Slashdot Mirror

coondoggie writes "If smartwatches and other ultra-small devices are to become the text generators of the future, their diminutive keyboards are going to have to be way more useful for, um, big fingered typists. Carnegie Mellon researchers may have the answer to that problem. Called ZoomBoard, the text entry technique is based on the iconic QWERTY keyboard layout." The zoom board paper (PDF) has details. Entering a letter becomes a multi-step process; first you mash the general area of the keyboard containing the letter you want, and eventually it becomes large enough to hit. Test subjects managed to hit 9.3wpm after practice, versus 4.5 wpm for people trying to peck on a teeny-tiny virtual keyboard. They were inspired at least in part by the venerable Dasher input method.

tekgoblin writes "In a joint effort between Microsoft and the Carnegie Mellon Human Computer Interaction Institute, a new interface has been born. The new interface is usable on any surface, including notebooks, tables, walls and body parts. The UI is completely multitouch and worn on the shoulder, which will turn any surface you are pointing at into a usable workspace by the combination of a projector and a 3D modeling device similar to the Kinect."

An anonymous reader writes "There is an amazing series of charts that visualizes trigrams and bigrams, portions of sentences that have been extracted from Google's web data set. The graphs highlight word associations and the frequency with which we use them on web pages. Chris Harrison from Carnegie Mellon University found, for example, that the word 'he' is often tied to 'argues,' while 'she' is found often with 'loves.' There are also word-relation charts that highlight words used in combination with their opposites, such as good and bad, peace and war, and PC and Mac." There are a lot of these things, and they're really interesting to browse through.

An anonymous reader writes "There is an amazing series of charts that visualizes trigrams and bigrams, portions of sentences that have been extracted from Google's web data set. The graphs highlight word associations and the frequency with which we use them on web pages. Chris Harrison from Carnegie Mellon University found, for example, that the word 'he' is often tied to 'argues,' while 'she' is found often with 'loves.' There are also word-relation charts that highlight words used in combination with their opposites, such as good and bad, peace and war, and PC and Mac." There are a lot of these things, and they're really interesting to browse through.

Al writes "Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have created a touch screen that can also produce physical buttons. Graduate student Chris Harrison and professor Scott Hudson use a projector and infrared sensor below the screen to illuminate it and make it touch-sensitive, and the physical buttons are created using air pumps below the surface. They say this type of screen could be particularly useful when a simple, flat touch-screen is too distracting, for example in a vehicle dashboard."

Hesham writes "Carnegie Mellon University's HCI Institute just released details on their "why-didn't-I-think-of-that-style" 3D video conferencing application. Considering how stale development has been in this field, this research seems like a nice solid step towards immersive telepresence. I was really disappointed with the "state-of-the-art" systems demoed at CES this year — they are all still just a flat, square, video stream. Hardly anything new. What is really cool about this project, is that researchers avoided building custom hardware no one is going to ever buy, and explored what could be done with just the generic webcams everyone already has. The result is a software-only solution, meaning all the big players (AIM, Skype, MSN, etc.) can release this as a simple software update. 'Enable 3D' checkbox anyone? YouTube video here. Behind the scenes, it relies on a clever illusory trick (motion parallax) and head-tracking (a la Johnny Lee's Wiimote stuff — same lab, HCII). It was just presented at IEEE International Symposium on Multimedia in December."

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's HCI Institute have developed a new input technology that allows mobile devices to use surfaces they rest on, like tables, for gestural finger input. This is achieved with some clever acoustic tricks — basically taking advantage of high frequency sound propagation through dense materials. Their video highlights some neat applications, such as controlling an MP3 player by scratching on a wall and muting a cell phone by scratching on a table. Further details are available in the academic paper (PDF)."

An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University's HCI Institute have developed a new input technology that allows mobile devices to use surfaces they rest on, like tables, for gestural finger input. This is achieved with some clever acoustic tricks — basically taking advantage of high frequency sound propagation through dense materials. Their video highlights some neat applications, such as controlling an MP3 player by scratching on a wall and muting a cell phone by scratching on a table. Further details are available in the academic paper (PDF)."

An anonymous reader writes "The Chris Harrison project has created a series of maps that show the geographical structure and distribution of the Internet. At the site you can view a global, geo-spatial map of the global internet. The visualizations were put together using data from the Dimes project. One visualization shows the density of Internet connections worldwide while the other displays how international cities are connected. Detailed Maps of Europe and North America are included as well. It's amazing how skewed the distribution is — beyond Australia, New Zealand, and parts of South-East Asia, the southern hemisphere has only a peppering of connectivity."

An anonymous reader writes "The Chris Harrison project has created a series of maps that show the geographical structure and distribution of the Internet. At the site you can view a global, geo-spatial map of the global internet. The visualizations were put together using data from the Dimes project. One visualization shows the density of Internet connections worldwide while the other displays how international cities are connected. Detailed Maps of Europe and North America are included as well. It's amazing how skewed the distribution is — beyond Australia, New Zealand, and parts of South-East Asia, the southern hemisphere has only a peppering of connectivity."

An anonymous reader writes "The Chris Harrison project has created a series of maps that show the geographical structure and distribution of the Internet. At the site you can view a global, geo-spatial map of the global internet. The visualizations were put together using data from the Dimes project. One visualization shows the density of Internet connections worldwide while the other displays how international cities are connected. Detailed Maps of Europe and North America are included as well. It's amazing how skewed the distribution is — beyond Australia, New Zealand, and parts of South-East Asia, the southern hemisphere has only a peppering of connectivity."

An anonymous reader writes "A new study shows that presence of the US, Asia, and Western European countries on the web is strongly declining. Newly internet-empowered countries are booming; many geographical regions are showing exponential growth, including Eastern Europe and South America. Chris Harrison explains: 'Countries that have never been able to place a website in the top 500 are now pushing dozens of established websites out of this prestigious list. This trend is both recent (within the last two years) and accelerating. Interestingly, Asia is seeing it's presence eroded the fastest, especially China.'"

An anonymous reader writes "A new study shows that presence of the US, Asia, and Western European countries on the web is strongly declining. Newly internet-empowered countries are booming; many geographical regions are showing exponential growth, including Eastern Europe and South America. Chris Harrison explains: 'Countries that have never been able to place a website in the top 500 are now pushing dozens of established websites out of this prestigious list. This trend is both recent (within the last two years) and accelerating. Interestingly, Asia is seeing it's presence eroded the fastest, especially China.'"

An anonymous reader writes "A new study shows that presence of the US, Asia, and Western European countries on the web is strongly declining. Newly internet-empowered countries are booming; many geographical regions are showing exponential growth, including Eastern Europe and South America. Chris Harrison explains: 'Countries that have never been able to place a website in the top 500 are now pushing dozens of established websites out of this prestigious list. This trend is both recent (within the last two years) and accelerating. Interestingly, Asia is seeing it's presence eroded the fastest, especially China.'"

An anonymous reader writes "A new study shows that presence of the US, Asia, and Western European countries on the web is strongly declining. Newly internet-empowered countries are booming; many geographical regions are showing exponential growth, including Eastern Europe and South America. Chris Harrison explains: 'Countries that have never been able to place a website in the top 500 are now pushing dozens of established websites out of this prestigious list. This trend is both recent (within the last two years) and accelerating. Interestingly, Asia is seeing it's presence eroded the fastest, especially China.'"

An anonymous reader writes "A new study shows that presence of the US, Asia, and Western European countries on the web is strongly declining. Newly internet-empowered countries are booming; many geographical regions are showing exponential growth, including Eastern Europe and South America. Chris Harrison explains: 'Countries that have never been able to place a website in the top 500 are now pushing dozens of established websites out of this prestigious list. This trend is both recent (within the last two years) and accelerating. Interestingly, Asia is seeing it's presence eroded the fastest, especially China.'"

An anonymous reader writes "A new study shows that presence of the US, Asia, and Western European countries on the web is strongly declining. Newly internet-empowered countries are booming; many geographical regions are showing exponential growth, including Eastern Europe and South America. Chris Harrison explains: 'Countries that have never been able to place a website in the top 500 are now pushing dozens of established websites out of this prestigious list. This trend is both recent (within the last two years) and accelerating. Interestingly, Asia is seeing it's presence eroded the fastest, especially China.'"