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Atomic Jenga could turn domestic refrigerators green
TECHNOLOGY field notes Los angeles, US
Hands-on with the next generation of computer interfaces CALL me a creature of habit, but I approach any new computer interface with a sense of apprehension. I’m downright inept when it comes to playing video games on the Nintendo Wii: the wand controller is just too foreign to my mouse and keyboard-entrained muscles. I feel that familiar sense of unease as I stand in a nondescript brick warehouse in
pinky. The gloves help a camera follow my hands but add to the feeling that I’m about to start a performance. Yet again, Underkoffler stresses this is serious computing, before adding that: “The goal is to get rid of the gloves entirely, and we’re not far from that.” First up was a basic training program. A grid of white letters hovers against a
downtown Los Angeles. I am at the headquarters of Oblong Industries, developers of the G-Speak gestural computing interface, and I’m about to trial its system for controlling computers through hand gestures. I find myself surrounded by a cage of metal scaffolding, which houses the system’s 16 near-infrared motion detectors, as John Underkoffler, Oblong’s chief scientist, boots up the system. I’m amidst three large screens, and above me three projectors beam images onto them. A fourth overhead projector, pointing onto a white table, serves as a fourth screen. Underkoffler insists that the G-Speak is targeting hardcore number-crunchers, not gamers, but the rig looks like it would be more at home in a rock club than an office. Underkoffler hands me a pair of black gloves with tiny reflective balls attached to the back of every digit except the
blue background on the screen in front of me. It feels playful when I’m told to form
26 | NewScientist | 14 August 2010
boxes extends in all directions. To navigate, I start with the gun hand and bend my middle finger so it’s at 90 degrees to my index finger. This action creates three axes on screen. Pushing up, in the
is used to the imprecision of a mouse. I straighten my fingers and I’m off again. We move on through applications for video editing, photo analysis, even airtraffic control. By the end, I am really starting to appreciate that G-Speak is meant for real work: the interface allows me to sort vast amounts of on-screen information with far greater ease than I could with a mouse. Vast sweeps of my hands create rapid movements, but the system is sensitive enough to allow precise movements to be picked up too. Will gestural computing become a mainstream technology? Perhaps, but this set-up is hardly going to fit into the standard office-worker’s cubicle. Oblong promises desktop versions will soon be ready to demonstrate, though. Mastering it would take practice, but probably no more than touch-typing, and it’s a lot more fun than that.
MacGregor Campbell n
Atomic Jenga could turn domestic refrigerators green FOR some materials, magnetism is like an atomic version of Jenga. Remove a few atoms from one place and their magnetic properties remain standing, but pull out others and these properties collapse. The discovery not only changes our understanding of magnetism, it could also speed the development of eco-friendly magnetic refrigeration. Vitalij Pecharsky and colleagues at Iowa State University in Ames studied a magnetic material containing the
direction of my thumb, moves my position up; moving my hand sideways, or forward and backward, has a similar effect. Twisting my hand rotates space. After a bit of flailing, I gain control. I learn to target a particular box and head slowly towards it in a smooth spiral. Then suddenly the flight jerks to a halt, my gestures no longer in control. Underkoffler points out that I have let my extended fingers curve just a bit. The system tracks my fingers to within one-tenth of a millimetre in all directions – it feels surprisingly sensitive to my hand, which
oblong industries
Wave goodbye to your mouse (but take the glove off first)
a “gun” by extending my index finger and pointing my thumb upwards. But this hand position forms the basic shape for interacting with all on-screen objects, allowing me to move a star-shaped cursor around the display. I “shoot” the gun by depressing my extended thumb and in so doing grab a letter and move it with a gesture to the table in front of me. So far, so Minority Report. Having mastered the basics of point and shoot, I move on to a 3D application. Here I go from shooting to flying. On the bank of screens, a universe of regularly spaced
rare earth metal gadolinium. The team’s predictions had suggested that a gadolinium atom’s influence on the material’s magnetic properties might vary with its position. To test this, they mixed in small amounts of non-magnetic rare earth metals when creating chunks of the material. Lanthanum tends to replace gadolinium atoms on the material’s surface, but lutetium prefers to replace gadolinium in its central layer. Lanthanum-doped material had
virtually unchanged magnetic properties, but the lutetium-infused material required a stronger external magnetic field to align its atoms (Physical Review Letters, DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.105.066401). This shows that the central layer of the material’s crystal structure is responsible for its desirable magnetic properties and suggests it is possible to tune them, says team member Durga Paudyal. “It has certainly come as an
“Remove some atoms from a material and its magnetic properties remain, remove others and they collapse”
unexpected phenomenon,” says James Moore of the Leibniz Institute for Solid State and Materials Research in Dresden, Germany. Gadolinium-containing materials give off heat when placed in a magnetic field, making them useful for a technology called magnetic cooling. This avoids the environmentally hazardous coolant chemicals currently used in domestic fridges. The expensive technology is still restricted to the lab, but a better understanding of how magnetic properties arise could lead to the development of cheaper materials with the same features, says the team. Kate McAlpine n
Hands-on with the next generation of computer interfaces CALL me a creature of habit, but I approach any new computer interface with a sense of apprehension. I’m downright inept when it comes to playing video games on the Nintendo Wii: the wand controller is just too foreign to my mouse and keyboard-entrained muscles. I feel that familiar sense of unease as I stand in a nondescript brick warehouse in
pinky. The gloves help a camera follow my hands but add to the feeling that I’m about to start a performance. Yet again, Underkoffler stresses this is serious computing, before adding that: “The goal is to get rid of the gloves entirely, and we’re not far from that.” First up was a basic training program. A grid of white letters hovers against a
downtown Los Angeles. I am at the headquarters of Oblong Industries, developers of the G-Speak gestural computing interface, and I’m about to trial its system for controlling computers through hand gestures. I find myself surrounded by a cage of metal scaffolding, which houses the system’s 16 near-infrared motion detectors, as John Underkoffler, Oblong’s chief scientist, boots up the system. I’m amidst three large screens, and above me three projectors beam images onto them. A fourth overhead projector, pointing onto a white table, serves as a fourth screen. Underkoffler insists that the G-Speak is targeting hardcore number-crunchers, not gamers, but the rig looks like it would be more at home in a rock club than an office. Underkoffler hands me a pair of black gloves with tiny reflective balls attached to the back of every digit except the
blue background on the screen in front of me. It feels playful when I’m told to form
26 | NewScientist | 14 August 2010
boxes extends in all directions. To navigate, I start with the gun hand and bend my middle finger so it’s at 90 degrees to my index finger. This action creates three axes on screen. Pushing up, in the
is used to the imprecision of a mouse. I straighten my fingers and I’m off again. We move on through applications for video editing, photo analysis, even airtraffic control. By the end, I am really starting to appreciate that G-Speak is meant for real work: the interface allows me to sort vast amounts of on-screen information with far greater ease than I could with a mouse. Vast sweeps of my hands create rapid movements, but the system is sensitive enough to allow precise movements to be picked up too. Will gestural computing become a mainstream technology? Perhaps, but this set-up is hardly going to fit into the standard office-worker’s cubicle. Oblong promises desktop versions will soon be ready to demonstrate, though. Mastering it would take practice, but probably no more than touch-typing, and it’s a lot more fun than that.
MacGregor Campbell n
Atomic Jenga could turn domestic refrigerators green FOR some materials, magnetism is like an atomic version of Jenga. Remove a few atoms from one place and their magnetic properties remain standing, but pull out others and these properties collapse. The discovery not only changes our understanding of magnetism, it could also speed the development of eco-friendly magnetic refrigeration. Vitalij Pecharsky and colleagues at Iowa State University in Ames studied a magnetic material containing the
direction of my thumb, moves my position up; moving my hand sideways, or forward and backward, has a similar effect. Twisting my hand rotates space. After a bit of flailing, I gain control. I learn to target a particular box and head slowly towards it in a smooth spiral. Then suddenly the flight jerks to a halt, my gestures no longer in control. Underkoffler points out that I have let my extended fingers curve just a bit. The system tracks my fingers to within one-tenth of a millimetre in all directions – it feels surprisingly sensitive to my hand, which
oblong industries
Wave goodbye to your mouse (but take the glove off first)
a “gun” by extending my index finger and pointing my thumb upwards. But this hand position forms the basic shape for interacting with all on-screen objects, allowing me to move a star-shaped cursor around the display. I “shoot” the gun by depressing my extended thumb and in so doing grab a letter and move it with a gesture to the table in front of me. So far, so Minority Report. Having mastered the basics of point and shoot, I move on to a 3D application. Here I go from shooting to flying. On the bank of screens, a universe of regularly spaced
rare earth metal gadolinium. The team’s predictions had suggested that a gadolinium atom’s influence on the material’s magnetic properties might vary with its position. To test this, they mixed in small amounts of non-magnetic rare earth metals when creating chunks of the material. Lanthanum tends to replace gadolinium atoms on the material’s surface, but lutetium prefers to replace gadolinium in its central layer. Lanthanum-doped material had
virtually unchanged magnetic properties, but the lutetium-infused material required a stronger external magnetic field to align its atoms (Physical Review Letters, DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.105.066401). This shows that the central layer of the material’s crystal structure is responsible for its desirable magnetic properties and suggests it is possible to tune them, says team member Durga Paudyal. “It has certainly come as an
“Remove some atoms from a material and its magnetic properties remain, remove others and they collapse”
unexpected phenomenon,” says James Moore of the Leibniz Institute for Solid State and Materials Research in Dresden, Germany. Gadolinium-containing materials give off heat when placed in a magnetic field, making them useful for a technology called magnetic cooling. This avoids the environmentally hazardous coolant chemicals currently used in domestic fridges. The expensive technology is still restricted to the lab, but a better understanding of how magnetic properties arise could lead to the development of cheaper materials with the same features, says the team. Kate McAlpine n