Hard hard user interfaces.

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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...
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Alternative hack for the Gesture Keyboard

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Long time for this post too! eh. mugging for the exams is quite a shakle to breakaway from :-P The reason I am writing this post amid the tests is being overwhelmed by Rahul Motiyar's new multitouch monitor mount hack. The thoughts from the B'lore trip and the above work culminated :-P

I happened to visit and take a look around HPL India B'lore. The way gesture keyboard solves the problem of indic languges was sure eye catcher. Its a tablet with a Stylus input interface using which a computer newbie can type in Hindi almost with zero learning curve. A big boon over the present Hindi keyboards, which work fast- but only for a very specially trained people.


 The HPLab's Gesture Keyboard



A generic Hindi keyboard


The way it works makes Devnagari entry a breeze. I happened to think about some extensions that could be done with this interface. "Why not make a simple computer screen work like a gesture keyboard with almost zero hardware mods"
The point is to learn from the Optical setups that the wonderful open source community is using today. A camera mounted over a infrared laser lit LCD can easily track the touch points- add to it, it can work a multitouch input panel too.

  • Mount a modified PS3 eye to track infrared over the monitor. Optionally, a wiimote can also be used(  tried Wiimote's IR tracking, works well for small IDs)

  • Write an GTK/WPM Module similar to Gesture Keyboard that would popup as soon as Hindi typing method is invoked




  • Align the Infrared Lasers right over the acrylic sheet such that a light plane parallel to the screen is generated.


  • The LLP mount when fitted over the LCD will track multiple IR points with almost zero force




  •  Gestures are parsed accordingly using a touch tracker( OpenCV, Touchlib) , and overlapping keyboard is calibrated.

Total Cost for the hack=Rs 500 for generic webcam+ Rs 1000 for two IR Laser modules.










Comments

  1. SrishtiTuesday, January 26, 2010 at 12:10:00 AM GMT+5:30

    This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. SrishtiTuesday, January 26, 2010 at 12:13:00 AM GMT+5:30

    This comment has been removed by the author.

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  3. SrishtiTuesday, January 26, 2010 at 1:04:00 AM GMT+5:30

    great keyboard design..it'll give a kinda relief from the burdensome unicode convertors!!definitely a gud news fr d Hindi Literature lovers.

    ReplyDelete

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