Archive for Motion
November 21, 2008 at 7:00 am ·
Filed under Games, Video, XBox 360, Technology, Motion, Development
Apparently, The Mill Podcast has a behind-the-scenes video online that lets you take a look in the 3D infrastructure the creators of the new XBox clip used to come up with their rather weird work of art. Like I said in the post about that commercial I don’t think this is the best work that has been put forward by the creatives that develop XBox360’s reputation and brand image, but I have to admit that this peek into the creation process is very cool. It’s nice to see how they ended up with the heavily rendered result you see online everywhere, and on TV in the US.
About The Mill: These podcasts offer an insight in to the making of some of the most challenging visual effects ads produced at the Mill. Visit www.the-mill.com to search through their archive of TV commercials to learn more.
Check out the clip
October 30, 2008 at 9:00 am ·
Filed under Technology, Mobile, Motion
The SideSight technology is a prototype contained in a paper that was presented at the User Interface Software and Technology conference that ran from October 19th to 22nd in Monterey, CA (USA). The title of the paper is “SideSight: Multi-”touch” Interaction Around Small Devices,” and is authored by Alex Butler, Shahram Izadi, and Steve Hodges, all with Microsoft Research Cambridge.
Shahram walked out with an award (together with the other guys of that team) for “Bringing Physics to the Surface”, another paper that was presented there. Microsoft SideSight removes “touch” from the device and makes it a function of the paper, tabletop, or even the air that’s next to the device. This opens up the possibility for “touch” functions to be built into tiny devices that don’t actually need a touchscreen.
“Despite the flexibility of touchscreens, using such an input mode carries a number of tradeoffs,” […] “For many mobile devices, e.g. wristwatches and music players, a touchscreen can be impractical because there simply isn’t enough screen real estate. With a continued trend for ever-smaller devices, this problem is being exacerbated. Even when a touch-screen is practical, interacting fingers will occlude parts of the display, covering up valuable screen pixels and making it harder to see the results of an interface action.”
With motion gestures like twisting one’s hands appropriately on either side of the phone, objects could be rotated in place. Pages could be panned and scrolled by moving a hand up and down, and Microsoft Research also proved that text could be entered and edited on the main screen through a stylus while the other hand scrolled the page — a movement that would be akin to the motions a user’s hands would make if he or she were writing on a sheet of paper.
The key is a row of tiny optical sensors that look “outside” the device. In a prototype Microsoft built for the paper, the researchers took a HTC Touch mobile phone, and augmented it with two linear arrays of discrete infrared (IR) proximity sensors, specifically ten Avago HSDL-9100-021 940nm IR proximity sensors spaced 10 millimeters apart. Although only the sides of the phone were enhanced, the entire periphery of a device could include these sensors, the researchers said. The sensors can read inputs up to 10 centimeters away, just through reflected infrared light.
“We were pleasantly surprised by the performance of the SideSight sensors in the typical office environments we tried given that we took no special precautions to reject ambient light” “We attribute this in part to the fact that the sensors are looking horizontally rather than vertically upwards towards overhead lighting.”
Individual fingers are sensed as a “blob” by the sensor array. One problem: users tend to drift one or more fingers into the area covered by the sensor field, the authors noted. Because they were unable to consistent determine which fingers were actively controlling the device and which were simply incidental, the research team decided to only look for a single finger, and use that to control the phone.
[via GearLog]
October 30, 2008 at 8:13 am ·
Filed under Video, Technology, WoW, Motion
Boy oh boy we’re on a roll! Microsoft Research delivered yet another pretty cool product preview based on the Surface technology: SecondLight. It looks and acts just like a Surface computer, with just that little extra thing- it can actually project a second image through the first image, which can land on a sheet of paper, a plastic sheet, or anything else semi-transparent that you want to use as a make shift secondary (or third, fourth, fifth) display. Those displays can also have their own multitouch capabilities in the air. Essentially, the two projections are independently displayed and your eyes capture just one image, but in fact the projection switches so fast your eyes can’t keep up with it. The second display can then show information about the first one, as you can see in some of the examples in the clip.
Larry Larsen:
This means a doctor can use a sheet of paper to dynamically ‘cut through’ a 3D MRI, or you could even scoop up windows on a surface computer and then interact with them on this lightweight display without altering the original Surface image.
They’ve just showed SecondLight at the MSR keynote but last night Larry Larsen from Channel 10 got a few minutes with Steve Hodges, Alex Butler, and Shahram Izbadi from the SecondLight team and they walked him through how it works.
October 28, 2008 at 11:35 pm ·
Filed under Technology, Motion, Windows7
The Windows Sensor and Location platform, which is new for Windows 7, enables your computer and applications to adapt to their current environment. With location sensors — including GPS devices, WWAN radios, and even triangulation technology — your applications and gadgets can know exactly where they are, enabling them to provide more locally relevant content and functionality. Ambient light sensors, for example, can allow your computer to automatically adjust your screen’s brightness based on the current lighting conditions. They can also enable applications to optimize their content for readability, making your computer more useful in a range of operating environments than ever before.
The platform provides a standard way to integrate sensor and location devices into Windows, as well as a standard programming interface for applications to take advantage of these devices. On Windows 7, the user has control over how data from these devices is exposed to applications. Hardware manufacturers can learn how to write sensor and location drivers by installing the Windows 7 WDK. Developers can learn how to write location-aware and sensor-enabled applications by installing the Windows 7 SDK.
Sensor and Location White Papers
Sensor and Location Labs
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