Apparantely, even when Johnny is procrastinating, he is doing interesting work
JL: I guess I just spend a lot of time on my hobbies that I really enjoy doing and it turns out that my hobbies end up being productive. Even the Wii remote work started as a way to procrastinate working on my thesis.
During the holidays, I spent some time reading about creativity and the basic principles of scientific research.
We (researchers) are supposed to come up with innovative ideas, but no one ever told us how to do that exactly. Great ideas are often said to be discovered by accident. People assume creativity is a talent, something you’re good at or bad at. However, according to Edward De Bono, creativity is a process we can steer. He came up with the concept of lateral thinking, which consists of a set of techniques to deliberately shift away from our traditional thinking patterns. I am currently reading his book De Bono’s Thinking Course. Although I am still a bit sceptic, let’s see where it leads me
The second topic I had a brief look at is how to do research. I came across a book called On Being A Scientist, which is great to remind you of your responsibility as a researcher. It also discusses a few case studies of dubious scientific methods. Richard Feynman (Nobel Prize in Physics) has another interesting take on misconduct in science, or as he calls it Cargo Cult Science.
It’s been pretty quiet here this week. Jan and me had a paper deadline, so I didn’t find the time to blog. I still have a few drafts lying around that I might finish somewhere next week if I find a quiet moment. Time to relax a bit now
I found out a bit too late that Nicolas Nova would be giving a talk at iMAL in Brussels yesterday. Luckily he always puts his slides online
The talk also explained his (seemingly random) blog title: “Pasta&Vinegar”. He states that the hybridization of digital and physical environments is explored both by academic researchers (pasta) and artists and designers (vinegar). In the talk at iMAL he talked about why vinegar is important for pasta
His slides contain lots of interesting and creative ideas, such as blogjects, augmenting animals (e.g. a dog with sensors that controls a WoW character) and a tooth implant that vibrates when you have an incoming call.
If you want to invent something that is to be used 10 years from now, who can you observe? Nicolas states that looking at new media, art and design can give us clues. He also explains that art and design can better convey desire of people for the future, and shows a typical diagram from an IT company that is not appealing to people and too much focused on the technology in the background. He finally refers to the use of technology in art. SIGGRAPH’s Emerging Technologies and Art Gallery are good examples of this and of combining pasta and vinegar.
Johnny Lee’s back again with his Wiimote interactive whiteboard. Commercial versions of these things are expensive and heavy. His technique doesn’t even need a projector, just a computer, a Wiimote and a simple IR emitting pen. The pen is just a stylus with an infrared LED in the tip.
Johnny Lee is back again indeed I posted about his method to track your fingers using a Wiimote earlier. This time he uses a the Wiimote’s infrared camera to track light pens (pens that emit an infrared light at the tip) on a surface to create an interactive whiteboard. It’s really nice that he can use any surface. You could use a projector in combination with an ordinary projection screen, a wall or a desk. If you don’t have a projector, you could turn any LCD display into a tablet surface.
Since the Wiimote can track up to four different points, these surfaces are also multi-touch. This means you can have multi-touch interaction on any projected image. It would be interesting to combine this with a steerable projector system.
The source code is available. I will definitely keep an eye on his Wii projects page.
