Touché Creates Smart Objects from Almost Anything

Image: Still from "Touché: Enhancing Touch Interaction on Humans, Screens, Liquids, and Everyday Objects" by and Courtesy of Disney Research.  

Imagine controlling your iPod or any other networked device simply by how you touch your forearm?  This is the future of interface.

Touché, a joint project being developed at Disney Research Pittsburgh in collaboration with researchers from the University of Tokyo and Carnegie Mellon University, "enables objects to know how they are being touched."  Using predefined gestures, a person can interact with objects like doorknobs and even liquid surfaces to perform unique actions.

The team has created a proof-of-concept video that demonstrates their revolutionary work.


Video: Touché: Enhancing Touch Interaction on Humans, Screens, Liquids, and Everyday Objects

Findings from the research team will be presented on May 7, 2012 at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, and they will be recognized with a prestigious Best Paper Award.

Here's the information about their research paper.

Touché: Enhancing Touch Interaction on Humans, Screens, Liquids, and Everyday Objects.

Sato, M., Poupyrev, I, and Harrison, C. Touché: Enhancing Touch Interaction on Humans, Screens, Liquids, and Everyday Objects. In Proceedings of CHI'12. 2012. ACM.
Paper [PDF, 10Mb]

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Sources

Carnegie Mellon University. (2012). Revolutionary Technology Enables Objects To Know How They Are Being Touched [Press Release]. Retrieved from http://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2012/may/may3_disneyresearch.html

Disney. (2012). Disney Research: Touché: Enhancing Touch Interaction on Humans, Screens, Liquids and Everyday Objects. Retrieved from http://www.disneyresearch.com/research/projects/hci_touche_drp.htm

Hatsune Miku, AI, and Personality Rights

Image: Hatsune Miku in Concert Courtesy of Everyday Me. 

Recently I've been pondering our ability to recreate the human experience--both in in the virtual and real world.  I was surprised to learn about Hatsune Miku.  Hatsune is a completely computer animated "singing synthesizer application" (Wikipedia, 2012).  2,000 people have been willing to fill a venue to be entertained by a proxy for an artist.  Of course, the music and animation were all created by artists & designers, but we are already at a point when computers are "quickly doing things that the programmers hadn’t planned for," including music, visual art, and language.

Video: Hasune Miku Concert Courtesy of knucklesmega

A few days ago, I came across Next Media Animation (NMA).  NMA is a computer animation studio and a unit of Next Media Limited, "the No. 1 source for print and online news in Taiwan and Hong Kong."  NMA reenacts news events where images or videos can not easily be obtained.  The video below is of Charlie Sheen's infamous escapades.  The animation does not exactly replicate the individuals, but what if it did?  What if in the future, these kind of reenactments are so lifelike that we cannot discern between reality and artifice.  This calls into question the ownership of our likeness (aka personality rights).  Can our likeness be owned?  Can it be owned after our death by an estate?  In the case of Steve Jobs, can a company own your image?

Video:  "Charlie Sheen raises hell at Plaza Hotel" by & Courtesy of NMA World Edition

My Old PalmV

Image: PalmV with Folding Keyboard

2004 seems so far away, and the PalmV that Jason Latta handed down to me with additional OmniSky hardware seems so quaint.

SiteCake

Video: SiteCake Trailer

Super easy to create a website with maps, video, text, and other content.  Users can drag, drop, and resize various components.  Try a live demo at http://sitecake.com/