Update to Thoughts on Interaction Modalities for Interactive Mirrors

So in my previous post i outlined why voice commands are an essential component for a robust viable interactive mirror. In this post i want to highlight the complexities of voice recognition specially within natural user interfaces.

Thoughts on Interaction Modalities for Interactive Mirrors

I’ve been contemplating for a while now on getting an interactive mirror for myself; till now i haven’t found the right one with the features and specifics i want. This has led me to potentially design an interactive mirror for myself that i hope to create this summer or when i have some free time. On that note; below are some interaction modalities that i considered and pros and cons associated to each.

Touch(multi-touch) – Touch is an important method of interaction as it allows for physical tactility of interactive objects. Furthermore users have become accustomed to interacting with digital object with touch.

However i see a couple of issues with touch interaction.

1.  Mirrors are notorious for getting finger prints and oils on them cleaning them regularly can potentially be a problem.
2. Touch interaction adds breaks to your morning routine you physically have to touch a button or open an app etc.

This is not to say touch interaction shouldn’t be present, it should and it’s a must for reasons i’ve outlined above. But what i mean is that touch interaction shouldn’t be the primarily interaction method.

Multi-Touch Technologies 1.01 Edition

Recently I’ve been getting a lot of requests to send a pdf version of Multi-Touch Technologies that I co-authored with members of Nuigroup and published in 2009. To that end I’ve re-uploaded the latest edition of the book to my Google drive and it can be downloaded from the link below.

This was the final edition of the book to be released.

ISBN: 978-0-578-03156-9

Multi-Touch Technologies 1.01 Edition

OptoSensor Thesis Documents

Since some of you guys have been asking questions about my optosensor project i’ve decided to upload my thesis documents which can be downloaded from below.

Thesis

Thesis Presentation

ikon

Released a new application called “ikon” on windows 8 and windows rt – its essentially like my original media app but for windows 8 in mind. It supports some new features that the original media app didn’t support, such as infinite canvas size, image selection and arrangements, Image Editing. You can download it from here. http://goo.gl/1rwXK

Scatterview Canvas

Fast Face Detection

A while back i was working on a interesting project for an Autonomous Realtime Image Analytics Engine a component of this engine was fast face detection and tracking using existing classifiers available in OpenCV but improving their performance to get the best result possible.

I was able to get a stable 50fps for face detection and tracking for up 10 faces.

1. Some optimizations that were made were to achieve this were
2. Threading  of the entire operation
3. skin segmentation
4. defining ROIs
5. and contour detection

Untitled from Taha Bintahir on Vimeo.

Enabling Flash in Windows 8 and Windows RT Metro Interface.

So recently i bought a Surface Tablet and realized that Flash was naively supported within IE , but there was a slight issue in that not every website that had flash content seemed to work. I later learned that this was due to Microsoft’s attempt to combat “BAD” flash websites. What Microsoft had done was essentially created a list which they called Compatibility View of safe websites which were allowed to render flash content within IE desktop and IE Metro; websites not within this list were deemed unsafe. Not that they are but just that they weren’t tested to be deemed “Safe”.

So, what to do now? I knew i wanted flash content within my browser but didn’t know how. While surfing the internet i came across many methods that to enable flash but none proved successful and then i stumbled across a small article by Adobe on how to test your flash enabled website for Microsoft’s compatibility view. The only catch was that it would only work on “ONE” domain at a time; this was okay initially but then i realized that as a avid media consumer i had to go and manually change and reset registry entries, work out the hosting providers and ip address in some cases; this was proving to be too taxing on time and energy.