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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
Recent posts

Back to life! Oh and a copy of my final dissertation.

I've been avoiding anything to do with my dissertation since submitting back in January. I must admit the entire experience was rather stressful and my hand-in date was the sixth of January which made for a rather dire Christmas and New Year, and everything was made much worse by an acute painful and prolonged illness which I've only just managed to shake (or rather, I'm temporarily asymptomatic). However, I just received my results (for my course, not my illness) and its good news, a pass with a distinction and it seems as if my markers think my dissertation work isn't quite as insane as I had come to suspect it had become! Woo-pee doo! Wearable Gestural Interfaces: A Viable Interaction Paradigm? An Exploratory Study. I had promised to publish it here and am going to put a copy as submitted - typos, terrible grammar, and all, in the hope that someone finds something of use in there. I know that I found several excellent masters papers which were of great use wh

Getting the design right vs getting the right design

So today I've been looking at ways to make the text input interaction more fluid and investigating if I can able some level of error correction (i.e. a spell checker). 1) 2 hours of use off and on and my arm aches, my back aches, my wrist aches. Even with the minimal arm movement that is required, my forearm still needs supporting and to spell a 5 letter words I am still moving the focal point about....6 inches across which is enough to induce fatigue over time. If I had more time I would do an about turn and look at just using a single finger (although that reintroduces the segmentation issue which the pinch technique solves).... 2) Writing without visual feedback is more taxing than I had thought. I originally did an experiment which involved people walking and writing at the same time as a "proof of concept" exploration. I suspect I had the task wrong though - I should have had them do it blindfolded! Luckily I've still time to repeat that experiment. 3) The

Recording/Playback

I've been busy with whipping my literature review and methodology sections together for the last few weeks (with the occasional diversion to tout the surveys, still a very low response so far *sadface*) and I'm heading towards crunch time now where I'm going to have to bring everything together for a draft version early next months. Since I'm now more in a documenting than development phase I've little work done on the prototype apart from to add recording/playback capabilities so that a session can be "recorded" and then I can explore if changes to the gestural interface improve recognition (although that isn't a major aim at this point). Again, a quick plea to anyone reading, just a few more responses to the gesture and display surveys and I'll be able to start my analysis for that data so if you have 5 minutes it would be greatly appreciated.

Final survey now up

Now the hard part, I have to find some people to participate! I've vastly over stated the amount of time needed to take the surveys since I know everyone is different in how they approach these. If there's any incentive, you get to see me performing gestures...more likely to be a deterrent given I didn't even shave before hand! If you wander across this blog before December 1st, if you could please take 20 minutes to participate in one of the surveys it would be a huge help.

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