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Showing posts from September, 2009

Hard hard user interfaces.

Started as someone doing ActionScript in Macromedia Flash I got into Human-Computer-Interaction after watching Jeff's Hann's multi-touch work. That's the power of a really cool demo that inspired the birth of NUIGroup community which spawned 1000s of makers all around the world making their own projector camera multitouch systems. All of it became mainstream once Apple released the iPhone to the world, and also gave birth to my interest in human-centered engineering. I spent some 10 years after that playing with sensors, haptics, and gestural interfaces through multiple input modalities but nothing stuck as much as multi-touch did. Thanks to Apple's execution. Everyone's phone/tablet interaction is default multitouch. (unless you have a visual impairment). Primsense evolved into Kinect, then came Wiimote, Leap but nothing stuck.  for speech, it was Amazon's Alexa. Latest news , that its going to lose Amazon 10B.  Like I am writing this post through my keyboard a...

Intuitive Gesture Pad for Hindi typing

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I happened to stumble across a gesture pad devised by Shekhar Borgaonkar. Needless to say, its one of the most wonderful innovations as per inputting Devnagri(Hindi) script is concerned. Due to its complexity, the Hindi based keyboards used today aren't user friendly at all. A beginner cannot think of using the same for text entry. Interfacing the same to a touchscreen/stylus-input make it intuitive, and hence cut down the learning curve required to type hindi into Computers/cellphones. Exactly as Shekhar says "I think this will benefit India because many people will be able to interact with computers for the first time in their life. " The demo of the concept is downloadable here

Received the GSoC certificate

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Finally I got my GSoC certificate of completion- huge thanks to my mentor Pawel Solyga(solydzajs) and Google Open Source Programs Office. The Fedex shipping had twisted and crumpled and torn it a bit on the way to Googleplex to Delhi, a little trick called "lamination" helped it look as good as a new one ( atleast in the scanned image below). yay!