After a couple of days fighting with scarce documentation, the TouchKit project, which I have written about here, is finally operational. It was tested with a helloworld and a drawing application, which came with the system. Here, you can see my colleague Mark operating the touch screen, which reacts by putting a red circle at every location where the fingers touch the display. The size of the circles depend on the amount of force exerted. Very nice!

We have also tested how the system works in dark. It seems that there is not much difference, since the TouchKit camera reacts only to infra-red light. The system appears to be fairly robust in this sense. Here, Matt is experimenting with the multi-touch display:

The installation process was a little bit bumpy, because it is described on the TouchKit web site in a concise manner. After “googling” and downloading the drivers for the firewire camera, the exemplar code had to be edited before it became functional with the hardware. The TouchKit Forum was very helpful in keeping me on the right track.

After the basic functionality of the system was proven, Mark Taipan, Matt Lape (receivers of the SURF award, and distinguished P54 undergrad students) and I figured out, that the temporary screen clamping setup and camera mount are not robust enough to operate the system easily: if any part of the system (screen, projector, camera) moves, it has to be recalibrated. Therefore we began brainstorming about possible mounting solutions. For starts, we came up with a horizontal table-top mount which would allow the system to be securely fastened. Here is Matt with the proposed TouchKit stand:

It would be useful if the table would be “tiltable” for different applications. We are working on modeling and designing such a solution. Further results will follow here, on eceblogger.

Thanks to Matt and Mark for their help!

Oszkar Palinko

Check out this video showing the Microsoft Surface in Sheraton hotels:

Apparently there’s one in Boston, and it looks like it’s the Sheraton next to the Prudential.

[via Interactive Multimedia Technology]

Andrew Kun

Today in my ubicomp course we’re discussing Adam Greenfield’s talk on Everyware given at Keio University in 2006. One idea that Adam presented was that of the Panopticon, a prison in which the prisoners never know if they are watched or not. Adam points out that inhabitants of a ubicomp world may feel this way unless we’re careful with how we design this world. Here’s the Panopticon from Wikipedia:

Watch the talk, or even better read the book Everyware, to find out what Adam suggests we should do to avoid a Panopticon-like world.

Andrew Kun

p.s. I had better luck with the 8-part YouTube version of the video (starting here) than with the Quicktime one.

I was just talking to Mark Taipan and Matt Lape who are working on an indoor navigation project that utilizes handheld computers. Their application allows users to see where they are on a map. Of course the small size of handheld computer displays limits the type of maps you can use. This is even more of a problem for many mobile phones (even smaller displays), which are likely to be the actual devices used in any commercially viable indoor navigation application.

One solution may come from projector phones such as this one. If you had a projector phone you could display a map on the wall and presumably get better resolution, or at least larger characters, than what you can get on a mobile phone display. It would be interesting to see if people would be willing to use such a system.

Andrew Kun

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

Last Friday Oskar Palinko defended his MS thesis. Oszkar’s thesis was centered around the cool push-to-talk (PTT) glove he has designed.

Oszkar ran a rather large user study (24 participants) to evaluate if the PTT glove outperforms a fixed PTT button. While in comparing driving performance when using the two PTT solutions Oszkar didn’t find a main effect, he did find that the experiment participants looked down at the steering wheel more often when using the fixed PTT. Is this a problem? Maybe. While the total amount of time subjects spent looking at the steering wheel when using the fixed PTT button amounted to about 1% of the total experiment time, the average fixation was around 300 ms long. If such a fixation came at the wrong time (e.g. at the moment a leading vehicle started to brake), this could be a problem.

Congratulations Oszkar on a job well done!

Andrew Kun

This fall I’ll be teaching a graduate level course on ubiquitous computing (ECE 992). The course will look at recent research in this field, or more accurately in a few segments of this field. Specifically, we’ll look at the visions of ubicomp, some applications, human-computer interfaces, context awareness and privacy.

The course will revolve around reviews of the recent ubicomp research literature. I envision something similar to an NSF review panel, with instructions on what to pay attention to (they won’t be exactly NSF instructions but will have similarities to those), a lead reviewer who starts off the review process, a scribe who takes notes and where the entire class constitutes the panel.

Students will also work on a ubicomp project - basically either the evaluation of an existing ubicomp system, the design of the specifications for a new system or the implementation of a new system. I hope that people who decide to take the course will bring their own ideas from their research or work and that we can create projects that will be useful to them in those domains. I know a couple of students from my lab will be able to do this.

You can check out the course website here and relevant links here. Questions? Send me an email.

Andrew Kun

Check out this post by Todd Bishop, and the very interesting video. It talks about the Microsoft Sphere, an adaptation of the multitouch Microsoft Surface to a spherical display, using Global Imagination hardware.

Andrew Kun

At the end of the Intelligent Environments 2008 conference we were treated to a visit to Microsoft Home. The people who work at this facility attempt to see 10 years into the future in order to predict the technological landscape Microsoft will have to compete in. Our host was David Baumert, Program Manager (see picture below).

So what does the future hold? I’ll talk about three technologies that David discussed: organic LEDs, RFIDs and communications.

Organic LEDs should allow us to embed displays into walls and create unobtrusive touch panels to be used in environmental controls, doorbells and such. OLEDs will be cheap, foldable and we’ll be able to paint over them to make them truly blend in with the environment. In fact, they (or similar display technologies) will allow us to transform entire walls or rooms into displays controlled by the current occupant.

RFIDs will be everywhere. OK, you don’t need to be part of Microsoft Home to know this, working at Walmart would teach you the same. However, it’s interesting to think about how these RFIDs can be used by your home to make your life easier. Some examples: RFIDs in food packaging can be used to recognize if you’re about to use the correct ingredients in a recipe (your home is displaying the recipe on the kitchen countertop); RFIDs in prescription medication containers by your home in the process of verifying that you’re taking the correct medication, at the correct time and correct amount; and the RFID in a knick-knack you purchased in Paris can tell your home the date and location of the purchase and this can be one factor in your home’s decision to recommend a Paris-based movie for your viewing pleasure on the anniversary of the purchase.

The third technology I wanted to mention is in fact the collection of technologies that make up the wireless communications experience. The folks at Microsoft Home expect that your mobile phone will be very much present 10 years from today, and that it’ll be much more powerful than it is today. It’ll be the key to your home, the intelligent gateway to your sought-after attention (spam will still be with us), and it will be a powerful remote control.

The visit was certainly a lot of fun. David Baumert knows the predictions of MS Home will not always be correct. E.g. he readily admits that the lack of small home robots (like the ones made by iRobot) in the current depiction of the future is a mistake. Nevertheless, seeing a group of smart people thinking about our collective technological future inspires one to try to do the same, as well as to work hard at shaping that future. For me, that was the most exciting thing to take away from this visit.

Thanks to IE ‘08 organizers for facilitating the visit, thanks to Microsoft for hosting us, and a special thanks to David for the excellent tour.

Andrew Kun

You might know, from previous posts, that I’m working with different kinds of push-to-talk (PTT) activation solutions. One of those is the PTT glove, which I will present at the Intelligent Environments Conference next week (07/21/08).

Today, we just got the first media attention event for the glove: it is featured on a very interesting blog about wearable computing, talk2myshirt.com/blog.

This blog came to my attention, while I was searching the web for commercial glove interaction solutions. The site has a very nice collection of these products. I like it, that wearable IT accessories are neatly categorized: gloves, hats, shoes, skirts, etc, even ties!

This may sound like a cliché, but it’s always good to communicate with other bloggers, professionals, researchers, etc. If I’m not aware of other solutions similar to mine, I might think that I invented PTT gloves, but it’s always good to get a reality check by seeing if anyone else had a similar idea before. Communication can also help co-operate with others and figure out what the real problems of a particular field of research are.

A good contra-example for this is the Miss Universe event. How can we have a Miss Universe, when only humans participate? Did we research all possibilities of life on other planets (not just in the Solar system) before declaring a human to be Miss Universe? What would the Klingons have to say about this (if they exist/ed)?

Oszkar Palinko