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Video Chat Via Transparent Desktop Overlay
Jason0x21 writes "Wired News has an article about UNC Comp. Sci. researchers developing a transparent desktop overlay for video conferencing, allowing remote coworkers to literally point and interact with things on your screen. The researchers say that Apple's Quartz graphics engine let them go from idea to prototype in 'about 45 minutes'. Windows versions predicted in the future."
One of my favorite pieces of technology I've ever gotten a chance to play with is the SmartBoard Interactive Whiteboard It's a whiteboard that's touch-sensative. Basically, combine it with your favorite projection monitor and you've got a 60 inch touchscreen monitor. Just like any other touch screen, anywhere you tap the board is treated like a mouseclick in whatever application you're using. As an added bonus, "magic crayons" (really nothing more than plastic styluses) are at the bottom of the board. When the board detects one of the pens removed from its holder, it treats all touches as requests to draw on the screen.
:)
It's a great presentation tool to liven up a powerpoint and avoid the need to have to walk accross the room to get the next frame. Furthermore, playing solitare with foot-high cards is quite fun.
Where are the screenshots? - seems logical to post considering it only took 45mins for a prototype.
Why boast how easy it was to get it happening then not showing it happening?
odd
From limited testing it seems that when a window is marked transparent in windows, it is composited into the display. But otherwise everything is non-compositing. This, in my experience, causes huge problems when fully opaque, non-layered windows are set atop a transparent one. Windows will often draw the old image while dragging the transparent window.
This is especially noticeable if you make a window transparent, then open the Task Manager (always on top) and drag the transparent window around. Very ugly..
And I haven't seen any way to make specific controls on Windows transparent alone or the window transparent alone (and leaving the controls opaque.
I had an internship at DoE lab outside of Chicago, Argonne Natl. Laboratory, at which we worked on a project similar to this. The system allowed multiple users (of various geographic, or digital distances) to connect to a Desktop Server, on which all users could interact with icons, windows and programs in tandem as if they interfacing with a local deskptop in windows. Althou, we used BeOS as our platform because it had a small footprint. Interesting that three years later private companies have out-done the DoE's work. Sad.
You sir are incorrect. You can certainly make Windows that use D3D TRANSLUCENT in Windows XP and possibly 2000. A friend of mine made his app fade out when minimized and fade in when restored. It was a game that uses D3D.
-]Phreak Out[-
I know freedesktop has (incomplete?) support for full RGBA windows, making a version (or opensource clone?) of this on Linux theoretically possible. Is there any work on such a thing?
What if your background isn't completely black or a solid color I know my office back ground isn't a flat color its a bunch of books and papers and folders not so neatly organized that overlaided on a coworkers desktop would really add to the confusion.
This must be Thursday, I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
Oh.. That'd take another 45 minutes. You need to use one of apple's other technologies, VoiceOver.
Assuming you have a touch screen, Windows has been able to do this since the release of Windows XP, using the remote assistance feature. Also, for the record, I hate getting into "I can pee this far, how far can you pee" debates. I just felt the need to reassert my "Windows shill" status by posting this ;-).
iRooster, the Mac OS X a
Business to business relationships have already become so depersonalised. This is just the next logical step - advancing technology that allows people to sit on their chairs to help other people. Heaven forbid that you would have to get up from your desk to help somebody!
Perhaps this kind of überchatting software is THE place where they can use those 3D desktop environments / window managers.
I don't really know if it would be useful, but perhaps it is cool to lean a window so you can see your partner while keeping an eye on the app content.
Anyway, beeing so far from the world as *I* am (yep, there are places on the south of the globe), where the bandwidth is kinda expensive, i can tell that i'll not be using this kind of technology for a while...
--krahd
mod me up scottie!
They must of only had 45min for the prototype.
Now if they had a full hour.
they could have tied in the speekable items from Mac OsX as well.
There you go it's voice controlled too....
Unless your camera sits exactly behind your monitor, (i.e. your monitor screen is transparent/one-way)
the image of your hand (despite the touch screen) on your collaborator's screen has to be computer generated. Or am I missing something here?
If the hand is CG, then all we have is a glorified cursor (but this too would be a pretty good hack if they got it done in 45 mins).
But wait, those pics don't seem to show the hand pointing in the right direction either!
Windows has had the ability to draw transparent windows since 2000. However, there's a limit to how far they can go.
Transparency in window systems is an idea that goes back almost as long as window systems have been around. People were even asking for it in the earliest versions of X11.
The only reason it hasn't been implemented more widely is because hardware hasn't really been up to it and applications didn't need it. Those applications that really did need it just used special graphics and visualization libraries.
Apple has this feature not because they had some great new insight, but they actually just got it essentially for free with the PostScript-based window system they acquired from NeXT, which was designed some time in the early 1980's and is based on stuff from Adobe. And now that hardware is up to handling it, it will just be a standard component of desktop window systems.
This looks similar to the eyetoy for PS2. It works the same way.
This is a better use of the idea in my opinion. I'd like to use this to replace a mouse, plus the collaberation use looks great. Kudos to the ones who put it together!
Can we do this with X11?
AB HOC POSSUM VIDERE DOMUM TUUM
If you don't have stickers, make a few small circles on the mirror using your girlfriends lipstick.
Now step about 3 feet away from the mirror.
Move your finger so that when you look in the mirror, it looks like you are touching the stickers but you don't physically do so, it just looks like you do to your eye.
Notice that you can do this regardless of your angle to the mirror, you just have to adjust your finger.
Now imagine that the stickers are icons on your desktop
and VIOLA!