Rising sun...

I just came across a post on a research project by Adobe, which makes manipulating video very easy and straightforward. I remember having read about a similar research project before, it might have been Zunavision but I'm not sure. This is, of course, exactly what is needed for Immersive Video [1] to make it the perfect playground for evaluating dynamic public displays. It also brings us closer to the scenario, where video cannot be trusted anymore. There is a great movie with Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes, Rising Sun, where a whole lab works full time over a weekend to manipulate video evidence in a murder case.

[1] Singh et al.: Immersive video as a rapid prototyping and evaluation tool for mobile and ambient applications, Mobile HCI 2006, DOI, PDF.

Migration, late 2008 style

My new laptop arrived on Thursday, a MacBook Pro. There are about a billion reviews out there already, so I won't bother retelling them. Coming from a trusty old PowerBook G4, the new machine is really nice - very beautiful, extremely well made and much faster. I was worried about the glossy screen but it turns out to be so bright and crisp that reflections don't stand a chance to outshine anything.

While I really like the screen and the speed, there are a couple of things, which I wasn't so happy with. The trackpad 'button' is really loud and it takes quite a bit of effort to actually click it. Maybe I have to get used to 'tap to click'. In terms of battery life, I was a bit disappointed - it barely lasted through a movie. The camera is a bit of a let-down as well - its resolution has been reduced back to 640x480, which pretty much rules it out for being used with Reactivision. And finally, it seems like the fan will kick in straight away when you tax the graphics chip - and it's not exactly quiet.

I used the Migration Tool to move everything over, which surprisingly worked well. I just made one mistake in the very beginning - I selected HFS (case sensitive) as my file system. It turns out some programs don't work with this, most notably StarCraft :( There only other thing that stopped working is the PDF plugin for Firefox (PPC only), which is very inconvenient. I have started playing with CrossOver but so far I've only been partially successful - I've tried to install Publish or Perish but could only get the old version to work. I might install a proper virtualisation tool (like Parallels) but I wanted to avoid doing that (in order to not be infected with Windows ;)

Update: Some more issues I discovered today: the DVI-to-DisplayPort-Adapter does not work with a standard DVI cable that has all the pins; it only accepts purely digital cables (similar to the mini-DVI adaptors, see here and here. When riding the bus this morning (and typing away on my laptop as usual) I also noticed that the discreet gfx chip really reduces battery life quiet a lot. I guess I'll only turn it on when I *really* need it...

Instrument from Outer Space

Amongst all the marking and preparation for the lectures I'll be teaching from next week onwards (Graphical Interfaces and AI in Games), I came across a new musical instrument, called the Tenori-On. It's probably old news to anyone working in this area but I struck me how well simplicity, dynamicity, spatial interaction and multi-touch gestures are brought together in this device. Compared to a run-of-the-mill tabletop system, it has a really low resolution but it seems to work really well, and looking at the gestures that the musician uses during the performance, it beats most tabletop systems hands-down in terms of expressiveness.