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Notes from a talk about DiamondTouch

I went to another University of Colorado computer science colloquium last week, covering Selected HCI Research at MERL Technology Laboratory. I’ve blogged about some of the talks I’ve attended in the past.

This talk was largely about the DiamondTouch, but an overview of Mitsubishi Electronic Research Laboratories was also given. The DiamondTouch is essentially a tablet PC writ large–you interact through a touch screen. The biggest twist is that the touch screen can actually differentiate users, based on electrical impulses (you sit on special pads which, I believe, generate the needed electrical signatures). To see the DiamondTouch in action, check out this YouTube movie showing a user playing World Of Warcraft on a DiamondTouch. (For more on YouTube licensing, check out the latest Cringely column.)

What follows are my loosely edited notes from the talk by Kent Wittenburg and Kathy Ryall.

[notes]

First, from Kent Wittenburg, one of the directors of the lab:

MERL is a research lab. They don’t do pure research–each year they have a numeric goal of business impacts. Such impacts can be a standards contribution, a product, or a feature in a product. They are associated with Mitsubishi Electric (not the car company).

Five areas of focus:

  • Computer vision–2D/3D face detection, object tracking
  • Sensor and data–indoor networks, audio classification
  • Digital Communication–UWB, mesh networking, ZigBee
  • Digital Video–MPEG encoding, highlights detection, H.264. Interesting anecdote–realtime video processing is hard, but audio processing can be easier, so they used audio processing to find highlights (GOAL!!!!!!!!!!!!) in sporting videos. This technology is currently in a product distributed in Japan.
  • Off the Desktop technologies–touch, speech, multiple display calibration, font technologies (some included in Flash 8 ), spoken queries

The lab tends to have a range of time lines–37% long term, 47% medium and 16% short term. I think that “long term” is greater than 5 years, and “short term” is less than 2 years, but I’m not positive.

Next, from Kathy Ryall, who declared she was a software person, and was focusing on the DiamondTouch technology.

The DiamondTouch is multiple user, multi touch, and can distinguish users. You can touch with different fingers. The screen is debris tolerant–you can set things on it, or spill stuff on it and it continues to work. The DiamondTouch has legacy support, where hand gestures and pokes are interpreted as mouse clicks. The folks at MERL (and other places) are still working on interaction standards for the screen. The DiamondTouch has a richer interaction than the mouse, because you can use multi finger gestures and pen and finger (multi device) interaction. It’s a whole new user interface, especially when you consider that there are multiple users touching it at one time–it can be used as a shared communal space; you can pass documents around with hand gestures, etc.

It is a USB device that should just plug in and work. There are commercial developer kits available. These are available in C++, C, Java, Active X. There’s also a Flash library for creating rapid prototype applications. DiamondSpin is an open source java interface to some of the DiamondTouch capabilities. The folks at MERL are also involved right now in wrapping other APIs for the DiamondTouch.

There are two sizes of DiamondTouch–81 and 107 (I think those are the diagonal measurements). One of these tables costs around $10,000, so it seems limited to large companies and universities for a while. MERL is also working on DiamondSpace, which extends the DiamondTouch technology to walls, laptops, etc.

[end of notes]

It’s a fascinating technology–I’m not quite sure how I’d use it as a PC replacement, but I could see it (once the cost is more reasonable) but I could see it as a bulletin board replacement. Applications that might benefit from multiple user interaction and a larger screen (larger in size, but not in resolution, I believe), like drafting and gaming, would be natural for this technology too.

CU Colloquia Technology | moore |

How to receive craigslist searches via email

Updated 1/7/2008: Note that Squeet appears to be non functional at this time.  Craig2Mail.com still appears to work.  Please let me know (via the comments) if there are other sites that provide this valuable service.

craigslist is an online classified ad service, with everything from personals to real estate to bartering offered online. I’ve bought a table from Denver’s craigslist and I know a number of folks who have found roommates via craigslist.

If you have a need that isn’t available right now, you can subscribe to a search of section of craigslist. Suppose you’re looking for a used cruiser bike in Denver, you can search for cruisers and check out the current selection. If you don’t like what you see but don’t want to keep coming back, you can use the RSS feed link for the search, which is at the lower right corner. Put this link into your favorite RSS reader (this is a simple application that manages RSS feeds, which are essentially lists of links. I’d recommend Bloglines but there are many others out there) and you can be automatically apprised of any new cruisers which are posted.

(You find tons of stuff via RSS–stock quotes, job listings, paparazzi photos… The list is endless.)

If you don’t want to deal with yet another application, or you’re not always in your RSS reader (like me), you can set up an RSS to email gateway. That way, if your cruiser bike search is so urgent you don’t want to let a good deal get away, you receive notification of a new posting relatively quickly. If you want, you can even email it to your mobile phone.

The basic steps:

  1. Go to the Squeet signup page. Sign up for a free account. Don’t forget to verify it–they’ll send an email to the address you give them.
  2. Open up a new browser window and go to craigslist, choose the city/section you are interested in, and do a search. The example up above was ‘cruiser’, in the bike section of the Denver CL.
  3. Scroll down to the bottom of the search results and right click on the RSS link. Choose either ‘Copy Shortcut’ or ‘Copy Link Location’, depending on your browser.
  4. Switch back to the Squeet window, and click in the ‘FEED URL’ box. Paste in the link you just copied. Choose your notification time period–I’d recommend a frequency of ‘live’, since cruiser bikes in the Denver area tend to move pretty quick. Then click the subscribe button.

That’s it. Just wait for the emails to roll in and soon enough you’ll find the cruiser bike of your dreams. Just be aware that it’s not real time–I’ve seen lags from 30 minutes to 2 hours from post to email. Still, it’s a lot easier that clicking ‘Refresh’ on your browser all day and night.

Technology | moore |

Google offers geocoding

Google now offers geocoding services. Up to 50,000 addresses a day. I built a geocoding service from the Tiger/Line database in the past. Comparing its results with the Google geocoding results, and Google appears to be a bit better. I’ve been looking around the Google Maps API discussion group and the Google Maps API Blog and haven’t found any information on the data sources that the geocoding service uses or the various levels of precision available.

Technology | moore |

Google does spreadsheets

Check out spreadsheets.google.com. Limited time look at what javascript can do for a spreadsheet. I took a quick look and it seems to fit large chunks of what I use Excel or calc, the OpenOffice spreadsheet program, for. Just a quick tour of what I such spreadsheet programs for, and what Google spreadsheet supports:

  • cut and paste, of text and formulas
  • control arrow movement and selection
  • formatting of cells
  • merging of cells and alignment of text in cells
  • undo/redo that goes at least 20 deep
  • sum/count
  • can freeze rows
  • share and save the spreadsheet
  • export to csv and xls

On the other hand, no:

  • dragging of cells to increment them (first cell is 45, next is 46, 47…).
  • using the arrows to select what goes into a formula–you can type in the range or use the mouse

Pretty decent for a web based application. And it does have one killer feature–updates are immediatly propagated (I have never tried to do this with a modern version of Excel, so don’t know if that’s standard behaviour). Snappy enough to use, at least on my relatively modern computer. I looked at the js source and it’s 55k of crazy javascript (Update, 6/9: This link is broken.). Wowsa.

I’ve never used wikicalc but it looks more full featured that Google spreadsheets. On the other hand, Google spreadsheets has a working beta version…

This and the acquisition of writely make me wonder if some folks are correct when they doubt that Google will release a software productivity suite. (More here.) Other interesting comments from Paul Kedrosky.

I know more than one person that absolutely depend on gmail for business functionality, which spooks me. And in some ways, I agree with Paul, it appears that Google “…takes a nuclear winter approach wherein it ruins markets by freezing them and then cutting revenues to zero.”

Personally, if I don’t pay for something, I’m always leery of it being taken away. Of course, if I pay, the service can also go away, but at least I have some more leverage with the company–after all, if they take the service away, they lose money.

Technology | moore |

Bloglines and SQL

I moved from my own personal RSS reader (coded in perl by yours truly) to Bloglines about a year ago. The main reason is that Bloglines did everything my homegrown reader did and was free (in $ and in time to maintain it).

But with over 1 billion articles served as of Jan 2006, I always wondered why Bloglines didn’t do more collaborative filtering. They do have a ‘related feeds’ tab, but it doesn’t seem all that smart (though it does seem to get somewhat better as you have more subscribers). I guess there are a number of possible reasons:

  • It’s easier to find feeds that look like they’d be worth reading (I have 180 feeds that I attempt to keep track of)
  • blogrolls provide much of this kind of filtering at the user level
  • privacy concerns?
  • No demand from users

But this article, one of a series about data management in well known web applications, gives another possible answer: the infrastructure isn’t set up for easy querying. Sayeth Mark Fletcher of bloglines:

As evidenced by our design, traditional database systems were not appropriate (or at least the best fit) for large parts of our system. There’s no trace of SQL anywhere (by definition we never do an ad hoc query, so why take the performance hit of a SQL front-end?), we resort to using external (to the databases at least) caches, and a majority of our data is stored in flat files.

Incidentally, all of the articles in the ‘Database War Stories’ series are worth reading.

Technology | moore |

Using Grids?

Tim Bray gives a great write up of Grid Infrastructure projects. But he still doesn’t answer Stephen’s question: what is it good for?

I think the question is especially relevant for on demand ‘batch grids’, to use Tim’s terms. A ‘service grid’ has uses that jump to mind immediately; scaling web serving content is one of them. But on demand batch grids (I built an extremely primitive one in college) are good for complicated processes that take a long time. I don’t see a lot of that in my current work–but I’m sure my physics professor would be happy to partake.

Technology | moore |