Evil idea of the day(2)

We watched a demo of the (. Kinect Sensor with Kinect Adventures!) yesterday. It makes you do pretty extreme motions ( like holding your hand in the air for 3 seconds). Afterwards we got talking about how might do this with jewellery (a ring or bracelet) not image processing.

I realise that Rose's bands she is making for the violin work could be used to prototype some kind of interaction mechanism. High on the low effort stakes but need a good idea

I liked the potter wand
   but would be more impressed if it did Bluetooth or 802.11g or something. So the notion of doing hand gestures to do things ( unlock doors?)  would look cool.

I'm wondering if there is some kind of simple screen? based interaction I could use.

John Frazer had a student Nicola Lefever  who did some great jewellery that you could use to recognise finger movements .

Oddness

Gave talk about architecture and ubi-comp today. Oddly while chatting Afterwards I was accused of being behind the one behind a lot of space syntax theory.
Which is odd this is the second time someone has accused me of this . ( other time was by very knowledgeable outsider at space syntax conference ). Probably coincidence but I am feeling wonderfully flattered non the less.

Pay back

I was reading about how the Kindle is the top selling item on Amazon, people seem not to be able to get enough of them.  I was also saying to Gonzalo how green technology needs to get a new image.

As an example Richard M. started quoting pay back time as a reason not to buy a hybrid car.

But lets look at the Kindle

difference in price between Fellowship or the ring for kindle ($8.76) and  real book ($9.64) so thats negative. Ok bad example. so Gulivers travels Kindle price $3.00 mass market paper ace £3.50 saving $0.5

To make this work you would have to buy (189/0.5) 378 books to make your original investment ( 189) back. Which admittedly won't fill the Kindle but (capacity 3,500 books ie more than your life time or books) but is more than I might buy for my self in a 15 year period ( will the Kindle last that long). In short in terms of pay back I don't think the Kindle is a winner.

But that's not the important part - its still selling "Kindle is our #1 bestselling item for two years running. It’s also the most-wished-for, most-gifted" and I don't blame anyone one
 but I do blame people who use say that they won't by a hybrid car or a solar hot water panel or more insulation or double glazing or what ever because the pay back period is so low.


People are buying Kindles because they want them not because they have the right pay back and so what's wrong with doing that for green technology ? 


Yes usual variations apply ( Kindles cost different amounts , some books are free, prices change according to what kinds of books you buy and yes I still might get one). 

Training should never be a substitute for designing a usable application.

Good article on training (the evils of such), on UXMatters

http://www.uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2010/12/its-not-a-training-issue.php

The wineshop progresseth

Not a bad week all told. Interesting talk on using hand recognition. Rose is doing great job with cloud mark II. Wood is being turned into intelligent wine tables. Gonzalo has sorted electronics and painted walls. I am hopeful that should be functioning soon.
Need to remember that parcel is ready to be picked up.
Sensors very quite possibly the quietest day this year.

navigating in games.

Instreasting set of slides. Would love to hear the talk that went with it.

https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dg3w5bqn_5995dwkxf9

Ambiguity

William W. Gaver, Jacob Beaver, and Steve Benford. 2003. Ambiguity as a resource for design. InProceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI '03). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 233-240. DOI=10.1145/642611.642653 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/642611.642653

Pondering over experiment

Pounding if I should make the experiment more complex. I spent a lot of time making it simpler. Now its too simple.

Also  found this link to time management for dyslexics.

Rebutals and Outage ( and dyslexia)

We had a Chi rebuttals meeting.

Interesting that everyone had to by buoyed up when getting knocked back. I had this too to one paper. Very low marks and unlikely to get in but the rebuttal was invited so I did it anyway. Naturally you feel outraged - this version was given lower marks than last time and we did improve it. So yes everyone feels quite hurt at how unjust the system is. In another year the paper will be out of date. It reminds me of how little science and academia is capable of approaching an external problem. You can't say solve X and still get a paper out of it. 

The interesting part was how everyone was still in the doldrums about it. I had that on friday but I had also sprung back much quicker and have written a really positive reply. 

Ruth suggested it might be a dyslexic thing I'm more used to having my work rejected as inadequate when to my eyes I can't see that its no more inferior  than the work of my peers. Perhaps I'm just feeling more militantly dyslexic after that BBC program on dyslexia. ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-11721272 )  http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00vy8c7  download at BBC iPlayer . 

I found there is quite a big wages gap between dyslexics and non dyslexics or as one paper put it"s. Socioeconomic status and IQ were not predictive of adult outcome among these men in contrast to their effect in the general population" or As Mellard and Woods put it "adults with SLD no longer earn more; rather they earn less than their non-LD peers (Goldberg et al., 2003; Goldstein et al., 1998)." more interesting there is as Dickingson and Verbeek said "Our results show that much of the observed lower wages for individuals with LD is due to differences in productivity characteristic s.However,there isa n unexplained portion of the wage gap that could possibly be considered wage discrimination against individuals with LD." basically dyslexics earn 77% of everyone else's salary.

Just a note to say we had a network outage on the sensor net. Yesterday and today it looks like. 

Cool stuff mobile table top with Xbox as input.

Kind of interesting - point it down at a table and get position/hight info ( good enough to get finger up/down? ) Cheap too

XBox Kinect running on OS X ( with source code ) from Theo Watson on Vimeo.

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.

Lost and found: Notre Dame psychologist studies how we get our bearings in buildings // News // Notre Dame News // University of Notre Dame

This is a link to a paper Ruth has published about getting lost in buildings. Notice the role of signage.

Lost and found: Notre Dame psychologist studies how we get our bearings in buildings // News // Notre Dame News // University of Notre Dame