Researchers from Cornell’s Creative Machines Lab wondered what would happen if two chatbots engaged in conversation with one another. The result: it is awkkkkwaarrddd. I won’t spoil the topics that do come up, so go on and watch the bizarre back-and-forth above.
[Via Engadget]
The BendDesk, a research projected created by members of the Media Computing Group, is an attempt to converge digital and physical workspaces into one desk. The concept desk features a curved multitouch display and supports up to ten touch points. The display can bring up digital content like documents, photos, or videos. And thanks to its ergonomically impressive design, the digital desk doubles as a physical desk; it can easily support a laptop, paperwork, pens and pencils on the horizontal surface. For now the BendDesk is merely an in-house concept project, so don’t expect to see something like finding a place in your room any time soon. The best we can do is watch it in all its futuristic glory in video demonstration form above.
[Via Engadget; MediaComputingGroup]
pCubee is a research project designed at the University of British Columbia.
We have designed a personal cubic display that offers novel interaction techniques for static and dynamic 3D content. We arrange five small LCD panels into a box shape that is light and compact enough to be handheld. The display uses head-coupled perspective rendering and a real-time physics simulation engine to establish an interaction metaphor of having real objects inside a physical box that a user can hold and manipulate. We have demonstrated four types of interaction techniques with pCubee: viewing a static scene, navigating through a large landscape, playing with colliding objects inside a box, and stylus-based manipulation of objects.
I think the Nintendo 3DS has met its competition in pCubee. If they’d just make a slot for game cartridges, I can totally see something like this becoming a viable portable gaming device. Can’t you?
Out of Microsoft and University of California Berkeley comes the Pictionaire touchscreen table. It uses integrated overhead cameras to capture physical objects and convert them into digital ones to be manipulated. The Microft Surface-esque table is almost six feet long, begging for an intuitive collaborative experience. Creating digital copies of “physical artifacts” couldn’t be simpler. You place an object (say, a notebook with doodles) onto the surface, the table recognizes its presence, the overhead camera snaps a picture of it, and all you have to do is drag and drop the corner edge of the object to a new area on the table. Viola–now you have a digital copy of the notebook that can be manipulated in a variety of ways. You can drag the digital copy onto paper-sized whiteboards and use a marker to add annotations. The surface can even act as a light table to create hand-drawn copies of things. Wireless keyboards and mice are supported for text imput and image search. Though Pictionaire remains a research project, it’s good to see Microsoft and company working towards a more practical experience with the Microsoft Surface table.
[Via New Scientist; Gizmodo]
CRISTAL, or “Control of Remotely Interfaced Systems using Touch-based Actions in Living spaces,” is very reminiscent of the Microsoft Surface in that it is controlled by touch-based gestures on a coffee table surface. It is one of the coolest concept devices I have seen put to use. CRISTAL allows you to control and manipulate various things in your living room space including TV, speakers, lights, a vacuum cleaner, and a digital picture frame. The interface displayed on the table is a digital projection of your living room; it couldn’t be made any simpler. To interact with your lights, for example, you can turn them on and off or even dim them with a sliding gesture on the table over the projected image of your actual lamp. You can access your movie collection from a media server on the table. You simply drag and drop a movie from the collection list to the table’s main interface; from there you can view the movie on the table itself, or–get this–you can drag the movie from the center of the table to the projected image of your TV and it will immediately play on your actual TV in your living room! With photos, you can view and resize them directly on the table, and you can drag them to your TV or digital picture frame to view them on those devices. And here’s my favorite feature: you can tell your miniature vacuum exactly where to go to clean up a mess by drawing a line from the vacuum to the messy destination. Neat, huh?
Stacey Scott, assistant professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada, member of the project: “We wanted a social aspect to activities such as choosing what to watch on TV and we wanted to make the process easy and intuitive. “Every time you get a new device into the living room, you get a new remote with it. And instead of difficult programmable universal remotes, this offers intuitive mapping of the different devices and home.” Christian Müller-Tomfelde, an Australian table-top display researcher: “It is a clever use of the tabletop as a ‘world-in-miniature’ interface to control room elements.”
Müller-Tomfelde commented that it could take five to ten years before we see something like this be manufactured and made available for the general public. As we have witnessed with Microsoft Surface, it can be very difficult to create and promote a table-top device with a steep price tag. Scott approximated that if CRISTOL was put on the market today it would cost somewhere between $10,000-$15,000. Today’s digital living room is packed with multiple devices that all perform different tasks. A device like CRISTOL that can put the control of all those devices onto one central table-top with a user-friendly interface would be a very helpful and exciting addition to homes all around the world.
[Via Wired]