Laster Technologies, a French company, has developed a new set of glasses that allows users to view data in a heads up display type of configuration. These glasses appear to be just as normal as most correctional lenses, with the exception of a projection system. A projector is attached to the glasses on either side, just in front of where the glasses touch the ear of the user.

Not only do these glasses display information, but they also read the displayed data through cameras and send it back to the host computer. These glasses give the user the ability to display any information the user needs, less than an inch away. This technology could prove useful for situations ranging from reading a book, to viewing schematics or instructions when working on a project.

Devin Mullen

Last week, undergraduates from the Project54 lab visited the KEEPERS camp. KEEPERS stands for Kids Eager for Engineering Program with Elementary Research-based Science. The purpose of the camp is to get young children interested in engineering. One of the tours that the camp went on was a trip to Professor Wayne Smith’s Biomedical Engineering lab, where campers learned about how electrical engineers design prosthetic limbs that react to signals from the brain. Chris Bancroft, a recent graduate of the UNH ECE masters program, gave a demonstration to the campers of how the technology works. He attached electrical leads to his arm and explained to the campers that when a person with a prosthetic limb moves their arm, the brain sends signals to the muscle. That is where the leads pick up the signals and send it to a microcontroller. In the demonstration in the lab, Chris had the microcontroller attached to pneumatic pumps that forced air into a muscle-like air bladder. He explained that when the signals from the brain are picked up by the muscle, they are amplified and then sent to the microcontroller which decides which pumps to turn on and move the muscle, lifting a wooden arm.

Devin Mullen

A pointing device, such as a mouse, touchpad or the pointing stick, has become an essential component of the modern computer system. As the number of portable computer users steadily increases so does the need for a compact and highly portable pointing device. The problem evident with existing pointing devices is that an increase in the portability of the device often results in the decrease of performance of the device and/or the comfort for the user.

The MoGo Mouse BT^TM of Newton Peripherals and the Slim G4 Mouse of DaoKorea were developed to improve the portability of the mouse by reducing its thickness down to 5mm enabling it to be neatly stored inside a PC card slot. However reduced graspability was indicated as their weak point, which ensued due to their very slim form.

To address this usability-portability trade-off problem a 5 person team of the Department of Industrial Design of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology has developed the Inflatable Mouse by essentially attaching an inflatable balloon on top of a slim mouse. The Inflatable Mouse is a volume-adjustable user interface. It connects to the computer through a USB port which can also be used to power its air pump. The air pump inflates the balloon up to the volume of a familiar mouse as needed, and deflates it entirely so it could be stored in the PC card slot of a portable computer when not in use. Apart from the standard functionalities of a mouse it also provides a new input modality of squeezing the mouse by sensing the air pressure inside the balloon, and also has multiple touch sensors on the top and both sides of the mouse. Changing pressure can be used for scrolling, selecting from a list etc.

Since the volume of the mouse can be promptly changed it can also be used as an output/display device, where a variety of dynamic expressions can be made, for instance simulating the beating motion of the heart.

For further reading and a video, check out:

• Inflatable mouse CHI 2008 paper
• Inflatable mouse youtube video

David Filipovic

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a device that allows a user to transform virtually any surface into a multitouch computer. The name of this new technology is Project LuminAR, which is basically an embedded computer in a lamp. The LuminAR bulb contains a pico projector, a camera, and a computer with wireless connectivity - all packaged into an area not much larger than a digital camera. The LuminAR bulb uses a pico projector to display a computer interface (which would normally be seen on a liquid crystal display) onto any flat surface. A built-in camera detects and interprets movement from the user, and sends that data to the computer. The user can navigate and type on the interface using gestures and a graphical keyboard. This reduces the need for hardware such as a mouse, keyboard, and display that are necessities on any desktop or laptop PC. Another great feature of this device is that it plugs into a robotic lamp which has the ability to move around based on the user’s movements and gestures. The LuminAR bulb can also be installed in any household lamp.

Take a look at the original article from the IEEE here.

Devin Mullen

Recently, users of Project54 have reported that the USB devices connected to their in-car computers at random would not power up correctly. Typically, a system reboot would solve the problem and power up the devices, but this situation is not ideal. The police officers using the Project54 application need all USB devices to consistently perform, and rebooting their computers is time consuming. Carol Perkins and I set up a diagnostic test in which 5 USB devices, including a GPS, wireless antenna, touch screen monitor, video adapter, and scanner, were set up in 5 different USB port configurations with a CoolGear USB hub. As shown in the figure below, two devices, the video adapter and the Symbol Scanner DS6707, had issues booting up. The Symbol Scanner did not power on 14% of the 50 trial runs. Of these 7 failures, twice the device booted initially, but eventually powered down without instruction. The figure below also shows that the power failures occurred while connected to 4 different ports, so we concluded that the reported problem was not due to any power allocation problems within the USB hub. When powered correctly, this scanner performs exceptionally well, so users will be asked to unplug and then replug the scanner when a power up is not successful. 

- Erika Swanson

The image above is the combination of a transparent FTIR-based multi-touch surface and a motion control board, such as the one from Nintendo BalanceBoard, to create a navigation metaphor. Dimitar Valkov, Dr. Frank Steinicke, Gerd Bruder and Prof. Dr. Klaus Hinrichs built this while working for the Visualization and Computer Graphics Research Group at the University of Munster. They created it as an easier way to navigate through a 3D virtual world. It allows the users to visualize movement through tight spaces such as caves where actual locomotion would be difficult. While this illustration includes wheels, the user of the device is not actually moving on wheels. The wheels are just a metaphor for the movement controlled by the user with hand and foot gestures.

I was drawn to this article because of the multi-touch surface similar to the one we have here at Project54, although it is not the main focus of the apparatus. The key to this navigational device is the use of a motion control board because it’s less strenuous to use feet to specify direction and speed than continuously using hands. They have presented this device to six subjects who were able to quickly adapt to using their feet and provided positive feedback on the device. The users appeared to have a natural ability to incorporate the use of feet and hand gestures for navigating in a virtual environment. With intuitive ease of use, reduced strenuous and continuous motion control requirements, the device seems to have great potential in becoming incorporated in more interaction metaphors.

Carol Perkins

Below: A pico projector made by the Microvision company

In the near future we could see a revolution in mobile display technology. Miniaturized projectors called pico projectors will replace current projector models and will make displaying media from mobile devices much easier. With this advance in technology, our mobile media will no longer be limited to a two inch screen. Instead, we will have the capability to increase the display size of a mobile device to about eight feet. These projectors will give mobile phone users the ability to display content such as movies or photos on a screen larger than most televisions. Currently most pico projectors are standalone units that connect to mobile devices via a cable. In a couple of years we could see built-in pico projectors in a variety of devices, ranging from mobile phones to mp3 players.

Below: A visual representation of Liquid Crystal on Silicon (LCOS) Technology

There are currently three different types of technology that are used in these mini-projectors: liquid crystal on silicon (LCOS), scanning mirror, and digital-light processing. Liquid crystal on silicon technology uses liquid crystals that sit on top of a chip, where the top of the chip is coated with material that makes it act like a mirror. The liquid crystals change their orientation based on an electric field, which in turn changes the polarization of the light that shines through the crystals and reflects off of the chip. In scanning mirror technology, three laser diodes direct light through a lens to a set of microelectromechanical mirrors mounted on silicon. These mirrors move horizontally and vertically to direct the light and create a picture. In digital-light processing technology, there is a chip that contains millions of microscopic mirrors that tilt to create pixels. Red, blue, and green light is reflected onto the microscopic mirrors, and then by tilting each mirror toward or away from the light source the pixel can be turned on or off respectively.

Below: Depiction of Scanning Mirror Technology

Take a look at the original article from the IEEE here.

Devin Mullen

These Lycra gloves are part of a new MIT prototype for a new gesture-based computing system. Graduate student Robert Wang and Associate Professor Jovan Popović developed this system that improves upon other techniques that use interfaces that adapt to human movement, such as the Nintendo Wii. Lycra gloves made of irregularly shaped patches are part of a system that rapidly produces 3-D images of the gloves on the screen using a new algorithm to produce images in a fraction of a second. Rather than incessantly calculating individual sets of data to determine the position of a hand, instead the algorithm searches through a database of various hand positions and selects the corresponding digital model.

I think it’s especially interesting that the motions used to control the screen on a Multi-Touch Table, in my experience, are very similar to the motions used with this gesture-based system in a virtual world, as shown in the video below. This prototype is faster and less expensive than the current methods to track the movements of the human body, and has the potential to increase the usage of such technology in areas like evaluations of athletic performances, animation, and of course video games.

Erika Swanson

On May 19th 2010, Minyi Zhong defended his PhD dissertation at Boston University. His dissertation topic is “Distributed control and optimization for power limited cooperative systems”. Minyi Zhong is a graduate student of Boston University’s Division of Systems Engineering. His dissertation committee includes Prof. Christos G. Cassandras (adviser) and Prof. John Baillieul, Prof. Yannis Paschalidis and Prof. Calin Belta.

Zhong started with the outline of the talk and a summary of the main contributions of his dissertation. His research work is focused on designing control algorithms for distributed systems, especially those wireless power limited systems such as sensor networks and mobile robotic networks. The application areas of his research include environmental monitoring and exploration, surveillance and reconnaissance, search and rescue in disaster relief, etc.

He then went on to explain that a distributed system consists of a collection of autonomous computing devices, often called nodes or agents, each of which has locally accessible control and data. These nodes communicate over a network through message passing and jointly perform a single task, provide a single service or share some common resources. He pointed out that the main theme of the research in distributed system is the design of intelligence local node algorithms which run on distributed hardware, consume local data and produce some desirable global system-wide behavior.

The main mathematical machinery used in Zhong’s research in distributed control is distributed optimization. In the distributed optimization framework he introduced, a control task of the distributed systems is formulated as a nonlinear optimization problem, which is then decomposed in series of sub-problems and each sub-problem is solved by a node of system. A key issue addressed by Zhong’s research is how to reduce the communication involved in a distributed cooperative system. His solution involves using node state estimation and event-driven communication so that only when a node finds out that its teammate’s estimate of its state is off by a certain threshold, a communication event will be triggered. Two types of threshold process were introduced (static and dynamic) and their convergence properties are analyzed.

He then illustrated the effectiveness of this event-driven communication scheme by applying it to the sensor network coverage and data collection problem, which is another main problem studied in his dissertation. Towards the end of his presentation, he showed talked about the robotic research platforms used in his experiment. The first one is based on Khepera III, which is a miniature robot with onboard processing and communication capability. But it lacks the ability to perform localization without outside help. The next platform is assembled using off-the-shelf components such as iRobot Create, laser range finder, webcam, netbook. Zhong then showed a video of these robots carrying out coverage control mission, in which he demonstrated this platform’s ability to perform self-localization based on laser scan data and vision-based event detection ability. Throughout the defense, Zhong answered questions from the committee members as well as from the general public.

Jiayin Tian

On May 10th 2010 Marcelo Gleiser gave a very inspiring talk at the University of New Hampshire. The lecture’s title was: A Tear at the Edge of Creation, which is also the title of professor Gleiser’s new book. The lecture was part of the CEPS Frontiers Lecture Series.

Marcelo Gleiser is a distinguished physicist and astronomer. He holds the Appleton Professorship of Natural Philosophy at Dartmouth College. In his career so far he authored more than eighty peer reviewed publications as well as three books in popular science. He is the recipient of many awards.

Professor Gleiser’s talk focused on the significance of asymmetries in our universe that made our lives possible. In the first part of his lecture, he gave a brief historical overview of the research of the “heavens”. He argues that everyone so far has been looking for a unified explanation of the universe and it’s laws, starting with the ancient Egyptians, Thales, Pythagoras, Plato, Kepler, Newton and all the way to Einstein. In Gleiser’s opinion, this might not be the right way of thinking, especially if one accepts that our universe is based on fundamental imperfections and asymmetries. He then goes on to explain how time, matter and life are all asymmetric. Time can expand only in one direction, because it is very improbable that things would go “backward”, towards less entropy. Secondly, the universe which we can observe is full of matter and lacking anti-matter. This seems to be a physical necessity, which also creates asymmetry. Finally life on Earth is also asymmetric. For example amino acids in the DNA are “left-handed” while “right-handed” amino acids can be fatal for humans.

Gleiser hypothesizes that self-aware intelligent life in the universe is very improbable and this is why in his opinion it is very unlikely that we will get in contact with other intelligent life forms. Because of this, we should cherish life on our planet and be “humancentrists”.

Professor Gleiser’s lecture was very interesting and witty at the same time. His clever remarks kept a constant smile on many faces. His great way of presenting keeps the audience’s attention easily on topic. I would suggest the book to everyone interested in knowing more about the nature of the universe and life in it.

You can follow up on this and similar topics on the 13.7 blog site, where professor Gleiser is one of the four contributors.

Oszkar