Revolutionary technology to be presented at MIT conference next week

KINGSTON, ON – A groundbreaking technology developed at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada may make traditional board games a thing of the past.

The technology allows groups of friends or family members to play electronic games like they used to do board games: in a sociable and physical setting, placed together around a table. It also eases game controls by using affordances of regular cardboard pieces.

DisplayObjects, by Eric Akaoka, is an organic user interface for creating computer displays on arbitrary surfaces, such as pieces of model cardboard or blocks of styrofoam. It allows easy prototyping of hardware gadgets through software/hardware fusion. The system tracks the location of the model, as well as the finger, via markers tracked through computer vision, and renders a 3D software model of the object back onto the hardware model through projection.

Paper

Akaoka, E., Ginn, T. and R. Vertegaal. DisplayObjects: Prototyping Functional Physical Interfaces on 3D Styrofoam, Paper or Cardboard Models. In Proceedings of TEI 2010. Cambridge, MA: ACM Press, 2010.

Video Paper

Akaoka, E. and Vertegaal, R. 2009. DisplayObjects: functional prototyping on real objects. In Proceedings of the 27th international Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Boston, MA, USA, April 04 - 09, 2009). CHI EA '09. ACM, New York, NY, 3507-3508 Video (MOV)

Movie Polaroid Camera

Polaroid cameras gained popularity for their ability to create memories instantly. However, the emergence of new technology has threatened their existence. Recently, touch technology and flexible displays have been developed. Touch graphene is a particularly interesting new technology. Graphene is a flat sheet of carbon rings just one atom thick, which is being studied for a range of electronic applications. Touch graphene may be able to bring to fruition various scenarios that we can currently only imagine.

The 4th annual TEI conference on Tangible User Interfaces will be held in Cambridge, MA Jan 25-27. Human Media Lab students will be presenting two papers on Organic User Interface technologies at the conference.

January 19th ILC 213 9.00 AM - 10.00 AM.