Interfaces

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.

This Technology Review article reports researchers at Microsoft and Mitsubishi are developing a new touch-screen system, called LucidTouch, that lets people type text, click hyperlinks, and navigate maps from both the front and back of a portable device. From the article: "A semitransparent image of the fingers touching the back of the device is superimposed on the front so that users can see what they're touching.

This NewScientist Blogs article reports two Hungarian researchers have discovered that a gamer's button presses can be predicted 2 seconds before they make them, through measurements of skin conductance. From the article: "wo Hungarian researchers have come up with a cunning way to create the most frustrating computer game imaginable.

Laszlo Laufer and Bottyan Nemeth at the Budapest Univesrity of Technology and Economics have discovered that a gamer's button presses can be predicted 2 seconds before they make them, through measurements of skin conductance.

This trick might ultimately have some important applications, like speeding-up a person's reaction time. But it could also conceivably be used to make computer games that predict a player's actions and adapt in order to frustrate them.

This ZDNet's Emerging Technology Trends Blog article takes a look at the EyePoint system that uses both eye-tracking technology and keyboard hot keys to reduce our dependency on the mouse while surfing on Internet. From the article: "In a recent article, Computerworld reports that Stanford University computer scientists have developed a new way to interact with our computers. The EyePoint system uses both eye-tracking technology and keyboard hot keys to reduce our dependency on the mouse while surfing on Internet.