Interfaces

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This Technologie Review article talks about an inexpensive pressure-sensitive pad that can sense multiple inputs at once. From the article: "Now that more and more smart phones and MP3 players have touch-screen interfaces, people have grown accustomed to interacting with gadgets using only taps and swipes of their fingers. But on the 11th floor of a downtown Manhattan building, New York University researchers Ilya Rosenberg and Ken Perlin are developing an interface that goes even further.

From this ScienceDaily article: "A system that can recognize human gestures could provide a new way for people with physical disabilities to interact with computers. A related system for the able bodied could also be used to make virtual worlds more realistic.

Manolya Kavakli of the Virtual and Interactive Simulations of Reality Research Group, at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, explains how standard input devices - keyboard and computer mouse, do not closely mimic natural hand motions such as drawing and sketching. Moreover, these devices have not been developed for ergonomic use nor for people with disabilities.

This Emerging Tech Roland Piquepaille article reports the University of Illinois at Chicago’s (UIC) Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) will develop the OmegaTable, a multi-sensory touch tabletop for interactive, visual data exploration in 2D and autostereoscopic 3D. From the article: "After the LambdaTable unveiled in 2007, the University of Illinois at Chicago’s (UIC) Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) will develop the OmegaTable, a new virtual reality display. It will be a modular, multi-sensory touch tabletop for interactive, visual data exploration in 2D and autostereoscopic 3D (3D without special glasses). EVL received a $450K grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop the device. The project will start in September 2008 for a 3-year duration.

This ScienceDaily article takes a look at a PhD thesis presented at the University of the Basque Country which puts forward the use of avatars or virtual Internet personages as an efficient form of non-verbal communication, principally focusing on emotional aspects. From the article: "Scientists have been working for decades so that the interaction between people and computers be more natural and intuitive. In fact, a great part of the success or failure of a computer application depends on the user interface. The way in which we communicate with the operating system, for example, has progressed a lot from the time when it was required to write complicated lines of commands on a black and white screen to those with much more intuitive windows.

This NewScientistTech article reports a device that relays a person's body movements to an array of electrodes on their tongue, developed at TIMC lab, could help people with balance problems recover their poise, or wheelchair users avoid pressure sores. From the article: "The wireless "tongue display" being used by French researchers is worn in the mouth like an orthodontic retainer. A matrix of 36 electrodes on the underside transmits electrical impulses to the tongue.

"The sensation is a kind of 'ticklish' feeling," says Yohan Payan, a researcher at the TIMC lab near Grenoble, France.

This New Scientist Technology Blog post reports Christian Moore have developed an open-source framework (so-called Lux) which brings full multitouch interaction to Apple's OSX operating system. From the article: "Here's a video that's been doing the rounds on the web recently. Lux is an open-source framework developed by Christian Moore that brings full multitouch interaction to Apple's OSX operating system.

This ICT Results article reports SIMILAR, a European task force focused on human-computer interaction (HCI), plans to make human-computer interaction ‘similar’ to the way humans do it. From the article: "Human-computer interaction has not improved enormously since Mark Twain’s time, when the typewriter was invented. A European research task force hopes to change that by making human-computer interaction, well, ‘similar’ to the way humans do it.

This NewScientist Technology Blog post takes a look at the relative keyboard project: a solution for entering text into mobile devices which could permits to type on any touch-sensitive surface and have it recognised correctly. From the post: "Do you ever get bored of looking at the same old keyboard? Fortunately two researchers at the Language Technologies Institute of Carnegie Mellon University have a new idea - making them invisible.

This NewScientistTech article reports a prototype software developed by UK researchers permits to use a camera-equipped cellphone to control a computer as if it was a three-dimensional mouse. From the article: "The software makes it possible to move and manipulate onscreen items simply by waving a handset around in front of a screen, a bit like the motion-sensitive Nintendo Wii controller.

"It feels like a much more natural way to interact and exchange data," says Nick Pears, of York University, UK, who made the system with colleagues from Newcastle University, also in the UK. "Most people who see it think it is really cool."

Pears says the current prototype, which can be used to control a desktop computer, is just the first step.