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Turn any surface into a gadget controller
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One Per Cent
Carnegie Mellon University
LOST the TV remote control again? Never mind – just create another one on the arm of your sofa with a swish of your hand. While you are at it, why not turn the top of your coffee table into a lighting controller, so you can dim your lamps while you kick back and watch a movie. The system that makes this happen, called WorldKit, is working in Chris Harrison’s lab at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And it could be in our homes in the next five years, he says. WorldKit combines cameras, projectors and computers to allow everyday surfaces like walls, tables, doors and worktops to host interactive controllers for gadgets including TVs, digital video recorders, hi-fis or room lighting. The system uses a Microsoft Kinect depth camera to pinpoint which surface your swishing hand is requesting to become a controller. As you move your hand back and forth, you say out loud what you want the surface to turn into – for example, “TV remote”. WorldKit’s software uses voice recognition to work out what type of remote you want and a digital projector on the ceiling beams an image of that controller onto the chosen surface. The Kinect camera then works out which buttons you are pressing. Harrison’s team will
demonstrate the system this week at CHI 2013, a conference on humancomputer interaction, in Paris, France. Harrison says the system will be useful when small “pico” projectors have become cheap and powerefficient enough to be dotted around our homes. “No one has yet come up with the killer app that will drive projector prices down. WorldKit might be that app,” he says. The system has other uses. For instance, it could beam interactive cookery instructions onto a kitchen worktop, creating a space for each
“As you move your hand back and forth, you say out loud what you want the surface to turn into” ingredient to be placed in. These spaces then light up as software takes you through the recipe. The technology impresses Patrick Baudisch, a computer scientist at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany, whose team will be presenting a way to track people in rooms using interactive floors at CHI 2013. “WorldKit looks like a very useful step forward in ubiquitous computing. It will help the field move forward and bring smart home applications a step closer to reality,” he says. Paul Marks n
©Niels Ackermann/Rezo/Solar Impulse/Polaris
That’s not a sofa. It’s my TV remote control…
Outlook is bright for solar plane The pilot will be hoping for bright skies. Solar Impulse, an ultra-lightweight solar-powered aircraft, will attempt to fly from San Francisco to New York next week. The single-seater aircraft’s four electric motors are powered by batteries charged using the 12,000 photovoltaic cells peppered across its wings and tailplane. Two-hour practice flights began on 19 April near San Francisco Bay and a round-the-world flight is planned for 2015.
Kiss goodbye to 3D specs Sick of wearing 3D glasses to watch TV? A new 3D system lets you watch high-definition TV without having to put on the special specs. The system, developed by Dolby, uses a sheet of plastic with undulations that simultaneously deflect light at 26 different angles. Resolution is lost as an image is split and sent in different directions, so the display has to be four times the resolution of standard high-definition television, which is expensive. A prototype was unveiled earlier this month at the National Association of Broadcasters show in Las Vegas.
Your Twitter mates are more popular Sorry to have to break this to you, but your Twitter friends are more interesting than you. Sociologists have long known that people have fewer friends than their friends do, on average. This strange friendship paradox arises because people with a larger number of friends skew the statistics. Now Nathan Hodas and colleagues at the Information Sciences Institute in Marina del Rey, California, have shown this holds true on Twitter, too. The team analysed the followed and the following contacts of 5.8 million Twitter and found that, on average, nearly all users were less popular than both their friends and their followers – perhaps not surprising, since celebrities like @justinbieber and @ladygaga massively tip the scales.
For breaking tech news go to: newscientist.com/onepercent –Good news for couch potatoes– 27 April 2013 | NewScientist | 25
One Per Cent
Carnegie Mellon University
LOST the TV remote control again? Never mind – just create another one on the arm of your sofa with a swish of your hand. While you are at it, why not turn the top of your coffee table into a lighting controller, so you can dim your lamps while you kick back and watch a movie. The system that makes this happen, called WorldKit, is working in Chris Harrison’s lab at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And it could be in our homes in the next five years, he says. WorldKit combines cameras, projectors and computers to allow everyday surfaces like walls, tables, doors and worktops to host interactive controllers for gadgets including TVs, digital video recorders, hi-fis or room lighting. The system uses a Microsoft Kinect depth camera to pinpoint which surface your swishing hand is requesting to become a controller. As you move your hand back and forth, you say out loud what you want the surface to turn into – for example, “TV remote”. WorldKit’s software uses voice recognition to work out what type of remote you want and a digital projector on the ceiling beams an image of that controller onto the chosen surface. The Kinect camera then works out which buttons you are pressing. Harrison’s team will
demonstrate the system this week at CHI 2013, a conference on humancomputer interaction, in Paris, France. Harrison says the system will be useful when small “pico” projectors have become cheap and powerefficient enough to be dotted around our homes. “No one has yet come up with the killer app that will drive projector prices down. WorldKit might be that app,” he says. The system has other uses. For instance, it could beam interactive cookery instructions onto a kitchen worktop, creating a space for each
“As you move your hand back and forth, you say out loud what you want the surface to turn into” ingredient to be placed in. These spaces then light up as software takes you through the recipe. The technology impresses Patrick Baudisch, a computer scientist at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany, whose team will be presenting a way to track people in rooms using interactive floors at CHI 2013. “WorldKit looks like a very useful step forward in ubiquitous computing. It will help the field move forward and bring smart home applications a step closer to reality,” he says. Paul Marks n
©Niels Ackermann/Rezo/Solar Impulse/Polaris
That’s not a sofa. It’s my TV remote control…
Outlook is bright for solar plane The pilot will be hoping for bright skies. Solar Impulse, an ultra-lightweight solar-powered aircraft, will attempt to fly from San Francisco to New York next week. The single-seater aircraft’s four electric motors are powered by batteries charged using the 12,000 photovoltaic cells peppered across its wings and tailplane. Two-hour practice flights began on 19 April near San Francisco Bay and a round-the-world flight is planned for 2015.
Kiss goodbye to 3D specs Sick of wearing 3D glasses to watch TV? A new 3D system lets you watch high-definition TV without having to put on the special specs. The system, developed by Dolby, uses a sheet of plastic with undulations that simultaneously deflect light at 26 different angles. Resolution is lost as an image is split and sent in different directions, so the display has to be four times the resolution of standard high-definition television, which is expensive. A prototype was unveiled earlier this month at the National Association of Broadcasters show in Las Vegas.
Your Twitter mates are more popular Sorry to have to break this to you, but your Twitter friends are more interesting than you. Sociologists have long known that people have fewer friends than their friends do, on average. This strange friendship paradox arises because people with a larger number of friends skew the statistics. Now Nathan Hodas and colleagues at the Information Sciences Institute in Marina del Rey, California, have shown this holds true on Twitter, too. The team analysed the followed and the following contacts of 5.8 million Twitter and found that, on average, nearly all users were less popular than both their friends and their followers – perhaps not surprising, since celebrities like @justinbieber and @ladygaga massively tip the scales.
For breaking tech news go to: newscientist.com/onepercent –Good news for couch potatoes– 27 April 2013 | NewScientist | 25