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AquaTop Immersive Display System: Get Your Hands Wet to Sink Some Files
mikejuk writes with an intriguing description of AquaTop, a (very) interactive display system developed at Tokyo's University of Electro-Communications Koike Laboratory, which uses a Kinect sensor, a projector, and a tub of cloudy water. Images are projected into the water, and as a user, "[Y]ou can move them around, resize them using the usual two-finger pinch, but you can also pick them up in cupped hands and transfer them somewhere else. The gesture I really liked was 'sink to delete' — yes, that's often how I feel about a file. Add some waterproof loudspeakers under the surface and allow the computer to run them at low frequency. The result is that you can now make the surface 'boil' in response to the sound. You can make fountains of water appear and project the right colors onto it to make it look like an explosion. In the demo game you throw energy bolts at squid that blow up if you hit them. You have to see the video to understand how putting your hands in cold water might be so much fun."
This isn't really useful right now, but these kinds of technologies lead to a possible future where we aren't that much different than we are now and we interact with our virtual world a bit more naturally. Contrast that to a future where we adapt ourselves to more easily access the information in our virtual world.
this would be great for pr0n.
Vibrating In-Bath Feedback is going to be popular with consenting adults I think.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
You sunk my dataship
Still prefer Augmented Reality Sandbox.
Example on the tubes
.
I think I may be getting too old, but the quote from TFS seems like a foreign language to me. If it can't be done on a VT100 it shouldn't be done at all.
And, you rotten teenagers stay off my lawn!
And how exactly do you envision that being useful? To paraphrase Douglas Adams, the ocean is big. Really big. Really really really big. Etc.
for i in `facebook friends "=bday" 2>/dev/null | cut -d " " -f 3-`; do facebook wallpost $i "Happy birthday!"; done
I assume he wants to gather balls of light with his fingers and fire them at people lost in the ocean.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
It might be rubbish or plain stupid, but it's a pretty cool use of different technologies which might give birth to other cool stuff.
If B.Franklin discovery was published in /. he would get comments like: "oh, a glow in the dark kite string, what's the use for that? jewelry?", "Attach it to your penis and have (your last) sexual experience thanks to Tor", "Who the hell needs electricity when we have candles... get off my lawn", "OMG!!!!111! Hittler".
Pathetic.
Yea I know OT.
switch to the old style classical interface. it is only the over feature stuffed web 2.0 version that is a pain to use.
if I login slashdot to me looks like it did 5 years ago. I know instantly when I haven't logged in as it take on the crappy web 2.0 interface that always hangs no matter what browser your using.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Did you honestly just say the equivalent of:
"Yes, heaven forbid somebody invent a driver interface because it's interesting to drive with, and not because it's good for keeping the car on the road."?
Exploring alternate interfaces is one thing. Claiming they are practical is quite another. An impractical interface is, pretty much by definition, worthless as an interface.
Sure, in terms of experimenting and looking at the problem from different angles, it's "interesting". But you always have to consider the practical use. Things without practical use are, basically, art projects. "Interesting to investigate" but utterly useless at actually getting anything done.
One can inspire the other, sure, but an interface like this is nothing more than a gimmick. Now, Kinect, Wii controllers, even those musical artists that "play" light or vegetables - they are interesting to investigate AND practical (for certain definitions of practical - the vegetable thing, for example, is nothing more than what we already do with touchscreens, measuring capacitance of objects to detect changes when they are touched). Maybe their early experiments weren't practical - but here's the clincher - YOU DID NOT HEAR ABOUT THEM. For good reason. And they certainly didn't make frontpage.
There's investigating alternatives, thinking outside the box, and going back to first principles and trying again. But this is just a very expensive and extremely impractical way to do things we already do much more efficiently with - critically - no hope of ever improving the contribution that this would make to those tasks.