interfaces

Dr. Li-Wei Chan and researchers from National Taiwan University (NTU) have developed a lamp that enhances interactivity on a multitouch table display. The lamp has infrared cameras to see hidden markers to compute its position in three dimensions. The calculated position would control how it projects additional high-resolution information onto correct places on the multitouch table top. More information is available in a NewScientist article.

LookTel, a mobile app that provides the visually impaired the ability to recognize everyday objects like text, medication, and street signs, won first prize in the 2010 CTIA E-Tech Awards in Mobile Applications - Healthcare.

Related news:
NIH sponsors LookTel mobile object recognition application for the visually impaired

The European Union is providing 5.5 million euros in funding to a nine-university consortium to develop IMMERSENCE, an "immersive multi-modal interactive presence." The ETH Computer Vision Laboratory is developing a rapid 3D scanner system that will enable an object to be scanned at one location and virtually teleported to remote users. Users can then interact with the virtual objects via both vision and haptics (touch). See below for the CORDIS article:

Sixty people participated in a multiplayer augmented reality game in Cologne, Germany. The game allowed participants to interact with virtual versions of Cologne's landmarks from different historical periods, providing them with a new way to learn the city's history that is very different from the typical interpretive tour. Computer vision techniques for spatially localizing landmarks were key to enabling the experience.

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is awarding a $1.4 million grant to Stony Brook University to build the Reality Deck, an immersive giga-pixel virtual reality room. The room, expected to be constructed in the next year, will be 40'x30'x11', contain 308 LCD screens, be driven by an 85-node graphics computing cluster, and employ computer vision technology.

Pranav Mistry of MIT has developed a "Mouseless" mouse using an infrared (IR) laser and camera mounted on a laptop. The laser beam is spread into a plane just above the tabletop. The laser illuminates the user's fingertips on the table. An IR camera mounted at the top corner of the laptop screen captures the bright blobs corresponding to the user's fingertips. The pattern and location of the blobs are translated into mouse movements and left and right mouse clicks. The device costs $20 to build. More information is available at Pranav Mistry's web site.

EBay has acquired RedLaser, a popular barcode-scanning application for the iPhone, from Occipital for an undisclosed sum. The RedLaser app simplifies comparison shopping and product finding using a mobile device. EBay is one of the world's largest online marketplaces, and Occipital is a technology startup focused on human-computer interfaces using computer vision.

Submitted by Sek Chai

Researchers at Hasso Plattner Institute (Germany) have built a prototype user interface that interacts with a user's feet. The system, Multitoe, uses a high resolution camera to detect light changes on a pane of glass on which the user stands, in a technique called frustrated internal reflection (FTIR). The system was presented at a recent CHI 2010 conference in Atlanta. More information is available in a PC World article.

The exhibition booths at CVPR2010 were lively this year. There were camera product demonstrations (from Tandent Vision Science, Tyzx, and Point Grey Research), and publishers (Now and Springer). At the very end of the hallway, there was a booth from Aldebaran Robotics where they demonstrated their Nao humanoid robot. Meant for research, the robot incorporates a host of vision capabilites with two VGA cameras.

Submitted by Sek Chai

Researchers at MIT have developed a user interface system that detects gestures using a multicolored glove and a standard webcam. The glove has 20 uniquely shaped patches in 10 different colors, which allow the gesture recognition software to understand the front and back of the hand. The arrangement of the color patches are also chosen so that similarly-colored patches would "rarely collide with each other". More information is available in a press release.