Digital In, Analog Out

Hacking Felica

2009-06-21T01:04:00.001-07:00

Felica, Sony's most successful RFID chip technology, has been used in many countries in the world.

In Japan, most of the national railways, JR, and several subways in major cities adopted Felica a few years ago, and currently in operation.

The largest electric money system, known as Edy, also built with Felica technology.

Of course, Sony has released the Felica SDK for business, but there are some ways to read information inside a felica chip.

felicalib(Japanese only) handles directly the DLL of Felica Stack, and provides the data structure for each commercial product, like Suica, Edy, etc.

I tried this library and successfully read my riding history of Suica-like railway card.

Now we can take attendance in the lab meetings with Felica cards, haha.

Content-Preserving Warps for 3D Video Stabilization

2009-06-21T00:39:00.000-07:00

Anyone who tries to make a production-quality video with Adobe Premiere or similar softwares?

One of the most stressful situation you might have in editing videos is struggling against camera shaking to make it smooth. It is totally a dull work.

A latest research paper about video stabilization, published by the researchers of University of Wisconsin-Madison and Adobe Systems will successfully cope with the problem.

It does not only smooth camera shaking, but also smooth the camera path, like "dolly shot", made by the camera movement in parallel.

It seems to produce a fairly good result. I guess it would be slotted in the next version of After Effects, Adobe CS5.

Content-Preserving Warps for 3D Video Stabilization

http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~fliu/project/3dstab.htm

Project Natal & PS3 Motion Controller

2009-06-12T17:00:00.000-07:00

At the E3 Conference 2009 , Microsoft and Sony both revealed their state-of-the-art game controller prototypes. Project Natal and Motion Controller.

Project Natal, Microsoft's latest demo reel, looks very impressive.

It seems to recognize user gestures with a kind of simple laser range finder.

These type of recognition must be difficult.

Few papars proposed so far, as far as I remember.

It may takes years to become a commertial product.

Sony's controller, on the other hand, is more practical.

They adopted stable technologies, like marker-based motion capture system.

So, tracking speed and quality is pretty good and the most important is they announced the release date(the spring of 2010).

I wonder if we can use its controller from PC, like wiimote. I really hope that.

Microsoft Office Labs 2019 (Future Vision Montage)

2009-03-10T01:14:00.000-07:00

At the Wharton Business Technology Conference, Microsoft’s Business Division president Stephen Elop unveiled the latest production from Microsoft Office Labs called “2019″(website), depicting the next-generation of communication, collaboration and production technologies.

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-GB&playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:a517b260-bb6b-48b9-87ac-8e2743a28ec5&showPlaylist=true&from=shared" target="_new" title="Future Vision Montage">Video: Future Vision Montage</a>

Apparently, this video looks like interpolating their state-of-the-art technologies like Surface and famous blockbuster Sci-Fi films. Mostly impressive, but not new concepts.
Maybe that's why they called this work "2019".

I'm looking forward to having a look at these works for real.

on the fly - a tangible multitouch display

2009-02-22T09:19:00.000-08:00

Hisato Ogata, a product designer at Leading Edge Design Ltd., exhibited his latest work at minimum interface exhition, Japan.

In this work, a sheet of paper is introduced as a haptic IO device.
In general, there are not so many kinds of interaction techniques on a multitouch screen. (Everything people do on it is zooming and rotating images.)
However, introducing real objects to interaction like this expands the capability of tabletop device.

on the fly @ minimum interface from Hisato Ogata on Vimeo.

via as3.org - on the fly @ minimum interface (Japanese)

IDEO Global Chain Reaction

2009-02-22T08:12:00.000-08:00

Ingenius!
This is why IDEO is known as one of the most creative companies in the world.

Recently, they built some prototypes of Rube Goldberg Machine, but not just standard ones. They connected them with the Internet, and extended the chain reaction.
They did it, in part, by tring geekey things, such as clicking a mouse button with a toppling Tickle-Me Elmo, or .

Check out the film below.

IDEO Global Chain Reaction from IDEO Labs on Vimeo.

And I found some nice CMs using Rube Goldberg Machine.
One is from Honda Accord Campaign, and another from Guinness.

Honda Accord

Guinness

via IDEO lab - The Incredible IDEO Global Chain Reaction Experience

Magic Spheres

2009-02-22T07:53:00.000-08:00

If a wall of my room was a speeker, I could listen music more excitedly.
Magic Spheres, designed by Morteza Faghihi, an Iranian designer, is an artwork that plays as a wall speaker, and consists of a dozen of speakers and an illuminant wall. The light patterns displayed by the set go in sync with the rhythm and beats of the music being played.

Wearable Head-Up Displays (HUD) comming!

2009-02-13T09:01:00.000-08:00

Konica Minolta Opt, a high-tech precise lens vendor of Blu-ray devices, unvailed their challenging work, a holographic see-through eyeglasses-shaped display at CEATEC Japan 2008 (October 2008).
http://www.ceatec.com/2008/ja/webmagazine/detail.html?mag_vol=017&mag_type=

It consists of one see-through screen on the left, a microphone in front of the lens, a monaural earphone, and a WiFi communicator (802.11 a/b/g). For more detail, see this pdf (Japanese).

I hope they release its software development kit (SDK) and allow developers to make applications for this device.

And, Sony also announced an eyeglasses-like HUD at CES2009.(Sony CES site), and it is currently in development, and said to be put on market in 2010.

Sony's device has been developed as a "MP4" player prototype rather than a novel type of display device.
I think that is a challenge, but maybe this kind of exploratory works makes Sony, Sony.

g-speak - the Minority Report OS

2009-02-06T20:59:00.000-08:00

If you like Minority Report-like systems, it would be the favorite. Oblong Industries' g-speak, in the true sense of the term, realizes the gestural interface of the film.

One of Oblong Industries' founders studied post-GUI interface at MIT Media Lab and served as science advisor to Minority Report.

Here is a statement from their webpage.

The similarity is no coincidence: one of Oblong's founders served as science advisor to Minority Report and based the design of those scenes directly on his earlier work at MIT.

Other foundational components are less directly visible but as crucially transformative. The g-speak platform braids development arcs begun in the early 1990s at MIT's Media Laboratory, where Oblong's principals produced radical user interface advances, distributed and networked language designs, and media manipulation technologies.

Cool movie. Check it out!

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

Photo Tourism

2009-02-03T11:58:00.000-08:00

Currently I'm reading the Photo Tourism paper(Snavely et al., SIGGRAPH 2006) as a reading assignment of my class.
http://phototour.cs.washington.edu/

This paper introduces how to reconstruct 3D information from a collection of photographs which contain the same objects.

Key Algorithm

Detect SIFT features
Match these features between each pair of images (Approximate Nearest Neighbor and RANSAC)
Retrieve 3D information (incremental Structure from Motion)

It seems to produce fairly good results, but takes heavy computation cost.(2 weeks for 2,635 images)

Test

2009-02-03T05:05:00.001-08:00

Testing...