Virtualizing my 'chaotic' physical desk

How is your physical desk ? I mean your everyday work table... In my case, oops. A really messy one.

So, now, imagine your computer desktop with an almost identical interface of the one you use in the 'real' world.

See what I'm talking about in the following video:



You can see more information of this new interface in its original website here. (Thanks to David Siñuela for this link).

Do you see what I mean ? I'm not quite sure this is going to help my chaotic way to organize my life :) But, seriously, it's a fantastic example of what we will have as our new desktop.

Tangible User Interface - A new approach on how to interact with computers

A tangible user interface is a user interface in which a person interacts with digital information through the physical environment

Wikipedia definition

Tangible User Interface (TUI) is something I have recently rediscovered. Some time ago, I read something about it, and now, working on topics related to augmented reality, I have found out that this field is growing up very quickly with a lot of solutions and people working on it.

The idea is quite simple: use physical objects (sometimes even tools we use every day) in order to interact and work with computers. This concept means that using technologies like computer vision, tracking devices, touch screens etc. the system is able to know how the user is manipulating a collection of physical objects, and then it is able to translate these actions into events in the computer interface.

There's a basic paper you should read in order to understand this concept. The author is one of the TUI parents (Hiroshi Ishii). The title is Tangible Bits: Towards Seamless Interfaces between People, Bits and Atoms. You can get it in pdf here. Please, read it.

Professor Hiroshi Ishii is in fact, the leader of one of the most important research groups working on that, the tangible media group at MIT. If you want to see how a group of researchers can combine work and fun, research and pleasure, don't lose the chance to see the projects they have developed and they are working on ... and there are some very amazing videos. In fact, I put one of them in one of my first posts here.

Although it is clear that TUI has a great future, there's a lot to do in order to see real applications. The key is to be able to find something clearly easier to do with a TUI than with any other approach.

As usual, I like to look for some videos about the topic. Again, I invite you to see the videos at the tangible media group.

Although Prof. Hiroshi with his paper began this new field, in the following video, you can see that in 1990 people from Xerox was working on the concept:



An from the MIT, the SenseTable:

3D extraction from a single 2D image

Three weeks ago, I started a research stay in the Czech Technical University of Prague, at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, and I'm going to be here three weeks more.

One of my objectives here is to research in 3D geometry extraction from just a single 2D image as input, centered overall in biomedical imagery. Well, there's not too much time, but I'm sure we will get some results...

The thing is that when I was looking for information about all this matter, I found a very interesting video of one of this kind of techniques. What you have to pay attention to is to the fact that the authors are able to get these results automatically, i.e., their method, from just a 2D input image, is able to generate a VRML 3D scene without any user interaction.

For more information on this work from the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science, you can go here.

A video, just here:

Fractal art

It's obvious how computer graphics has taken the most of fractals and vice versa. Fractals are now, in fact, a compulsory topic in a computer graphics subject, due to the huge number of their applications in modeling, basically.

The word "fractal" has two related meanings. In colloquial usage, it denotes a shape that is recursively constructed or self-similar, that is, a shape that appears similar at all scales of magnification and is therefore often referred to as "infinitely complex." In mathematics a fractal is a geometric object that satisfies a specific technical condition, namely having a Hausdorff dimension greater than its topological dimension. The term fractal was coined in 1975 by Benoît Mandelbrot, from the Latin fractus, meaning "broken" or "fractured."

Fractal at Wikipedia.

I have been working in 3D terrain visualization, and it is incredible the quantity and quality of fractal techniques in order to model natural elements, like terrain, plants and woods, clouds etc. Their use is almost the only way to provide realism in such environments. And this fact is logical, since the nature itself has a lot of fractal behaviour.

Just looking at the Internet I have found several good examples of fractals and art. See this example (a bit long but beautiful):

(if you have bandwidth problems, watch all the video until the end, and press 'play' again; normally the cache is going to help you the second time)



But if you want to enjoy high quality fractal art, see Jock Cooper's www.fractal-recursions.com website and enjoy his works. Fantastic. He has some animations using fractal music... just as an example:

"I Robot" - are we closer ?

Science fiction films sometimes affect our vision of the future. At least, this has been my case.

I have watched so many films related to robots, some of them so unreal, that I really thought we would never be able to see a real humanoid robot walking around and doing real works.

Industrial robots, like robot arms, are more than a reality. The production of a lot of things, like cars, is undertaken by such machines. But many of their tasks are very 'mechanical', in the sense that they follow strict rules and patterns.

The evolution of robotics, focusing on humanoid-like ones, depends on several factors:
- The mechanical elements, i.e., the physical machine and its ability to behave like a human being. As you can see in the videos I have attached at the end, this seems to be a reality today. Perhaps is just a question of mass production (in order to be able to buy one).
- The 'software' component. Uhmmmm.... without any doubt the critical point. Without a good software, nothing interesting can be carried out by the robot.

Let's pay attention to the 'software' component. It's obvious that nothing standard can be developed for a robot if we want to let him/her/it act as human beings... In fact, inside this factor we found the most important challenges we fight with as programmers: Artificial Intelligence and Computer Vision. It is not my objective here to talk about these important computer science fields, may be in a future, but just to say it is required thousands of hours of very talented people to reach a new step in these technologies.

So, now, some of the videos and links that are changing my mind, in the sense that I really think now I will be able to see in a future some robots at the street or at home doing something useful (humanoid robots, I mean).

Aibo from Sony. It seems they are at the end of their production. I saw last year, in a congress, a football match with some of them. Really a beautiful machine:

www.sony.net/Products/aibo

Below, a real fight between two robots. It comes from a japanese robot competition called Robo-One. I would like to see something similar but without any human controlling their movements, i.e., with an intelligent software able to let them see, interpret and act.

(if you have bandwidth problems, watch all the video until the end, and press 'play' again; normally the cache is going to help you the second time)



And they're even able to dance:



The control over the robot motion is becoming very sophisticated. See the following one in which a female robot shows us that she is very charming:



But if you want to see my favourite, look for information about Asimo, from Honda. In its website, world.honda.com/ASIMO/, you can get a lot of information and some incredible videos.

Enjoying 'motion tracking'

Nintendo Revolution is going to be called Wii.

Here a first ad with the new name. With the new motion tracking features of their new game control, the number of rendered triangles by second, fragment/pixel shaders performance, framerates etc. are going to be anecdotal.

(if you have bandwidth problems, watch all the video until the end, and press 'play' again; normally the cache is going to help you the second time)

More on multi-touch interfaces ...

Another amazing video on multi-touch screens but now assisted by voice recognition technology (Thanks to Jordi Camarasa for this link). It is obvious that there's still a lot to do in graphical user interfaces, and that the future in this field is incredible.

The video is a demo of a what the authors call a game table prototype. The game in question is WarCraft III.

Using both inputs (hands and voice) it is possible to have an incredible control over the game. It's a very interesting demo.

(if you have bandwidth problems, watch all the video until the end, and press 'play' again; normally the cache is going to help you the second time)

Free online programming books

A very common problem some programming students have is the access to good and free tutorials and books.

Check out this link:

195 Free Online Programming Books (from www.techtoolblog.com)

It's a fantastic list of programming books. All free. Some of them, believe me, very good !

8 bit computers - a retrospective look

There was a time in which just one person was able to develop a game... using machine code, simple graphics, very good ideas, a lot of imagination, and many hours ...

There was a time without UML, Object-Oriented Programming, .Net, Java ... even without C ... It was the time of BASIC.

There was a time in which a tape recorder was something more than your only way to copy music... It was the only way we had to load and save programs ... It was the time of the beeerererrppereerpppeeeppeeep ... We were so familiar with such a sound that we were even able to guess if the sound corresponded to graphics or code ...

I'm referring to the beginning of the 80s. And I am lucky, I lived that moment.

I was 13 the very first time I saw a computer. Impressive. I decided to learn everything about computers. After one year learning what I could from magazines and books, I convinced my parents to buy my first computer. My idea was to buy a Sinclair Spectrum, but when we went to the shop, a Sony MSX was their suggestion. I didn't mind.

MSX was the first serious attempt to reach a standard for personal computers. Sony, Philips, Panasonic, Toshiba and other companies produced computers under this standard. It was a fantastic computer, with an important continuity (MSX-2, MSX-2 turbo R ...) but finally, it disappeared.

The original ROM included the BASIC programming language and, with the disk version of the machine, an operative system called MSX-DOS also appeared. Microsoft was behind that (the BASIC interpreter and the OS), and I have to say, they did a very good work. In fact, it was the best computer in that period (IMHO).

At that time, I was able to earn money (I was 14-18) developing games. In fact, there was no option. Without the Internet, without software to install... the only thing we were able to do with our computers was to learn programming. I have found a video that shows perfectly what I'm talking about:

(if you have bandwidth problems, watch all the video until the end, and press 'play' again; normally the cache is going to help you the second time)



What the video shows was true. The only I was able to do at the beginning was to buy those magazines with printed code inside, so you had to type it if you wanted something to do with your computer. Consequently, you were almost forced to learn programming. And after learning BASIC, machine code was the only chance to get more performance from those old computers.

Very different situation now. You can buy a computer and be able to do millions of things without even know what a program is. Is this current situation better than ours ?

Apple forever !

Apple is celebrating 30 years: an innovative and impressive period !

(if you have bandwidth problems, watch all the video until the end, and press 'play' again; normally the cache is going to help you the second time)