Wednesday, December 17, 2008

"He was like..."

While certainly not the technology focused topic I usually post, I definitely wasted a few minutes trying to sing the following chorus in the true spirit of procrastination. Try to sing along (if you can). If you are linguistically incapable, just reading along is amusing enough.

"he was like
she was all
he was all
they were like
we were all,

like oh my god
like totally

we were like
that was all
they were all
he was like
she was like

all totally
like oh my god"




If this was not educational enough for you, the following "anthropological introduction to YouTube" has a boring title, but is an incredibly fascinating and entertaining discussion of the cultural and social phenomena within the depths of YouTube... and relevant to the video above. Like totally. (warning: 1 hour talk, but definitely one of the better uses of 1 hour in my life).

Monday, December 15, 2008

Nice Pen-based Input Research

One of the things I enjoy to using this blog for is to share cool projects from Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research. This post highlights projects by Gonzalo Ramos (or "Gonzo" for short) and his co-authors. He has worked on several projects demonstrating how much better pen input software could be. These are just a few I like.

1. The Zlider - A pressure sensitive slider widget that adds additional navigation and control capability to standard slider interactions. Academic research video below. Quick demo montage at beginning, but the demo meat is at 3:07


2. Using a Pen to Effortlessly Bridge Displays. Using a stylus, you can simply drag documents between computer screens or mobile devices. The pen motion also implicity defines the orientation of the displays relative to one another. Academic video below. Demos at the beginning and more mobile screen scenarios at around 2:43


3. Rolling the Pen as Input Using an external tracker and a Wacom tablet, rotating the pen in your fingers can be used to control another parameter without moving the stylus. Academic video below, demo meat at 2:19


You can check more of his projects on his website.