Our lab has recently acquired a TouchKit development system. It serves as a basic building block for creating multi-touch screen user interfaces. The TouchKit consists of an infra-red illuminated projection screen and a FireWire camera board. A projector has to be added to complete the system. Here is the initial setup:

The image shows the projection screen in front which is held upright by an improvised clamping board on its right side. The projector throws the image onto the screen from the back, allowing the user to interact from the front. In this initial setup the camera board is mounted on a box and connected to a PC using FireWire. The system has a really interesting principle of operation: as the user touches the front of the screen, the infra-red illumination coming from the inside of the screen changes. This change is picked up by the camera and is further processed by the software API, which is based on the OpenFrameworks C++ library.

Multi-touch user interfaces have become more popular recently with the introduction of technologies like Microsoft Surface, iPhone and CNN’s Magic Wall created by Peceptive Pixel Inc. The last one claims to be the most advanced multi-touch user interface. Here is a video showing its impressive capabilities.

We are still in the process of setting up and configuring our TouchKit system. We will post more information about it here when it becomes operational. Once this is done, it will be a great asset for students in the UbiComp course this fall at UNH taught by Prof. Andrew Kun. Students will be developing innovative user experiences based on the TouchKit as part of their course projects.

Oszkar Palinko

As a part of Project54, we have a newly formed Radio Testing Lab which is used for performing tests on projects related to the usage of Land Mobile Radios. Currently we are working on two projects that attempt to solve problems associated with the utilization of mobile radios. While the first project provides a solution for the interoperability problem using radio patching, the second project is based on the implementation of APCO Project 25 radio standard.

In the lab, for test equipment, we have more than fifteen radios made by different manufacturers (Motorola, Kenwood, and E. F. Jonson), several digital phosphor oscilloscopes (Tektronix TDS3000B series), a vector signal analyzer (Agilent 89441A with RF section), and a bunch of PCs and laptops. With this equipment and our experience we can assure that our projects are well tested and verified. Below are two pictures from the lab.

Using the radio patching method, we have developed a solution for the radio interoperability problem. It is based on more affordable off-the-shelf devices and represents an adequate solution for small public agencies. The system supports full radio patching with proper PTT functioning and has audio signal latency bellow what is specified by ITU-T standard. It turned out that radio patching is the cheapest and fastest solution to the radio interoperability problem. More information about the system can be found in this technical report, and here about its precursor system.

Project 25 seems a perfect solution to constant growing needs for data communications in cruisers because it supports both data and voice transmissions over radio channels. Also, most public safety agencies already have and use Project 25 compliant radios. However, in order to fully utilize their radios and Project 25 data capabilities those agencies have to purchase very expensive Project 25 data capable base stations. Small public safety agencies usually cannot afford such expensive pieces of equipment. To address this problem, we have developed a software-based Project 25 data base station as an affordable way for small agencies to bring the data into their cruisers. The project is in its final testing stage and very soon will be ready for deployment. You can read more about our base station in this previous post. More technical information about the implementation of the transmission side can be found in Eric’s thesis.

Ivan Elhart

The title of this post was the first sentence that popped into my mind, when I figured out that our DriveSafety simulators can be divided into many small, so called SingleBox, simulators. The title is of course an hommage to Clarke and Kubrick’s timeless work 2001: A Space Odyssey. In this movie Dave Bowman realizes, that the monolith is full of stars.

My realization that the simulator is full of small, SingleBox simulators reminded me of the above scene from the movie. The SingleBoxes can be set up by accessing the configuration page of any DriveSafety simulator. Each channel computer can be reconfigured to act as a separate system. In this case the computers have more work to do, since they all have to act both as hosts and channels in the same time. This could lead to some dropped frames, but in our experience, the simulations are totally acceptable. Here is an interesting image showing multiple scenarios running on what used to be channels and are SingleBoxes here:

What’s the use of this? The most important property of the SingleBoxes is that they are highly portable, which is very important for presentation purposes. We just had one of them shipped for a demonstration of my paper at the Intelligent Environments conference past week in Seattle. We just separated the rear channel off the DS-100, which was otherwise left fully operational. The other advantage of the SingleBox mode is the possibility to combine many of these into a single simulation. This would open a new range of study topics, where more than one subject would participate in the same scenario, therefore allowing interaction between the drivers. Some students already expressed their willingness to volunteer in such experiments. I hope they are not fueled by the possibility to play bumper cars in a virtual world.

Before finishing, let me get back to the topic of the Space Odyssey movie for a few more seconds. If you watched it, have you ever wondered about the meaning of the starchild? I always did. Kubrick said about it that it is up for anyone to come up with their own explanation. But I really like this one by Donald MacGregor. Accordingly, it is not by chance that Richard Strauss‘ Also Sprach Zarathustra was selected for the opening theme of the movie. This piece was composed based on Friedrich Nietzsche’s same-titled book, which apparently served as inspiration to Kubrick’s fascinating movies. If I got you interested, please visit the link with the detailed explanation.

Oszkar Palinko

My colleague Andras Fekete and I had a chance to visit the Forney Museum of Transportation in Denver, on our journey with Dr. Miller and Dr. Kun to Colorado for the National Institute of Justice conference. The museum started as the private collection of Mr. J. D. Forney with only a few cars. Today, it is a unique historical collection of over 500 exhibits including antique cars, locomotives, buggies, unicycles, bicycles, motorcycles, rare, exotic, and concept vehicles. The most famous exhibits are: Amelia Earhart’s “Gold Bug” Kissel, Prince Aly Khan’s Silver Ghost Rolls Royce, the Brewster with a heart-shaped radiator, the Hispano Suiza, the Forney Locomotive, and the 4005 Big Boy – the world’s largest steam locomotive (how big it is you can see in the picture below). We were lucky to meet an engineer who had been operating one of the Big Boys and who, in the museum, shared his experience and passion about locomotives with us. The Big Boy was designed to operate at 80 mph with total weight of 1,189,500lb and producing a maximum of 6,290 horsepower. It is really impressive. Only 25 Big Boys were built ever, between 1941 and 1944, and only 8 of them still remain.

The only car in the museum in which we could sit in was the Model T. The model T was the first car produced on an assembly line designed by Ford which was the beginning of the automotive revolution which started in 1908. The Model T had economy of 13 to 21 mpg, 20.2 horsepower, and maximum speed of 40 to 45 mph. In 1927, when the last Model T was built, the Ford Motor Company was producing an automobile every 24 seconds. In the period between 1908 and 1927, more than 15 million Model T cars were built which “put America on wheels”. In the picture below, my colleague Andras and I are enjoying the Model T and for a moment pretending that we are at the beginning of the 20th century.

The museum is really impressive with its huge and unique historical collection of vehicles of all kinds. It is a perfect place to visit for all fans of cars and history. We had a pleasant time and all custodians were more than polite. You can find more pictures from the museum here.

Ivan Elhart & Andras Fekete

Usually, I’m skeptical about new ideas coming from my co-worker and good friend Alex Shyrokov, but this time I have to admit that he was right. He showed me a small application called FreeMind, that allows to create and manage mind maps. I was unaware of the existence of such maps, though i might have heard about it before (and stored it in the back of my mind), because when I read about it, it sounded as a very obvious and reasonable thing. The software itself is very intuitive. Just after a day of usage, I had the mind map of my proposed MSc thesis.

What is “mind maps” actually? It is a diagram system of one’s ideas concerning a certain topic. It can be used to visualize our thoughts and links between them that are generated in our minds while acquiring new knowledge. Visualizing can help us to better understand these links, which can be there subconciously, i.e. we might not be aware of them before actually putting them down on a paper or in this case into an application. This method certainly helps me in getting my thoughts about my thesis organized.

FreeMind is a very useful small, free tool that helps create mind maps. You create a treelike hierarchical structure with information stored at nodes and leafs. A very useful feature is the possibility to put URL links into nodes which can be accessed with a single click. The nodes’ sub-categories can be collapsed (folded) easily, also with a single click. The whole structure can be very conveniently dragged and zoomed, so it is very easy to realize the “bigger picture” or to go into “small details”. The feature that i like the most about FreeMind is that it has great import and export capabilities. This way, you can export your mind map to HTML, Flash, JPEG, PDF and publish it on your site! You can import for example a folder structure or your bookmarks from Internet Explorer. Without further ado, here are some examples.

This is an interesting mind map of nothing less than life itself. This map shows the complex diagram of risk management in medicine. Ever wondered how headaches are diagnosed in traditional Chinese medicine? Have you given it a thought, what has to be considered for building a career? You could even take notes in classes using FreeMind. What if priests have to organize their favorite excerpts? Can FreeMind help them too? Of course. You can also import del.icio.us bookmarks into a mind map, via Internet Explorer bookmarks. Here are the steps to consider when creating your own mind map.

The following figure leads to the mind map of my thesis.

Specail attention was given to the background section, which I had most trouble organizing in my mind before. Most of the nodes have links to online versions of papers. This way, I can access my whole background wherever I have internet, i.e. “on the go”.

Of course mind maps using FreeMind is just one option of organizing your thoughts. I chose this, because it works for me well. Hopefully, this application will develop further to have even more options like customizable icons, better arrow interconnections, ability to interact with Reference Manager, more import/export options, etc. Since it is open source, everyone can introduce new elements to the progam.

I would recommend this program for everyone to try at least for 5 minutes. It might help you too.

Oszkar Palinko

Last week we received our newest research tool, a state-of-the-art eye-tracker, called faceLAB, product of Seeing Machines Inc. It uses a pair of stereo cameras to track the direction of the subject’s gaze. Not only the eyes are tracked, but head position and orientation too. Based on the collected data, it calculates fatigue measures (for example, PERCLOS) . It can be said that faceLAB is a head, gaze and fatigue analysis tool.

The stereo cameras came together with a bunch of hardware needed for faceLAB to run: a laptop, lenses, camera stands, video overlaying devices, calibration (chess) board, etc.

Contents of the faceLAB package.

The software is very nicely designed. I worked with stereo imaging before, so I can say that the mathematic calculations behind the the user interface are very complex and fascinating. For example, the system calculates the position and orientation of the cameras in 3D based only on showing the cameras the checkered calibration board.

The user interface is divided into four parts. The upper right window shows the views of the cameras and the extracted gaze direction, eye closure, head anchor points, etc. In the lower right quarter of faceLAB a virtual 3D world is shown.

In the virtual space, a model of the driving simulator can be created, with special areas, that will represent certain devices (GPS navigation device, radio, P54 screen, etc). The application can then log when the drivers are diverting their gaze from the road to the in-car devices.

After initial testing on the test stand, the cameras were mounted into our driving simulator onto the dashboard.

Next, tests will be performed to find the optimal position of the cameras. Pilot runs will be conducted to see how the logging of data is done and to verify the setup.

The eye-tracker opens a whole new field of research possibilities. Among other things, now we can track the flow of visual attention of drivers, which is a very important measure for safety assessment.

If you have any questions or comments about the eye-tracker, feel free to post them below. Thank you for your attention,

Oszkar Palinko

It is my pleasure to introduce Ching-Yao Chan to the readers of eceblogger. Ching-Yao is Associate Research Engineer at California PATH, UC Berkeley. PATH stands for Partners for Advanced Transit and Highways and it is an organization within the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Berkeley. Ching-Yao leads several externally funded projects in the field of intelligent transportation systems. I had a chance to collaborate with him on one of these projects, in which he helped the UC Berkeley police deploy a police cruiser with the Project54 system.

Ching-Yao has just returned from an extended stay in Japan, where he served as Visiting Professor at the University of Tokyo. He graciously agreed to share some of his experiences about living in Japan with us. Thank you Ching-Yao, we’re looking forward to your contribution to eceblogger.

Andrew Kun

Hi all,

I’m writing to introduce the second person to agree to contribute to eceblogger - Nathan Purmort. Nathan received his BS EE at UNH in May 2006. After graduating he joined the Project54 effort at UNH as a Research Project Engineer where he currently works on software development, testing and maintenance activities. Nate is also a graduate student in the UNH ECE department working towards his MS degree.

Nate will spend about 2 weeks in Japan this winter on vacation. He graciously agreed to spend a portion of his vacation time telling us about his experiences in this country. We all know that Japan has a great impact on business and technology worldwide. Therefore, I think it will be interesting for us all to learn more about it from Nate. Nate will follow up his blogging with a presentation at UNH sometime early in 2007.

Nate, thanks for agreeing to contribute to this blog. Safe travels - we are looking forward to your posts.

Andrew Kun

Hi all,

Welcome to the eceblogger.com site, where electrical and computer engineers can share their professional experiences with each other in a blog format.

Our first blogger will be John Nelson. John is an alumnus of the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of New Hampshire. He received his Bachelor of Science degree in 1992 and his Master’s degree in 1994 and has since held several industry positions in Massachussetts and New Hampshire. He is currently the Director of Research and Development at UGS-Tecnomatix in Portsmouth, NH.

Since UGS-Tecnomatix has customers in China, John travels there frequently. In fact, John will visit China between November 11 and 18. China is of great interest to electrical and computer engineers both as a manufacturer of electronic equipment as well as a potential customer for such products. Therefore, I am very pleased that John has agreed to share with us some of his experiences about travelling to, and working in, China. He will follow up his blogging with a presentation at UNH sometime after his return from this trip.

I hope you’ll enjoy John’s posts. Please feel free to respond with questions and comments. Please join me in wishing John safe travels and in thanking him for taking the time to share his experiences with us.

Andrew Kun