October 13, 2007

Multitouch, holograms, & other next-gen I/O

• A team at USC has built a holographic “360° Light Field Display” using a spinning mirror, and the resulting video is pretty amazing.  Note: Do not attempt to make out with images depicted this way.  (I do wonder if you can sing “Iron Man” into it, as you would an oscillating fan.)
• Italian design firm V12 Design+Engineering has come up with an interesting proposal: the Canova dual-display touch-screen notebook computer.  Here are additional images, including a mockup of the device running Photoshop. [Via Rob Corell]
• The Ecko LCD bus shelter is designed to let passersby scribble graffiti via Bluetooth-enabled cell phones; here’s a slightly larger image.  I’m having trouble finding more on the topic, making me wonder whether it ever got out of the concept phase.
• Helsinki’s CityWall collaborative social space “is a large mutli-touch display installed in a central location in Helsinki which acts as a collaborative and playful interface,” enabling navigation of specially tags media from Flickr & YouTube. [Via]
• The crew at Minimaforms has brought SMS-driven laser writing on smoke to Bristol’s OFFLOAD festival. [Via]
• CNET has posted additional images & details on the Microsoft Surface touch-sensitive screen.
• My old colleague Noah Mittman offers a useful clarification regarding “haptic interfaces”: “For an interface to be haptic, touch must be its output”–not just the input.  He points out a crazy haptic glove shown this year at SIGGRAPH.  See also this CAD interface that simulates sculpting.
• For more info on how these things have evolved & where they might be going, see Robert Cravotta’s history of gesture interfaces. [Via]
  

Adobe puts 3D insect eyes on your camera

“Why,” I wondered for a long time, “is a wild-haired Eastern European guy walking around our floor carrying a medium-format camera & a hot glue gun?”  The answer, I discovered, is that Adobe research scientist Todor Georgiev* has been working on algorithms for use with a plenoptic camera & was motivated to build his own lenticular lens array.

So, what does any of that mean?  The goal is to let cameras capture a moment in time from multiple slightly different perspectives.  The resulting image (a series of smaller images, actually) might then enable the photographer to change the focal distance of the photo after the fact, or to use depth information to aid in selecting & editing objects.

News.com has more info & images, and I think the potential comes through best in Audioblog.fr’s video of Adobe VP Dave Story showing off the lens.  Gizmodo writes, “It’s a way-cool demo, but it might be a while before you see such a fancy lens on everyday cameras. But a focus brush in Photoshop? Whoa. Sign us up.” [Via Cari Gushiken]

*Okay, his hair seems to be less wild these days, but Todor still kicks out “light reading” like this (PDF). I think I left my copy at the beach.