Skip to main content

Some observations/questions

Study delayed since I think I can make progress with the prototype and answer some of my questions while opening up new ones :/ I'm glad I know this sort of last minute thing is quite common in research or I might be panicking (3 months to go, omg!).

I'm still having problems with marker tracking due to varying lighting conditions.  At home, my "reliable" green marker doesn't like my bedroom but is great downstairs and in my office. Blue/red/yellow - all tend to suffer from background noise. I may have to try pink! Basically I know that colour based segmentation and blob tracking is a quick and easy way of prototyping this, but real world? Terrible!

If using dynamic gestures what are the best symbols to use? In fact is any semiotic system useful for gesture interaction? One could also ask are symbolic gestures really that useful for a wearable system....

Where should a camera point? i.e. where should its focus be?
I've found myself starting gestures slightly left of any central line, so primarily using the right side of my body - how true does this hold for other people? Is there a specific camera angle that is useful? These ones are for the study.

I was trying out a mockup of the interface on my palm and while I know the "natural" interaction style would be to make any projected UI elements into touch elements, my tracking just cant support it (in fact I have to wonder how anyone has done that since it sends histogram based trackers e.g. camshift insane). Hence there is a gulf between the input modalities location and that of the visual output modality which I don't believe represents an effect interaction paradigm. I've not tried it on other surfaces, I want to get a little further with the UI first.


Still hopeful of putting together another demo video by Monday.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

I know I should move on and start a new blog but I'm keeping this my temporary home. New project, massive overkill in website creation. I've a simple project to put up a four page website which was already somewhat over specified in being hosted on AWS and S3. This isn't quite ridiculous enough though so I am using puppet to manage an EC2 instance (it will eventually need some server side work) and making it available in multiple regions. That would almost have been enough but I'm currently working on being able to provision an instance either in AWS or Rackspace because...well...Amazon might totally go down one day! Yes, its over-the-top but I needed something simple to help me climb up the devops and cloud learning curve. So off the bat - puppet installation. I've an older 10.04 Ubuntu virtual server which has been somewhat under-taxed so I've set that up as a puppet master. First lesson - always use the latest version from a tarball unless you have kept t

Camshift Tracker v0.1 up

https://code.google.com/p/os6sense/downloads/list I thought I'd upload my tracker, watch the video from yesterday for an example of the sort of performance to expect under optimal conditions ! Optimal conditions means stable lighting, and removing elements of a similar colour to that which you wish to track. Performance is probably a little worse, (and at best similar to) the touchless SDK. Under suboptimal conditions...well its useless but then so are most trackers which is a real source of complaint about most of the computer vision research out there.....not that they perform poorly but rather that there is far too little honesty in just how poorly various algorithms perform under non-laboratory conditions. I've a few revisions to make to improve performance and stability and I'm not proud of the code. It's been...8 years since I last did anything with C++ and to be frank I'd describe this more as a hack. Once this masters is out of the way I plan to look a

More Observations

After this post I AM going to make videos ;) I spent some time doing some basic tests last night under non optimal (but good) conditions: 1) Double click/single click/long tap/short tap These all can be supported using in air interactions and pinch gestures. I'd estimate I had +90% accuracy in detection rate for everything apart from single click. Single click is harder to do since it can only be flagged after the delay for detecting a double click has expired and this leads to some lag in the responsiveness of the application. 2) The predator/planetary cursor design. In order to increase the stability of my primary marker when only looking at a single point e.g. when air drawing, I decided to modify my cursor design. I feel that both fiducial points should be visible to the user but it didn't quite "feel" right to me using either the upper or lower fiducial when concentrating on a single point hence I've introduced a mid-point cursor that is always 1/2 wa