Scientists have developed new technology that could eventually make a doorknob that knows whether to lock or unlock, admit a guest, or leave a message.
Posts tagged "interface"
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Touch tech makes almost any object ‘smart’ →
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Swiss scientists create mind-controlled robot for disabled patients →
A team of scientists at Switzerland’s École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne have developed a robot that can be controlled using only your mind. The new technology was demonstrated earlier this week, and involved a quadriplegic man wearing a cap to record his brain signals, which were then transferred to a small wheeled robot that he could move left and right simply by thinking it.
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Excuse Me, But Is Your Leg Ringing? →
Technology innovation—sometimes it’s great, sometimes it seems like someone is pulling your leg. In this case, almost literally.
UnwiredView.com ran a story last week about a Nokia patent filing that it calls “borderline creepy,” involving haptic technology and tattoos. Haptic technology, as described in the patent, “is a tactile feedback technology that takes advantage of a user’s sense of touch by applying forces, vibrations, and/or motions to the user.”
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Command robot planes with a wave of your arms →
Controlling drone aircraft could one day be as simple as waving your arms.
Yale Song and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a way of controlling drones taxiing on a runway using gestures.
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Two Extremes of Touch Interaction →
Microsoft Research Redmond researchers Hrvoje Benko and Scott Saponas have been investigating the use of touch interaction in computing devices since the mid-’00s. Now, two sharply different yet related projects demonstrate novel approaches to the world of touch and gestures. Wearable Multitouch Interaction gives users the ability to make an entire wall a touch surface, while PocketTouch enables users to interact with smartphones inside a pocket or purse, a small surface area for touch. Both projects will be unveiled during UIST 2012, the Association for Computing Machinery’s 24th Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, being held Oct. 16-19 in Santa Barbara, Calif.
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New direction for game controllers: Prototypes tug at thumb tips to enhance video gaming →
University of Utah engineers designed a new kind of video game controller that not only vibrates like existing devices, but pulls and stretches the thumb tips in different directions to simulate the tug of a fishing line, the recoil of a gun or the feeling of ocean waves.
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Is the Keyboard Going the Way of the Typewriter? →
Legend has it that the standard distance between the rails in a railroad, the gauge that is, is 4 feet, 8 and a half inches because that’s what it was in England, and it was that distance in England because that was the gap between the ruts in the roads that the Romans built, and the ruts are that far apart because that’s the width between the wheels of a Roman war chariot.
It’s not true, of course, because the Romans didn’t even bring war chariots to England; they had stopped fighting wars with chariots hundreds of years before they ever got to Londinium, as they called it. Still, it’s an interesting idea, precisely because it’s believable—standards live forever.
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Mind Over Motor: Controlling Robots With Your Thoughts →
Over recent months, in José del R. Millán’s computer science lab in Switzerland, a little round robot, similar to a Roomba with a laptop mounted on it (right), bumped its way through an office space filled with furniture and people. Nothing special, except the robot was being controlled from a clinic more than 60 miles away—and not with a joystick or keyboard, but with the brain waves of a paralyzed patient.
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Intel Laptops Feature Touch, Gesture, and Voice Control →
Touch, voice control, and even gesture control—the latter popularized by Microsoft’s Kinect gaming controller—will be coming to lightweight laptops dubbed “ultrabooks,” said Mooly Eden, Intel’s vice president for sales and marketing, at Intel’s press conference this morning.
Intel dominates the market for desktop, laptop, and server processors, but has been a spectator to the rapid growth of smart phones and tablets. Worse for the Santa Clara, California, chip maker, high-powered smart-phone and tablet processors based on designs from U.K.-based ARM are beginning to show potential in Intel’s traditional realm.
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Stroke your car seat to pump up the volume →
IMAGINE swishing a fingertip along the fabric of your car seat to control the radio volume. Or impressing guests by dimming your living room lights with a languid swipe along the arm of your sofa. These ideas could soon become reality thanks to a smart fabric that behaves like the touchscreen on your cellphone.Because you can clean it, the material will be practical for everyday use.
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Samsung SUR40 for Microsoft Surface →
The 40-inch SUR40, co-created by Samsung and Microsoft, is a thin tabletop computer that sees and responds to whatever is placed on it. Each of the table’s LCD pixels emits an infrared beam that reflects off an object back to a sensor. The processor synthesizes the sensor data to create an eight-bit image from which it can pick out shapes and large text, such as product names and numbers. Once the object is identified, the table displays related YouTube videos and other product information. Right now most apps are on the simpler side, but developers are free to program custom games and more, depending on what bar or store the table winds up in. $8,400
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Heads-Up: Lumus Shows Off 720p, See-Through Video Glasses →
We’ve all see video glasses before – those clunky, Geordi La Forge-looking things that promise to display a 10 foot screen in front of your face. The drawbacks, generally, are size and transparency. Lumus, however, has solved those problems and is working on bringing a pair of see-through, HD video glasses to market that look more Minority Report than 1990s Star Trek.
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Omnitouch allows you to turn anything into a computer interface.
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Using the Kinect SDK people are coming up with novel Minority Report like interaction with desktop computers.
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Paper computer shows flexible future for smartphones and tablets
