It’s great to see that disabled persons are integrated in normal life. The video shows how a (blind)human-machine interface can be built so that the people are able to program software. (The video also shows how they are teached to do so.)
[www.siue.edu – A.M. Stefik: Dissertation (2008, PDF)]
This video shows the today’s circumstances to use a BCI (brain computer interface). You need a lot of tools and time to gather simple text messages.
But it’s impressive and I’m sure something like this is the human machine interface of the future! Maybe I saw to many films like “Matrix” and so on but seriously: The brain is the only body part we all have! So in fact e.g. deaf people will be able to speak. Maybe we can make an advance in communicating with sick people, think of paraplegic people or people in coma. Perhaps we will be able to communicate in some way with animals!
[engr.wisc.edu…: Department of Biomedical Engineering]
The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) promotes research efforts to enable protheses near humane or in some way even better. So they try to connect them with human cerebral cortex to deliver information from brain to the protheses and also back again! So people can control protheses only by thoughts and will get sense impressions like the structure of a touched surface. The video (especially the first half) impressions were impressive to me:
Unfortunately there can be negative deployments but let’s think about all the good things which can be done with that technology! A lot of people can live a better life just because they will be able to do normal things.
[exhibitions.cooperhewitt.org: Modular Prosthetic-limb System]
Research efforts look at the human body as a medium for tactile input “technology” (and therefor they also need it as visual output surface).
That’s a really nice approach so that one don’t have to hold e.g. a mp3 player or a smartphone. But you have to have some free skin and that wouldn’t be accepted by users in winter.
In the video you can see Chris Harrison dialing with his hand – and than? Is he holding his hand at his ears and does he have a body built in microphone? ;D
Here someone shows how a smartphone is able to track a users face real-time:
If this isn’t a fake that’s some kind of pleasing and frightening to me.
The comfort of user interfaces is increasing a lot – e.g. tracking head motions and do some automatic things with that like shut off the display.
But e.g. global corporations are able to log your gestures online during watching films and with that data concluding to your intimate preferences and many more…
A nice new technology connects the visual advantages with the tactile ones and keeps being adjustable in both aspects.
So in the future e.g. one can feel a slider (graphical element to adjust e.g. volume) and so the volume level of mobile devices or more complex elements like smilies or whole text messages without looking at it.
Until today that was a really missing feature!
In the next video a researcher is transferring human head movement data via gyrosensor to a roboter and his video data back to the human.
Is this a another new technology (of virtualization) towards alienation (robots taking over your representation in the world and therefor the public majority) and dissociation (knowing yourself | your body) as one can see in the film “Surrogates”?
Here is a guy who invented some nice thing:
He wants to tell us that “you are absolutely not distracted in any way from the road”. Sorry but: Are you kidding us? In that case what’s the purpose of the “new steering wheel”- to remind the driver to his duty of attention to the traffic?
I think, these transparent displays are very cool
and when they are flexible and indestructible
they offer a great potential for interesting applications in the future.
As I wrote some time ago, human-machine interaction is going towards the interesting trends we saw in futuristic films years ago. Here is another example of a human-machine interface which reminds us particularly of “Minority Report”. A man is gesticulating with both his hands free in space and on a screen you can see a 3D scene performing appropriate actions.
That’s impressive!
—
But because I’m seeing some disadvantages with this technology for me it isn’t such impressive anymore. The disadvantages or let’s say challenges are:
And beside the other details a main goal for future investigations has to be to remove the need that a user has to recheck visually what he is doing with his hands (red cross and borders in the video and so on). The user wants to e.g. translate a picture, commands that with his hands and that’s it. The extra necessity to visualize that destroys the / my sensations.
But the technology (free hand gestures and 3d scenes) is a really great step into future!