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Tangible Actions/Replaying Gestures
Once the novelty effect wears off for a direct multitouch interface, interaction can be very slow and inefficient compared to the high-gain mouse interactions most users are familiar with. We developed the concept of Tangible Actions based on the broad idea of making the user’s previous actions tangible and manipulable. Tangible Actions are continually-created interactive…
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Surface Monster Nom Nom Nom
Someone on the Microsoft Surface team was nice enough to send me a project they were working on. Enjoy! This was a whimsical project that received some notice at CHI 2009 as a novel way to extend the interface space of the tabletop into the space above it. What I really like about this “augmented…
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Research in Action 2009
Tommorow, Tuesday November 17th is my department’s Research in Action day. Think of it as a science-fair-like event, but without anu judging or prizes. Basically, its a chance for us computer science graduate students to show off what we have been working outside of regular conferences. The formal description of my project is: The consequences…
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Slampad
(with Julian Lepinski) A colleague and I submitted an entry to the UIST 2009 Student competition sponsored by Microsoft, which challenged entrants to come up with a use for a keyboard that could detect the pressure applied to each key. Here is the pitch from our entry: Mental distractions during text-entry tasks requiring intense concentration…
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People Suck at Computers.
Most people are afraid of computers. Even something as gloriously inviting as the Microsoft Surface, which I worked on during my internship at Microsoft Research, has people interacting with it cautiously. At least this is what I saw in my user studies. My participants were mostly professional adults (read: the people who actually make the…
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Diamond Touch Projects
While working on 3 courses last semester, I got a head-start on some research ideas. When I was starting out, I was simply interested in the idea of “Miming and Mimicry” as an inspiration. After many discussions, I’ve developed further ideas, but still with Miming and Mimicry as the seed. Here’s the most tangible of…
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Where I'm going, where I've been
Near the end of the first semester of my Master’s, my research topic was becoming clearer – along the lines of “teaching the use of gestural interfaces”. This was motivated by the proliferation of gestural interaction in devices of many form factors. Much of my thoughts on this were driven by my improv and theatre…
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Evolving Ambiguous Digits
The above image represents my final Machine Learning project, Evolving Ambiguous Digits. I have just finished writing it now. Yeah! First semester of Master’s finished! More details are to come (I will likely make a project page). But the above is the output of a neural network as represented by a Restricted Boltzmann Machine, when…
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How can computers use tacit knowledge?
I’m seven weeks into my Master’s, and the clouds are beginning to clear around my research topic. But first, an aside… In my improv class at Impatient Theatre on Saturday, there was a scene that was described as “incredibly complex”. We were playing with the idea of an “analogous scene” that explores and expands the…
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Teaching Origami by Overlaid Video
The motivation of this project was to teach novel gestural interaction to new users when static diagrams did not suffice. I recorded a video of myself making an origami boat. Then, I projected this video full-size back onto the same space. I brought in a few people to try to learn the process. The video…