» Video

Multi-Touch Interaction Research

Skevos Mavros — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 22:40:42 +0000

When two friends on opposites sides of the country independently emailed me links on the same day to the same cool video clip, I knew it must be worth checking out. And it is – it’s a demonstration of “Multi-Touch Interaction Research – a touch-screen technology based on a “frustrated total internal reflection sensing technique” (no, I don’t know what that means either). But check out the video demo at either of these two links (same demo, just different pages).

Multi-Touch Interaction Research at their NYU home page (its downloadable there), or:

Streaming version at YouTube.

The future of computing? Maybe – It would breathe new life into the tablet PC market I bet. Especially if they can get the system to be able to determine which finger you are using at any time, so that commands/modes can be mapped to certain fingers. I can see this one day making the computer mouse look as cumbersome as punched paper cards.

UPDATE: But not everyone agrees that it is a useful technology – see the discussion on the demo here. Personally, as a Wacom tablet user/lover, the uses for this are quite obvious to me,and there will doubtless be less obvious uses and improvements over time (the computer mouse did not always have a scroll wheel).

Squeezing Out Hawaii Five-O

Skevos Mavros — Tue, 31 Jan 2006 08:51:41 +0000

If this is real, I for one think it’s extremely impressive. It’s the Hawaii Five-O Theme, played on the hands (manualism) via Google Video. He squeezes his hands to gether to make… um… farty sounds that form recognizable tunes. It looks like the most fun that can be had with your hands without sending you blind…

Online Parliament – Bandwidth Waste?

Skevos Mavros — Sun, 12 Aug 2001 01:32:26 +0000

I have a guilty secret. I like to watch and listen to Parliament. Especially question time. I tell people I like to watch it because my partner is a Ministerial Adviser, but the truth is I’ve been listening to Parliamentary debates and Question Time on the radio since my school days.

The only thing that used to bother me was that there would often be three things happening at once (two houses of Parliament and a Committee hearing), and we would only get to hear one of them.

But ever since I discovered the Parliamentary Live Webcast page, I’ve been a happy Dixer-Watcher. I can still only watch one room at a time, and the resolution through my modem is pretty bad, but I get to choose what I watch. Aaaahhh….

Unfortunately, all this video streaming is killing my bandwidth limits. Hey! Ministers! Talk faster!