The 6th sense

A friend of mine just point me to a very interesting article. It describes the technology to interact with both digital and real worlds in a fashion similiar to that in "Minority Report".

I think it is better to see the article and video. Check it here:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/pattie_maes_demos_the_sixth_sense.html

If it doesnt work try this one:

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/481

Don't let computers replace nature!

Reading some web articles, I found this one:

http://www.cellular-news.com/story/36824.php?source=rss

It speaks about the problem of using technology in such a way of completly forgeting about the real things. For e.g. the games which virtualize a dog or cat and where the users (usually the children) will play with this game instead of the real animal. A similar problem is caused by high-definition videos showing some of the great places in the earth (like Niagara Falls, or some mountains) which may convince people to just look at these videos instead of visiting the real nature. 

We've actually spoken about this problem in the last WMM '09 but the guy in the article (Peter Kahn, http://faculty.washington.edu/pkahn/) is actually doing some intensive research in the field. I highly appreciate what he's trying to defend.

CORESA & WMM 2009

Last week, 19-20 March 2009, we had organized the CORESA 2009 conference together with the Workshop on Multimedia Metadata 2009. See this website:

http://coresa2009.enseeiht.fr/

I've just realized how cool is to have your presentations posted anywhere. So here it is my presentation:

Mobile User Study at WMM '09

View more presentations from omar.choudary.

It was quite a fun experience. As an organizing and participating student I had a lot of activity. Firtst there were all the planning meetings and other tasks. Then of course the preparation of the presentation ... my presentation, as I was participating to the WMM also. I'll put the article on my website.  Also all the papers from the WMM (including mine) have been published here:

http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-441

During the conference I enjoyed all the nice talks from the WMM experts as well as presentations from other PhD students. One of the great things was the chance to meet one of the mobile guide gurus, professor Timo Ojala, which was a very cool guy. Also WMM experts as Ralf, Harald, Christian or Mathias are really nice people to meet.

From the CORESA side I can't say much as I've been participating almost entirely at the WMM but from what I've heard it was very cool too. One of our colleagues presented a paper at the end of the conference.

We had a gala dinner at the Bemberg Foundation. This is a very nice (and old) building where Mr. Bemberg, which from what I've heard was very rich, has exposed his art collection which was big enough to make you busy more than 2 hours. More information can be found here:

http://www.fondation-bemberg.fr/

At the end everyone was happy with the organization (especially with the excellent transportation that we've provided... :D) and level of the conference so I can say it was successful. 

New Intelligent GPS device from NAVIGON

The company Navigon has created a GPS-based car navigation device which is "smart". Why? Because it seems that it can record the user preferences (roads, visited places, etc...) and provide the best choices for the user. It also comes with many other interesting features, like real views of exists. Check an article here or their website. 

Dell mini - it comes with GPS

It seems that Dell is trying to make laptops closer to smartphones than viceversa. The new Dell Inspiron mini 9 provides anything you need from a notebook and it has also GPS so that you don't get lost. 

Check it here

Cool Devices - new screens

In this post I want to present two new pieces of hardware that will surely make a difference in the display market.

First of all there is the Sony Flexible Screen , check this article: http://www.engadget.com/2007/05/24/sonys-worlds-first-16-7-million-color-flexible-oled/
The sony screen can actually display 16 million color in a flexible screen that is as thin as a normal sheet.

The second amazing display has been developed by Polymer Vision and is called "Readius". It is an e-book reader which means that it can display the content of electronic books (files stored on a digital media, e.g. hard-disk, USB stick, etc...). What is the big advantage of this one? Its screen can be folded! Yes, and it fits in your pocket (check Youtube for Readius e-book reader).
It has a memory of 8GB, but you can connect USB devices and it also has mobile broadband connection (e.g. HSDPA). There is no cost known at this moment but it could be interesting to follow this one.

The "Readius" device is not a first display to read electronic books, but it is the first one to fold and fit in the pocket. The original device I think it might be the Amazon's Kindle. Check it on Amazon, it costs about 360$ but it is extremelly popular, as they don't have any device on stock.

Cool Devices - 2008 overview

I will start a series of posts regarding new and cool devices that I discover.

Let's start with what exists, regarding smartphones. First, there is the cool and fun Nokia N95 that we already have at the institute. There are a lot of cool applications for this phone and many of them are actually amazing. Check this site: http://www.nokia.com/betalabs to see a lot of cool ideas.

One of the hot devices of the last year was clearly the Google G1, created by HTC, Google and T-Mobile. It has a lot of features, it is the first smartphone running the Android OS, has an electronic compass so you don't get lost in the woods :) Btw.. if you want one you don't need to sign a contract with T-Mobile, you can buy it unlocked !?! (yes, unlocked) from the android market website (google for Android Market and you'll find it).

The big hero of 2008 of course, the iPhone. Only one phone has been able to get almost 10 % of the phone market, it's unbelliveble. Lots of applications for it on the apple store. I am still a fan of Nokia even if the iPhone is really cool :)

Now my favourite... the Nokia N97 . You must check this phone out. It is really amazing. I don't know exactly if it features a GPU like the N95 but it has a huge touchscreen, a full qwerty keyboard that slides out under the phone, all the nice features of a cool smartphone (5MP camera Carl Zeiss optics, GPS, accelerometer, 32GB of memory - OMG -). This smartphone will be available in the mid 2009.

Some other cool devices that have appeared in 2008 are the Blackberry Bold (they say it has an unique touch-screen) and the Samsung INNOV8 which features an 8MP camera (huge!).