Tag: hci

Tunnel Dreams

at night you dream of tunnels – because you are actually in control of tunneling equipment operating somewhere beneath the surface of the earth.

if you can directly link the brain of a paralyzed soldier to a computer mouse – and then to a drone aircraft, and then perhaps to an entire fleet of armed drones circling over enemy territory – then surely you could also hook that brain up to, say, lawnmowers, remote-controlled tunneling machines, lunar landing modules, strip-mining equipment, and even 3D printers.

6th Sense

Students at the MIT Media Lab have developed a wearable computing system that turns any surface into an interactive display screen. The wearer can summon virtual gadgets and internet data at will, then dispel them like smoke when they’re done.

We don’t have sense organs for data. Thanks to efforts such as Tim Berner-Lee’s all of this knowledge has become available online. Could we evolve a 6th sense that would give us access to meta-information that may help us make the right decisions? When you go to supermarket and you look at all the different kinds of toilet papers, you don’t pull out your cell phone to look for which brand is the most eco-friendly. Pattie is wearing web-camera, a battery-powered projection system with mirror. It lets you walk up to any surface (including your hand) and interact with the projected interface. It responds to his gestures. If you hold your hands like you are taking a photo, the camera takes a photo, and then when you go back to the office, you can project all your photos and sort through them using natural gestures. She showed a projection of a phone keypad on her palm and dialed a number to make a call. She shows a video of a guy looking at products in a supermarket. It projects a green, yellow, or red dot on a product, telling you whether or not it’s eco-friendly (or whatever criteria you set up). If you look at a book, it’ll project the Amazon rating on the book.

i ignored this when i read about the 6th sense bla bla, but it is genuinely interesting. could we overlay our perception of the world with a sense for data?

Bionic eyes

Want

Engineers at the UW have for the first time used manufacturing techniques at microscopic scales to combine a flexible, biologically safe contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights. “Looking through a completed lens, you would see what the display is generating superimposed on the world outside. This is a very small step toward that goal, but I think it’s extremely promising.”

2008-01-24: I am really impressed. I only learned about this last week myself. Either I am becoming mainstream or the Economist has a very good nose of what is going on 🙂

Contact lenses are good at correcting vision. That, however, is not enough for Babak Parviz. Dr Parviz wants to get them to provide information, too. His model is the “head-up” displays of useful information on the windscreens of aircraft. Putting such displays into lenses might be valuable for both soldiers and civilians, but shrinking the technology to the point where it could be done has proved hard. Dr Parviz revealed that he was getting close.

2008-03-13: Retinal implants

A bionic device the size of a pencil eraser – the labor of 20 years for a group of visionary Hub doctors and scientists – is offering hope that some forms of blindness could be alleviated within a few years. The Boston Retinal Implant Project is one of 22 programs around the world working to restore vision to the degenerative blind. Their work: a bio-electronic implant that delivers images to the brain via a connector the width of a human hair.

2015-05-28: That’s a quick surgery

The tiny Bionic Lens would be inserted into the eye during an 8-minute surgery where the patient’s sight would be corrected instantly

Future Bionic lens could also include projection systems that will give the user capabilities of projecting their phone screen, or integrating NASA technologies to allow for better focusing resolution than anything seen before, or even installing a system that allows for slow drug delivery inside the eye.

2021-11-07: Retina stimulation

Our research allows us to bypass the damaged light-sensitive cells and stimulate the pathways that lead to the brain with tiny bursts of electricity. We send electrical impulses to specific locations within the eye. A spot of light is perceived and patterns can be formed. If we are successful in our research, this pattern vision can give blind people sight again.

2023-05-06: Science Eye

In genetic diseases, such as retinitis pigmentosa or age-related macular degeneration, abnormalities in the layer of photoreceptors in the retina ultimately lead to their death. With the photoreceptors lost, light signals can no longer be translated to electrical signals, resulting in blindness. While the photoreceptors are lost in retinitis pigmentosa, the RGCs — and other cells in the retina — remain intact. The brain can still decode light signals. The idea behind the Science Eye is to modify these RGCs to become photoreceptive so they can be stimulated, by light, and send those signals to the brain.
Imagine a Science Eye implanted in a person with perfect vision. It might stimulate the brain in such a way that the person sees specific images or places, via fine control of the RGCs. You could see and interact with an entire world that isn’t there. It’s kind of like plugging in to a simulation, a virtual world plugged directly in to your eye. Alter the brain, alter reality.

Baby Driving

With a 6-month-old at the controls, researchers at the University of Delaware are encouraging underage driving. Conventional wisdom has held that because of safety issues, children aren’t considered ready for that until age 4 or 5; the earliest age doctors might recommend powered mobility is age 3.

Damn. I still don’t have a driver’s license. Should we increase the autonomy of babies by giving them scooters and HCI interfaces so they can tell us what they want? Or does that make them grow up too fast? Discuss.