Open - A wonderful word ...

I really enjoy the adjective open. When applied to computer science topics is something that only offers advantages.

I'm not going to describe here the good things we have in open source solutions, and how incredible to visit sourceforge is in order to get almost everything you need but with an open license and with source code.

Recently, I'm enjoying with another application of the world open to lecturing. A fantastic example is the MIT. They have opened almost all the material they use in their courses, and believe me, they are worthwhile (go here). They have incredible lectures notes and even videos. I personally love the videos you can follow in subjects like Introduction to Algorithms. They are very useful and interesting.

Visit and enjoy the MIT OpenCourseWare and take the most of it !

A morphable model for the synthesis of 3D faces

Although it is something not new, I show you a video of a morphable model for the synthesis of 3D faces presented by Volker Blanz and Thomas Vetter. You can see more information of their work at here and here.

Pay attention to the last part of the video, when this technique is applied to real images, being able to reconstruct the head and finally being able to modify the original image. The results are much better that the classical 2D image warping techniques.

Another video about multi-touch screens

I have found another excellent video on multi-touch screens (thanks to Jordi Camarasa), where Jeff Han and Phil Davidson (see their website) demonstrate this technology is really very useful.

Enjoy it.

Tangible user interfaces and music

The Music Technology Group (Pompeu Fabra University of Barcelona) specializes in audio processing technologies and their music and multimedia applications.

Among several research projects, I have found a very interesting one: reactable (see http://mtg.upf.edu/reactable/)

reactable, as you can see in the following videos, is characterized by the use of a Tangible User Interface in the production of sounds and music.







Don't lose the opportunity to test this software. It's open source. You can get it here.

At reactable website, there's also a fantastic collection of similar projects, all with videos ready to be enjoyed. See them here.

Intelligent interfaces in CAD

Have you ever worked with a 3D CAD system ? It is really time consuming... In order to get some results, you need a lot of time.

New AI techniques can provide very interesting results to this problem. A solution can be the use of handwork or sketches as input in those systems. The problem is however, how can these sketches be transformed into technical and accurate geometry.

GIDeS++ is a good example. From the authors we can read the following:

With the advent of new interaction techniques and supporting hardware we should look beyond traditional WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, and Pointers) interfaces. Mouse and keyboard are by far the most widespread input devices and have been around for a good many years. However, before these, designers have been using pen and paper for an even longer period. GIDeS++ is a tool that adopts the paper-and-pencil metaphor to bridge the gap between designers’ and modellers’ innate ability at freehand drawing and the more elaborate and structured methods required by traditional CAD systems. GIDeS++ offers handwriting recognition for both gestures and measures, combined speech recognition as an alternative to floating toolbars and a set of innovative, simple and efficient tools that allow for quick prototyping and modification of three-dimensional shapes.

In the following video, a bit long but very interesting, you can see the product in action:



You can get more information of this system here. In this website, you can enjoy with more videos and even to download the product itself. Inevo is the company behind.

Motion capture as a 3D modeling tool

Recently, via Gizmodo (thanks to Ignacio Bellver for the link), we were able to see an amazing work from a sweedish group called FRONT.

The idea is quite simple and not new, but perfectly undertaken. Using 3D motion capture, it is possible to design 'in situ' a collection of new furnitures. After this process, real size models are generated (using stereolithography).

More information can be found at Dexigner web site here.

Finally the link to this impressive demonstration of the process:

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: