Blowfish12

Are you the kind of person who likes to give your colleagues (or any friends you may have left) a PowerPoint presentation at the drop of a hat? If so, you could be a prime customer for the Kinect-powered wearable projectorthat's being developed by Sven Kratz and colleagues at the University of Munich in Germany.

Called the Attjector - short for attention projector - their shoulder-mounted system is designed to project slides onto a wall at precisely the point your attention is focused. It does so using a microchip-based picoprojector to deliver a bright image of your bullet points, holiday snaps or pet pictures sent via Bluetooth from a PowerPoint style app on a phone.

But how does it know where to project the image? Enter Kinect, the contactless, gesture-based interaction system from Microsoft.

The projector is mounted on a movable motor-driven gimbal (see it being tested here) so that its projection direction can be steered to where you need it. A Kinect depth camera, mounted beside the projector seeks out the image of your hand and dominant fingers as you point out key facets in your presentation - and drives the gimbal motor to ensure the projection is always pointed to the area where your hand is gesturing.

Why do this? Kratz and colleagues say that holding a phone projector with one hand while pointing at a presentation with the other creates a wobbly mess - and that auto-tracking with Kinect sorts this out. It may have all the makings of a solution in search of a problem, but the Munich team are confident the idea has legs. Or shoulders. They'll now use a headset to monitor eye-gaze to further refine the Attjector's ability to focus on your attention point.

Presented at The First Workshop on Kinect in Pervasive Computing, held in Newcastle, UK, in mid-June, Attjector builds on ideas like Microsoft Research's astonishing LightSpace system, which allows users to "pick up" parts of a projected presentation as a dot of light in their palm - and place it magically elsewhere in a room.

Blowfish12@2012 blowfish12.tk Author: Sudharsun. P. R.

Company uses Kinect to create a touchscreen out of any surface (w/ Video) (phys.org)

NASA offers free Mars Rover Landing Kinect game for Xbox 360 (slashgear.com)

NASA's Next Mars Rover "Lands" on Xbox Kinect - Wired News (wired.com)

Ubi turns any wall into a touchscreen using Microsoft's Kinect (wired.co.uk)

Ubi Interactive working on Kinect-powered projectable touchscreens (theverge.com)

Startups Try to Help Microsoft's Kinect Grow Up Beyond Gaming - Bloomberg (go.bloomberg.com)

Samsung Galaxy Beam Projector Phone - You Know You Want One (futurelawyer.typepad.com)

Ubi turns any wall into a touchscreen using Microsoft's Kinect (arstechnica.com)

Superfast mirrors track a ping-pong ball in flight

Hundreds of broadcasters are set to cover the Olympic action starting next week, but even the most dedicated camera operators can't always keep up with sports that move at lightning speed. Now, researchers at Tokyo University in Japan have built a camerathat can perfectly track fast-moving objects like a ping-pong ball mid-flight.

Rather than moving the device itself, the camera's gaze is controlled by two mirrors attached to high-speed motors which can readjust in a fraction of a second, much faster than adjusting a bulky recording device. These rapidly moving mirrors combined with a filming speed of 1000 frames per second allow the camera to keep the ping-pong ball dead center.

Oku Ishikawa Lab Professor Masatoshi Ishikawa says: "I hope the technology will be applied to various fields in robotics, medical/bio operation, scientific observation, as well as judgment or analysis in sports at the Olympic Games."

The researchers say the camera could also record close-up views of flying birds or insects.

Blowfish12@2012 blowfish12.tk Author: Sudharsun. P. R.

Look at the Size of That Thing: Incredibly Detailed Death Star Made From a Ping-Pong Ball! (inhabitat.com)

That's No Moon...It's An Insanely Detailed Death Star Made Out of a Ping Pong Ball [Star Wars] (kotaku.com)

Death Star ping-pong ball isn't a moon (slashgear.com)

Camera can keep its eye on the ball (upi.com)

Workshops teach programming with offline, playful approach (wired.co.uk)

Denny Hamlin, already sore, is ping-pong ball in 15-car Daytona crash (aol.sportingnews.com)

Impressive Lil' Death Star Carved From Ping Pong Ball (geekologie.com)

Ping Pong Balls (needlesspounds.com)

Fact for the day: 17-07-2012

In February 2009. Twitter had a monthly growth (of users) of over 1300 % - several times more than Facebook.

The inspirationt for the brand name Yahoo! Came from a word made up by Jonathan Swift in his book Gulliver's Travels. A Yahoo was a person who was ugly and not human in appearance.

The first ever search engine was called "Archie" and was created way back in 1990 by a Canadian student Alan Emtage.

In 1999, new fiber was being installed at a rate of 2800 miles or 4500 kilometers per hour !

Tom Vendetta is the youngest Google employee ever hired. He was hired by Google when he was just 15 years old. Vendetta used to fool his friends by sending fake press releases and news. Vendetta was employed because he was young and would know how young hackers thought. His job was to help address security flaws in Gmail.

More than a billion transistors are manufactured.....every second!!!!!!!!

Heard of Mentaplex? It was an April fools joke that Google could read peoples minds and search the Internet for what they were thinking of.

Blowfish12@2012 blowfish12.tk Author: Sudharsun. P. R.