I still think this because who did they test this on? Who was asked about the choice? How was it decided? I go through often in my sessions that testing is essential to design, and I think as much as the product will have been tested, the name is also important.

It may not seem a huge deal but actually I hate saying it. So I don’t. That’s not good PR. Also because of all the childish jokes I am embarrassed to say it. I am referring to it as the Tablet or iNewton.

oh ya and searching for information on an iPad actually showed ads for Ann Summers.

Erm thanks for that Google, but not quite what I was looking for! I’m not sure how they could have gotten something so essential so wrong. *disappointed*

EAVB_OPWHPRWAMY

]]> http://www.informationasmaterial.com/wordpress/2010/02/ipad-shame-about-the-name/feed/ 0 http://www.informationasmaterial.com/wordpress/2010/02/chrome-youre-my-hero/ http://www.informationasmaterial.com/wordpress/2010/02/chrome-youre-my-hero/#comments Mon, 08 Feb 2010 09:06:55 +0000 Christine http://www.informationasmaterial.com/wordpress/?p=1847 Trying to refresh my theme on several browsers just wasn’t working, until Chrome came to the rescue.

…so I was trying to change my theme which is frustrating at the best of times. I read a tweet from Imjustcreative about a theme (NewYork NewYork Siiimple) he had made. I checked it out, and man it was sexy…  I had to change my theme. I was bored with my own site and this is what I needed to get it off the ground again.

I wanted to modify some of the way things were done in the layout and every time I changed something, as much as I reloaded Firefox and Safari, I still ended up having to wait until the browser decided it was happy to show me how it looked with my changes.

I reloaded, I used cmd + R a lot, and still it didn’t respond as a refresh. Even clearing the cache didn’t show my changes immediately. This meant that I spent far longer modifying then I wanted to.

This morning, I was waiting for changes to become visible and I remembered I had abandoned Chrome a little while back. Well I fired it up and thought at least I will be able to see the change on it… well what a fantastic surprise! It loaded, I made a change hit refresh – and it REFRESHED! Thank you chrome, I will do my testing on your browser in future! You’re my Hero.

(oh – on a side note, this theme is ace but every time I load the plugin for the top menu it breaks it… I have left it off for now but if anyone has any ideas I would be happy to listen.)

Last week one of my students, Heather (you can read some of her work there) presented to the group an interesting view on the technologies we are using for 3D. Not sure I should admit this but, it really opened my eyes. Gone were the days of pretending you could see 3D when really it was more effort than it was worth.

She brought in a 3D webcam which is available for under £30 (shown below). This records the images twice and applies the filters to it. It worked really well and I wonder if this might be a way that people might start using the internet. If both people had the 3D cams then it really would be a lot more like the person was actually there. Of course you will both be wearing the dorky glasses which a lot of folks maybe don’t want to do. Headsets have become accepted even if they do still look pretty funny.

Channel 4 did a week of 3D and it was a success, so why can’t we have a channel dedicated to this stuff, they gave out so many pairs of 3D glasses that we need a use for them.

When she was doing her presentation and we were on the webcam I was truly amazed, and with big films like Avatar making 3D happen I wonder how many other films will take the leap. Is this a good thing? Do we want more 3D or are we already past that and not really bothered about 3D technology anymore?

I can’t wait to see what happens in this field.

Hmm where did I put those glasses…

I love finding something really geeky, and when I saw this little beauty my eyes lit up! So many amazing little products out there and I just don’t have a big enough desk or bank account to own them all!

This is on x-treme geek and I really wish there was one supreme go to site for all things geek. I guess I’ll just have to wait.

Below is what was printed:

Can video games make you a better air traffic controller? How about a better surgeon? And, for the huge demographic bubble of baby boomers, can video games keep you cognitively sharp into old age?

Continuing our focus on brain fitness this week (see also Nap for Success), here’s another surprising research finding: video games make you smarter! And not just any video games like the sedate Tetris… it’s the action-packed shoot-em-ups like Unreal Tournament and Counter Strike that work best. Specifically, visual search skills were dramatically better in hard-core gamers compared to non-gamers:

In the experiment all of the participants in the Bavelier-Green study rest their heads on a chin rest and stare at a square in the center of a computer screen. Randomly a target… flashes at one of twenty four possible locations on the screen. Immediately the screen is flooded for about a second with a clutter of circles, squares, and lines. Finally, the screen goes blank and the participants are asked to remember where the target had originally appeared on the screen. Regular video-game players do this with about 80% accuracy, while nonplayes get it right only about 30% of the time. [From Think Smart: A Neuroscientist’s Prescription for Improving Your Brain’s Performance by Richard Restak (emphasis added).]

A second experiment showed that even non-gamers could do much better on the test after a mere month of game play. Clearly, if you are hiring air-traffic controllers, it would be good to know if they are serious gamers. And it’s not just that occupation…

Doctor, What’s Your High Score on Metal Gear?

Surgeons who play video games more than three hours per week commit 37 percent fewer errors in the operating room, are 27 percent faster at laparoscopic skills… and are 33 percent faster at suturing than surgeons who don’t play video games.

Boomer Bonus

Based on research on aging brains, Restak also suggests that playing action games may be better at preventing cognitive decline than “brain fitness” programs. It’s not that puzzles and brain teasers are ineffective, but rather that video games are infinitely more engaging and far more likely to keep the user playing over weeks or months. (Restak does caution that games featuring excessive and random violence like the Grand Theft Auto series might improve cognitive skills but also might have negative consequences as well.)

So, the news is good: spend some time with your Xbox 360, Playstation 3, or WII… you won’t have to feel guilty, because you’ll be stimulating your brain, improving your cognitive skills, and maybe even staving off the effects of Alzheimers.

About Pattie Maes

At the MIT Media Lab’s new Fluid Interfaces Group, Pattie Maes researches the tools we use to work with information and connect with one another. Full bio and more links

About Pranav Mistry

Pranav Mistry is the genius behind Sixth Sense, a wearable device that enables new interactions between the real world and the world of data. Full bio and more links

An interview with Pranav Mistry, the genius behind Sixth Sense

Pranav Mistry is the MIT grad student behind Sixth Sense, a tool that connects the physical world with the world of data. He and his advisor at the MIT Media Lab, Pattie Maes, unveiled Sixth Sense at TED2009, and the Sixth Sense demopremiered yesterday on TED.com — and in both places, it has fired people’s imaginations. The TED Blog spoke with Pranav this morning, to ask him some questions that have arisen on TED.com and at the TED office.

From the interview:

Why choose a projector versus goggles?
We actually thought a lot about this. At MIT, lots of research has been done with glasses — there’s even research going on to put information in your contact lenses. But this particular project has an important aspect: We want this thing to merge with the physical world in a real physical sense. You are touching that object and projecting info onto that object. The information will look like it is part of the object.

Read the full interview with Pranav Mistry, after the jump >>

Watch the Sixth Sense demo on TED.com >>

TED Blog’s interview with Pranav Mistry, 3/11/2009What was your role on the project?
I took this from the idea, the concept, and developed the software and the hardware. Pattie is my advisor. She helps me brainstorm, “What should we do next?” From the beginning, I started working on the concept of merging the physical world and the digital world, like with my earlier project, Quickies, merging physical sticky notes with digital data.
Why choose a projector versus goggles?
We actually thought a lot about this. At MIT, lots of research has been done with glasses — there’s even research going on to put information in your contact lenses. But this particular project has an important aspect: We want this thing to merge with the physical world in a real physical sense. You are touching that object and projecting info onto that object. The information will look like it is part of the object.

Also, a projector opens up interaction and sharing. Say you and I are walking down the street in New York, talking, and suddenly I get mail we both want to see. I can show it on a wall, and we can take a decision together right there. It’s opening information to share. At a coffeeshop, we can use the whole table as an interactive surface.
Where’s the battery?
The project itself contains a battery inside, with 3 hours of battery life. The other thing is, I’m making a small solar panel. I’m trying that out right now because I want to go with sustainable energy – and so you don’t always need to be charging. Whenever you’re outside, you’ll be charging, and with the system, you can be outside more.
How does the software know what you want the system to do next?
The software works on the basis of computer vision. There’s a small camera acting as your eye, your third eye, your digital eye, connecting you to the world of digital information. Processing is happening in your mobile phone, and basically works on computer vision algorithms that we developed ourselves, taking advantage of some open-source code but mainly writing code ourselves here at the lab. We had to write a lot of algorithms from scratch here because there was nothing that did what we wanted. We wrote 50,000 lines of code.

The software recognizes 3 kinds of gestures:
+ multitouch gestures, like the ones you see in Microsoft Surface or the iPhone — where you touch the screen and make the map move by pinching and dragging.
+ what I call freehand gestures, like when you take a picture [as in the photo above]. Or, you might have noticed in the demo, because of my culture, I do a namaste gesture to start the projection on the wall.
+ iconic gestures, drawing an icon in the air. Like, Whenever I draw a star, show me the weather. When I draw a magnifying glass, show me the map.

You might want to use other gestures that you use in everyday life. This system is very customizable. Because it’s my choice, I do it my way in the demo, but I don’t want the user to change their habits. I want the Sixth Sense to change for them.
Have you thought about using this device for gaming?
Definitely. We can do all the kinds of gaming that exists now, but not only that, we can use the physical world inside the game. You can play with physical stuff, invent some new games. Maybe you can hide something in the physical world — open a book and hide something in the pages.
We’ve been using “Minority Report” as shorthand to explain the device, or the heads-up screen in “Robocop.” But was this device influenced by science fiction
I’m not a very big fan of science fiction. I think that I’m a very big fan of living in the physical world. I’m good with digital technology, but I start to miss the physical world. I miss riding my bike, talking to friends. Technology now separates us from the physical world more and more. Even social networking sites are taking us away from the physical world.

At the lab, we like making things that we can touch, we can feel, we can take with us wherever we want to go, that we know how to interact with. The digital world has power because it has dynamic information, but it’s important that we stay human instead of being another machine sitting in front of a machine.

Whatever science fiction movies we watch now, we can make the technology real in two days. What we can do is not important. What we should do is more important.
What would you have said on the TED stage, if you and Pattie had had one more minute?
We have lots of applications. Any application now on your computer or mobile phone, you can use in Sixth Sense. In fact, I was going to come on the stage and do a live demo, but then we decided to use the demos I had filmed. We were worried about technical problems and the low light. But we have more to show.
The demo has gotten a lot of attention. What’s life been like since your demo at TED?
As soon as the talk finished, so many people rushed up to us. Before TED I was working, easy, three months straight in my lab. I was thinking after TED I would take a one-week break. But even today I haven’t taken that one-week break. We are getting, every day, 50 mails, “we should do this, we should do that.”

There’s some really interesting comments, not only from people interested in making computer interfaces, but people asking, “Why can’t we use this system for people who have accessibility problems, blind people, deaf people?” The camera can act as a third eye for the blind person, and tell them what it sees. It could be an ear for a deaf person. Ideas are also coming from developing countries — in part because of the low cost. It cost me $350 to build Sixth Sense in the lab, but the price will come down.