Chi papers in

OK my primary paper choked ( on the stats ) but I ended up making a good writing contribution to another and it got in on time.

Well Chi is a lottery but as with most lotteries if you don't play you can't win. I'm now back to planning my next series of studies. Oddly with ShareIT gone I feel it strangely liberating.

Given the grant famine we are about to enter I'm thinking about how to take advantage of our current generation of hardware to make some more results.

Cambridge Tourist information office application on the Microsoft Surface

Our next application is about to go into a trial at the Tourist information office at  Peas Hill Cambridge ( CB2 3AD).  The current application is very slick but thats easy to say before real people get their real hands on it. 


We are inviting people to come down and have a look at it and try it out for them selves from the 17th of May to the 10th of June. We are looking for groups of people who might want to report back there responses at the end of the day. 


Given the amount of preparation its going to be a textbook interaction paper. 


Come and help break the software ! The location is http://www.visitcambridge.org/VisitCambridge/ContactUs.aspx


The video is new and still hasn't settled at YouTube hopefully the video will sort its self out at some point. 

more links

Flat cables .

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000YFBQEU

http://www.ramelectronics.net/showPDF.ep?pdfName=tips%20and%20techniques.pdf

http://www.superbrightleds.com/cgi-bin/store/commerce.cgi?product=BARS#NFLS-x30

Live from DANA center

Absence of blogging for a bit while I was in a tizz getting the big table working. After much work managed to get everything sorted. I'm currently sitting in the DANA center now. Falling behind on teaching work. Mean while the table was working but now isn't.

I'm now sitting in the cafe waiting for the event to get going. The table is off line I'm now stuck under a bit of direct sun light which completely overwhelms the tables vision system.

ShareIT project presentation.

Back to reading more by Passini.

Cursed and not so cursed research.

Had a skype meeting with Yvonne and Richie yesterday. Richie is in the US and is going to come over and prototype a physical visualisation of the movement experiment.  We are going to come up with ways to visualise the data. 

Richie is on for repeating the experiment in the US.

The cursed experiment is on hold for two days due to the snow. This won't effect the validity of the final experiment. 

I've been reading up about FLEX sounds intreasting I'm going to get it running on my mac. Perhaps I can do the zoomable interface idea again but this time in real time on mac and PC with minimal load time. I've been trying an other touchSimulator - not wildly impressed but I like the transparency stuff. 

interface links

I'm looking for something suitable for the interface for the Dana center gig. 

I like this circular interface style but what can it mean?

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=DHMJJwouq5I

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=_2fZnESUw5s

zooming.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=udj6hMKK5z4&feature=related

frustration + joy.

I've been trying a number of ways to get the ambient buzz visualisation system working. I've been beset by set backs - I asked to get hold of an dead lap top as an active sensor but was told to ask for a lone pool machine. The down side is you can't loan them out for a month only a few days. The machine I did loan (PC) as fairly useless - it took hours to get going and then I have prfound problems trying to log on then the internet seemed not to work at all. 

I switched to the mac -mini. Not the best solution as I will have to get the machine out from under the stairs when we have a visit planned next week. I've been having huge problems with the mini- ages to log on( I think its using wireless) and the keyboard stopped working ( batteries died and not more in the lab). Next the mouse (PC mouse) started to behave funny. So I've stolen Paul's he is not into day. But after rebooting and trying to atach ethernet I'm not getting very far. 

I'm currently aiming to put the mac mini + monitor in under the floor ( with security cable) to monitor noise  + vibration on the stairs and while that is in I'm going to get the pressure sensor working with the Arduino which I want to calibrate (along with the other sensors). Ideally I want to contact the mini over the network to check on how it is going (note enable remote access). 

ON the good news front - we have got the money to build the floor stickies stuff. 

day of good ideas (AKA squeak rant)

The PC died in transit to the show. Jeff wants to use this as an excuse to get USB connection working to table. The down side is that he wants to make it work in smalltalk (in fact more specifically in squeak). I'm quite the cosmopolitan when it comes to computer languages but I'm not sure I want to stick to a ghetto language with out any specific reason to do so apart from Jeff's reluctance to learn anything else. I can hardly blame him, I've seen people resolutely stick to the first language they learnt over a 30 year carrier in computing. 

I love changing languages but have recently come to the conclusion that the reason I change languages is to get access to some new cool library (compiler writers please take note) that lets me code something neat up quick. That said I'm about to go back to C++ to use the open computer vision library but open computer vision is in desperate need of a significantly well written user guide. 

So my research in the next few weeks will lie either with signal processing signals from the diamond touch table or doing real time video processing for gesture recognition and we should do this all in squeak because it is good at using the multimedia processing features (oddly no), you can deliver double click-able applications that conform to the operating system  interface standard that the non programmers on the team can use(no), that lots of people can reuse our library (no), that we can make the program open source by integrating it on to source forge. Basically there is no clear reason to my mind to program this in smalltalk any more than there is a reason to program this in visual basic. 

I'm open to the case to use smalltalk but I need something distinctive that smalltalk has that I can't find anywhere else (translation give me a USP). Don't get me wrong small talk is a good tinkers language, if you out put are papers to conferences rather than code that other people can use( which is the life of an academic so I don't think Jeff is badly trained)  then small talk is the way to go. But I'm not sure this is my or the projects context. 

We are on the move like an idea who's time has come

to quote the great man himself.
We have a phd student who looks super cool and a nift programmer coming all the way from America starting as soon as possible. I have a really cool idea about the whole thing.