In Traction

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Using a Wiimote to realize the Minority Report user interface

Via Gizmodo:

This Wiimote hack is one of the more astounding mods we’ve seen to Nintendo’s pride and joy, but even more remarkably, it’s really only taking advantage of the Wiimote’s IR and Bluetooth capabilities to create what may be the multitouch mecca — multitouch without the touch. So would you wear little reflective rings on your fingers to have tactile control of your television screen? We would. In a heartbeat. And then we’d call Captain Planet to kick some ass when we’re finished watching 30 Rock.

Very cool stuff. Since almost anyone at our institute has a Wii nowadays (including me), this should not be too hard to create ourselves.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0awjPUkBXOU]

The author of the video is Johnny Lee and works at Carnegie-Mellon. Just had a quick look through his impressive list of publications (UIST, SIGGRAPH, DIS, CHI, etc.), and found an interesting paper on how one can predict the task a user is currently performing by analyzing his EEG signals. This one is on my reading list about general sensing techniques (I hope I find some time soon to start reading papers again).

Thoughts on speed reading

On Monday afternoon, I participated in a Smart Reading course together with a few colleagues. Although the basic techniques of speed reading were explained, it left me wanting to know more. Since I don’t feel like paying more than a thousand Euros for a full, three-day course, I started to look for some more information on the topic.

If you want more or less the same information that we received in the course, have a look at this excellent overview of speed reading techniques.

For those of you who want to speed read through information on your computer display instead of in books, there is software available that uses the technique of Rapid Serial Visual Presentation to help you read faster. One of these applications is RapidReader. They have a nice video illustrating that reading faster doesn’t significantly hamper your comprehension:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hs6CGBlqulk]

There are also some free alternatives, such as Spreeder (an online speed reader) and dictator.

Apparently there is a yearly contest called the World Championship Speed Reading Competition. The current record holder is Sean Adam with 3850 words per minute with comprehension. There were also some famous people in history that could speed read, including Jacques Bergier and USA presidents John F. Kennedy and Jimmy Carter. There are also some claims of a child prodigy that could read more than 400 000 words per minute, but that might be attributed to her photographic memory.

Although a lot of the claims around speed reading are unrealistic and it is surrounded by the typical vagueness of pseudoscience, the idea still intrigues me. I went to the book shop yesterday and found a few books (some exclusively in Dutch, others translated from English) that seem interesting to have a look at. I also included books on Mind mapping since this is the technique used to summarize the books you read. There is another book in English that seems to be recommended by a few people: Breakthrough Rapid Reading by Peter Kump.

The Dutch books I might have a look are:

Gebruik je hersens Snellezen Mindmappen Gebruik je verstand

Going further in geo visualization

I read an article about Everyscape. Everyscape tries to give its users an immersive experience by stitching together a set of panoramic photographs, in contrast with the satellite imagery that is being used by other tools such as Google Earth. I played a bit with the NY demo and was pretty impressed.

Everyscape

Apparently their web-based software is based on the initial software by the founder’s previous company, Mok3. There is a great video that shows a tour through a long hallway at MIT which was constructed of only 20 panoramic photographs. I found another (less impressive) Youtube video of Mok3’s software:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsZj-_E5cSo]

It reminded me a bit of Microsoft’s Photosynth, which was presented at TED this year:

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-DqZ8jAmv0]

Interesting talks coming up

I’m attending two interesting talks this month (together with some colleagues).

Adam Greenfield is coming to Leuven on November 27th. He wrote the book Everyware: the dawning age of ubiquitous computing and gave a keynote at Pervasive this year.

Adam Greenfield

Next Monday, I’m going to Living Tomorrow in Vilvoorde for a session on the Internet of Things. I still have to figure out some issues with the registration though.

Living Tomorrow

Object recognition with video phones

Andrea Gaggioli blogged about the Pocket Supercomputer by Accenture. The original article was published by NewScientistTech:

Live video footage is fed from the handset to a central server, which rapidly matches on-screen objects to images previously entered into a database. The server then sends find relevant information and sends it back to user (…) The central server uses an algorithm called the Scale-Invariant Feature Transform to match objects. The algorithm uses hundreds or thousands of reference points, corresponding to physical features such as edges, corners or lettering, to find a match. The process works no matter how the object is oriented, but objects must first be carefully imaged and entered into the central database.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkqUjQj8H3M]

This is certainly a step forward compared to RFID and 2D barcodes such as Semacodes or QR codes. It reminded me of Atom tags that could recognize existing logo’s and also used server-side shape analysis and pattern recognition.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_7Yy-zQiRo]

Unlike these two techniques, the existing 2D barcodes are not human-readable.

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