A friend of mine has recently linked me to this interesting multi-touch video (see below). The video depicts a multi-touch project done by Felipe Gomes, an intern at Mozilla who has integrated Windows 7’s multi-touch features with Mozilla’s Firefox web browser. Also, if you haven’t done so already, take a look at some of the multi-touch work Mike, Ankit, and Oszkar have done here at Project54.

Multitouch on Firefox from Felipe on Vimeo.

Mark Taipan

This summer I have had a great opportunity to be an intern at Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL) in Cambridge, MA. This is not only a great prospect for my professional career, but also a chance to experience how working in a real company looks like.

MERL is a daughter company of the Mitsubishi Electric Corporation from Japan and therefore they have close collaboration. As the name implies, it is a research facility where people work on many different areas, such as digital communications, multimedia, user interfaces, speech interaction, mechatronics and many others. Their overwhelming publications page just confirms how important research is in this institution.

As a MERL intern, I am a member of the speech group. My advisor here is Bret Harsham and for this summer we have been working on testing an in-car speech user interface which was developed here at MERL. This interface enables contacts, music and points-of-interest selection using voice commands. The experiments will be concerned with the influence this interface may have on driving performance and will be performed on their driving simulator (shown in the picture below).

The driving simulator is based on a racing game simulation and consists of three huge DLP projector screens which create a very wide field-of-view, force feedback steering wheel and pedals, and a motion chair. The motion chair is very powerful, because it simulates the vibrations caused by road surface and engine, as well as the tilting of the car caused by acceleration and deceleration. The feeling it produces is very realistic and it may help prevent simulator sickness which was so common in our simulator studies.

We are looking forward to publishing the results of this interesting study. So, stay tuned for more info on this topic.

Zeljko Medenica

Microsoft is either loved or hated by most of society these days. But no matter where you stand on the company, you have to agree that the vision they show in the video below is amazing, and displays great contributions to society. The video is an envisioned future of 2019, just ten years ahead. It’s amazing how Microsoft takes the time to make such a production out of their ideas for future technology, so that the rest of society can understand their vision. My favorite part is the personal devices that people carry around, which interact with many other devices wherever they go. Enjoy.

Mike Litchfield

Here is an interesting design on home automation using Twitter from http://matthewmorey.com/. The setup utilizes Twitter to communicate with a variety of electronic devices. There is a computer with access to Twitter that looks at the Tweets and parses them looking for commands. Attached to the computer are different types of devices such as an LCD display, a thermometer and a light.  The setup can take a picture and post it online, display text on the LCD, figure out how bright it is in the office and more.

You can find the twitter page here:

http://twitter.com/MattsOffice

Eric Ojala

Both Rohm and NEC are focused on unveiling new chip designs for integrated circuits that would consume no standby power. Integrated circuits are briefly inactive in between cycles on chips, and the new chip designs take into account that not all parts of the circuit require constantly receiving full power. In an attempt to curtail this leakage power that is consumed by an IC,  the companies have implemented “power gating” in the new designs. “Power gating” is a method of turning off individual circuits on a chip that do not need power. NEC plans to release a prototype by the end of 2009, but Rohm, Inc. hopes its chip will be in consumer products within the same time frame. Popular Science Magazine writes, “The new chip designs differ [from current IC chips] in that they don’t require the inactive portions of the circuit to receive full power at all times, allowing for more efficiency both during use and in a traditional ’standby mode’.” It is predicted that the new designs’ efficient energy usage will help decrease overall power consumption and could improve efficiency  within a device.

From Tech On!:

Erika Swanson

In this article from MSNBC.com, the Associated Press explains how Cyberdyne, a Japanese Robotics company has been showing off their newly designed rehabilitation suit. The HAL (hybrid assistive limb) is aimed to help those with weak leg muscles and mobility issues in daily life. It has sensors that read brain signals directing limb movement through the skin and sends them to the mechanical leg braces that are strapped to the thighs and knees, as well as belted to the waist.

Although it is very expensive now, it may be more affordable in the future, and definitely seems like a more portable option for some people with disabilities.

Mike Litchfield

For the majority summer, the bulk of my work on the multi-touch table has been working with Ankit and Oskar on the Google Earth application, in which we have overlayed geotagged photos with additional orientation data as 3-D models. We have added the ability to control the Google Earth application with the multi-touch table using different gesture we’ve designed. We will be using this application in an experiment that will compare two methods of storytelling, one using the Google Earth application and the other using a traditional picture slideshow with an additional map. The purpose of this is to explore the advantages of the overlayed photos as well as the application on the multi-touch table.

We have recently submitted the project as a poster and short paper submission to the Ubicomp 2009 conference and it has been accepted. The conference will be held in Orlando,Fla at the end of September. Below is a video that Ankit and I created to go along with the short paper/poster submission.

Mike Litchfield

Hello ecebloggers,

Over the past semester Andrew Kun, Tim Paek, Zeljko Medenica, Oskar Palinko, and I have been investigating the influence of Personal Navigation Devices (PNDs) on driving. Nowadays these devices are widespread in vehicles. They typically display the real-time location of the vehicle on a map and play spoken prompts when drivers need to turn. While such devices are less distracting than paper directions, their graphical display may distract users from their primary task of driving.

We have conducted experiments in our high fidelity driving simulator to see the influence of two PNDs on driving:

• the influence of a standard PND, with a combined visual (electronic map) and spoken output,
  
• and the influence of a PND with spoken output only.

The first goal of the experiments was to find out if a PND with combined output causes drivers to spend less time looking on the road ahead than a PND with spoken output only. The second goal was to examine the effects of glancing at the PND’s visual display on driving performance. We hypothesized that a PND with combined output will influence the percent dwell time (PDT) on the outside world negatively when compared to the PND with spoken output only, i.e. drivers will be more distracted by it. Our second hypothesis was that PND’s visual display will influence negatively on the driving performance. We expected an increase in the lane position and steering wheel angle variances to occur whenever drivers look away from the road.

The experiment results showed that our hypotheses were correct:

• We found that drivers using a navigation system with a graphical display indeed spent less time looking at the road compared to those using a navigation system with spoken directions only.
• Glancing at the display was correlated with higher variance in driving performance measures.

The video below shows how the PND’s visual display influences driving performance.

With respect to designing in-car navigation aids, our results seem to suggest that if users can trust a PND enough to follow the spoken directions they are given, even when they are lost, a navigation system with no visual display may be the most favorable option since visual attention and consequently driving performance will likely be improved.

This work will be presented at the AutomtoiveUI2009 conference.

Have a good one,

Nemanja Memarovic