Motivation and Information Gap

Update: Motivation vs Action

[...] take motivation from an inspiring movie, friend, or environment (by Jeff)

See also: How to Build Momentum by Daniel

See also: The Secret of high and low energy tasks by Craig

Face Input

Have you seen those single input games? One where you just have to press space to jump? One where you have to press space to gain height for your air plane? Where you change the orientation of your phone to see the beer glass being depleted?

What about face input? You can either blink or move your head. You can even ask your girlfriend for a split screen game.

The future input events:

• this.onkeypress
• this.onclick
• this.ontouch
• this.onvoice
• this.onface
• this.onacceleration
• this.onorientation
• this.onhoverhands
• this.oneye
• this.onmusic
• this.onmind

See: http://mrdoob.com/lab/actionscript/webcam/face_driven_3d/ (see also the article)

How many web cameras does your multitouch multiscreen application consume?

Update: See Face Tracking Tetris with Kinect

See also: Emergency and Disaster Service mentioned by Nathan

The Technium referenced some thin interesting named Readers of The Screen:

See also:

• An earlier discovery
• Do-It yourself eye tracker by Michal
• Real-time hand tracking by Andrej
• About Face-TLD: Tracking-Learning-Detection Applied to Faces by Z. Kalal
• Activity zones for touchscreen tablets and phones by Dan
• Real Time Head Pose Tracking from Multiple Cameras with a Generic Model
• Eye tracking laptop by Martin
• Eyetrax by Martin
• faceAPI
• How Shazam Works by Bryan
• Creating Shazam in Java by Roy
• Robust Landmark-Based Audio Fingerprinting by Dan
• Playing with Shazam fingerprints by Paul
• Facial Recognition for Android
• Robot arm with voice control
• Nonverbal Communication by Jeanne 
• ActionScript face detection by Devaraj
• Building a future friendly web by Brad
• Object tracking in Java by Ganesh
• Semantic Revolution by Yuriy
• Control them before they control us

Have you tried turning it off and on again?

• Most Of Your Accomplishments Are Invisible
• Every Conversation You Have Is Roughly The Same
• You’re An Expert Of Bleeding-Edge Technology Products, Aren’t You?
• Your Talents Are Forcibly Undervalued
• You’re Never Allowed A Moment’s Peace
• People Ask You To Perform Miracles
• Your Assumed “All-Knowing” Status Sets You Up To Let People Down
• You Possess Unlimited Responsibility
• A Life Of Alienation
• You Have No Identity

via lifereboot.com

See also: Reasons for quitting IT by Jack

Make Innovative Ideas Happen

“Nearly every major breakthrough innovation has been preceded by a string of failed or misguided executions.” — Frans Johansson.

It’s our implementation, not our idea that matters.

• It’s how we apply those ideas.
• How creative we are.
• How useful we are.
• How brave we are.
• How technically skilled we are.
• How we anticipate what our users will love.
• How we learn from the ideas and work of others.

It’s not about our ideas, it’s about what the ideas can do for our users.

[...]

The most brilliant idea, with no execution, is worth $20.
The most brilliant idea takes great execution to be worth $20,000,000.

That’s why I don’t want to hear people’s ideas.
I’m not interested until I see their execution.

by Derek

See also:

• Look appealing to investors
• Great ideas don’t get funded by themselves [ unless they do ]
• 50 Awesome Quotes on Vision
• Mosh Pit as Innovation Model
• How innovation depends on trust
• Inner vision is essential to bringing it forth by Martin
• Your idea sucks, now go and do it anyway by Jason

Innovation is a distraction

Go make something. Now!

Way to success: Get better on what you have been doing.

Big ideas look weird in the present

See also: TechTalk – NUI – What’s in a Name

My Core, Your Context, you pay.

Sleep is that time you’re working on startup problems with your eyes close

Iterate your ideas on a whiteboard and use your sleep, shower and jogging time to process the ideas. When you come back change your white board. This is the fastest way to plan your company.

Convert C Headers to .NET

Alexandre Mutel has been busy generating a .NET wrapper for DirectX 11. From what I could gather he is reading .h files in and writing .cs files out.

Note that his post seems to be unavailable.

New OpCodes used by his tool:

• instruction “calli“
• instruction “sizeof” for generic
• instruction “cpblk“, memcpy in IL

For future reference to gather some of my thoughts:

It so happens to be that jsc is also providing some support for PInvoke to convert an application to java source code.

Could one at one point program a java application in C# which runs on JVM and uses DirectX via jni? Technically it is possible yes although while jsc uses a version of jni which seems to be bound to the CDecl calling convention.

The names of the exported native functions can be read as described on stackoverflow. For parameters a .h file is required.

What is Cdecl?

ANSI C or POSIX (see the API) portability is a goal

see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interix

__cdecl: caller pushes and pops args off stack, args passed right to left.
Older, unmanaged code that was developed by using the standard C libraries can implement functions that take variable numbers of parameters by using a technique that is known as varargs. Only the code that calls these functions knows for certain what it has placed on the stack, so it is the responsibility of the calling code to clean up the stack when the function completes. This is referred to as the Cdecl calling convention. It is the mechanism that unmanaged code that runs on Windows Embedded CE uses (you can use this as a point to select between Cdecl and StdCall nn your code).

 

See also:

• CXXI: Bridging the C++ and C# worlds by Miguel

Crowd Sourcing Ideas

• Simple = easily knowable.
• Complicated = not simple, but still knowable.
• Complex = not fully knowable, but reasonably predictable.
• Chaotic = neither knowable nor predictable.

See Robert Paterson’s post.

See Jurgen Appelo’s post.

[...] a complex idea all of whose component parts are variations or combinations of a single simple idea – Complex Ideas

See also 10 Ways To Create Content That Matters!

See also Life Lessons: A Stephen Fry Interview!

Update:

See also: http://www.slideshare.net/jurgenappelo/complexity-versus-lean?from=ss_embed

See also: http://cfpm.org/pub/users/bruce/thesis/chap4.pdf

See also: http://www.noop.nl/2011/01/complexity-thinking-presentation.html

See also: Open Innovation and Crowd Sourcing by Jim

Touch

CLI (Command Line Interface) = (Think textual, such as the command prompt or DOS)
GUI (Graphical User Interface) = (The Windows UI)
NUI (Natural User Interface) = (Think of physical interaction with a GUI)
OUI (Organic User Interface) = (Spend some time researching here)

TouchTETRIS

This 4 player game has some serious potential.

The last time I decided to highlight multitouch technology was when I mentioned the finger tools concept by Matt. And there is a Touch Notation abstract over here.

Today I found a DSL project “TouchToolkit“.

name: DoubleTap

validate
 Touch state: TouchUp
 Touch limit: 1
 Touch step: 2 touches within 1 sec
 Touch area: Rect 50x50 including last 1 touch within 1 sec

return
 Touch points

The question is do we really want to express touch gestures from a text file. What if we would want to record touch simulation and give it a name.

In the following image we have a file “Default.g” which is the container for recorded gestures.

With JSC the developer would be able to apply this recorded gesture on all platforms supported by jsc. More details on that soon enough.

If you are looking for multitouch hardware see this list.

See also: Dell Latitude XT multitouch drivers.

How will we define the gestures for our multitouch devices in the near future?

Here are some icons to describe various states of the touch points:

Here are some interesting scenarious;

See also:

• Open Source Gestures
• Touch Gesture Reference Card by Luke (pdf)
• See this paper by Florian Weil! And a presentation.
• DHTMLX library already has some support for touch!
• Defining a Gesture Ontology for Games
• Do we need touch events?
• Android  Screen Interactions
• Kreativ Stop Motion (there is some lego tetris at thi end)
• sensory interfaces by interface ecology lab
• Gesture library teaser
• Asus transformer prime with 10 finger support

Stratus To Cirrus

P2P. Waiting for my Samsung Galaxy Tab to look more into this.

 

See also: WebRTC