Surface Trip to Ball State

Recently, a group of staff traveled to Ball State for a mini-conference on the Microsoft Surface to see what the various groups were up to. There were attendees from Ball State, Notre Dame, and Ohio State. Eric Morgan from the library recorded a video of the various aspects of the Surface.

Surface control of the home

A bit pricey at $10k but very cool immersive app that allows the surface to use a camera to then control all of the various gadgets in the room. Might be a fairly cool app to try to duplicate as part of the course.

The approach, Cristal, uses gestures to control the various devices and I am assuming, a fair amount of under the hood operation to get things going. It would be very cool if you could blend a limited range Bluetooth to automatically discover devices but the camera input is a bit more intuitive, i.e. I see what is in my room and then can manipulate it.

Hat tip to Gizmodo

Touchable Holography

From SIGGRAPH 2009, touchable holography using a combination of convex mirrors (for the holography), Wiimotes (for hand position detection), and point focused ultrasound (for the sensation of touch).

Video

That is wicked cool!

WPF Line Graph Control

Very cool line graph control that automatically scrolls operating strictly in WPF

Link

As part of our ramping up for using the Wiimote as a rehabilitation tool, I have been toying with the WiiFit board. Beyond the initial snafus getting Brian Peek's WiimoteLib to work with WPF, it has been relatively smooth sailing since then.

In particular, the weird threading model of WPF and the WiimoteLib was one of those undocumented / magic fixes that seem to crop up every once and a while. Fortunately, several of the example apps with WiimoteLib were fully built in WPF demonstrating how the dispatcher needed to be used to preserve thread safety.