I am currently working together with Jan on improving the Gummy tool (website still under construction). We have come a long way since Jan wrote the first version for his Master’s thesis. I figured it might be interesting to share a few screenshots of different phases in the development: Here’s the first version (June 2007): A version … Read more
Our hard work before the holidays has paid off We just heard that our full paper submission for AVI 2008 has been accepted. Jan Meskens, Jo Vermeulen, Kris Luyten and Karin Coninx. Gummy for Multi-Platform User Interface Designs: Shape me, Multiply me, Fix me, Use me. To appear in Proceedings of AVI ‘08, the working conference on Advanced visual interfaces, Napoli, Italy, May … Read more
Lode recently blogged about a seminar by Microsoft Research on how to give a great research talk, starring John Krumm, Patrick Baudisch, Rick Szeliski and Mary Czerwinski. Some other resources I recommend are “How to give a good research talk” by Simon Peyton Jones, and the Presentation Zen blog. These should already provide you with the basics for giving a good (research) talk. Here is what I … Read more
On Wednesday I went to one of our university’s anniversary lectures (celebrating its 35-year existence) by Professor Gerard ‘t Hooft. Professor ‘t Hooft is a theoretical physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics for “elucidating the quantum structure of electroweak interactions in physics”. The lecture was very entertaining and interesting. He started with the physics of very small, elementary particles … Read more
Lode pointed me to an interesting article on Wired about research done at the Fluid Interfaces group of MIT Media Lab. The article was based on the recent TED Talk by Prof. dr. Pattie Maes (who is a Belgian by the way :-)). In their prototype, the user carries a wearable projector that projects information on physical surfaces or objects. This is essentially augmented reality but without … Read more
At Ubicomp 2007, there was a book stand by Springer just outside the conference room. On the last day, the volunteer behind the stand told me that I could choose one of the books that were still lying there. I didn’t see anything interesting at first. Since a few people at our institute are working on multimodal systems, … Read more
I just read a (short) interview with Johnny Lee by Hacked Gadgets. I covered a few of Johnny’s Wii projects in my blog before (the finger tracking and interactive whiteboard hacks). His latest project uses the Wiimote to perform head tracking. Apparantely, even when Johnny is procrastinating, he is doing interesting work JL: I guess I just spend a lot of time on … Read more
During the holidays, I spent some time reading about creativity and the basic principles of scientific research. We (researchers) are supposed to come up with innovative ideas, but no one ever told us how to do that exactly. Great ideas are often said to be discovered by accident. People assume creativity is a talent, something … Read more
I experimented a bit with Jabberwacky today. Jabberwacky is a chatterbot that won the Loebner Prize in 2005 and 2006. It learns from the interactions it has with humans. This sometimes results in funny conversations. Here is an excerpt of the conversation I had with it: Me: Hey, don’t be rude, you are the robot, remember? Bot: You are not a … Read more
Via Hack a day: Johnny Lee’s back again with his Wiimote interactive whiteboard. Commercial versions of these things are expensive and heavy. His technique doesn’t even need a projector, just a computer, a Wiimote and a simple IR emitting pen. The pen is just a stylus with an infrared LED in the tip. Johnny Lee is back again … Read more