July 31, 2011

Tactile walker navigation

Researchers of the Viterbi School of Engineering (University of Southern California) constructed and evaluated a tactile vest in combination with a stereo head-mounted camera. So with the camera they are able to measure the distance to objects in sight and the vest gives tactile signals to the one who is wearing it. Their main use case is to help blind people orientating. Therefore they won’t need the blindman’s stick anymore.

I’m sure there are a few other use cases such as helping people to navigate while they have to look at something different (maybe for construction workers).

But first they have to smarten this technology up ;) and also improve some things. Because there may be some problems for blind people navigation especially with little ledges / tripping hazards. How to ‘visualize’ that with a tactile vest? Furthermore it would be a big innovation if navigation hints are in 3D so the user can easily go ahead and / or sideways. And so on.

[viterbi.usc.edu: “Guide Vests”]

April 17, 2011

Tangible widgets for touch screens

A team of researchers from RWTH Aachen University and University of California, San Diego created some widgets to extend multi-touch tables with tactile feedback.

In addition to that one is able to create new forms of interaction by the combination of hardware and software. So it’s a nice new user interface technology. But with that you can or maybe sometimes need to have different devices / widgets at once. Where to place them when you need them and when you don’t need them? Probably these devices can get lost and become dirty quickly. But they are a good possibility to close the gap between software and hardware user interfaces respectively to fuse both ways so it would be perceived as one consistent interface.

[hci.rwth-aachen.de: SLAP]

April 8, 2011

Digital writing only with a glove

Jeff Rowberg developed a glove which tries to replace the standard PC-keyboard.

Here a video that explains the functionality: www.kickstarter.com/…/video.html And here’s more material:

Hm, seems cool to me. If you combine it with accelerometers you can use gestures for further interaction. Not only zooming gestures are possible. Also gaming like punching seems to be an option. And all that with one glove. What if you wear two of them maybe with some kind of different functionality?! And in combination (meaning registering the distance between parts of both gloves) there is much more interaction potential.

And the best: You can built it on your own because it’s made by open source hardware. So we can try to improve the glove or support Jeff.

[kickstarter.com: Keyglove]

[www.keyglove.net: The Keyglove Project]

March 20, 2011

Seeing like a house-fly

By this time there is a prototype of a surround sight camera which allows to identify 3d-geometrics by computing the distances to the camera.

Because of seeing this technology on a 2d-monitor and just a little bit of the output of the camera (for me) it is hard to envision the use case addressed in the video. BVut it seems to be interesting to be able to see like a fly. So than it might also be possible to study insects in a less abstract way!?! Another option is to spot a person the way (light two steps in front of him) without lighten the whole way or even room (for what reason ever ;).

[sti.epfl.ch: École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne]

March 13, 2011

Invisible user interface

Researchers experimented with drawing user interfaces in the air. The neat thing is that you can’t see this interface! You have to be aware of it by using your visual memory.

That sound’s very interesting for the scenario in the video to give driving directions. If you don’ have to be accurate in giving visual informations / drawing you don’t have to carry a inconvenient things like a cumbersome note pad with pen.

And if this augmented reality (AR) technology is decreasing itself in size and weight you probably would use the combination of AR-glasses with the ‘freehand drawing’ to be able to draw and see what you are drawing, everywhere. Than one is also able to draw in more than one planes – that’s (approximately) 3 dimensional!

[hpi.uni-potsdam.de: Imaginary Interfaces]

March 4, 2011

Tactile feedback shows the way

Last week / in my last post we saw how the brain is able to control a means of transportation. But how to know where to drive? Beside the speech output option of GPS one has to verify the way by looking at the GPS. But with the tactile feedback called “Shear Feedback” by researches of University of Utah the driver can have his look on the road.

This option is really nice because it allows many use cases (bike riding directions, direct blind people, …) and is private (no one else realizes the informations (security reason) respectively get’s distracted by the cues (privacy reason)).

But I’m asking myself if this is really applicable for bike riding when there are vibrations through rough underground?! Under these circumstances you can’t hold your fingers at one point and the vibrations maybe interfere with tactile cueing. Interesting work has to be done…

[heml.eng.utah.edu: Shear Feedback]

February 25, 2011

Thoughts control your way

Researchers made first steps towards controlling a car with brain power by just putting an EEG on the drivers head.

In my opinion it’s easier to let the car control itself and his way. But the possibility to give the car the route just by thoughts can be a further supplementing step in this area.

In my point of view the people who invented the EEG are the real ‘heros’ but the combination of that with a car is an exciting trend. And the researchers from AI group of ‘Freie Universität Berlin’ had done some more interesting work on car steering human machine interface:

[…fu-berlin.de: AutoNOMOS Labs]

February 18, 2011

Multitouch display * display

What could this big multitouch display be for?

So I think this wall possibly can support some kind of teamwork. But standing a long time in front of such a big display isn’t good for your eyes.

One little detail: The color chooser could be implemented by using gestures so a human can open it where he is.

[rug.nl: university of groningen “Reality Touch Theatre”]

February 13, 2011

Touch screen in car

Why do we need touch screens in cars instead of knobs or buttons to control volume and so on?

I think in one hand it’s a good idea because you can change the interface in one car very easily (from background to themes and whole controls or even the entire arrangement).  But on the other hand the display in the video above is dazzling and the haptic feedback might be missing. So the driver could be more distracted than with conventional control elements.

February 4, 2011

Electro-impulses instead of glasses

That’s funny!

But can this be true? To trigger a blink of an eye with mini ‘electro-shocks’ to the temple, that’s possible in my opinion. You need at least 25 blinks / electro impulses for each of the eyes. That’s also feasable, I think. (I don’t know exactly if this is really enough but it has to be the minimum!) But when I try to blink with my eyes as quick as possible everything is getting dark. The amount of time I closed my eyes is bigger than the time I have my eyes open and the ‘open time’ isn’t long enough to process the content / images. So in my point of view this video is funny but not more.

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