![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jducoeurSignal-boosting for the most interesting video I've seen lately: Pranav Mistry exploring the potential of the SixthSense system.
TED is an increasingly-influential series of conferences about the cutting edge -- of tech and other things -- and often has cool ideas, but this one's exceptional, less for the technology actually shown and more for the ideas in it. The high concept is that there has been a lot of work done for bringing real-world objects into the digital realm, but not enough for going the other way. He shows some demos -- I suspect semi-rigged, but still provocative as all get out -- for how to build a cheap system that makes the digital and real worlds really interactive. The key idea is that, by combining a portable camera and projector, you can really start blurring the lines.
The tech itself is homebrew and a little hokey, but those with a sense of technology history will remember that most technological revolutions start that way. I think he's on to something here, and it'll be interesting to see where it evolves...
TED is an increasingly-influential series of conferences about the cutting edge -- of tech and other things -- and often has cool ideas, but this one's exceptional, less for the technology actually shown and more for the ideas in it. The high concept is that there has been a lot of work done for bringing real-world objects into the digital realm, but not enough for going the other way. He shows some demos -- I suspect semi-rigged, but still provocative as all get out -- for how to build a cheap system that makes the digital and real worlds really interactive. The key idea is that, by combining a portable camera and projector, you can really start blurring the lines.
The tech itself is homebrew and a little hokey, but those with a sense of technology history will remember that most technological revolutions start that way. I think he's on to something here, and it'll be interesting to see where it evolves...
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-17 08:23 pm (UTC)Some things about his presentation bother me though. Take his example, based on taking apart the mouse. He's correct about the notion that the ball and those rollers sense movement of the mouse. But he's entirely glossing over the fact that it doesn't somehow just magically produce pure information about where that mouse is. All that hardware really does is tell the thing it's attached to how much the mouse moved relative to it's last position, and in what direction. The real positioning intelligence is in the computer you connected it to, buried down in a device driver.
He seems to be throwing out the idea that since you have this inexpensive physical device that reports its position, that you can just borrow parts from it and have a cheap positioning device that will now do something different, while completely hand-waving the supporting technology that made it work in the first place. It sounds good to the average man on the street who's never delved deep into the guts of a computer, but it seems a bit disingenous to be completely glossing over the fact that you need supporting infrastructure behind this surface model.
It kind of reminds me of Do It Yourself, a filksong by Bill Sutton
http://www.bsutton.com/Bill/Filk/diyAnnotated.txt
(no subject)
Date: 2009-11-18 12:41 am (UTC)Admittedly, he hugely glosses over the camera-and-projector system as well: like I said, I think a lot of the demo is semi-rigged, in the sense of being highly optimized for very specific problems. But TED talks are limited to just a few minutes, and aren't *supposed* to be about the details -- they're all about the big idea. So I can't fault him for appropriately customizing to his audience...
This could change the game...
Date: 2009-11-20 12:01 pm (UTC)