OS6Sense

Well with my current need to avoid people as much as possible I've had to make a last minute change to my methodology for data gathering. Hopefully I'll be able to mingle with the general populace again next week and do a user study but this week at least I'm in exile! Hence I have put together 3 surveys of which the first is online. The first ones quite lengthy but it would be a huge help if anyone who wanders across this would take 20 minutes to participate. Gesture Survey 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_cb4PQ6oRs Took me forever to get around to that one but I've been trying to solve lots of little problems. There's no sound so please read my comments on the video for an explanation of what you're seeing. The main issue I'm now having is with the fiducial tracking in that the distance between the centroids of each fiducial is important in recognising when a pinch gesture is made, however due to the factors of distance from the camera causing the area of the fiducial to vary and, at the same time, the often poor quality of the bounding area for each fiducial causing the area to vary, I cant get the pinch point to the level where it provides "natural feedback" to the user i.e. the obvious feedback point where the systems perception and the users perception should agree is when the user can feel that they have touched their fingers together. As it stands, due to the computer vision problems my system can be off by as much...

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...

I've had a very unexpected event happen in that my little one has come down with mumps (who has already mostly recovered from it) and its something I've never had or been immunised against, hence I've had to cancel the study I had organised for this weekend (it obviously would not be ethical for me to be in close contact with people while I might have a serious communicable illness...I just wish others would take a similar attitude when ill). And I may have to avoid contact with people for up-to 3 weeks since the contagious period is 5 days before developing symptoms and 9 days afterwards which rather puts the dampers on my plans for a user study...3 weeks from now I had planned to be writing up my analysis NOT still analysing my results. PANIC! Hence, I've adapted my research plan - I'm going to be putting up a survey this weekend which I'll run for 3 weeks, run a limited (5 uesrs! lol) user study of the prototype just after that and have to base my results/d...

Well there's obviously going to be a flurry of interest in WGIs given the publishing of the Omnitouch paper. Brilliant stuff, anyone want to fund me to buy a PrimeSense camera? Seriously though, ToF cameras solve a lot of the computer vision problems I have been experiencing and I was very tempted to work with a Kinect , the problem being that the Kinects depth perception doesn't work below 50cm and that would have lead to an interaction style similar to Mistrys, one which I have discounted due to various ergonomic and social acceptance factors. If I had access to this technology I would be VERY interested in applying it to the non-touch gestural interaction style I've been working on since I see the near term potential of the combined projection/WGI in enabling efficient micro-interactions (interactions which take less time to perform than it does to take a mobile phone from your pocket/bag). Anyways, good stuff and its nice to see an implementation demonstrating some ...

Yes, but I'm not posting it yet *grin* A very frustrating bug cropped up when I tried tying the camshift based detector into the marker tracking service - only 1/3 of the marker co-ordinate updates were being processed! Sure, my code is ugly, inefficient, leaking memory left right and centre BUT thats no reason to just silently discard the data I'm generating (and yes, I am generating what I think I'm generating). I strongly suspect the culprit is asyncproc - I've had some experience before with trying to parse data via pipes and hence know its....not the preferred way to do things, however proof of concept wise I hoped it would save the hassle of having to get processes talking to each other. *sigh* "If its worth doing once, its worth doing right." Anyways, I've worked around it, and have the basics up and running. What are the basics? - Basic gmail reader. Main purpose here is to look at pinch scrolling. - Basic notifier. Shows new mails as they...

Much better but I'm still not happy with it - camshift + backproj + kalman means that the marker coordinates are a lot smoother with far less noise (obviously) but the nature of detecting markers in segmented video still leads to a less than robust implementation. There's room for improvement and I still need to add in some form of input dialog for naming markers (and I must confess I am CLUELESS on the c++ side for that.....wxwidgets? Qt?) but I'm that little bit happier. As per usual I had hoped for a video, but the lack of a dialog makes configuring things into a manual process (I've got basic save/load support working but given how sensitive this is to lighting still its a lot of messing around) hence I'm delaying yet again. Given my page views though I don't think I will be disappointing many people. What is frustrating is the amount of time I've had to spend on basic work with computer vision rather than looking at the actual interactions for this ...