Microsoft vs Competition: 2-1

After showing off the surface some years ago (and the sphere a few months ago, see earlier post in this blog) competitors have reacted by several types of multi touch tables. Not sure but I think the way open source and other projects around multi touch showed up may have pushed Microsoft to bring the surface to the market after all or at least faster than they would have planned.

Surface, the next itteration is called SecondLight

But now there is a new great piece of work delivered by Microsoft Research in Cambridge - SecondLight. The new table projects an image through the table itself, so that any translucent material (such as tracing paper or perspex) held above the Surface screen displays a different image to what you see on the table's display.



This means you can have a satellite image of a town on the table, and have the street names projected on to a piece of paper that the user holds above the map. Or you could have a photo of a car, with the tracing paper displaying images of its innards as you pan the paper across the screen. Microsoft described the technology as a "magic lens".

How it works

SecondLight works by projecting two different images from beneath the table. The table surface itself is formed of a liquid crystal display that switches between frosted and transparent states when electrical voltage is passed through it.

By rapidly flicking the screen between the two states, the table appears as permanently diffuse, displaying an image like an ordinary Surface table.

The screen is, in fact, transparent for half the time. And during these periods then second image is beamed on to the paper, confusing the eye into believing it's seeing two images simultaneously.
Using an infrared camera, the secondary "display" can also be used as a multitouch surface. What's more, it can display video.

Microsoft gave no indication of when SecondLight will be ready for commercial release, but judging by the interest in the ordinary Surface tables, it shouldn't keep this one locked in the labs for long.

Thompson: Educational games will lose you money - a bit shortsighted

Although most press attention goe to windows 7 (and for a reason, I think it looks pretty cool, just hope they are able to deliver on all their promises) I just read an interview with Microsoft's Neil Thompson who has warned developers and publishers that trying to create games with specific educational value will just lose a company money. (complete interview can be found here).

Thompson said that although titles like Brain Training are both informative and fun, setting out to combine education and entertainment was a bad idea. "We're in the business of producing fun, not education," offered Thompson.

I think this is a bit shortsighted. It might not be profitable right now except for nintendo but I think games and simulation offers great benefits in learning and training. The current population of kids is gaming a lot and educational games would make complexe material more accesible to them (and probably not just to them). Also it gives more flexibility in the way the material is offered (just think about the graphical options).

This can not be matched with the books as used when I went to school. I personally think educational games can make learning more fun and help make complex matter more understandable than books can do.

think different, design different, get an extraordinary office building

I've been thinking why technological possibilities are never part of the architecture of office buildings and probably this is because architects have a brand and need to stick to this. This limits the possibilities when using an architect that is well known (I remember that for some buildings there are even contracts that the architect can come in and check if all the furniture used is still the original. if not she/he gets a compensation and you are not allowed to use the architecs name anymore)

When looking at all technical possibilities and how this possibly can be used in a building it would be cool if you can bring in some creative minds who are pretty smart in thinking and designing and let them sit together and design the office breaking traditional rules and without the limitations the big names (and thus brands) in architecture have.

When you look for example at the website of intactlab (www.intactlab.nl) and imagine all tables in meeting rooms and the community area are multitouch (and linked to each other) with some cool new ways of using them

And what about bringing in people like Felix Schmidberger (http://www.coroflot.com/public/individual_file.asp?sort_by=1&portfolio_id=532845&individual_id=156757) who thinks about technology and the looks

And for the general design of furniture I personally like Frank Weil (http://www.frankweil.com/) who designs modern furniture in high quality which perfectly fits with an office like this to ensure there will be a balance between technology and design.

Obviously there are many more design artists and creative technologists who can play a key role here but I think the point is clear. We still build traditional offices and then fill them with technology. It would just be great to start incorporating technology in the design phase already and give it a key role (especially in the communication era we are in now). So start with a concept on how you like to work, fill this in with technology available to facilitate this working style and then build the office around it in such a way technology is creatively used in innovative design for the building including the furniture

Maybe there are some great examples already. If so please mail me some info on this or put it in the comments on the post. Really looking forward to this

Microsoft's SideSight: Something Apple Should Watch

Just ran into this and I think this is such a cool development I couldn't help to shameless copy the article from gearlog (just click to read it again at the gearlog blog, but also to read many more cool blog posts)

A new Microsoft-developed technology called SideSight looks like something that deserves to be on a next-generation iPod touch. Or in a magician's repertoire.



The SideSight technology is contained in yet another paper that company executives are presenting at the User Interface Software and Technology conference this week. (See Microsoft's take on new ways that cell phones could "talk" as well as guided tours of images.), The paper in question is titled "SideSight: Multi-"touch" Interaction Around Small Devices," and is authored by Alex Butler, Shahram Izadi, and Steve Hodges, all with Microsoft Research UK.
Touch was a revolutionary concept when it debuted with the iPhone, in part because it was implemented so well with gestures. Pinching, sliding and tapping the iPhone and iPod touch all directly impact the interface.



SideSight removes "touch" from the device and makes it a function of the paper, tabletop, or even the air that's next to the device. What does this mean? According to Microsoft, it opens up the possibility for "touch" functions to be built into tiny devices that don't actually need a touchscreen.



"Despite the flexibility of touchscreens, using such an input mode carries a number of tradeoffs," the paper's authors wrote. "For many mobile devices, e.g. wristwatches and music players, a touchscreen can be impractical because there simply isn't enough screen real estate. With a continued trend for ever-smaller devices, this problem is being exacerbated. Even when a touch-screen is practical, interacting fingers will occlude parts of the display, covering up valuable screen pixels and making it harder to see the results of an interface action."
So what can you actually do with SideSight? Quite a bit, as it turns out. By twisting one's hands appropriately on either side of the phone, objects could be rotated in place. Pages could be panned and scrolled by moving a hand up and down, and Microsoft also proved that text could be entered and edited on the main screen through a stylus while the other hand scrolled the page -- a movement that would be akin to the motions a user's hands would make if he or she were writing on a sheet of paper.



A quick motion toward the device could also be interpreted as a "click," according to Microsoft.
The key is a row of tiny optical sensors that look "outside" the device. In a prototype Microsoft built for the paper, the researchers took a HTC Touch mobile phone, and augmented it with two linear arrays of discrete infrared (IR) proximity sensors, specifically ten Avago HSDL-9100-021 940nm IR proximity sensors spaced 10 millimeters apart. Although only the sides of the phone were enhanced, the entire periphery of a device could include these sensors, the researchers said. The sensors can read inputs up to 10 centimeters away, just through reflected infrared light.

"We were pleasantly surprised by the performance of the SideSight sensors in the typical office environments we tried given that we took no special precautions to reject ambient light," the paper's authors wrote. "We attribute this in part to the fact that the sensors are looking horizontally rather than vertically upwards towards overhead lighting."
Individual fingers are sensed as a "blob" by the sensor array. One problem: users tend to drift one or more fingers into the area covered by the sensor field, the authors noted. Because they were unable to consistent determine which fingers were actively controlling the device and which were simply incidental, Microsoft decided to only look for a single finger, and use that to control the phone.



(The authors noted as well that the sensors weren't directly connected to the phone. Instead, they were connected via USB to a PC, and then to the phone via Bluetooth. The convoluted interface reduced the effective sensing capability to 11 frames per second, a limitation of the test rig and not the circuits.)



What does the future of SideSight look like? Improved power consumption, improved sensor range, and an enhanced prototype: "In the future we believe that it may be possible to print or-ganic electronic versions of such sensors, and so we are also interested in exploring a SideSight configuration that has the entire casing covered in this type of proximity sensing material," the Microsoft Research employees wrote.

the new Lego

Ok, the Danish have invented the lego as we all know and played with however the Finnish invented the next cool set of building blocks. The people at http://www.multitouch.fi did an amazing job. Don't know yet what is cost (probably even don't want to however MII can use this in the concepts we design so I might drop them a mail to ask about the pricing)



These building blocks can be stacked in any way so think multitouch walls, floors and furniture (maybe not at the same time since that might be a bit overkill). Just look at this

And before you start thinking this is just an artist impression of something that only exists on the drawing board just look further to

There is also a nice youtube video on the web showing a bit more of the possibilities. Some kind of 3D and multitouch stackable like lego. This is toys for boys:)

touch interfaces available now

I was looking at the new HP Touchsmart computer since I really like the interface. It's a complete touch enabled interface (hope the next version will be multitouch so you can do even cooler stuff with it). This computer would be a great communication device to communicate with the family in house or use it in any place where a wall mounted touch computer would be a benefit. For a nice demo of the interface look at this youtube video

Looking at the HP touchsmart triggered me to look at different ways of searching information on the internet. I looked at a way that would fit into the touch interface of the HP touchsmart and this search brought me to http://corp.viewzi.com/ as a nice way to search info. You still use your favorit browser however the search is done in a different way (but still using google and yahoo). It presents information in different views depending on your needs. There is a great way to search for pictures (using Flickr) or have your information stored on a timeline (based upon google timeline) to make it visible in time





You can easily switch view by just slecting a different view from the ribbon on top


It makes the search a bit slower but that's worth the convenience and nice way to crawl through it. Obviously the still is room for improvement but I'm sure the will do improve over time and combined with a touch computer like the surface (as I talked about in an earlier blog) of the new HP Touchsmart it's a powerfull utility

It took some time but it's great to see how (multi)touch will become a serious way of interacting next to the good ols mouse and keyboard and it give great new opportunities to handling information and in the era of information overflow this is a great thing

ITIL beyond IT

It's great to see most companies manage their IT infrastructure in a well structured way using a methodology like ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library). According to the ITIL website ITIL® is the most widely accepted approach to IT service management in the world. ITIL provides a cohesive set of best practice, drawn from the public and private sectors internationally.

When looking at ITIL it will bring you some great benefits

• reduced costs
• improved IT services through the use of proven best practice processes
• improved customer satisfaction through a more professional approach to service delivery
  standards and guidance
• improved productivity
• improved use of skills and experience
• improved delivery of third party services through the specification of ITIL or ISO 20000 as the standard for service delivery in services procurements.

In order to be able to use ITIL and get the full set of benefits there are a lot of great tools available on the market helping you in managing these processes.

When looking at the structure of the processes and the tools available it would make sense to use ITIL outside the IT as well. There are some examples of this but one of the most common is missing here. It is a great way to manage your Audio/Visual infrastructure.

Although most AV infrastructures are not that mature yet (although this will change rapidly in the near future since the AV equipment makes this more and more easy to do) it would still be wise to use ITIL to manage your AV infrastructure. This would help any team managing an enterprise AV infrastructure to manage this more pro-actively, improve availability, manage costs in a better way and supports the process of thinking in a strategic way about the future of your AV infrastructure.

ITIL can facilitate the process of getting more mature without huge investments since most enterprises already have the tools in place to manage the IT infrastructure (let's be honest, there is not a big difference between and IT and AV incident, nor much difference in managing IT or AV configuration items and both should have a Service Level Agreement with their internal customers on the support and services they can expect). When using these tools you automatically create an integrated approach to managing your IT and AV infrastructure.

The big challenge here however might be that in general IT and AV report into different groups in an enterprise (IT versus Facilities). If we can get passed this barrier we see many opportunities to save costs and at the same time improve quality of the infrastructure and services.

location based services part 2

Last weekend I was in Berlin for the in-line marathon (1:37:44) and everybody (except for the elite since they only have a gross time and not a net time) was wearing these RFID based yellow pods as runners do. This made time tracking much easier but has a big disadvantage. You need to cross a physical line for measuring. The systems measures your starttime, halftime and finish time. I basically works great to tell you your ranking and time but it misses some great info like your speed at any point, where you accelerated etc.

When these devices were developed it made perfect sense since a GPS device was still bulky. Also the accuracy compared to GPS is much better. However when looking at the current state of technology it would be great to combine the RFID based solution as we have right now with a gps sensor and a sim card (any local prepaid simcard would do). Then you have the power of an accurate time keeping with the advantage of on line track/race info.

This would be a great help in analyzing your race start to finish since this dataset is a great overlay on eg google maps to compare road conditions with speed. Also info on altitude variances would be made visible

At the same time you give the people at home a nice way to interactively follow your race, get online stats etc and the race director and press a great tool for visualizing the race in a different way for those who watch the race

When looking at GPS module currently available ( eg. http://edageek.com/2008/09/16/ublox-amy-gps/) it should be possible to integrate this with some electronic circuits and a sim card in the same yellow RFID chip already used in races. Power can be taken from a small rechargeable battery combined maybe even with solar cells

The system would be the same as now with the RFID based devices. You either buy one and can use the same in any race or you rent one (with a deposit for the same amount of money to buy one). If you buy one the RFID part might only be useful in a race but the gps part would be be well usable in a training (you still can upload your data to a computer and analyse it) when using your private sim card. The databases can vary with the sim you use. So a private sim for training and a race sim (prepaid and local provided by the race organization) during the race

The same then can be done with tracking any large amount of people in an open space like an open air festival. The only challenge would be buildings (depending on the construction material and power of the GPS unit)