Oddly Specific: Microsoft Kodu edition

Make no mistake, the girl is real & "actual"!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OFRGD1s74c

Apple, multi-touch and text input

Last week, Gizmodo published this great write-up on the touch technology expected with the Apple tablet speculated to be launching later this month.

I'm pretty stoked about the idea of an Apple tablet- having postponed my plans for a new laptop/netbook on several occasions last year. Text input will be a deciding factor and the article covers pretty much everything about what to expect.

I am, somehow, still betting that Apple may integrate a touch surface on the back of the device in addition to a touch screen- where gestures and tactile operations on the device’s case will result in actions on the screen. I found this paper about a technology which these researchers call LucidTouch that precisely describes how a device such as this might function:

In this paper, we present LucidTouch, a mobile device that addresses this limitation by allowing the user to control the application by touching the back of the device. The key to making this usable is what we call pseudo-transparency: by overlaying an image of the user's hands onto the screen, we create the illusion of the mobile device itself being semi-transparent. This pseudo-transparency allows users to accurately acquire targets while not occluding the screen with their fingers and hand. Lucid Touch also supports multi-touch input, allowing users to operate the device simultaneously with all 10 fingers. We present initial study results that indicate that many users found touching on the back to be preferable to touching on the front, due to reduced occlusion, higher precision, and the ability to make multi-finger input.

Here’s a video of a prototype of the device:

I’m not sure who owns the patents for this technology, but Microsoft(!) & Mitsubishi published most of this research. With that said, I still believe Apple may have some version of this in the works- very similar to their new multi-touch MagicMouse from Oct ‘09.

Update: Pretty much inline with what was speculated for the iphone 4G just 4 days ago! I still think Apple may introduce the concept with their tablet.

Google homepage devolution?

Despite spending millions of dollars on interviews, eye-tracking studies, field analysis and live experiments, on Jan 4 2010, the UE team at Google somehow managed to allow their homepage to look like this:

A sad day in Google’s homepage timeline indeed… wonder how many more iterations till they devolve into this?

(And yes, I’m surprised they’ve been forgetting to update their corporate timeline since July ‘09? What’s going on Google?!)

Pale Blue Dot

Seen from over 3.7 billion miles away, Earth appears as a small blue spec in the vastness of space in this epic photograph from the Voyager-1 spacecraft taken in 1990. This is how you, I and everyone else on the planet looks like from the edge of the Solar System.

Carl Sagan related his thoughts on the deeper meaning of the photograph:

Look again at that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

If that wasn’t humbling enough, take a look at this video of our known universe, or even the Universe Reference map- just incase you need directions the next time you take a trip down our galactic realm.

Or for that matter, the next time you feel small & insignificant!

Source: Wikipedia, Gizmodo, AMNH