The year 2011 has been quite busy and revolutionary.

I now own a company called TABULA, which focuses on Natural Interfaces and Touch Technologies.
Its a laboratory, where i am developing and marketing my own products:

TouchTop, a state of the art multi-touch media environment with a full ZUI (Zooming Interface) and stunning performance. [link]

TouchMyBrand, a robust solution for large projected interactive surfaces. [link]

FaçadeSignage, a novel Digital Signage solution leveraging the power of Projection Mapping. [link]

I’ll be posting from there mainly, this blog was born as a research-related scrapbook, now research and job has merged and frankly i am not so much into blogging news from the world.

So thank you for following me, i do hope you will enjoy the news and still be part of this journey.

See you at www.tabulatouch.eu

I am very pleased to annonuce that the “Classroom of the Future” book has been published by Sense Publishers.
This book is the outcome of the homonym workshop that took place in 2007 and where i was invited for a talk.
What i liked the most was of course the topic, but even more the people: inspired, smart, willing to share knowledge and experiences.
The majority of the speakers became the co-authors of this book that is divided into five different sections, covering building design, technology, and community-related aspects of the classroom.
I wrote the chapter about technology-enhanced classrooms entitled “Making the Classroom a play-ground for Knowledge”, summing up my experiences and visions of the upcoming learning space that is not just “packed” with technological tools, but enhanced by a whole new and pervasive interactive language.
You can find a preview of the book here, i would really love to receive feedback (if you want a preliminary version of the chapter ask me).
Congratulations to Kati Mäkitalo-Siegl, Jan Zottmann, Frederic Kaplan and Frank Fischer for their work in turning a succesful workshop into a “tangible” book.

Uh! It has been a while, i’m not writing here it’s a long time.
Tomorrow i will have my Doctoral defense in Florence, and i hope it will be fun!

Right after that i am going to donate blood for the thousands of wounded people in Abruzzo, Italy.
To them goes my thinking and prayer.

On tuesday i was invited by Frederic Kaplan at EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) for a talk on Interactive Surfaces.
It has been a really interesting experience: the audience had precise questions about applications and technology. Besides the talk i had the chance to try WizKid live!
WizKid is a robot with social skills that features a novel interaction paradigm, combining robotics with a mid-air gesture interface called “halo”. Me and Frederic exchanged a lot of ideas about the project, the metaphors and the tech issues related to the “halo interface”, that in my opinion has the possibility to become widespread also in a number of other devices.
WizKid was exhibited at MoMa for three months, and it is now returning back to its swiss home (not on his own legs, at least for the moment ) to be upgraded and refined.
Thanks again to Frederic for the chance, and it was also very nice to meet again Nicolas Nova and talking about his experience as a veteran LIFT organizer.

Hello world. This one to tell i am still alive, despite the lack of blog updates. I’m here at CHI 2008 in Florence, just started attending, have a poster to present for the MICC, an Engineering SIG to facilitate and, hopefully, some interesting things to get excited about in the world of Human Computer Interaction. If this is the case (whichi i am sure of), i will keep this post updated.

Give your sketches a kinetic feel
K-Sketch is a work presented by Colwell and Landay, it’s about creating a sketching user interface that speeds up the animation process. There is a lot on sketching, and these guys tell it’s for “novice” animators. My feel of it is that it is an awesome technique that could be in a pro tool too. Maybe multitouch?

Computational Textiles
For the soft and tangible interface lovers. Lilypad Arduino is about embedding technology in dresses, but not only that. Technology doesn’t look like that, dress does look like something more. And girls become passionate in programming and start computer science courses!

Get something more serious than a Wiimote
Had an interesting talk with Stephen Hughes, who was presenting his work with the U. of Glasgow on tactile input. He is actually the engineer founding SAHM-Engineering, that provides an integrated architecture of wireless sensors packed into a small box. That is very similar to what U. of Bologna does as the hardware platform fo TANGerINE, and a good sign that these micro-architectures are growing in market demand. Side our booth there was also Pamela Jennings with her project “Constructed Narratives”.
She is using tangibles with smart sensors too, to construct blocky “things” that map to conceptual structures, using WordNet as API and other text mining. Very different use of this technology!

Media Spaces: a panel lacking the future The panel featured Buxton and other famous researchers. Very good intro about the history of media-spaces (which you could name also telepresence), and some insight about the present, but.. the future? No real answer, and a shared feeling that the market of mobile devices is driving it all. Buxton said: “more is less! (more technology, in the right place, becomes less complexity).

A taste of digital Pen & Paper
I missed some workshop in the past and still wasn’t able to use the digital pen&paper technology. Hopefully ETH Zurich booth with Beat Signer showed their iPaper suite for digital annotation (and much more), and also a poster from Jurgen Steimle about, i would say, the future of Post-It. Both use Anoto technology, and both say that Anoto (who is the only widely available provider of APIs and tech) is “holding back” too much in terms of licensing agreements, and that is one of the reasons why digital pen&paper isn’t still widely used.

Just back from Villars, Switzerland, where i participated to the workshop “Classroom of the Future: Orchestrating Collaborative Learning Spaces” during the CSCL Alpine Rendez-Vous.

This workshop has been simply great: caring organization by Kati and Frédéric and cool interactions with everyone, but mainly with Giulia, Nicolas, Lily, Jim, Martin, Paul, Do Lenh. We also had a lot of fun creating our future classroom prototype along with Joanna, Tash, Andreas and Khaled.

Out of the many ideas, one aspect regarding technology enhanced classrooms has popped in my head.
The problem is not technology, indeed, neither are the students: the missing link between usual teaching and the future of education are the teachers.
This makes a lot of sense, as they are the main orchestrators of the education process. How can they teach with technology they don’t know well? So the problem goes back to teacher’s training.
The talk from Jeffrey Huang, about connected classrooms and augmented environments also made somewhat clear to me that in such a new space, where social interaction is entwined with new technology, the role of the facilitator is more and more important.
Just a tech person? No, someone following the group dynamics and presenting them with the right interactive experience, then letting them play freely with it.

Looking forward for some kind of follow-up, in the meantime we’ll try to keep in touch.

The more i play with technology, the more i see the importance of paper.
When working on bidimensional visualization surfaces (that is 99% of the time), we use objects and spaces that are very similar to paper sheets. That is why providing the affordance of paper, especially in tabletop interfaces, guarantees a more natural interaction with objects.
But paper has also another, very important, feature: it is disposable.
Creativity needs freedom, and experimentation is made of many trials. Paper is a friend of prototypation and sketching, it is transportable and always-on. In general, every intermediate step in the production of an idea perfectly fits the temporary persistence of paper, while the digital domain is the right place for the final outcome.
Bridging the two domains is the challenge: digital pen and paper (like Anoto) is trying to give an answer, i expected many more products based on this cunning technology, but we are still at the beginning.
In my view interactive tables in general are one of the "pillars" for this bridge, an my research is heading also in this direction.

The IUI2007 Conference will feature the Tangible Play Workshop: “Research and Design for Tangible and Tabletop Games”. This is very interesting, also because the conference venue is at the Hawaii, but right now i’m too busy working on tabulaTouch (yes, i know there haven’t been news for quite a long time.. but we are working a lot).
I hope to hear/read something about the workshop, Philips will be talking about tabletop games from an industry perspective, and this is the right time (where is MERL heading with DiamondTouch?).

In my view, games are the optimal ice-breaker for tabletop technologies, even if the real advantage of a clever interaction design on tables has to be found in other, more business-related, markets..

Instead, i will be attending a workshop in january at the CSCL Alpine Rendez-Vous called “The Classroom of the Future” where we will be investigating roomware and tabletop applied to learning, see you there.

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.

 

 

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!

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.