Flows and interaction

Reading about support for mobile social interaction or social icebreakers I was inspired to this idea of a projector based system which would project information in front of you. The user would be presented with three or more possible flows or directions to moving each of which would expose different types of information to the user.   if the user followed a particular branch that Branch might then split up again into more detailed information.
The idea would be that if two users were exhibiting interest in the same kind of subject than they might be directed to collide with each other and then over the subject might discover they have some interest in common.

File this under experiments to do when I had a near infinite number of projectors on hand

Transport Systems Catapult Vision ( and the Internet of Stuff )

In case you didn't know transportation Systems catapult vision is setting up in Milton Keynes and looking for collaborators.  I was watching http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MtlqZsEx0I&feature=youtu.be

And a few of things have occurred to me from a research perspective. 

• I’ve been reading a PhD thesis on cycling in Newcastle. And the thing that truly still offends me is that there is no good transportation model or modelling tool for cycling. On the one hand I feel confident that my experience from developing modelling tools for pedestrians I could produce something that would work for cyclists. The downside is that this is really transportation research and way outside the remit of HCI. That said my current research arc is looking at interaction and navigation in buildings so there is some leeway. 
• As I mentioned to you I could create a nice box for counting cyclists. I think a real-time picture of cycling in a city could be quite interesting. 
• I like the idea of taking a lean start-up approach to encouraging cycling in the city.
• From a more computer  point of view and with the transportation hub strongly in mind I would think that people like MatterNEt ( http://matternet.us )  would be a big concern for the transportation hub people. Check the TED talk.  http://matternet.us/ted/  Amazon have also reported delivering items via drones. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25180906 currently this is illegal in the US/UK which is why the matter let people are looking at the Third World as a prototyping area. Clearly there is some interesting research looking at what would happen if  a change in the law was made.
• I think there is a very interesting PHD looking at modelling drone deliveries ( drone logistics).  Four example
• If we had deliveries via this kind of drone air force how many machines are we considering having in the air?
• What kind of delivery system would we have to have to match up with what we get at the moment by courier services?
• I am sure that lot of people would like to know about the costing of such a system. 
• Would having drones delivering goods to your back garden or office be cheaper than delivering them by courier?
• This would be quite a complex question involving needing the modelling of multiple autonomous agents.
• Four example, it is cheaper to ship by rail but the flexibility for trucks to move more on demand makes shipping by road a preferred option. 
• It would also be interesting to look at the energy consumption of these kinds of devices.
• Four example many people have suggested that it would be impossible for the UK to switch to a largely electric transportation economy. The current vision is that petrol will still be largely the only viable transportation source.
• The drones are still mostly electric would this mean that shipping lots of goods via drones would reduce our overall energy dependencies?
• Finally and I think Santi probably has this wrapped up already, but do the transportation modelling people have a good visualisation tool to look at these new transport models they are making?
• There definitely seems some possibility there for research. 

On the subject of iWatch

Just checked out some iWatch design predictions 

Apple iWatch Design Predictions from divadwg

Like the talk - here are some thoughts. 

Acceleration 
We have been doing research into physical interfaces. One important possible interface element is that you get orientation/movement which you can use for a lot of  interface activity. Myo ( MYO - The Gesture Control Armband https://getmyo.com/?goback=%2Egde_753787_member_217567055) incorporates nerve   sensing technology to give finger/ hand shape position. With this your interface becomes more like Harry Potter hand waving. Imagine pointing to the TV palm out like a policeman to stop it. Finger flick to carry on.

Accelerometers means you could have a simple fitness app - if you could measure pulse then you could save about 80,000 US lives a year by detecting early signs of cardiac arrest. Sleep apps for phone are very popular this might be another early big market for iWatch apps. 

Our research work 

One of our experiments was helping to people learn to practice violin ( getting arm/body position is important). So the use of a vibrotactile element (vibrator)  is very important ( helps get your attention sent info back). You could program these things to help with learning drumming or ballet or other physical skills. Some people done good work with relearning to walk after strokes - a bit specialised but shows the potential for novel interaction with iWatch. So the iWatch could be the Wii Fit of the mobile gaming world.

As far as the you identifier - you could make it use body electricity to modulate a unique signal to each device you touch. Basically if your wearing your watch your system knows it's you the moment you touch it. No long in screens just touch. Same goes for the 3 card reading locked doors you have to pass in order to just go to the loo. Could be replace by pressing the flat plat as you push the door.  

In Reality 

Personally I'm expecting the iWatch to be a small upgrade to the old IPod with multi-touch. little more than iPod mini + bluetooth and apps would be a huge achievement for Apple now. 

Idea of the day - wikipeida for structured knowledge

I was talking in a co-worker who is developing tools to permit people to edit semantic information. It reminded me of CYC an attempt to create a comprehensive ontology of common sense knowledge. 


Personally I've always been sceptical of these kinds of attempts to create formally verifiable structured knowledge. 


That aside I mentioned to the co-worker that perhaps what someone should do is to build a crowd source engine - like Wikipedia. The engine would have enough tools to permit people to enter information in the network of knowlege directly. I guess something like DBpedia ( but being explicitly written rather than extracted from wikipeida ). 


Perhaps its already in existence you see a lot of projects like this ( FreeBase, Open Cyc) - perhaps FreeBase is it( except that's commercially owned right?). 

Idear of the day - bring back the command line!

Thinking about the Newton/Iphone I realised I liked the command line interface it had 
( Dinner John thursday ) ( remember milk ) 


If you could build an interface that was really really quick where basically you did a command key combination then it would send up a message box where you could type 


dinner John Thursday


The system would be smart enough to guess who John was  ( from your contacts [and your facebook links] ) or it would produce a list of best guesses. It would vaguely know when dinner was and then produce a dialog box ( which might prompt for more info). 


I guess like Google it would have a good guess for miss typed commands (dinjer with jon - did you mean dinner with john Grady today at 6:00 ? ). 


The idea would be to collect a number of things in the same interface. 
Remind Ruth about milk 
sets up an email with a template 
Hi Ruth, I thought I would just take this opportunity to remind you about milk. 
Thanks ... )

where as 

Remind me milk

might set up an alarm 

Tell Ruth late 
Sets up and email to ruth saying I am late. 
Phone ruth


The idea is to keep lots of stuff which might cause you to switch contexts. I've looked at quicksilver on the mac but its more of a better finder than anything.


The whole thing would have to be fast enough to stop you context switching with an interruption.

Polipo and ZLIB

The subject of infinite bandwidth got me thinking to webcache technology.

I found polipo - a simple to use webcache. I'm big into cacheing why use bandwidth when you don't have to and like it. 


I was interested in something which might let me override some of the web adverts and let me instead reuse adverts for stuff I already have or to have useful information on the adverts (you have a meeting in 20 mins)

Guzumped

A couple of years ago ( really was it that long ?) I worked on trying to unpick the signals from Diamond touch and then spot both fingers. Well I wrote a simple version and got about 80% success rate from it - not bad. I wrote it up but the paper got rejected ( mostly due to poor success rate )

I've thought of a better mechanism one that would handle multiple fingers ( more than two ) but the implement is quite difficult and with the cloud and the table I've never had enough time to really sit down and spend the 5 days it would take to redo.

Well in the mean time someone had managed to do something and get it published! Impressive the paper reads really like the one I wrote but this one managed to get published and it had an 80% success rate.

I'm not that miffed - I had got distracted on other things. But I did feel it was more fundermental - makes implementing 2*1D tables very possible.

I'm more irritated with my self someone else managed to do a multiple mice paper - which was technically much easier but I never managed to think of the useage case ( again side tracked on the table + cloud).

QRCodes

I was chatting with Mike and mentioned I fancied building an erring or broach on Ponoko which would be an engraved with a QRCode.

I thought I could use a processing library but it turns out the library needs a perfect image. I couldn't find an Mac application that worked but I've down loaded an iPHone application that looks OK ( works against the screen)

I've found to problem which is the image has to be the quite big. I wanted something which could capture an image of a face ( + earrings/ broach ) then pull out the image in much worse conditions. i.e something like a party picture or an image you might grab of someone.

OK so two problems with QRCode firstly it needs to be big secondly its a binary image which is hard to encode as a physical image cut into something. I thought about doing something with rectorvision glyphs. But they are hard to cut too ( the image is bits within bits within bits )

So I've been wondering how difficult it would be to design a low bit rate glyph which only had one body with a number of holes. Perhaps a good masters project except the students never want to do interesting projects.

Scratchy input

More seriously cool input - ideal for portable table.

Grand project idea

I've decided what I could do with is a Year planner which I could print out at A3, which would come from my Google Calander. 

Strange it does not exists yet.