apple Researching Virtual Reality Headsets
Friday November 07, 2008 02:19 PM EST
Written by Arnold Kim
Apple suggests that by detecting the user's movements, the image could be adjusted accordingly:
For example, the device may detect a user's head movement and cause the portion of media displayed to reflect the head movement.
Apple even makes the point that they could take the realism so far as adding theatre surroundings, adjusting sound effects based on the user's "seat" and even adding outlines of other patrons sitting in the theatre.It's not unusual for Apple's patent applications explore novel concepts but Apple has published previous patents related to similar headsets.
arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20090108-microsoft-t...
Microsoft trains next-gen coders with XNA's Kodu
By Frank Caron | Published: January 08, 2009 - 11:14PM CT
Microsoft's keynote at CES this year may not have been the most exciting at the show, but one of the company's announcements has proven to be much more interesting than it originally appeared. One of the company's big reveals was Kodu, a basic programming-tool-turned-XNA-game that Microsoft is pushing as the next big thing for young minds. And while it is easy to be underwhelmed with the software upon first glance, our time with it behind closed doors proved that Microsoft is definitely on to something.
We sat down with Matthew MacLaurin, Microsoft's Principal Program Manager, to go through the unique programming learning tool. Made by a team of only four people, Kodu began life as an internal focus-testing tool for youth and has transformed into an application being positioned as one that focuses on user-created games built from the simple programming language contained within the application.
The key to understanding Kodu is that it shouldn't be viewed as a game. This isn't a product designed to stand up against other titles on the Xbox Live Arcade, and it doesn't really compare to an actual game-focused retail product such as LittleBigPlanet. In fact, if any analogy is fitting, LittleBigPlanet, with its simple mechanical switches, would be similar to assembly, while Kodu would effectively be a high-level language.
Instead, this "utility" is a product of the XNA platform and academic pursuits that has the potential to prove extremely useful to the education of elementary programmatic principles in youth. It's essentially a tertiary programming language laid atop XNA and the Xbox 360's assembly.
The language of Kodu takes a principally semantic form, but in a more literal sense. MacLaurin nodded in approval to our summation; the language, like most pseudocode and learning languages, focuses on building what amounts to simple sentences that translate to programmatic action. Kodu language relies on simple constructs of what are dubbed "nouns," "verbs," and "adjectives"—with the according links to actual language. Users create strings of nouns, verbs, and occasionally adjectives to form actions.
These commands can be strung together as a series of conditionals, and multiple pages of code can be added and jumped between, similar to lines in BASIC: there is a "GOTO" command which allows users to jump pages, allowing branching logic. Aside from the jump commands, code runs linearly through to the end and then loops. To keep things simple, all of these "sentences" take simple conditional forms bracketed by "while" and "do" but neither of these conditions is mandatory in a given "sentence."
This semantical "sentence" structure is combined with a fully visually-oriented, OOE programming environment. Objects (in the OOE sense) take on a virtual form within the "world" of Kodu. This world is fully customizable, and every object within it can be tasked with essentially infinite amounts of code—MacLaurin made a point of saying that the amount of remaining hard drive space was the only finite limit. For programmers who've dabbled in Flash Actionscript or even Visual Basic, this representation of objects and the location of code will be largely familiar; each object effectively "contains" the code related to it. To assign actions to a given object, the user simply selects the object and adds the code.
This visual OOE system comes together into something that proves to be pretty impressive considering its relatively small footprint and low-key approach to programming education. Consider the following example:
The user begins by placing a generic UFO object from an included library of objects into the game world. This UFO is selected and assigned the following action: "SEE FRUIT, MOVE TOWARDS". The user then places a number of generic fruit objects in a line moving from the saucer to the edge of the level. Upon running the code, the saucer moves to the nearest fruit and ultimately comes to a standstill at the edge of the level when there are no more nearby fruit.
Running through the entire roster of examples that we saw during our demo would take pages, but suffice it to say that the programming language here is surprisingly robust, all things considered. At a high level, this program can be used to create games.
While the tool is meant for a younger audience, it proves to be most impressive when used by a learned programmer. I jokingly asked MacLaurin if Kodu supported more robust programmatic techniques such as recursion. Surprisingly, it does. A specific command called "Createables" allows users to specify objects which can spawn other objects. This can be used to recursively create further objects. I joked that I would try to make a Fibonnaci sequence-styled app and he conceded that it was more than possible.
For an educational tool, Kodu has surprising potential. As a student of programming myself, this kind of tool clearly teaches some key principles of semantic programming, simple structures like conditionals, loops, and the basics of object-oriented programming in a way that is both visually engaging and extremely easy to operate. The entire interface uses radial, icon-based menus, and creating code and objects is incredibly smooth and fast.
The program will be coming to the Xbox 360 sometime this spring. The team is hoping to include the ability for users to share creations over Xbox Live, but legal issues are currently being ironed out. Either way, though, Microsoft's understated and easily-overlooked tool in Kodu is surprisingly smart, sharp-looking, accessible, and powerful. It may not do much for the average consumer, but this could very well become a hit for academia.
Between a rock and an interface |
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The web regularly delights Bill Thompson with what it finds for him
Designers and developers should be consulting their psychologists, says Bill Thompson
And I don't even have to go looking for things to read, as the Bloglines news aggregator brings the latest postings from the ninety-two websites I'm most interested in to one place, checking their RSS feeds and managing them for me. All I have to do is skim through looking for anything that catches my eye and seems worth a little attention. So today I got to see what claims to be the best ever photograph of Jupiter taken from an earth-based telescope, captured by an 8.2m telescope in Chile using new "adaptive optics", and learned that Superstruct, the Institute for the Future's "massively multiplayer forecasting game", has just gone live. I signed up straight away. Winding way Then the serendipitous nature of the web took me to BoingBoing, a group blog that calls itself a "directory of wonderful things" which is, although sometimes deeply annoying, always interesting. And that in turn led to a paper on the Scientific Commons website, a two-year old doctoral thesis by a researcher at Utrecht University in the Netherlands in which he reports on his experiments comparing different forms of computer interface in problem-solving.
Psychologist Christof van Nimwegen is interested in effective user interfaces for computer systems, and distinguishes between systems that require users to internalise the knowledge needed to carry out a task and those that externalise it in the form of wizards, prompts, menus and the other elements we associate with modern computers. A typical form of externalisation is when you select and drag an item on an interface and it shows where you can drop it by highlighting areas as you move over them. You don't need to know what is going on, you just need to follow the cues. Van Nimwegen's investigation focused on the ways in which externalizing interface information influences a user's performance in solving problems requiring planning, tasks that are more complicated than just creating or editing a document. They asked users to solve a reasonably complex puzzle involving moving different coloured balls between two boxes using a small dish, and built two versions of the game program, one of which offered more guidance to the user - involved more externalisation - than the other. They found those with less support could play better after an initial learning period. They also coped better with interruptions and remembered more about playing the game after an eight-month gap, indicating that they had internalised the game rules more than those who got support from the game program. The same results were found with more realistic applications including a conference scheduler. Life lessons Van Nimwegen's work is important on many levels, and anyone designing user interfaces should read it as it provides experimental evidence to support hunches we have all had for many years about the depth of learning that different interfaces encourage.
It is also the sort of basic psychological research that we desperately need in the Web 2.0 world where major sites like Facebook are constantly being redesigned on the basis of little real understanding of how people engage with their computers. Vast amounts of work have been done in our attempt to understand human psychology, and the investigation of how we can use computer systems for co-operative work has been going on for decades. Yet few of today's user interface designers seem to make use of the things we already know. The research carried out by psychologists is important because it involves proper experiments, with control groups, null hypotheses and statistical analysis - all the things that focus groups and usability labs don't have. Making use of the results in the real world is not easy, but it is very worthwhile, despite the temptations to skip the hard stuff and just get on and build the website or launch the computer. One of the criticisms of the One Laptop per Child project to get low-cost computers into the hands of the world's poorest children was that there was no pedagogical framework, no attempt to design learning systems around the technology. But at least someone is doing some serious work on the usefulness of computers generally, work that can be applied to all classroom computers and not just the OLPC.
We just have to hope that educationalists, technologists and interface designers pay attention.
Bill Thompson is an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet.
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One of the most wonderful things about spending a lot of my day online is that there is always something interesting to read when work gets boring or I'm waiting for the coffee to brew.
Sociable Design - Introduction
Abstract
This is an abstract for the attached PDF file, "Sociable Design"
Whether designing the rooftop of a building or the rear end of a home or business appliance, sociable design considers how the design will impact everyone: not just the one, intended person standing in front, but also all the rest of society that interacts. One person uses a computer: the rest of us are at the other side of the desk or counter, peering at the ugly rear end, with wires spilling over like entrails. The residents of a building may never see its roof, but those who live in adjoining buildings may spend their entire workday peering at ugly asphalt, shafts and ventilating equipment.
Support for groups is the hallmark of sociable technology. Groups are almost always involved in activities, even when the other people are not visible. All design has a social component: support for this social component, support for groups must always be a consideration.
Sociable design is not just saying “please” and “thank you.” It is not just providing technical support. It is also providing convivial working spaces, plus the time to make use of them.
Sociable technology must support the four themes of communication, presentation, support for groups, and troubleshooting. How these are handled determines whether or not we will find interaction to be sociable. People learn social skills. Machines have to have them designed into them. Sometimes even worse than machines, however, are services, where even though we are often interacting with people, the service activities are dictated by formal rule books of procedures and processes, and the people we interact with can be as frustrated and confused as we are. This too is a design issue.
Design of both machines and services should be thought of as a social activity, one where there is much concern paid to the social nature of the interaction. All products have a social component. This is especially true of communication products, whether websites, personal digests (blog), audio and video postings mean to be shared, or mail digests, mailing lists, and text messaging on cellphones. Social networks are by definition social. But where the social impact is obvious, designers are forewarned. The interesting cases happen where the social side is not so obvious.
The PDF file, Sociable Design, is a draft chapter for a new book. Comments are welcomed. Send them to don at jnd which is in the domain org
Don Norman
www.jnd.org
- Description Click to Edit
-
I have spent the last year really thinking about the future of the Web. But lately I have been thinking more about the future of the desktop. In particular, here are some questions I am thinking about and some answers I've come up so far.
(Author's Note: This is a raw, first-draft of what I think it will be like. Please forgive any typos -- I am still working on this and editing it...)
What Will Happen to the Desktop?
As we enter the third decade of the Web we are seeing an increasing shift from local desktop applications towards Web-hosted software-as-a-service (SaaS). The full range of standard desktop office tools (word processors, spreadsheets, presentation tools, databases, project management, drawing tools, and more) can now be accessed as Web-hosted apps within the browser. The same is true for an increasing range of enterprise applications. This process seems to be accelerating.
As more kinds of applications become available in Web-based form, the Web browser is becoming the primary framework in which end-users work and interact. But what will happen to the desktop? Will it too eventually become a Web-hosted application? Will the Web browser swallow up the desktop? Where is the desktop headed?
Is the desktop of the future going to just be a web-hosted version of the same old-fashioned desktop metaphors we have today?
No. There have already been several attempts at doing this -- and they never catch on. People don't want to manage all their information on the Web in the same interface they use to manage data and apps on their local PC.
Partly this is due to the difference in user experience between using files and folders on a local machine and doing that in "simulated" fashion via some Flash-based or HTML-based imitation of a desktop. Imitations desktops to-date have simply been clunky and slow imitations of the real-thing at best. Others have been overly slick. But one thing they all have in common: None of them have nailed it. The desktop of the future – what some have called “the Webtop” – still has yet to be invented.
It's going to be a hosted web service
Is the desktop even going to exist anymore as the Web becomes increasingly important? Yes, there will have to be some kind of interface that we consider to be our personal "home" and "workspace" -- but ultimately it will have to be a unified space that all our devices connect to and share. This requires that it be a hosted online service.
Currently we have different information spaces on different devices (laptop, mobile device, PC). These will merge. Native local clients could be created for various devices, but ultimately the simplest and therefore most likely choice is to just use the browser as the client. This coming “Webtop” will provide an interface to your local devices, applications and information, as well as to your online life and information.
Today we think of our Web browser running inside our desktop as an applicaiton. But actually it will be the other way around in the future: Our desktop will run inside our browser as an application.
Instead of the browser running inside, or being launched from, some kind of next-generation desktop web interface technology, it's will be the other way around: The browser will be the shell and the desktop application will run within it either as a browser add-in, or as a web-based application.
The Web 3.0 desktop is going to be completely merged with the Web -- it is going to be part of the Web. In fact there may eventually be no distinction between the desktop and the Web anymore.
The focus shifts from information to attention
As our digital lives shift from being focused on the old fashioned desktop to the Web environment we will see a shift from organizing information spatially (directories, folders, desktops, etc.) to organizing information temporally (feeds, lifestreams, microblogs, timelines, etc.).
Instead of being just a directory, the desktop of the future is going to be more like a feed reader or social news site. The focus will be on keeping up with all the stuff flowing in and out of the user’s environment. The interface will be tuned to help the user understand what the trends are, rather than just on how things are organized.
The focus will be on helping the user to manage their attention rather than just their information. This is a leap to the meta-level: A second-order desktop. Instead of just being about the information (the first-order), it is going to be about what is happening with the information (the second-order).
Users are going to shift from acting as librarians to acting as daytraders.
Our digital roles are already shifting from acting as librarians to becoming more like daytraders. In the PC era we were all focused on trying to manage the stuff on our computers -- in other words, we were acting as librarians. But this is going to shift. Librarians organize stuff, but daytraders are focused on discovering and keeping track of trends. It's a very different focus and activity, and it's what we are all moving towards.
We are already spending more of our time keeping up with change and detecting trends, than on organizing information. In the coming decade the shelf-life of information is going to become vanishingly short and the focus will shift from storage and recall to real-time filtering, trend detection and prediction.
The Webtop will be more social and will leverage and integrate collective intelligence
The Webtop is going to be more socially oriented than desktops of today -- it will have built-in messaging and social networking, as well as social-media sharing, collaborative filtering, discussions, and other community features.
The social dimension of our lives is becoming perhaps our most important source of information. We get information via email from friends, family and colleagues. We get information via social networks and social media sharing services. We co-create information with others in communities.
The social dimension is also starting to play a more important role in our information management and discovery activities. Instead of those activities remaining as solitary, they are becoming more communal. For example many social bookmarking and social news sites use community sentiment and collaborative filtering to help to highlight what is most interesting, useful or important.
It's going to have powerful semantic search and social search capabilities built-in
The Webtop is going to have more powerful search built-in. This search will combine both social and semantic search features. Users will be able to search their information and rank it by social sentiment (for example, “find documents about x and rank them by how many of my friends liked them.”)
Semantic search will enable highly granular search and navigation of information along a potentially open-ended range of properties and relationships.
For example you will be able to search in a highly structured way -- for example, search for products you once bookmarked that have a price of $10.95 and are on-sale this week. Or search for documents you read which were authored by Sue and related to project X, in the last month.
The semantics of the future desktop will be open-ended. That is to say that users as well as other application and information providers will be able to extend it with custom schemas, new data types, and custom fields to any piece of information.
Interactive shared spaces instead of folders
Forget about shared folders -- that is an outmoded paradigm. Instead, the new metaphor will be interactive shared spaces.
The need for shared community space is currently being provided for online by forums, blogs, social network profile pages, wikis, and new community sites. But as we move into Web 3.0 these will be replaced by something that combines their best features into one. These next-generation shared spaces will be like blogs, wikis, communities, social networks, databases, workspaces and search engines in one.
Any group of two or more individuals will be able to participate in a shared space that connects their desktops for a particular purpose. These new shared spaces will not only provide richer semantics in the underlying data, social network, and search, but they will also enable groups to seamlessly and collectively add, organize, track, manage, discuss, distribute, and search for information of mutual interest.
The personal cloud
The future desktop will function like a “personal cloud” for users. It will connect all their identities, data, relationships, services and activities in one virtual integrated space. All incoming and outgoing activity will flow through this space. All applications and services that a user makes use of will connect to it.
The personal cloud may not have a center, but rather may be comprised of many separate sub-spaces, federated around the Web and hosted by different service-providers. Yet from an end-user perspective it will function as a seamlessly integrated service. Users will be able to see and navigate all their information and applications, as if they were in one connected space, regardless of where they are actually hosted. Users will be able to search their personal cloud from any point within it.
Open data, linked data and open-standards based semantics
The underlying data in the future desktop, and in all associated services it connects, will be represented using open-standard data formats. Not only will the data be open, but the semantics of the data – the schema – will also be defined in an open way. The emerigng Semantic Web provides a good infrastructure for enabling this to happen.
The value of open linked-data and open semantics is that data will not be held prisoner anywhere and can easily be integrated with other data.
Users will be able to seamlessly move and integrate their data, or parts of their data, in different services. This means that your Webtop might even be portable to a different competing Webtop provider someday. If and when that becomes possible, how will Webtop providers compete to add value?
It's going to be smart
One of the most important aspects of the coming desktop is that it's going to be smart. It's going to learn and help users to be more productive. Artificial intelligence is one of the key ways that competing Webtop providers will differentiate their offerings.
As you use it, it's going to learn about your interests, relationships, current activities, information and preferences. It will adaptively self-organize to help you focus your attention on what is most important to whatever context you are in.
When reading something while you are taking a trip to Milan it may organize itself to be more contextually relevant to that time, place and context. When you later return home to San Francisco it will automatically adapt and shift to your home context. When you do a lot of searches about a certain product it will realize your context and intent has to do with that product and will adapt to help you with that activity for a while, until your behavior changes.
Your desktop will actually be a semantic knowledge base on the back-end. It will encode a rich semantic graph of your information, relationships, interests, behavior and preferences. You will be able to permit other applications to access part or all of your graph to datamine it and provide you with value-added views and even automated intelligent assistance.
For example, you might allow an agent that cross-links things to see all your data: it would go and add cross links to relevant things onto all the things you have created or collected. Another agent that makes personalized buying recommendations might only get to see your shopping history across all shopping sites you use.
Your desktop may also function as a simple personal assistant at times. You will be able to converse with your desktop eventually -- through a conversational agent interface. While on the road you will be able to email or SMS in questions to it and get back immediate intelligent answers. You will even be able to do this via a voice interface.
For example, you might ask, "where is my next meeting?" or "what Japanese restaurants do I like in LA?" or "What is Sue's Smith's phone number?" and you would get back answers. You could also command it to do things for you -- like reminding you to do something, or helping you keep track of an interest, or monitoring for something and alerting you when it happens.
Because your future desktop will connect all the relationships in your digital life -- relationships connecting people, information, behavior, prefences and applications -- it will be the ultimate place to learn about your interests and preferences.
Federated, open policies and permissions
This rich graph of meta-data that comprises your future desktop will enable the next-generation of smart services to learn about you and help you in an incredibly personalized manner. It will also of course be rife with potential for abuse and privacy will be a major function and concern.
One of the biggest enabling technologies that will be necessary is a federated model for sharing meta-data about policies and permissions on data. Information that is considered to be personal and private in Web site X should be recognized and treated as such by other applications and websites you choose to share that information with. This will require a way for sharing meta-data about your policies and permissions between different accounts and applicaitons you use.
The semantic web provides a good infrastructure for building and deploying a decentralized framework for policy and privacy integration, but it has yet to be developed, let alone adopted. For the full vision of the future desktop to emerge a universally accepted standard for exchanging policy and permission data will be a necessary enabling technology.
Who is most likely to own the future desktop?
When I think about what the future desktop is going to look like it seems to be a convergence of several different kinds of services that we currently view as separate.
It will be hosted on the cloud and accessible across all devices. It will place more emphasis on social interaction, social filtering, and collective intelligence. It will provide a very powerful and extensible data model with support for both unstructured and arbitrarily structured information. It will enable almost peer-to-peer like search federation, yet still have a unified home page and user-experience. It will be smart and personalized. It will be highly decentralized yet will manage identity, policies and permissions in an integrated cohesive and transparent manner across services.
By cobbling together a number of different services that exist today you could build something like this in a decentralized fashion. Is that how the desktop of the future will come about? Or will it be a new application provided by one player with a lot of centralized market power? Or could an upstart suddently emerge with the key enabling technologies to make this possible? It’s hard to predict, but one thing is certain: It will be an interesting process to watch.
www.nytimes.com/2008/08/17/technology/17ping.html?...
Digital Designers Rediscover Their Hands
GEVER TULLEY has only one qualification for training software designers how to become more creative. He teaches children how to build objects like gravity-powered wooden roller coasters with their hands, at his Tinkering School in Montara, Calif., south of San Francisco.
Now Mr. Tulley does the same thing for dozens of adults who are in the front ranks of software design at Adobe, the big software supplier based in San Jose, Calif. In daylong workshops, about 100 Adobe designers wrestle with plastic beads, small electronic displays, Ikea water glasses and tiny sensors to create wacky motion games. Usually, about the only thing these folks touch on the job is a computer mouse.
“Some people thought we were crazy to do this,” says Michael Gough, a vice president for design at Adobe. “But for others, the experience has started to inform how they work,” giving them a better appreciation of how customers experience Adobe’s programs.
“So we’re going to keep pushing it,” Mr. Gough says.
Mr. Tulley’s transformation highlights a little-noticed movement in the world of professional design and engineering: a renewed appreciation for manual labor, or innovating with the aid of human hands.
“A lot of people get lost in the world of computer simulation,” says Bill Burnett, executive director of the product design program at Stanford. “You can’t simulate everything.”
Using computers to model the physical world has become increasingly common; products as diverse as cars and planes, pharmaceuticals and cellphones are almost entirely conceived, specified and designed on a computer screen. Typically, only when these creations are nearly ready for mass manufacturing are prototypes made — and often not by the people who designed them.
Creative designers and engineers are rebelling against their alienation from the physical world. “The hands-on part is for me a critical aspect of understanding how to design,” said Michael Kuniavsky , a consultant in San Francisco who for three years has convened a summer gathering of leading designers, called “Sketching in Hardware.”
At last month’s session, at the Rhode Island School of Design, attendees broke into small groups, wielding soldering irons and materials their grandfathers probably knew more about.
Such experiences hone instinct and intuition as opposed to logic and cognition, advocates say, and bring the designer closer to art than science.
“I’m not sure employers are recognizing the importance of hands-on,” Mr. Kuniavsky says.
Mr. Gough began to appreciate the possibilities of Mr. Tulley’s “learn by making” idea for Adobe only after his own children attended the Tinkering School.
Part of corporate resistance to experimenting with hands-on activities comes from the difficulty of measuring the value of paying employees to, say, build a go-cart or a radio set while in the office. Yet educators say the benefits, even if intangible, are clear. “All your intelligence isn’t in your brain,” Mr. Burnett says. “You learn through your hands.”
At Stanford, the rediscovery of human hands arose partly from the frustration of engineering, architecture and design professors who realized that their best students had never taken apart a bicycle or built a model airplane. For much the same reason, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology offers a class, “How to Make (Almost) Anything,” which emphasizes learning to use physical tools effectively.
“Students are desperate for hands-on experience,” says Neil Gershenfeld, who teaches the course.
Paradoxically, yearnings to pick up a hammer — or an oscilloscope — may deepen even as young people immerse themselves in simulated worlds. “People spend so much time in digital worlds that it creates an appetite for the physical world,” says Dale Dougherty, an executive at O’Reilly Media, which is based in Sebastopol, Calif., He manages a magazine, Make, that is devoted to building digital-era gear.
Fifty years ago, tinkering with gadgets was routine for people drawn to engineering and invention. When personal computers became widespread starting in the 1980s, “we tended to forget the importance of physical senses,” says Richard Sennett, a sociologist at the London School of Economics.
Making refinements with your own hands — rather than automatically, as often happens with a computer — means “you have to be extremely self-critical,” says Mr. Sennett, whose book “The Craftsman” (Yale University Press, 2008), examines the importance of “skilled manual labor,” which he believes includes computer programming.
EVEN in highly abstract fields, like the design of next-generation electronic circuits, some people believe that hands-on experiences can enhance creativity. “You need your hands to verify experimentally a technology that doesn’t exist,” says Mario Paniccia, director of Intel’s photonics technology lab in Santa Clara, Calif. Building optical switches in silicon materials, for example, requires engineers to test the experimental switches themselves, and to build test equipment, too.
Bringing human hands back into the world of digital designers may have profound long-term consequences. Designs could become safer, more user-friendly and even more durable.
At the very least, the process of creating things could become a happier one. While working in simulated computer worlds has undeniable appeal, Mr. Tulley says, “the physical act of making things helps the whole person.”
G. Pascal Zachary writes about technology and economic development. E-mail: gzach@nytimes.com.
www.nytimes.com/2007/12/18/science/18tier.htm?_r=2...
Why Nobody Likes a Smart Machine
At a Best Buy store in Midtown Manhattan, Donald Norman was previewing a scene about to be re-enacted in living rooms around the world.
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Does technology make your life easier? Or just add some frustration? Join the discussion.
Further Reading
"The Design of Future Things." Donald A. Norman. (Basic Books, 2007)
Nielsen Norman Group.
"Designing Interactions." Bill Moggridge. (MIT Press, 2007)
"Sketching User Experiences." Bill Buxton. (Morgan Kaufmann, 2007)
He was playing with one of this year’s hot Christmas gifts, a digital photo frame from Kodak. It had a wondrous list of features — it could display your pictures, send them to a printer, put on a slide show, play your music — and there was probably no consumer on earth better prepared to put it through its paces.
Dr. Norman, a cognitive scientist who is a professor at Northwestern, has been the maestro of gizmos since publishing “The Design of Everyday Things,” his 1988 critique of VCRs no one could program, doors that couldn’t be opened without instructions and other technologies that seemed designed to drive humans crazy.
Besides writing scholarly analyses of gadgets, Dr. Norman has also been testing and building them for companies like Apple and Hewlett-Packard. One of his consulting gigs involved an early version of this very technology on the shelf at Best Buy: a digital photo frame developed for a startup company that was later acquired by Kodak.
“This is not the frame I designed,” Dr. Norman muttered as he tried to navigate the menu on the screen. “It’s bizarre. You have to look at the front while pushing buttons on the back that you can’t see, but there’s a long row of buttons that all feel the same. Are you expected to memorize them?”
He finally managed to switch the photo in the frame to vertical from horizontal. Then he spent five minutes trying to switch it back.
“I give up,” he said with a shrug. “In any design, once you learn how to do something once, you should be able to do it again. This is really horrible.”
So the bad news is that despite two decades of lectures from Dr. Norman on the virtue of “user-centered” design and the danger of a disease called “featuritis,” people will still be cursing at their gifts this Christmas.
And the worse news is that the gadgets of Christmas future will be even harder to command, because we and our machines are about to go through a rocky transition as the machines get smarter and take over more tasks. As Dr. Norman says in his new book, “The Design of Future Things,” what we’ll have here is a failure to communicate.
“It would be fine,” he told me, “if we had intelligent devices that would work well without any human intervention. My clothes dryer is a good example: it figures out when the clothes are dry and stops. But we are moving toward intelligent machines that still require human supervision and correction, and that is where the danger lies — machines that fight with us over how to do things.”
Can this relationship be saved? Until recently, Dr. Norman believed in the favorite tool of couples therapists: better dialogue. But he has concluded that dialogue isn’t the answer, because we’re too different from the machines.
You can’t explain to your car’s navigation system why you dislike its short, efficient route because the scenery is ugly. Your refrigerator may soon know exactly what food it contains, what you’ve already eaten today and what your calorie limit is, but it won’t be capable of an intelligent dialogue about your need for that piece of cheesecake.
To get along with machines, Dr. Norman suggests we build them using a lesson from Delft, a town in the Netherlands where cyclists whiz through crowds of pedestrians in the town square. If the pedestrians try to avoid an oncoming cyclist, they’re liable to surprise him and collide, but the cyclist can steer around them just fine if they ignore him and keep walking along at the same pace. “Behaving predictably, that’s the key,” Dr. Norman said. “If our smart devices were understandable and predictable, we wouldn’t dislike them so much.” Instead of trying to anticipate our actions, or debating the best plan, machines should let us know clearly what they’re doing.
Instead of beeping and buzzing mysteriously, or flashing arrays of red and white lights, machines should be more like Dr. Norman’s ideal of clear communication: a tea kettle that burbles as the water heats and lets out a steam whistle when it’s finished. He suggests using natural sounds and vibrations that don’t require explanatory labels or a manual no one will ever read.
But no matter how clearly the machines send their signals, Dr. Norman expects that we’ll have a hard time adjusting to them. He wasn’t surprised when I took him on a tour of the new headquarters of The New York Times and he kept hearing complaints from people about the smart elevators and window shades, or the automatic water faucets that refuse to dispense water. (For Dr. Norman’s analysis of our office building of the future, go to nytimes.com/tierneylab.)
As he watched our window shades mysteriously lowering themselves, having detected some change in cloud cover that eluded us, Dr. Norman recalled the fight that he and his colleagues at Northwestern waged against the computerized shades that kept letting sunlight glare on their computer screens.
“It took us a year and a half to get the administration to let us control the shades in our own offices,” he said. “Badly designed so-called intelligent technology makes us feel out of control, helpless. No wonder we hate it.” (For all our complaining, at The Times we have nicer shades that let us override the computer.)
Even when the bugs have been worked out of a new technology, designers will still turn out junk if they don’t get feedback from users — a common problem when their customer is a large bureaucracy. Engineers have known how to build a simple alarm clock for more than a century, so why can’t you figure out how to set the one in your hotel room? Because, Dr. Norman said, the clock was bought by someone in the hotel’s purchasing department who has never tried to navigate all those buttons at 1 in the morning.
“Our frustrations with machines are not going to be solved with better machines,” Dr. Norman said. “Most of our technological difficulties come from the