The creator should certainly assist monitoring the comments and reporting inappropriate comments, however they shouldn’t be financially liable for comments they can’t control. Maybe frequent inappropriate comments means comments are disabled by default.
I believe it's a combination of being proud and thinking within a silo that every possible option has been exhausted. Often impossible is a term used to describe many unknowns such as scope and depth. When a researcher does a related work search it often only covers some of the categories and sometimes seemingly unrelated work results in changes that the original researcher could not see.
There have been tons of publications of this work with comments that you might want to read up on. For example, from Engadget:
"...this new DiamondTouch touch panel table interface has one thing NYU's unit lacked: game. IGN has video of the DiamondTouch panel in action, and it really appears to be a glorified top-down projection system -- which it is. The image is projected onto a white table, which contains the actual magic. By touching the table you complete a circuit that sends a signal through your body with the X/Y position of your touch. This means the table can handle multiple simultaneous touches, so you and your friends can all gather around and do gaming as it was meant to be done, tabletop style. Mitsubishi's system also includes voice control, and they show it all off with a fairly impressive demo of WarCraft III." - Paul Miller, Engadget (view article)
From Joystiq
"...let's be honest, Mitsubishi really throws down here. Unsatisfied with pretty light shows or boring diagrams, they're out to research that ancient query, "But what about the games?" Using Warcraft III, the fellas at MERL are able to use voice and touch to control the game in what appears to be an impressively seamless fashion." -John Choo, Joystiq (view article)
From HipTech Blog
"...brings the exciting possibility of multiple simultaneous touches. Another notable feature is the speech recognition that is demonstrated in the video, although I can't imagine myself talking to a table non-stop for the whole duration of a 4v4 game. Now if the MERL team could show us a video of a real game of WarCraft on the DiamondTouch and played with skill, I would probably wet my pants." -Leo Huang, HipTech Blog (view article)
Also, NYU's stuff does not feature speech and gesture together. This also distinguishes the work from other gesture recognition system like the ones seen in Minority Report. Having speech and gesture opens up a whole new realm of interaction possibilities.
Good Point, here's a comparison from the folks at Engadget:
"...this new DiamondTouch touch panel table interface has one thing
NYU's unit lacked: game. IGN has video of the DiamondTouch panel in
action, and it really appears to be a glorified top-down projection
system -- which it is. The image is projected onto a white table, which
contains the actual magic. By touching the table you complete a circuit
that sends a signal through your body with the X/Y position of your
touch. This means the table can handle multiple simultaneous touches,
so you and your friends can all gather around and do gaming as it was
meant to be done, tabletop style. Mitsubishi's system also includes
voice control, and they show it all off with a fairly impressive demo
of WarCraft III." - Paul Miller, Engadget (view article)
A question from Rob "Xemu" Fermier regarding the lag in scrolling gestures.
[Rob] Very cool technology and a nice approach for demonstrating it. Using contemporary examples like Google Earth and Warcraft 3 is an excellent way of taking relatively abstract concepts and making them real for people. The gap between academia and "real world" software development is often pretty huge and it's great to see more approaches like this that can bridge that gap.
[Ed] Thank you. One of the things that I like most about my research is that computer games such as Warcraft III allow it to appeal to a larger audience. That is, my research is not only of interest to academics, but to the general public.
[Rob] I noticed the frame rate for scrolling, etc hitching a bit... I'm curious if that was an artifact of the technology used to do gesture detection, or just the machine playing the game?
[Ed] Diamond Touch is a special type of input device for tables that can detect the gestures and movements of up to four people simultaneously. This input currently runs at a frame rate of 30 frames per second which does not seem like a lot but they are more than sufficient for gross gestures such as using a whole hand to pan a map. Also, since four people can interact simultaneously the effective frame rate is really 120 frames per second. Modern windows applications will often respond to the mouse at a rate of around 120 per second. This means that there is a bit of jerkiness in the Warcraft III panning gesture. This could be resolved by using interpolation of mouse events between frames. This is done in the Google Earth demo, thus the jerkiness is almost non visible.
Certainly the limitations of today's tabletop technologies would make it difficult to play Warcraft III as well as you can with a mouse and keyboard. But eventually, these limitations will be overcome and we will be able to interact with computer games in ways that were previously not possible. I detail some of the possibilities in a recent paper published at Pervasive Games 2006. It's important to realize that tabletop games are not replacements for mouse and keyboards over Warcraft III. Rather, tabletop games represent a new genre of gaming where people can interact face to face rather than having to look away from each other as we do with current console games. Being able to interact with rich hand gestures and speech provides an engaging experience that normally can only be found when manipulating physical objects such as a gun in an arcade.
The goal of this research is to understand the capabilities and limitations of speech and gesture tabletop interaction. This will hopefully inform the design of future multimodal tabletop games.
Slashdot Mirror
The creator should certainly assist monitoring the comments and reporting inappropriate comments, however they shouldn’t be financially liable for comments they can’t control. Maybe frequent inappropriate comments means comments are disabled by default.
I believe it's a combination of being proud and thinking within a silo that every possible option has been exhausted. Often impossible is a term used to describe many unknowns such as scope and depth. When a researcher does a related work search it often only covers some of the categories and sometimes seemingly unrelated work results in changes that the original researcher could not see.
There are a couple more links on this site
"...this new DiamondTouch touch panel table interface has one thing NYU's unit lacked: game. IGN has video of the DiamondTouch panel in action, and it really appears to be a glorified top-down projection system -- which it is. The image is projected onto a white table, which contains the actual magic. By touching the table you complete a circuit that sends a signal through your body with the X/Y position of your touch. This means the table can handle multiple simultaneous touches, so you and your friends can all gather around and do gaming as it was meant to be done, tabletop style. Mitsubishi's system also includes voice control, and they show it all off with a fairly impressive demo of WarCraft III." - Paul Miller, Engadget (view article)
From Joystiq"...let's be honest, Mitsubishi really throws down here. Unsatisfied with pretty light shows or boring diagrams, they're out to research that ancient query, "But what about the games?" Using Warcraft III, the fellas at MERL are able to use voice and touch to control the game in what appears to be an impressively seamless fashion." -John Choo, Joystiq (view article)
From HipTech Blog"...brings the exciting possibility of multiple simultaneous touches. Another notable feature is the speech recognition that is demonstrated in the video, although I can't imagine myself talking to a table non-stop for the whole duration of a 4v4 game. Now if the MERL team could show us a video of a real game of WarCraft on the DiamondTouch and played with skill, I would probably wet my pants." -Leo Huang, HipTech Blog (view article)
Also, NYU's stuff does not feature speech and gesture together. This also distinguishes the work from other gesture recognition system like the ones seen in Minority Report. Having speech and gesture opens up a whole new realm of interaction possibilities.
"...this new DiamondTouch touch panel table interface has one thing NYU's unit lacked: game. IGN has video of the DiamondTouch panel in action, and it really appears to be a glorified top-down projection system -- which it is. The image is projected onto a white table, which contains the actual magic. By touching the table you complete a circuit that sends a signal through your body with the X/Y position of your touch. This means the table can handle multiple simultaneous touches, so you and your friends can all gather around and do gaming as it was meant to be done, tabletop style. Mitsubishi's system also includes voice control, and they show it all off with a fairly impressive demo of WarCraft III." - Paul Miller, Engadget (view article)
Another Comment from http://paradynexus.blogspot.com/
A question from Rob "Xemu" Fermier regarding the lag in scrolling gestures.
[Rob] I noticed the frame rate for scrolling, etc hitching a bit[Rob] Very cool technology and a nice approach for demonstrating it. Using contemporary examples like Google Earth and Warcraft 3 is an excellent way of taking relatively abstract concepts and making them real for people. The gap between academia and "real world" software development is often pretty huge and it's great to see more approaches like this that can bridge that gap.
[Ed] Thank you. One of the things that I like most about my research is that computer games such as Warcraft III allow it to appeal to a larger audience. That is, my research is not only of interest to academics, but to the general public.
[Ed] Diamond Touch is a special type of input device for tables that can detect the gestures and movements of up to four people simultaneously. This input currently runs at a frame rate of 30 frames per second which does not seem like a lot but they are more than sufficient for gross gestures such as using a whole hand to pan a map. Also, since four people can interact simultaneously the effective frame rate is really 120 frames per second. Modern windows applications will often respond to the mouse at a rate of around 120 per second. This means that there is a bit of jerkiness in the Warcraft III panning gesture. This could be resolved by using interpolation of mouse events between frames. This is done in the Google Earth demo, thus the jerkiness is almost non visible.
Certainly the limitations of today's tabletop technologies would make it difficult to play Warcraft III as well as you can with a mouse and keyboard. But eventually, these limitations will be overcome and we will be able to interact with computer games in ways that were previously not possible. I detail some of the possibilities in a recent paper published at Pervasive Games 2006. It's important to realize that tabletop games are not replacements for mouse and keyboards over Warcraft III. Rather, tabletop games represent a new genre of gaming where people can interact face to face rather than having to look away from each other as we do with current console games. Being able to interact with rich hand gestures and speech provides an engaging experience that normally can only be found when manipulating physical objects such as a gun in an arcade.
The goal of this research is to understand the capabilities and limitations of speech and gesture tabletop interaction. This will hopefully inform the design of future multimodal tabletop games.