Technical Overview - Native Client — Google Developers

Technical Overview - Native Client — Google Developers

This allows you to compile C/C++ as a kind of in web browser app. I could build some very cool things with this ( If I had the time).

DIS paper accepted!!!

We are happy to inform you that your paper

 207 - Kolab: appropriation & improvisation in mobile tangible collaborative interaction

has been accepted to DIS 2012 Long and Short Papers .

We received 449 papers which is about 150 more papers than DIS 2010, and many more than anticipated. We were able to accept only 89 papers due to the time and venue restrictions (so, the acceptance rate was just less than 20%).


This is a good day. 

Skype robot

At home Ruth is away a fair amount and I've found it nice for the kids to talk to Ruth via skype.

Its a bit of a faf to set up but the kids feel more connected to her when she can read to them and they can see her.

So my specks for the SkypeRobot



It would be a mobile camera/screen which could be controlled remotely by the remote user ( I got lots of great comments about 'can you bring mummy in here').
The remote user should be able to move the camera/screen too.
I guess the whole thing should be fairly robust and without keyboards but just a 'call' button for the kids....
As plug and play as possible - all you need is wifi and a power point.

http://www.coolcomponents.co.uk/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=233
http://www.lynxmotion.com/images/html/build16a.htm
http://www.coolcomponents.co.uk/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=46&products_id=234

Future meeting room.

Fun looking room in Napire


Future Multitouch Meeting Room from Oli Mival on Vimeo.

I'm intreasted in the bit about "The table can recognise and interact with objects placed on it’s surface such as mobile phones, laptops or books using infra red fiducial markers."

I'd love to know how they worked.

Looks nice but clearly they need to get to work on the software. We don't sort that many images in a meeting - but perhaps that is just for the camreas.

Norman Mailer and Marshall McLuhan on CBC in 1968

One of my interests is how/if we are made by technology how does it change our view of the world and our selves. I've been watching these and enjoying them immensly.
Interesting the notion of the pre/post TV generation which has resonances with the pre/post Internet generation ( I've heard them called digital natives).
Lovely to see prime time television from a point when people can say Faustian or Existential.


Violence is the search for identity.






McLuhan 'to select is to distort' so quote-alisious.
'All science and technologies are extensions of our own bodies' is another apt one.

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).

A blog on Ubicomp

[ dtools ]

[ I Stuff ]

On the 'if I had to build a carpet again' pile

http://www.glowsafe.com/e-shop/index.php?cPath=39_41

For that Tron effect.

works mostly on clothing. I wonder what voltage ?

+44 (0) 870 199 8524

LCD multi touch $2990.00

We have been talking about a large multi touch LCD display as the basis for the table industry. With this you could put your feet beneath it ( and treat like a real table ). 30 inchs isn't bad.



Not with a border.

Conductive paint

We are having lots of wireing problems at the moment. I quite like this use of conductive ink puts electronics half way between painting and lego.

Thoughts on technology

1. Science and technology are different things. People even particanters frequently merge to the two together but they are not the same thing. One does not lead to the latter. When an atomic physicist builds an atomic bomb they actually become atomic engineers. They are engaging in a separate process, with separate rules and separate processes and outcomes. Science has higher credence with the wider population so sometimes subjects are miss represented to maintain cultural funding.

1.1 Scientists and Technologists think differently about things. For a scientists the ultimate outcome is promotion of self and their perticualr beliefs. For engineer the ultimate outcome is the promotion of the changes made by the technologist them selves the self is unimportant. This is ego centric and world centric production.

2. I might contend that science is an extension a practice based upon technology. A microscope ( technology ) is invented and this leads to a number of scientific discoveries. Many scientists engage in technological development in the name of science and it is these developments which frequently 'spin off' into technology rather then the scientific results. Scientific knowledge is largely ignored (or not researched )when developing new products. I would contend the creation of new medical drugs is largely an technological process rather than a scientific one.

3. A technology is defined by the experience of it - what it affords. A table or chair is hard to define until you define what it lets you do with it you couldn't do with out it rather than what it is. For many engineers this is what might be termed 'utility'. But utility has a number of preconceptions about what is good and what is 'bad'. For example making a game or something fun is an affordance but does not sit well with most engineers vision of 'utility'.

4. The affordance drives the adoption mediated by the process of capitalism.

Today I felt very sorry for the people marching for jobs outside parliament. If they want to have some kind of influence they should have really marched outside some venture capital buildings.

Venture capital is driven by risk rather than understanding the technology and its outcomes so you get some strange results. Venture Capital has its own logics which limits what it can and cannot do. For example VC cannot stray to far outside the current technological domain.

5. All new products are the process of either technology push ( technology affordance) and market pull. I would content a successful project is actually a combination between the both. Pull is the potential market and push is why your potential competitors havn't met that need yet.

6. Market need is a myth. Who sat round in the 1820's saying if only we could get from London to Manchester in 3 hours life would be so much better? Needs are only discovered/perceived by creating methods to meet those needs. This what we think of as market need is simply known technological affordance (If I can get from London to Manchester in 3 hour how could I use that). When it looks like you are assessing market 'needs' then you are only applying knowledge of current known solutions rather than being open ended about speculating entirely new ones. It is very difficult to frame a question where a true need is identified, and if it was done generally then its moderatly unlikely that the technologist in question will be able to innovate sufficiently to meet that need.

7. All technology is in fact driven by appropriation. Appropriation is process of users seeing affordances which have not been perceived of by the original creators. Phoning your self up to leave a message as a reminder is example of appropriation. In fact appropriation drives all new technologies. Only does meeting a need ( for filling a new affordance) leading to substantive innovation but this assumes the technology creator knows both the aforndance and the likely appropriation - which can happen but is rare.

8. Appropriation also cultural -in modern society we use thing to meet social needs most of our vital needs are already catered for. So for example people might consider solar panels on their roofs but not insulation in their buildings. The movie and digital media are pushing them selves towards extinction due to digital copyright problems. The obvious solution would be to demand analogue storage devices (DVDs) which would inheriantly introduce noise into the picture and so make copying difficult. But they cannot due to the view of digital media being 'the future'.

9. Appropriation can occur for non discursive reasons. SUV/4x4 met a non discursive need.

10. The experience of technology is fundamental to our relationship to it and the every day.

11. Some technologies are about what to think with and some are about what to think of.

Another system how too

I'm mid paper writing at the moment

but got emailed this

http://labs.ideo.com/2009/02/11/hacked-rear-projection-tv-into-multitouch-display/

Is a good how-to on how to do laser scanning.

Iphone idears Digital jitney

Having had the iphone for a few days now I have had a few more idears about what you could do with it.
The gps is they good and I realised that you could implement a great eco transport tool. To make it work you would need two iPhone apps and a web server.

App 1.

If you want to go from a to b you press the summon button on your specially down loaded iPhone app.
Your origin and destination are compared to a list of shared Taxis running in the city.
If some part of your route matches a near by taxi it is redirected to you. If not fresh one is dispatched.
Your phone gets a Ok response a time a price and expected journey time.
You enter your credit details on the iPhone app and effectively pay over the web.
The journey time is in a range the taxi your getting may or may not change route according to who calls it.
The taxi arrives - its larger than normal and can take 4-6 people.
You share the taxi for part of the route which means you share the cost.
The taxi driver has a Iphone/Tomtom app which is dynamically updated from the central server. It gives directions which it the driver uses to wave through the city to the next pickup./drop off (these can change dynamically).
Taxi drops you off at near your destination.

So what do you get for this.
1. You get taxi like service (origin/destination travel)
2. The taxi may take longer than a pure taxi. - It might stop for others.
3. You get 1/N (where N is the number of passengers ) cost.
So if you imagine that you manage to share the taxi with 4 other people you get 1/4 cost. So an £8 ride becomes a £2 ride - not bad.

The city gets something between a taxi service and a bus service. The taxi doesn't move until someone wants to go some where so you avoid empty bus syndrome. The taxi is fuller than a taxi or car so you get more efficent movement with out sacrificing safety or door to door movement.

Cool fabrication site

Found lovely website which does flat pack fabrication on demand. 

http://www.ponoko.com/

I wonder if we can make an open source table top - they do wood and 8mm acrylic... 

Results from the first Pilot study

1. flat power supply so can close box. 
   
2. longer vibration sensor cabel.
3. add temp./light sensor ( fans come on when its hot) 
4. wireless mouse/keyboard good. 
5. enable ethernet point and run everything remotely. 

Generally went quite well but I'm not sure about the vibration  (stair case) data. Need to enegage this fully on Monday.  

We now have about 2 hours worth of data. 

Chi papers

Had a nice meeting with Yvonne and the others yesterday. General conversion about papers for Chi. Having spoken again with Paul we think that could be a good paper about the location of the new table. 

New table is to be simple but playful guide to location of people in the new building. Theory is we test it out and see how syntactical view of location applies - good sheep paper. 

Also Y. wants something quick measuring/visualising activity in building. I like notion of doing say slow trails of people + measuring network traffic+noise as an indication of how much people are present. Again I can rework this syntactically plus look at C.Raty stuff. 

Some success

Tried a number of alternatives out and found that having tracing paper UNDER the acrylic top with nothing above does a good job when using portvideo of Open computer vision. 

This does track your finger but needs code to reject large blobs. 

Also had some improvement with the background subtraction for the floor/wall stickies project. 

screen thoughts

We got the Rectivision stuff working on the table with a flood light + diffuser over it + the using tracing paper over the acrylic. 

Getting close to making the table work well in FDIR mode. I think i need to have some baffles to stop the edges leaking light down. I've managed to make the dot go away by tilting the screen so finally I can try upping the threshold to make the work work. 

Also got the basics of floor stickies working and gave demo. 

Heard rumours of large 4M media wall in new building..  

odd idear about tracking physical documents

odd idear,

Special printer driver that sends paper off to be prininted but also marks the paper with machine readable barcode. This code tells the machine where the document that it was printed from WAS. Perhaps internal database to keep track of document.
So if you have a printed document holding it up to the screen camera would then make it open on the desktop.

Technology and objections

I went with Ruth to look at some cybercars in Daventry. I mention them to some of the people I work with who you know are computer scientists but the first reaction I got was. 'Won't muggers run out stop the cyber cab and then mug you in the cab'. I got this a couple of times.

Now I don't want to approach the issue directly - after all you might same the same thing about cyclists or indeed car drivers (if somone comes along waves you down smashes the windscreen are you going to be able to drive away?) - what makes me intreasted is that this was peoples first reaction.

I was looking at some big LCD displays used in an underground station and thought. 'If I proposed that the first recactoin would be whats to stop someone smashing the display then running away?'

I remember the response the PRT system got when I presented it to the students at the london bussness school they thought PRT was a more unusable than a perpetual motion machine (they called a free energy device) someone else had proposed.

Now I guess the probem is should people be blind to possible problems ? One of the victorian objections to rail travel was that traveling at such speeds as 30 miles per hour would make peoples head explode.

I guess people are just not that good at dealing with uncertainty. I said to Ruth about the cybercars is that with the new London Heathrow terminal that they will just have to be able to see them in action for a few months before people can 'adjust' to actual technology rather than anticipate problems.

For me the question is that it appears that certain technologies appear to be less critialcally assessed than others ( the Ultra/PRT system against the perpetual motion machine for example). Is this universal could this be experimentally assessed in some way - perhaps giving people a group of technologies and asking what they thought but how to allow for the same imagined problems? Perhaps the same technology but presented in diffrent ways to diffrent people?