Mind-Blowing Interfaces On Display At SIGGRAPH 2009 173
An anonymous reader writes "Tech Review has a roundup of some cool, experimental new interfaces being shown at SIGGRAPH 2009, underway in New Orleans this week. They include an amazing 'touchable holograph' display, developed by a team in Japan, which uses an ultrasound device to simulate the sense of touch as the user grasps objects shown in 3D. The other ideas on display are Augmented Reality for Ordinary Toys, Hyper-Realistic Virtual Reality, 3D Teleconferencing and Scratchable Input Devices. If this is the future of computers, sign me up."
The conference has also seen the release of OpenGL 3.2 by the Khronos Group.
Re:ultrasound... (Score:1, Insightful)
So that's why it was made in Japan...
The scratch interface could be a problem (Score:3, Insightful)
I tap my desk all the time, just as a habit. Wouldn't want my cell phone to interpret that the wrong way -- or, if not my cell phone, perhaps somebody else's. And I wonder about somebody entering the room with a heavy step, or scuffing their feet... could be weird.
I remember ïseeing Apple's voice recognition demo'd years ago (on a Mac IIfx! yikes, that's old) and the presenter had to address the computer each time. "Computer, close the window. Computer, open Microsoft Word." Etc. Somebody in the audience asked him how that would work in a shared, open, noisy office environment, and he didn't know. He suspected that you couldn't use it on more than one computer, or you might end up directing somebody else's machine to do stuff. "Computer, shut down." Oops. Might the same be true of a scratch interface?
Re:Augmented reality (Score:3, Insightful)
Apple made it popular to have white wires hanging out of your ears. It just takes marketing
Re:Holodeck (Score:1, Insightful)
You say that now, but you'll be changing your tune when you need to gun down a borg with a thompson submachine gun.
Augmented reality was the only decent dispaly. (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine real life way-points for GPS navigation, or mid-air big screen TVs, or general awesome HUD display. A single pair of badass augmented reality glasses could replace all of your monitors (TV, computer, etc) it could give perfect directions (follow the magic glowing green line) virtual computer terminals (say, via an Airport network computer) floating text bubbles for deaf people, insta binoculars, glorified porn, etc.
Re:Augmented reality (Score:4, Insightful)
The easiest and simplest use for augmented reality would be to label the real world ...
Wear the special glasses (small and compact, not the prototype bulky ones) and everything you look at gets a label explaining what it is, stare at it and it gives you more detail, museums, art galleries and similar can finally remove labels from exhibits and people can get the more info than those audio commentaries while they look round at random and at their own speed ....
Re:TV screens still have a long way to go (Score:2, Insightful)
That's "dynamic" (i.e. fake) contrast. A display with dynamic contrast can turn down its backlight when displaying a black screen, which artificially increases the ratio between the brightness of a white screen and a black screen. However, that trick can't be used when displaying an image that's half white and half black, so the "real" contrast ratio you see most of the time is much, much lower.
Backlight brightness adjustment is a good feature but it doesn't compare to real high dynamic range. It's easy to see that the "dynamic" contrast ratio is a meaningless measurement: all you have to do is completely turn off the backlight when displaying a black screen and your dynamic contrast ratio is infinite! A real high dynamic range display could display an image of the sun as seen from space where the sun was so bright you wouldn't want to look directly at it, but space itself would be so dark that in a dark room you wouldn't be able to perceive the edges of the display.
Re:Augmented reality (Score:5, Insightful)
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