Robots and the BBC

One of my favourite MPhil students sent me this link after my post about Robot Skype. Very nice and just in time for XMas.

Good day so far. Submitted a grant application, then had a nice meeting with the Team from Bang! ( on BBC 1 ).  It sounds more cool than it was ( there were representatives from all the science departments there). I did bring a few of the BBC team and did an impromptu tour of the labs and they where very fascinated by the results.

Did I give out my business cards ? Yes
Did you come over as a typical shy nerd - Well I tried.
Did I take names ? No
Am I going to follow this up ? - OK well no.
Am I useless as self publicity ? - yeah
Are academics expected to show real world outcomes of their research as part of their funding: yep

Still I need to get back to rebutting CHI paper and that is the bottom line.

Osculator

So Intereasting find over the weekend was a program that can read wimote ( wii remotes) and claims to read a wii fit plus board ( not sure ) and converts into OSC signals. 

Gives rise to insperation to a surfboard game running round the city (possibly looking for signs).

Tangible interaction idea of the day

Just finished reading the Tangible and embedded interaction proceedings ( including Simon's low hanging fruit paper gurrr). Did have one idea inspired by the original answering machine interface.

What would an email interface look like? Small ball to represent each email - could you colour code them to indicate aspects of the message ( urgent, from this group, contains X in the subject line... ) Could you build it for a group of people ( the secretaries for example) mix the RFID tag in the ball with a tracker that would display/project the subject line.

Uist-fully.

Weirdly once the rebuttal process is over the reviews disappear.  

Slow mac slow mail problem

I was wondering why typing was so slow in new Mail program on Lepoard on OS X- turns out that TimeMachine was turned on. I'm surprised this speeded typeing up.