Category: design

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BodyNotes was created by the MIT Media Lab. It contributes to a series of projects that enhance the interaction between patients and healthcare practitioners. BodyNotes is a mobile tool that combines anatomical landmarks to physical objects as a mean for a patient to discuss body pain with her doctor.

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The video introduces Anna, an amputee who uses BodyNotes to track the pain and comfort she feels throughout the day when wearing her prosthetic limb. Anna can view visualizations and summaries of her reported pain by location, intensity, time, duration and activity.

This data is also accessible to Annas prosthetist. BodyNotes also allows remote, real-time collaboration.

During their session, Anna uses a photo to indicate the exact points where she feels pain. Since this screen is simultaneously seen by the prosthetist, and the interaction is synchronized, he can show what modifications Anna could do on her own.

BodyNotes enables advanced logging and telemedicine functionality on mainstream mobile phones. It has the potential to improve health care and communication, allowing patients and doctors to better spend their time by reducing the need for office visits.

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Can we create a device that makes people aware of their early cataract condition? Using a light-field display, the researchers’ method projects time-dependent patterns onto the fovea. Interactive software measures the visibility and point spread function across subapertures of the crystallin lens. By repeating this procedure for several light-paths, the cataracts size, position, density, and scattering profile are estimated.

Created by the MIT Media Lab, Camera Culture’s research group with Vitor Pamplona, Erick Passos, Jan Zizka, Manuel M. Oliveira, Everett Lawson, Esteban Clua and Ramesh Raskar, CATRA utilizes a forward scattering technique, which allows the user to respond to what they visually experience.

Their device scans the lens section by section. The user sees their projected patterns and presses a few buttons to map the light attenuation in each section of the eye. This information is collected by the device creating an attenuation map of the entire lens. This allows individuals to monitor the progression of the severity of the cataract.

The maps capture a full point spread function of the lens, allowing the researchers to simulate the visual perception of a cataract affected subject over time. Early cataract onset is difficult to diagnose. This device aims at measuring cataracts, which is highly portable and collects quantifiable data to help tackle a global health problem making it ideal for the developing world.
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The Junkyard Jumbotron lets you take a bunch of random displays and instantly stitch them together into a large, virtual display, simply by taking a photograph of them. It works with laptops, smartphones, tablets — anything that runs a web browser. It also highlights a new way of connecting a large number of heterogenous devices to each other in the field, on an ad-hoc basis.

The Junkyard Jumbotron is designed by Rick Borovoy, Ph.D. and Brian Knep at MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media.

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Get the code to install it on your displays, here.

Matthew Blackshaw created a nice 4$ (or less) touchpad with a copper-based matrix!

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Relief, created by Daniel Leithinger, Adam Kumpf and Hiroshi Ishii is an actuated tabletop display which is able to render and animate three-dimensional shapes with a malleable surface. A direct extension of this work, Recompose created by Matthew Blackshaw, Anthony DeVincenzi, Dvid Lakatos, Daniel Leithinger and Hiroshi Ishii, is the gesture control of such actuated surface.

By collectively utilizing the body as a tool for direct manipulation alongside gestural input for functional manipulation, we show how a user is afforded unprecedented control over an actuated surface. We describe a number of interaction techniques exploring the shared space of direct and gestural input, demonstrating how their combined use can greatly enhance creation and manipulation beyond unaided human capability.

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Marelo Coelho, Lyndl Hall and Joanna Berzowska have developed a series of techniques for building sensors, actuators and circuit boards that behave, look, and feel like paper.

By embedding electro-active inks, conductive threads and smart materials directly into paper during the papermaking process, they have created seamless composites that are capable of supporting new and unexpected application domains in ubiquitous and pervasive computing at affordable costs.

Pulp-Based Computing: A Framework for Building Computers Out of Paper from Marcelo Coelho on Vimeo.

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Max Mathews, the father of computer music.

Guitar Games – Revolutionizing How We Learn to Play Guitar

Aurelius Prochazka created a series of projects to help novice musicians to play the guitar. The brilliant idea here is that the more you train your ear to recognize what you hear, the more you will enjoy playing music. Because you’ll understand what you’re playing!

His most recent work, Guitar Games, allows you to plug in your standard 1/4″ plug electric guitar, a Rock Band 3 guitar, or a MIDI guitar and play on your Mac, iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch. Playing the guitar on small devices might not be the way to go, not to worry! If you own Rock Band, you owe it to yourself to take your guitar gaming to the next level and transfer all the experience you’ve amassed playing Rock Band into learning to play a real guitar!

Guitar Games teaches you how to play songs and how to hear better. Beyond that, it also helps you develop your own personal guitar playing style.

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You can try it out during Live Product Demo at Maker Faire on the San Mateo Fairgrounds May 21-22. If you’re already a backer by then, come claim your free Guitar Games guitar pick!

Designed by Jay Silver and Mitchel Resnick Drawdio lets you draw musical instruments on normal paper with any pencil (cheap circuit thumb-tacked on) and then play them with your finger. The Drawdio circuit-craft lets you MacGuyver your everyday objects into musical instruments: paintbrushes, macaroni, trees, grandpa, even the kitchen sink…

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My intern Jinha Lee and I crunched some fun ideas during his research internship at Microsoft!

See-Through 3D desktop done by Jinha Lee and Cati Boulanger in the Applied Sciences Group

I thought it deserved a spot on my blog too! So our See-Through 3D Desktop offers a behind-the-screen interaction with a transparent OLED with view-dependent, depth-corrected gaze.

Despite advances in 3D sensing and display technologies, our interactions with computer desktops have remained stagnant from the form that evolved under 2D I/O modalities. Our See Through 3D desktop is a 3D spatial operating environment that allows the user to directly interact with her virtual desktop. The user can reach into the projected 3D output space with his/her hands to directly manipulate the windows.

Users can casually open up the See-Through 3D Desktop and Type on the keyboard or use a trackpad as in traditional 2D operating environment. Windows or files are perceived to be placed in a 3D space between a screen and the input plane.

The user can lift up her hands to reach the displayed windows and arrange them in this 3D space.A unique combination of a transparent display and 3D gesture detection algorithm collocates input space and 3D rendering without tethering or encumbering users with wearable devices. See-through 3D desktop is a term for the entire ensemble of necessary software hardware and design technological components for realizing this volumetric operating environment.

Voil!