May 22, 2009

Multimedia Business Cards, Face Tracker from LM3LABS

Multimedia augmented business cards offered by Lm3Labs. When a corporate logo on the business card is viewed by a customer's webcam, multimedia events are triggered:























"Catchyoo Face Tracker tracks faces of passing people for creating eye-catching interactivity with digital content. Faces become pointers which trigger events and follow people".

This window looks like it would be fun to play with!
LM3LABS English
LM3LABS JP

May 20, 2009

xXtraLab's Multi-touch Projects

xXtraLab is an interaction design firm located in Taiwan. The xxtralab team has been working on some interesting multi-touch projects. Take a look!






















Multi-touch wall for briefing and real-time info sharing
Multisensory iTea-table



"xXtraLab Design Co. is one of the leading multimedia company in Taiwan, focusing on the design & engineering of HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) interfaces in museum, exposition, and showrooms (client lists here). Members of xXtraLab come from diversifying fields such as visual design, digital media, architecture, interior design, information engineering, design computing, industrial design, and fine art. we respect different cultural views and work as a multi-disciplinary team to offer inclusive design services."

Kodu: A visual programming language made for children to create games, running on the Xbox, using a game controller for input.

"The core of the Kodu project is the programming user interface. The language is simple and entirely icon-based. Programs are composed of pages, which are broken down into rules, which are further divided into conditions and actions. Conditions are evaluated simultaneously.

The Kodu language is designed specifically for game development and provides specialized primitives derived from gaming scenarios. Programs are expressed in physical terms, using concepts like vision, hearing, and time to control character behavior. While not as general-purpose as classical programming languages, Kodu can express advanced game design concepts in a simple, direct, and intuitive manner." -Microsoft

Video from MSR Techfest (low quality, but provides an example of Kodu in action)

Interview about Kodu (link to video)

Kodu Blog

Article: New program allows everyone to program videogames (USA Today 1/7/09)

The Kodu Technology Club at Explorer Elementary School

Screenshots from the Kodu website:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/kodu/programming_ui.jpghttp://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/kodu/load_ui.jpg
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/kodu/sensor_wheel.jpg
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/kodu/kodu_turtle.jpghttp://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/kodu/kodu_sutekki.jpg

Update from the Microsoft Research UK's Innovation Day 2009 -SecondLight, Collaborative Slate, and More!

Demonstration of SecondLight, Microsoft's plans for the next-gen Surface:

More from the Microsoft Research UK website:

Family Archive (links to video)


Links to videos can be found on the Enabling Innovation Through Research2009 website

For your convenience, you can link to the videos from here:

Keynote

Andrew Herbert

Digital Lifestyle

HomeBook
HomeWatcher
Kitchen Postcard
SecondLight
TimeCard
Wayve
Family Archive

Converging Sciences

Doing Real Computer Mathematics
Modelling & Simulating Biochemical Systems

Education

NodeXL

Environment

Somniloquy
Understanding and
Simulating Forests


RELATED:
Microsoft Research Fast Facts

May 19, 2009

MeeTTable: Kevin O'Mahoney's Multi-Touch Meeting Table Project

Kevin O' Mahoney is a multimedia developer who is working on his Masters in Media Design at Cork University in Ireland. The MeeTTable, pictured above, supports collaboration among 2 or more people who are developing 3D design projects. (Kevin is a member of the NUI-Group.)

More information about Kevin's project, include a video, can be found on his blog.

May 16, 2009

IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia Dec. 14-16, San Diego, CA

The IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia will be held in San Diego, CA. December 14-16, 2009. A variety of workshops will be held in conjunction with this symposium - links are provided below.

The information below is from the ISM 2009 website:

The IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia (ISM2009) is an international forum for researchers to exchange information regarding advances in the state of the art and practice of multimedia computing, as well as to identify the emerging research topics and define the future of multimedia computing. The technical program of ISM2009 will consist of invited talks, paper presentations, and panel discussions.

Submissions of high quality papers describing mature results or on-going work are invited. Topics for submission include but are not limited to:

Multimedia systems, architecture, and applications
Multimedia networking and QoS
Peer-to-peer multimedia systems and streaming
Pervasive and interactive multimedia systems including mobile systems, pervasive gaming, and digital TV
Multimedia meta-modeling techniques and operating systems
Architecture specification languages
Software development using multimedia techniques
Multimedia signal processing including audio, video, image processing, and coding
Visualization
Virtual Reality
Multimedia file systems, databases, and retrieval
Multimedia collaboration
Rich media enabled E-commerce
Computational intelligence including neural networks, fuzzy logic, and genetic algorithms
Intelligent agents for multimedia content creation, distribution, and analysis
Internet telephony and hypermedia technologies and systems
Multimedia security including digital watermark and encryption
Mobile Multimedia Systems and Services
Multimodal Interaction, including Human Factors
Multimodal User Interfaces: Design, Engineering, Modality-Abstractions, etc.
Multimedia tools including authoring, analyzing, editing, and browsing


The conference will offer a variety of workshops:

The ISM2009 Workshop Call for Proposals can be found here.

Papers submitted to each workshop will be reviewed by the program committee and external reviewers of the workshop.

The following workshop proposals have now been accepted:

DSMSA
Data Semantics for Multimedia Systems and Applications

MTEL
Multimedia Technologies for e-Learning
http://www.math.tu-berlin.de/~knipping/ieee/ism09-mtel/

MIPR
The Fifth IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Information Processing and Retrieval
http://www.cis.fiu.edu/conferences/mipr09/

MASP
Multimedia Audio and Speech Processing: advancing the state-of-the-art
http://speechlab.ifsc.usp.br/ism2009/

CBTV
Content-based audio/video analysis for novel TV services
http://ism2009.eecs.uci.edu/cbtv09/

MS
Third International Workshop on the Many Faces of Multimedia Semantics

AdMIRe
International Workshop on Advances in Music Information Research
http://www.cp.jku.at/conferences/admire2009/

Any general questions regarding ISM2009 Workshops and workshop proposals should be directed to the ISM2009 Workshop Co-Chairs:

Shu-Ching Chen, Florida International University, USA
Chengcui Zhang, University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA
Atsuo Yoshitaka, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Japan
Ilja Radusch, Technische Universitaet Berlin, Germany

at: ismwork@eecs.uci.edu

Check the website for updates.