This is a brilliant idea for an augmented reality app. The idea is simple: point your iPhone camera towards any object with printed text and the app translates the text and maps it back onto the object on your screen. Could you imagine if this was integrated into a pair of glasses? One of the [...]

“SixthSense is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information.” Sixthsense, a brilliant example of augmented reality, was designed by Pranav Mistry, a researcher at MIT’s Fluid Interfaces Group. Watch the video above, or the fairly recent [...]

I originally posted this step-by-step guide on my old Website (www.shardex.com) in 2006. I noticed on my server’s records that people are still looking for it on Google so I figured I would stick it back up on here in case someone wants to update their navigation’s splash screen. The only issue I have found [...]

Aldebaran’s mission is to “…create and deliver affordable, autonomous, and easily programmable humanoid robots.” Though robots-for-the-home are most likely still quite a few years away, I always like to check out the new and emerging offerings robotic companies are producing. Nao seems pretty well sorted, but I can’t tell from the video how useful he’ll [...]

Some really clever researchers at the University of  Tokyo’s Shinoda lab have figured out how to rig up a haptic-feedback hologram system. Using two Nintendo Wii remotes (Wiimotes) to figure out a person’s location, an image is displayed on a convex mirror to generate a holographic effect. That’s been done before, but the the really [...]

I recently watched a TED talk by Golan Levin on how he combines engineering and art to create really innovative interactive experiences. One example of his work take’s a brilliant recital of Kurt Schwitters’s Ursonate by Jaap Blonk and translates the words into on-screen text in real time. It’s immensely fun to watch a grown [...]

Captology is a very interesting research area in human factors and human-computer interaction. The etymology of captology comes from ‘Computers as persuasive technologies’. The goal of captology is to understand how to use existing and emerging technologies to influence a person’s behaviors and beliefs. Check out the Stanford lab to find out more. From their [...]