Lecture 10-9 Post-Mortem

The thing about this class is that, I probably know about 70%-80% of the content because I'm in computer science. Friends and teachers will sometimes show these nifty videos or Slashdot will mention it or it'll somehow cascade to you because it is relevant to what you do. It's something that the geek community passes around, revels, and applauds over.

So I suppose the reason why I am in this class is to see if there is something new to be absorbed, some different angle that was noted that no one has seen before. From a programmer's point of view, you see things in technical terms. (But before computers, I was really an avid artist in high school) And sometimes I look at things from an aesthetic point of view and I know why it didn't end up being successful despite the advanced technology it touts.

Therefore, what I do find interesting are the little side thoughts I have have when I review a lot of the information again.

For example, the car data extraction mentioned in class today (I had seen this earlier in a cognitive science class I had taken a few quarters back). Back then, I shrugged and said, "I guess it's interesting for the car makers to know this information". But this time. I noticed the 360 camera in the video and I sort of had a side thought of an idea:

The biggest concern with cars and driving in general are collisions.

Collisions happen when you don't see something, or see it but its too late to correct your mistake. As long as you are aware of everything around you and you don't actively collide into it, you should be fine (unless someone else runs into you).

Therefore, there should be something to consistently monitor what is around your car at all times.

Now I know in Japan, it's law to have the 4 corner cameras on your car, but that still means you have to monitor the objects in your car cameras.

But the idea I had was that you could create a detection system that monitored the space around your car. There can be a feedback either on a monitor that showed a representational model of your vehicle and all objects surrounding it or some other device to keep you aware of all things surrounding your vehicle at all times.

Now the system's advantage would be that if you were to turn your car, you would turn on your signal lights and it could scan the objects in the direction that you intended to turn your car. It would give a light 'be cautious' beep to tell you there is someone in the other lane. And a louder beep if there is someone in the lane within collision distance. (In addition, the system is also good because if forces drivers to turn on their turn signals -which is a huge problem and is also the cause of a lot of collisions today). This is a very initial idea and would need a lot of fleshing out, but perhaps it would be a better system than just putting camera monitors on the car's dash that the driver might not necessarily always be able to look at if they have to keep their eyes on the road.

Another thing I was interested in was the minicam that one of the researchers used, was it real time live stream or a series of intermittent pictures strung together? And if it's the former, it is certainly small enough to aid in surgical procedures. Why not use the tiny cams instead of the giant tubes you have to stick down a patient's throat?

Fun Stuff

I checked out the Processing.org page and it looks like a lot of fun, so I might fiddle around with it, regardless of if I'll end up doing a final project for it.

Yay, the professor showed the Image resizing video, I show this one all the time to my friends, along with this video:

Microsoft Image technology

*note: seadragon looks a lot like dynograph

I find that Photosynth was the much more impressive part of the presentation

I also found a tangible music table video last year that I thought would apply to this class very well:

Reactable

How cool would it be to have a live interactive concert with these?

HCI people research

I saw that by next Sunday, we had to find a 'Person of the Week' for COGS120. Not too sure about all the specs. of the assignment, however, I figured the best way to start was to find notable HCI people and then pick one out of all of them:


Douglas Engelbart - came up with the 'mouse'
Paul Fitts - math models of rapid/aimed human movement
Alan Kay - OOP and GUI
Steve Mann - Wearable computer (I've seen a video of this somewhere)
Ivan Sutherland - sketchpad

(that's what I have so far -and it's mostly people that I think have a bigger influence in general) But I will continue to look for others...

I'm sure, more will be covered in lecture.

We are Monkeys

Don't you ever look at what the Japanese make and then feel as if you're a backwards monkey? I know I do.

Flexible OLED

Sony Revolution

Sugar Battery

Sony Interactive Room
(sorry, I don't know why the sound on this video is so bad, I've seen a better version of it somewhere else)

In addition, I also saw some really cool things in Japan when I visited there about 7 years ago:

1. They had already come out with (or were planning to come out with) taxis with cell phone docking gadgets that would pull your destination location from your cell phone (yes, Japan already had GPS built into a lot of phones in the year 2000). So, you didn't have to even tell the taxi driver, he would just look at his little gps monitor that he has and go to where ever your destination was located.

2. Vending machine cashiers - There were several semi-fast food places in Japan where you ordered your food via vending machine and when you finished the purchasing transaction, you would take the receipt to the back kitchen. I thought this was brilliantly convenient since there is generally less error in machines (compared to humans) and the restaurant only needed to maintain a machine, they didn't even need to pay a person to deal with the whole thing

educamp - new way to teach kids

I went to educamp on 9-15 and the general discussion was over the new way to teach students.
One of the points that was brought up was that the majority of people in the next generation will predominantly use computers. Therefore, it would make sense to train kids to interface more efficiently with the computer. There was much debate over whether things like basic arithmetic and the 5 set sentence structure could be taken care of by software and we would only teach the students to interface with them. However the point was brought up, why do we need to teach children to accommodate computers?

Unfortunately, the session ended early because we were only allocated an hour. But I think they will do this more often in the future.

http://educamp.pbwiki.com/

Testing

I decided to get a jump start and just make the blog required by Sunday for Cogs120.

I will post more after the 1st lecture, since instruction has not started yet.

Chris and Kenton really liked this class and I always get all excited over new human computing interface stuff I find, so I think I'll enjoy this class too.