NeatTrix

The Wiimote controlling drum machines, by which I mean, machines that play the drums. A quick read of his website tells me that he’s using Arduinos to control the machines, plus some custom stuff. Pretty nice.

No, it doesn’t see dead people (not yet). It’s a wearable gestural interface.

Description

Videos

Since we have a burgeoning thread of articles about this sort of thing, here’s yet another gestural display interface. iPoint 3D promises display interaction without a data glove. Two firewire-interfaced cameras feed live video to a dedicated processor which then tracks the motions of  hands and fingers in real time and relays the information to a computer. See www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090220075312.htm and www.hhi.fraunhofer.de/en/departments/interactive-media-human-factors/overview/ipoint-presenter/ for more information.

Originally developed at NASA (www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/news/releases/2004/subvocal/subvocal.html), subvocal speech recognition allows human-computer control through non-voiced speech recognition. Electrodes placed near the larynx on the throat pick up minuscule (< 1 millivolt) potential changes associated with speaking words without sound. For example, reading silently. That is, thinking that you’re going to say something you don’t actually voice. Evidently, bioelectrical signals similar to EMG are transmitted even though you don’t intend to say anything aloud.

The Ambient Corporation (www.theaudeo.com) has commercialized this technology, recently making the first voiceless phone call (edageek.com/2008/02/27/msp430-microcontroller).  Below is a video demo using this technology to control a wheelchair. The biggest drawback of this, EMG, or any electrode-based human-computer interfacing are those damned electrodes. Daily use irritates the skin, and then there’s all the motion artifact, not to mention that you have wires hanging off your face.  Implantable electrodes? Feeling Borg-ish?

When I saw the film, Minority Report, with Tom Cruise, I was completely intrigued by the data glove and gestural interface depicted in the film, and even worked on developing an interface with some of the same ideas in mind. Well, I’ve been scooped again. Check this out:

I am so jealous…

Since the new Kindle will soon take the place of the current model, I thought I’d give a nod to Igor Skochinsky, who notoriously hacked the Kindle over a year ago.  In an interview, he described the Kindle as a closed system, but not that closed.  He also said the Sony Reader and iPhone were much more closed.  Easy or not, here are the three entries from his blog, detailing the steps taken to gain access to the console, and mess about inside. (continue reading…)

I love to play the guitar.  I’m good enough that I can find the chords or tab of most songs that I like to listen to, sit down and play it.  Well enough so that it’s enjoyable to me.   And really, that’s all I want.  I can’t, however, translate my love of songs and my, I think, astute appreciation of good music (would I like any other kind) into any kind of a music writing ability, lyrical or otherwise.  My chord progressions are uninspired, dull affairs, and my lyrics, maudlin effusions of love and death with the occasional scatological reference. In a word, bad. (continue reading…)

Palm announced and demonstrated their new phone, the Palm Pre last week at CES (Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas.  The phone runs their new Linux-based WebOS and it looks very nice.  Palm, the one-time undisputed leader of the PDA have been playing catch-up for several years now, chasing the blackberry and the iPhone -not to mention all the windows-based systems.  It’s definitely late to the party, but it looks like they have put a lot of work and thought into the functionality of this phone, unlike a lot of the crappy touchscreen phones that surfaced in the wake of the iPhone.  Here’s hoping.  Videos after the jump. (continue reading…)

I met this guy at a siggraph in 2003, I think,  in the developing technology section.  I checked out his website and keep checking in on it from time to time. He works for Microsoft Research now, doing some really cool stuff. I recommend checking out the whole site.  You download and try some of the programs, others have been incorporated into commercial products.   His specialty is on interfaces and he’s done some very cool work.

This is what he was showing at siggraph.  It’s called a focus-plus-context screen. Basically, it’s a massive low-resolution display with an embedded high-resolution display.   It gives you the benefit of seeing the big picture, while still being able to focus on a particular part of it.  The two displays are linked so when content scrolls into the high resolution display, the content is shown in high resolution.

http://www.patrickbaudisch.com/projects/focuspluscontextscreens/index.html

Johnny Chung Lee has been doing some neat stuff. Admittedly, I saw these videos last year. I thought Mr. Lee had great potential then, and now he’s working for Microsoft. Maybe there’s hope for Microsoft. His main site is www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/. The Wii remote stuff is located at www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/projects/wii/.

Anyway, these videos are great examples of coloring outside the lines.

There are ways to do the some of the same tricks with a webcam, but you can’t beat this Wii remote as a platform. For $40 you get an IR-sensitive camera, 3-axis accelerometer, lots of buttons, and a Bluetooth connection to a computer. The Wii remote uses the ADXL330 3-axis accelerometer from Analog Devices. The sensor bar referred to in the videos is several IR (infrared) LEDs (light-emitting diodes) with a known spacing. There are 5 LEDs located at each end of the sensor bar. The apparent spacing of the LEDs in combination with the accelerometer data (tilt and velocity) yields positioning.

If only the Emotiv Headset had some IR LEDs…

Here’s something neat. It even has “neat” in its name: NeatTools (www.neattools.org). This is free software, a graphical programming language that allows you to manipulate inputs and outputs from your Windows-based computer. NeatTools seems a little dated, but it looks like it works OK under XP and Vista. It may well be on its way to improvement. Evidently, the creators have recently decided to make NeatTools open-source (http://sourceforge.net/projects/neattools). Another company, SenSyr (www.sensyr.com) makes a data interface supported by NeatTools

Partial Neattools Program Screen

Anyway, it looks as if these folks are striving for progress.