Random Accesses

A contact lens that harvests radio waves to power an LED is paving the way for a new kind of display. The lens is a prototype of a device that could display information beamed from a mobile device.
Realising that display size is increasingly a constraint in mobile devices, Babak Parviz at the University of Washington, in Seattle, hit on the idea of projecting images into the eye from a contact lens.

One of the limitations of current head-up displays is their limited field of view. A contact lens display can have a much wider field of view. "Our hope is to create images that effectively float in front of the user perhaps 50 cm to 1 m away," says Parviz.

His research involves embedding nanoscale and microscale electronic devices in substrates like paper or plastic. He also wears contact lenses. "It was a matter of putting the two together," he says.

Source: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18146-contact-lenses-to-get-builtin-virtual-graphics.html

In some households, fighting over the TV remote is a raging nightly battle. In mine it’s more of a cold war detente. Either way, by the end of next year Hitachi (NYSE: HIT) may take the conflict to a whole new level. Working with Canesta and GestureTek, the Japanese electronics giant has created a line of television sets that will be able to recognize a viewer’s hand gestures. Instead of a remote control, you can just wave your hand in the right way to change channels or volume. Check out the video after the break to see Hitachi’s demonstration at CES from earlier this year.

From tablet PCs to iPhones, designers are giving us new ways to interact with our electronic devices. The future of the human-computer interface is likely to be much more tactile and intuitive than our current dependence on keyboard, mouse or remote control. With gesture controlled television, Hitachi and its partners aren’t just removing the necessity of a remote, they’re blurring the lines between the real world and the digital one.

Source: http://singularityhub.com/2009/10/29/new-hitachi-tv-controlled-by-gestures-video/

Last week Apple released the Magic Mouse, a new computer mouse with a "multitouch" interface that responds to movement of fingertips across its surface in addition to conventional click-and-drag actions. Archrival Microsoft isn't ready to launch a competing product just yet, but the company does have plans for its own multitouch mice. Earlier this month, researchers presented five prototypes at the User Interface Software and Technology in Victoria, British Columbia, and their work won the symposium's best paper award.

With a multitouch mouse, a user can, for example, browse through a virtual stack of digital photos by flicking a finger across the mouse's surface, rotate an image by stroking the mouse, or zoom in on a picture by drawing an arrowhead with a fingertip.

Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/23805/?a=f

For more than 500 years the book has been a remarkably stable entity: a coherent string of connected words, printed on paper and bound between covers.

But in the age of the iPhone, Kindle and YouTube, the notion of the book is becoming increasingly elastic as publishers mash together text, video and Web features in a scramble to keep readers interested in an archaic form of entertainment.

Recently, for instance, Simon & Schuster, the publisher of Ernest Hemingway and Stephen King, is working with a multimedia partner to release four “vooks,” which intersperse videos throughout electronic text that can be read — and viewed — online or on an iPhone or iPod Touch.

And in early September Anthony E. Zuiker, creator of the television series “CSI,” released “Level 26: Dark Origins,” a novel — published on paper, as an e-book and in an audio version — in which readers are invited to log on to a Web site to watch brief videos that flesh out the plot.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/01/books/01book.html?_r=1

Do you ever wish you could just reach out and move the icons on your computer desktop around the same way you do with pieces of paper on your physical desk? BumpTop has created a software system to allow you to do just that. Their version of a computer desktop has icons that appear as objects with weight and shapes that can be manipulated, letting their interaction seem much more intuitive to users.

Today, BumpTop announced that it has taken the concept to the next level, and will provide multi-touch support for Windows 7 and MS touchscreen. CEO and Co-founder Anand Agarawala explains the original concept of BumpTop in a TED video.

So there’s really two products here, the current BumpTop system which you can upload onto your PC right now via their website, and a future touchscreen enhanced version that will likely be released to coincide with the adoption of Windows 7. Both versions are trying to make files on your desktop more like real world objects, like so many other experimental human-computer interfaces we’ve discussed.