Monthly Archives: May 2009

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Cool idea for an augmented reality game. The game is an overlay on the video stream from the built-in camera, and it could be implemented in an iPhone today, given that there are official APIs to the camera video stream.

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I love it when someone does your homework for you. If you want to use an accellerometer or gyro to do interaction, this video covers the basics of human wrist motion as well as how to quantize or discretize your raw tilt data into useful blocks or ranges.

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This is too wierd and inelegant. But it does have the advantage of being compact.

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The faster the cursor moves, the bigger the cursor area is.

With an ordinary mouse pointer in Microsoft Windows, the pointer area is always just one pixel.

This technique should allow faster clicking, as well as cursors that are easier to follow when they move quickly.

This video also has some nice examples of the classic bubble cursor.

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There is an aspect of this software that I’ve totally fallen in love with. In a graph view, move two items together, and they will automagically connect. It’s so playful and elegeant and wonderful.

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Technology in phones are leaping towards making these kinds of visualizations possible.

The Google G1 phone has GPS and compass. If you assume that the phone is located about 1.5 meters above ground level, this could be prototyped on that phone. Augmented reality is just around the corner.

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This looks kind of interesting for large screens. Use your index finger for pointing, your thumb for left clicking, and any other finger for right clicking. What could be more intuitive?

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Here’s a new gesture for you: Microroll.

It’s when you move a finger a small distance on the screen without sliding it. Screens of today can’t discriminate between these gestures, but it certainly feels different to your finger. I’ve tried doing these gestures one-handed on diffent parts of the screen and it gets incredibly awkward on some places. Try it.

These guys say you can distinguish between slide and roll by doing analysis. But in my opinion that will intruduce unacceptable lag for direct manipulation. Maybe it could work on an offscreen keyboard. But for what?

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This is the first time I’ve seen facial recognition and emotion recognition in video.

This video editing software can suggest the next clip based on who’s in the frame, and what mood they are in.

Looks like you can film all day, and then have the computer automatically segment and categorize all your video for you. What an amazing future we all have ahead of us.

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I haven’t gotten a chance to feel how this feels yet. But I think the buttons with E-ink display looks very promising. It certainly looks like they have all the benefits of standard hard buttons, while retaining much of the benefits of using a display to dynamically change the content of the buttons.

I wonder how long we’ll have to wait before we get full size e-ink keyboards for our laptops and PC’s. Caps Lock and Num Lock would be so much more elegant if the characters could change.