Philips Entertaible tabletop device was recently shown at IFA fair.
Nothing more was disclosed about the platform than the previous press release (the technology behind is described as IR leds plus photodiodes, robust to room illumination changes), but there are some videos that clearly show the market target: board games.
Las Vegas, indeed, would be a very good place to start selling tabletop solutions.

In two days the 2nd Concept Mapping Conference will begin in San Josè, Costa Rica.
My paper about the wikiWall project has been published, but i’m not physically attending the conference.
Luckily, the CMC06 staff is great and already provided a community blog to promote online discussion about it, so i’ll try to be virtually there.

My blog was.. deleted in mysterious ways yesterday.
Expect a slow backup, thanks to Bloglines and its persistent rss-feeds.
I love Bloglines!

Actually my summer holidays finished on the 16th of august, but i have to blog about the beautiful trip i did in France with Isabella.
We first went to Switzerland, i had to see the Goetheanum in Dornach, headquarter of the Anthroposophical Society of Rudolf Steiner. Impressive and threatening outside, warm and maternal inside.
We toured Basel, the in France to Dijon we entered bourgogne, hills, cows, lakes, more cows. After some days visiting villages (Avallon, Vezelay, Fontenay..) we went north to Fontainebleau, the city and nearby villages are surrounded by the second forest of France. I wanted to visit G.I.Gurdjieff‘s grave and find the place where he started his institute in the 20s: "Le Prieurè".
We then went to Chartres cathedral and headed south for more bourgogne, visiting Cluny and staying a couple of days in Taizè, the ecumenic prayer community.
What a summer :), Isabella took a lot of beautiful photos you can see here.

Back to work, more challenges ahead, ideas, code, experiments… what’s more, i am starting to get interested in Apple Macintosh history and internals.. gosh!
How is it to code for the Mac?

 

 

I am pleased to announce the birth of tabulaTouch, the multi-touch sensing platform for tabletop interaction i’ve been researching from the beginning of the year at Natural Interaction.
You may notice a similarity with Jeff Han’s project that made the net go “wow” in march.
Actually, my research started in the second part of 2005 following an intuition on the FTIR principle applied in Lightable,a pure design project that had nothing to do with interaction. I was assembling the table while Han’s paper came out, you know, ideas are in the air way before we catch them.
tabulaTouch can sense multiple points of contact on surfaces of different shape and size, where gestures can be recognized and become expressive actions.
The first case of study has beel tabulaMaps, an application for the collaborative management of digital maps that features the intuitive roto-translation approach; we are planning to integrate it with GIS products.
We are also researching interesting media-handling templates that will bring the platform in public spaces, as well as ad-hoc environments, while iO Agency is engineering the hardware.
A very special thank goes to Viviana for her help in the initial hardware-related steps, and Fabrizio for his skills in electronics.
You can check a sample video in the NIRC projects page, as well as a longer version on YouTube.

The title is not an obvious one, but the perfect description of the double jet-lag effect after a 5 day trip to New York: i woke up in Italy on tuesday and i felt like i just had a very lucid and long dream!
The experience at CVPR has been smooth, some contacts, some interesting works (but mainly technical ones) and a cunning keynote talk by Alex Pentland on a new model of "social signaling".
This MIT guy talks about "really social software" that can monitor your body language (in his case he used speech) without looking into mean-making, but rather gathering social-signals that can be used to predict the outcome of any kind of negotiation (jobs, life, dating..).
The idea of people "mirroring" each other gesture, and learning from them, is not new to me and is appealing how this science breaks in, and is supported, by new technology.
The rest of New York has been a very interesting experience about being cheated by cab drivers, living park life, going downtown and bathing in memory at Ground Zero, Guggenheim museum and Zaha Hadid, MoMa and DaDa, dancing in Brooklyn at Max diner…
I had fun, and also felt like this journey gave me a real view from another world.
Back in the NIRC the work is developing fast, new prototypes are coming along, and Espresso (italian weekly magazine) wrote about us. Stay tuned!

Last weekend a took a break for visiting friends in London.
It has been a very relaxing journey, i’m becoming less excited in city events in general and looking for more serendipity, talks, meetings, coffee and tea while i try to relax my mind and listen to what’s inside.
It’s not such a mystical thing, but the feeling of "living on the top of my head", where only usual associations driven by external stimuli happen , is very strong these times.
I stayed at Padideh’s and Rudi’s beautiful flat in Holborn, went out for short trips (beautiful one to the London Silver Vaults), shops, university, books.. then i met my old friend Riccardo who’s living in the city for 6 months and plans a some-years stay. We had geeky talks, but also personal ones, Rick is one of my best
mirrored minds, i like talking with him. Also had the chance to see Meriel, who’s doing really well in London.
Keyspots: the video "What the bleep do we know", a US documentary on quantum physics effects on daily life, the only hand-made video about Mark Lombardi that Rudi managed to get from his gallery, and Babbage’s difference and analytical engine in the Science Museum.

Next week i will be in New York for the oral presentation of my paper at Vision for HCI Workshop. First time in the US ever!

It’s been a week of physical
work in the the NIRC (Natural Interaction Research Center) headquarter,
a countryhouse in the Chianti classico region of Tuscany: mounting
furniture, cleaning the garden and setting up our laboratories.
I won’t go in details, Alessandro has his own blog focused on this adventure, but i want to report the great emotion i’m experiencing in taking part.

Working with the mind and the body, inspired by a common vision, creates a particular emotional flow that has, indeed, a clear and natural outcome: peace and harmony.

Sounds hippy eh? Anyway we both envision this state as being very useful for working on new ideas.

Well.. i guess Mount Athos monks had similar feelings… ok, forgive the comparison.

Today we received the visit of Deutsche Welle TV, from Berlin.
They are preparing a report about "Soccer & Science", and MICC Lab has a lot to say with the work of Marco Bertini, Walter Nunziati and Carlo Torniai about video understanding of soccer events.
After playing the "spectator" part for a while, me, Lea and Alessandro had the chance to show the interactive table with wikiWall running on it.
The
lightning conditions were bad.. (you know how much a vision system is in-tolerant about that), but in the end the result was good and fun.
We’ll tune on DW Tv and see how italian research is described..

Two papers about the wikiWall project have been accepted, the first is for ICME06 and the second is for Vision For HCI Workshop of CVPR06.

Next.. i will try also for the 2nd Concept Mapping Conference..

In general i think mixed/augmented reality applications that inherit the virtual reality concept of googles and mix it with the absolute user tracking have drawbacks in terms of usability.
I stumbled in the Mixed Reality Interface (MRI), no more a research project but a ready-to-buy device that implements the mixed reality paradigm in a clever way, i mean:

• you don’t have to wear googles, the interface is presented on a screen (LCD in this case)
• the interaction metaphor is entirely tabletop, you manipulate tangible objects on the surface and have their digital counterparts move/rotate in the artificial scene
• i like the concept of the "point of view", or "user", object that moves the camera

MRI is "just" a device (the right choice), but in general, the shown applications are also very nice: smooth animations when an object is put on the surface or disappears, no jittering, and photorealistic rendering (this is good for anything dealing with "reality").
Techwise, it seems this device is vision-based (they say illumination changes can cause problems), no detail on the tracker identification system.
The company is Kommerz, there are a bunch of interesting videos on their site.

Mark Lombardi has been a great conceptual artist.
He renewed the "history painting" bringing it closer to our age, depicting entangled relationships between people, corporations and institutions.
And, of course, the most appealing thing to me is that he used concept maps for his diagrams, well, sort of.
His drawings have a formal taste, as well as an artistic flavour, his aesthetics reveal emergent patterns, highlight key roles and, the most
important thing, drive the reader/watcher through the experience.

I’ve been a Lombardi enthusiast since the beginning of my thesis and i’m now studying the only book available about him: "Global Networks", which portrays a lot of his works.
Maps are so powerful, but maps are not graphs, they just cannot be arranged
by an algorithm.. a man, or a group, must gather, share knowledge and draw it in a meaningful way.
Lombardi was alone, and i wonder if in the world there exist an active constructivist map-building community..
By the way, if you own a video about Lombardi (2003, Andy Mann), let me know!

It seems HP is joining the tabletop-interested gang too. "Misto" is described as a special edition touchscreen-pc, no words on multi-touch capability but explicit game-oriented vision like in Philips Entertaible.

Another good sign from the big ones.

Jefferson Y. Han has developed the missing chain in the TableTop world, a true multi-touch device that can be realized with little technological effort.
It is vision based, ultra fast and precise, now Mitsubishi and Philips are not the only ones out there.

On january 4, during CES in Las Vegas, Philips presented Entertaible: a novel interactive table featuring a 30 inches display that has multitouch capabilities.

They seem to be looking at the entertainment world and seem serious about mass marketing something based on it.

The video is very interesting, even if the performance is a bit sluggish but.. hey, it’s Philips, i think we are only allowed to see some old video shots taken from a prototype.

So, with Philips entering the scene, MERL with its DiamondTouch device is not the only one dominating the about-to-arrive tabletop market with a multitouch platform.
Let the games begin..