Users can touch the screen to activate controls on the display but as soon as they lift their finger off the screen, the system can interpret their gestures in the third dimension, too. In effect, it turns the whole display into a giant sensor capable of telling where your hands are and how far away from the screen they are.

“The goal with this is to be able to incorporate the gestural display into a thin LCD device like a cell phone and to be able to do it without wearing gloves or anything like that,” says Matthew Hirsch, a doctoral candidate at the Media Lab who helped develop the system. MIT, which will present the idea at the Siggraph conference on Dec. 19…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?

Japan’s handset makers must focus more on software and be more aggressive in hiring foreign talent

At first glance, Japanese cellphones are a gadget lover’s dream: ready for Internet and e-mail, they double as credit cards, boarding passes and even body-fat calculators.

Competition is fierce in the relatively small Japanese cellphone market, with eight manufacturers. But it is hard to find anyone in Chicago or London using a Japanese phone like a Panasonic, a Sharp or an NEC. Despite years of dabbling in overseas markets, Japan’s handset makers have little presence beyond the country’s shores.

“Japan is years ahead in any innovation. But it hasn’t been able to get business out of it,” said Gerhard Fasol, president of the Tokyo-based IT consulting firm, Eurotechnology Japan.

The Japanese have a name for their problem: Galápagos syndrome.

Japan’s cellphones are like the endemic species that Darwin encountered on the Galápagos Islands — fantastically evolved and divergent from their mainland cousins — explains Takeshi Natsuno, who teaches at Tokyo’s Keio University.

The Sharp 912SH for Softbank, for example, comes with an LCD screen that swivels 90 degrees, GPS tracking, a bar-code reader, digital TV, credit card functions, video conferencing and a camera and is unlocked by face recognition.

Meanwhile, Japanese developers are jealous of the runaway global popularity of the Apple iPhone and App Store, which have pushed the American and European cellphone industry away from its obsession with hardware specifications to software. “This is the kind of phone I wanted to make,” Mr. Natsuno said, playing with his own iPhone 3G.

The conflict between Japan’s advanced hardware and its primitive software has contributed to some confusion over whether the Japanese find the iPhone cutting edge or boring. One analyst said they just aren’t used to handsets that connect to a computer.

The forum Mr. Natsuno convened to address Galápagos syndrome has come up with a series of recommendations: Japan’s handset makers must focus more on software and must be more aggressive in hiring foreign talent, and the country’s cellphone carriers must also set their sights overseas.

“It’s not too late for Japan’s cellphone industry to look overseas,” said Tetsuro Tsusaka, a telecom analyst at Barclays Capital Japan. “Besides, most phones outside the Galápagos are just so basic.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/technology/20cell.html

The feature length doc Objectified explores product design in the words and ideas of some of today’s most influential designers. Director Gary Hustwit first drew attention with the film Helvetica. Objectified has been getting rave reviews at festivals, and we hope will soon be released commercially.

http://gizmodo.com/5123118/the-worlds-best-gadget-designers-speak-in-objectified

http://www.objectifiedfilm.com/

That yellow first-down line shown on televised football games isn’t really on the field. But to viewers, it appears to be there, just like the turf and the players. The technology, developed by Sportvision and called 1st and Ten, is an early commercial example of a field of computer science called augmented reality, in which the real world is overlaid with virtual information. Once the stuff of science fiction, augmented reality is now also making its way to smartphones, thanks to advances in both hardware and software.

People in Amsterdam who download a free application called Layar on their cellphones can look through the camera and see information about nearby restaurants, A.T.M.’s, and available jobs displayed in front of buildings that house them. This information is provided by companies like Hyves, the Dutch social networking site, and ING, the financial services company. The businesses pay a fee to SPRXmobile, the privately held company based in Amsterdam that developed Layar.

We carry powerful computers in our pockets…
& all the information we need is coded “out there” in databases.

Clothes could one day take snaps of everything happening around whoever is wearing them.

US researchers have made smart fabric that can detect the wavelength and direction of light falling on it.

The research team has found a way to accurately place sensors in each fibre and co-ordinate the electrical signals they send when light falls on them.

Details…

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8143936.stm

Everyware – Adam Greenfield

Adam Greenfield’s 2006 book Everyware is his attempt to create a unified theory for ubiquitous computing.

“It’s about a vision of processing power so distributed throughout the environment that computers per se effectively disappear.”

http://www.amazon.com/Everyware-Dawning-Ubiquitous-Computing-Voices/dp/0321384016

Thinking about what may be next for the development of virtual worlds, societies, economies, and more, this documentary explores the extent to which Second Life is helping to shape the first one.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0AvgVrnX6U

PhonePoint Pen is an experimental new system for capturing gestures made with a mobile phone. While motion-sensing apps are nothing new, this is the first we have seen that actually lets you write letters in the air that your phone can read and understand.

The project is the work of students at North Carolina’s Duke University. “We’re trying to get past the whole idea of typing on a keyboard or using a stylus to enter information into devices,” said Duke’s Romit Roy Choudhury. The app should in theory work on any smartphone with a motion sensor built in.

more: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/technology/2009/06/11/phonepoint-pen-air-writing-with-your-mobile-phone-115875-21432885/