Touchco, Ken Perlin & Ilya Rosenburg's Multitouch Company, Bought By Amazon

Here is the scoop:
Amazon buys touchscreen startup Touchco, merging with Kindle division
Ross Miller, Engadget, 2/3/2010

Amazon Said to Buy Touch Start-Up
Nick Bilton and Brad Stone, New York Times, 2/3/2010


Is Amazon Building a SuperKindle?
Nick Bilton, NYT, 2/3/2010
"Unlike traditional capacitive sensors, our patent-pending system can detect any object — not just a finger — and can determine how much pressure is being applied to every point on a sensor simultaneously. IFSR sensors are natively multitouch, use less power than capacitive sensors, and are much less expensive to produce, making them a highly disruptive technology with widespread market applications."

RELATED
Here is my Aug. 29 post:
Natural User Interface Surfaces:  TouchCo - IFSR Technology company, founded by NYU Media Research Lab's Ken Perlin and Ilya Rosenburg


TOUCHCO GUI:

Touchco GUI example from Nick Bilton on Vimeo.

A Touch of Ingenuity:  Inexpensive pressure-sensitive pad could make surfaces smarter
Kate Green, MIT Technology Review, Sept-Oct


Multitouch Screens Could Enliven New Devices
Nick Bilton, NYT, 12/20/09


TouchCo was an outgrowth of the UnMousePad research at NYU.


Photo from the UnMousePad website:



Photo from NYT:

Photo from NYT:

Photo from NYT:



Ken Perlin

Bluebell Jeans' Interactive Website: Toss the guy around your screen, zip his jacket up and down, and download the vid, pics, and music.

I came across the Bluebell Jeans' interactive website today after following a link for something else...

On the website, you can manipulate the model with your mouse (or finger on a touch-screen). You can go straight to the website and get started by unzipping the guy's jacket and spinning him about, or take a look at the video below. Better yet, do both!



You can download the video, pictures, and music from the Wrangler Blue Bell website!

The link to the Bluebell Jeans interactive website was found on Richard Leggett's On New Media blog post.  The post has a few great links and is worth reading: The World is Moving to HTML 5 and Other Flights of Fancy

Apps with Geographic Data Can Make You Healthy: Bill Davenhall's TED Talk

Bill Davenhall is the health and human services marketing head at ESRI, a geographic information systems (GIS) software development company. In this recent TED Talk, he shows how geographic applications and mobile devices can help provide patients and doctors with useful information for health care planning and informed decision-making by harnessing the power of existing data maps.

The presentation includes a variety of interesting map, representing a "place history", something that is central to the field of geographic medicine. The video is about 9 minutes long, but worth viewing, especially if you care about your health!



Thanks to RealVision for the link.

For more information about this topic, see the International Journal of Health Geographics website.

Interactive website links: Featuring Moodstream, Getty Images' site is great for whiteboards or touch-screen PC

I'm always on the look-out for high-quality interactive content on the web.  I can share this with the teachers I work with at one of my schools. This particular school now has an interactive whiteboard in every classroom, as a number of SMARTBoards, were recently installed.  Good interactive websites that are are great for interactive whiteboards are also great for use on touch-screen PCs and displays.

The interactive website I'm featuring today is called MoodStream.  I came across it a while ago, and thought it would provide creative way to provide a stressed-out student a productive way to "chill". Moodstream was created by the Barbarian Group for Getty Images in 2008.

Moving the sliders will change the music and pictures to match your choices.  As you listen to music, you'll see videos and picture montages from Getty Images. As you view the images, you can select your favorites, and they are ported into a "Moodboard", shown below, along with the corresponding music.  To save your creation, you have to register for the free service.  You can play back your board and create additional boards.

What I like about Moodstream is that it gives students the opportunity to identify their feelings, choose different feeling experiences, and create something related to their experiences.  They can later share their creations with others if they wish.   I think that this activity might work well with pairs or small groups of students as well.


Below are screenshots of Moodstream. The first shot is of the screen with the controls hidden from view. The second shot shows the slider control to the left, and the Moodboard chart where the selections are stored. The selections can also be viewed in a text format.

"Moodstream is a powerful brainstorming tool designed to help take you in inspiring, unexpected directions. Whether you want images, footage, or audio, or just need a stream of fresh ideas, tweak the Moodstream sliders to bring a whole new creative palette straight to you."

-Getty Images

OTHER INTERACTIVE WHITEBOARD RESOURCES


Here are a few:

How to Download and Insert a You Tube Video Into SMART Notebook

Interactive Whiteboard Games by PBS Kids

SMARTBoard Goodies Blog, by Mrs. Coggin (A wealth of great activities.)


Teachers Love SMARTBoards

Scholastic's Interactive Whiteboard Resources and Activities (Lots of information for integrating interactive whiteboard activities into lesson plans.)

SMART Board Bubble Wrap (You can save this to your computer and pop the bubble wrap without being connected to the web.)

Flexible Interfaces & Useful Wearables for All - Combining Good Concepts: Slap Bracelet, flexible ePaper, Morph, Asus Waveface, the Porcupine, Sixth Sense, and the iPhone/iPad. (How about an iCuff?!)

One of the projects I toyed with for a Ubiquitous Computing class three years ago was an application that would work nicely on a PDA that I could somehow strap to my wrist. I wanted to something that would allow me to keep my hands free and support some of my work functions as a school psychologist, such as observing and assessing students, counseling young people, and consulting with teachers and parents. The application would also be useful to my colleagues.


The second part of this application would support teens and young adults with more severe disabilities who participate in a community-based vocational training program. The application would provide a means of giving the students feedback during on-site work activities as well as in work adjustment simulation activities at school.


I abandoned the idea early on, due to frustrating BlueTooth issues and the lack of a suitable way to secure the PDA to various types of wrists.


It is 2010 and now we have the iPhone, iPad, touch-screen netbook/slates, e-readers, 3GS, consumer-ready RFID, low-cost portable GPS devices, and in some places, ubiquitous free Wi-Fi, low-cost digital cameras, and a range of devices that have the potential to play together in some way. Below are a few examples of how far things have come.   

EXAMPLES

True Wearable, by Propeller (This was a prototype introduced in 2007, I think.)

(Belkin Sports Armband for iPhone;  Trueband, by Grantwood Technology; MarewareSportShell)

RIDGELINE W200
The water-resistant Ridgeline has many of the features I'd like, such as the touch screen interface, a blacklit keypad, an adjustable strap, and range of I/Os. I kind of liked the wearable scanner and imager feature. The scanner/imager can be rotated.  If the imager also included a video camera, it would be a plus, since I use video quite a bit to develop video social stories for some of the students I work with who have autism spectrum disorders.  

The Ridgeline W200 is too ugly and clunky for me to consider wearing!   I'm sure price of the Ridgeline would be out of the question for public school employees and community mental health workers who work with young people with special needs.  


(Ridgeline W200 Wearable Touch-Screen Computer)

E-Paper Slap Bracelets: Like the 80's... Except Different -Gizmodo

"Everybody had them or at least seen ‘em. Slap bracelets were usually made of thin piece of aluminum wrapped in fabric. Using the same form, Chocolate Agency came up with a mini multimedia device that snaps on with a slap. The entire surface is E-Paper and possesses all its thin, high contrast, power efficient qualities. The length can be adjusted by adding magnetic snaps to the ends. Best part is there’s no recharging needed. It gets all the power it needs via kinetic energy so go ahead, go slap happy."  -Yanko Design

Video: e-Paper Slap Bracelet, Designed by Chocolate Agency

Nokia Morph (Concept)
The Nokia Morph is a concept project that integrates nanotechnology into mobile devices. I posted about the Morph last year:  Last Night I Dreamt About Haptic Touch-Screen Overlays




Asus Waveface Smartphone (Video from CES 2010)


The Porcupine
This morning I devoted about 45 minutes skimming over the Proceedings for the Fourth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction, TEI '10, held January 25-27 in Cambridge, MA.  A paper related to the Porcupine, a wearable sensing device, caught my eye:  


Coming to Grips with the Objects We Grasp: Detecting Interactions with Efficient Wrist-Worn Sensors (Eugin Berlin, Jun Liu, Kristof van Laerhoven, Bernt Schield, TEI 2010) 


From what I can tell, the features of the Porcupine, if embedded in a wearable iPhone-type device, would be extremely useful in a variety of fields, including special education, rehabilitation/habilitation, health care, mental health, vocational training for people with more complex disabilities, and so on.

Porcupine 

Porcupine Project Documents
(The code for Porcupine is available on Sourceforge.net.)

Sixth Sense

I posted about Sixth Sense earlier in 2009:

Pattie Maes TED Talk: Sixth Sense - Mobile Wearable Interface and Gesture Interaction (for the price of a cell phone?!)  Sixth sense allows you to use ANY surface for interaction, and can provide you relevant information about whatever is in front of you.   This would be a great feature for people with disabilities and in the future might also function as a cognitive prosthesis. 


Below is a TED Talk video of Pranav Mistry, the Ph.D student who invented Sixth Sense, discussing open-source Sixth Sense and related applications:

So now what?
After the iPad was unveiled, several people who blog about assistive technology and augmentative communication were curious to see if the new device had the potential for use with people who have disabilities.  

It does.

Here are a few links:

iPad for Our Rooms (Kate Ahern, Teaching Learners with Multiple Special Needs)

Accessibility and the iPad: First Impressions (Ricky Buchanan, ATMac)

From what I understand, the iPad will work with Proloquo2Go, an alternative/ augmentative communication program for Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch. Proloquo2Go is priced at a level much lower than other PDA-based systems, and can be purchased at the iTunes App Store. It can be downloaded for use on the iPad once the iPad is available to consumers. 


This is great news.


Now someone just needs to get on the convergence train and develop a flexible, mobile device that incorporates the best features of the devices and applications that currently exist!

iPad Alternatives, Anyone?

-Lenovo

Taking a break from report-writing, I had the urge to find out more about iPad alternatives. Many reviewers aren't happy that the iPad has fewer features than expected. So what are the alternatives?

Here is a video about Lenovo's hybrid tablet/laptop. It's a little fancier than the iPad, has more features, and most likely will be more expensive:

IdeaPad U1 Hybrid Notebook


The IdeaPad gives you a tablet and a PC/laptop, it is 3G and Wi-Fi enabled, and is basically two systems in one.  When the tablet is connected to the laptop base, it provides the full power of a PC. The touch screen is resistive touch, not capacitive touch, but apparently it acts as if it is a capacitive touch system, if the reviewers are correct.


The HP SLATE
Brief Intro


Interview


RELATED
Pixel Qi might function like an e-reader, but is rumored to be touch-enabled in future versions.

-Thomas Ricker, Engadget 12/7/09

Pixel Qi:  The LCD Screen That Could Finally Kill Paper for Good
-Lauren Anderson, Popular Science, 1/12/10


How Pixel QI works:

-Popular Science, Graham Murdoch


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Mary Lou Jepsen, Inventor of Pixel Qi Technology, Discusses Screen Technologies & Multi-touch Tablets