Clay's Blog - Instructional Tech

Just One Word: Plastic

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 09:44:00-0600

There have been a couple of tech news reports in the last week that focus on new plastic technologies, especially for eBook/Reader applications. An article in the IEEE Spectrum, "Inside the Plastic Electronics Revolution", outlines the work that Plastic Logic has done in developing plastic-based electronics. These cheap and low-power polymer-based transistors are perfect for applications like eBook reader devices and interactive signage. Arizona State University has recently shown prototypes for flexible active matrix displays. The technology was funded by military grant programs and early devices will be used there first. The representative from ASU's Flexible Display Center believes consumer applications may be available as soon as 18 months. According to the press release, the "electrophoretic" screens are lightweight and consume only a fraction of the power of a typical LCD. Very cool stuff just over the horizon.

arc90's Readability Bookmarklet

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 14:42:00-0600

If you're like me, you do a lot of reading online. Unfortunately, often much of the page is taken up by superfluous and sometimes distracting clutter. Here's a simple little tool that works on some (but not all) pages to help make it a bit easier to read: Readability Click on the settings in Step 1 on the left side of the page to see which one suits you best in the example text below. Drag the link under Step 2 to your browser link bar or to your bookmarks. The link is a Bookmarklet, a bit of client-side JavaScript that performs a set of operations on the currently viewed page. If you want more information and explanation of this tool, check out arc90's experiments page on it. Try it out!

WikiDashboard from PARC

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 16:12:00-0600

Since it has become a popular destination for students, Wikipedia has had a special place in the hearts of faculty, and by that I don't mean a nice and sunny place. It's often argued that because it is freely editable by anyone and everyone, the overall quality of the articles is suspect. Perhaps this assertion is true, but it's not one that has been shown conclusively to be true. And there are those that argue the exact opposite is in fact true. Researchers at PARC have given us all a tool that might help us come to a better conclusion by providing what they call "social transparency" with respect to Wikipedia articles and their editors. Check out their really interesting work on the issue: WikiDashboard They've also included a quick start if you're not exactly sure how it works.

The TechCrunch CrunchPad Prototype B

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 11:09:00-0600

Michael Arrington over at TechCrunch just demoed the second prototype of their custom touchscreen tablet. After reading the article and checking out the videos of the prototype I found myself using Will Smith's words in Independence Day, "I gotta get me one of these!" The tablet runs Ubuntu and the user interface is essentially a browser OS (it runs a custom version of Webkit). I love that you get a full 1024x768 resolution display, which is well-suited to web browsing. You can access all of your favorite sites including the Google suite of tools, Wikipedia, Hulu.com, and YouTube. The designers think they could produce this thing for about $300. Sign me up! I hope they move forward with production. Check out the details and demo videos at Tech Crunch.

Adobe Advanced Technologies Lab: Zoetrope

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 16:33:00-0600

Technology Review has an article about a new tool called Zoetrope developed at Adobe's Advanced Technologies Lab by Mira Dontcheva. The article includes a video of Zoetrope in action. Zoetrope gives the user access to a range of data interaction tools that harness snapshots of a web page over time. The user can use the DOM to interact with individual components of a page, especially data driven components. "Lenses" can be place over these data-driven areas and the data can be seen over a temporal period. These changes can be graphed or visualized using Zoetrope and can be linked with other lenses on the same page or even other sites. This is truly incredible software. The web is really becoming a giant database and we are reaching a point where tools are popping up all over the place to harness this data and visualize it so that it becomes meaningful in everyday contexts.

Dan Goldman's Interactive Video Object Manipulation Project

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 08:44:00-0600

Just ran across some amazing work being done by Dan Goldman, who did his doctoral work at University of Washington and is currently working as a Senior Research Scientist at Adobe in Seattle. The research is focused on interacting with video and with objects in video and relies on current work in computer vision. The technology allows users to interact in some really amazing ways with video for annotation and motion analysis. The process uses a storyboard metaphor to visualize a short video clip in a static image. The user can manipulate spatial relationships in the storyboard image in a natural way to interact with the video stream. Some details and references are available on the Adobe Technology Labs site. Check out the technology in action in this amazing video clip on Vimeo: Dan Goldman - Interactive Video Object Manipulation Project

Sony PRS-700 eReader

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 15:12:00-0600

Sony just announced the latest version of the Portable Reader System, the PRS-700. Hop on over to Gearlog for a quick show and tell. The new version is $400 and includes some nice features. Sony has added a touchscreen for page turns, including turning multiple pages quickly by swiping and holding. A welcome addition is a set of side LED lights for reading in the dark. Sony also announced changes to the online bookstore, which currently truly sucks. I doubt any changes could make it worse. For complete specs, pics, and complete specifications checkout Sony's site. [Edit] TeleRead has some additional information from the announcement press conference. One thing Paul Biba mentions in the TeleRead post is that this new version is a great deal faster than previous versions and faster than any current competitor. This is apparently due to Sony's expertise in writing custom drivers and designing the display processor. A faster eReader. Now I really want one of these....

Microsoft Image Composite Editor

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 14:51:00-0600

Microsoft Research recently released a great little panorama image stitching utility. You can check it out at the Microsoft ICE project site. The utility is a free download. One of the really nice features of this tool is that it can export to many different image formats. Once exported, one could bring the image into, for example, a video editing package to do pan and zoom effects for video. In addition, there is an export option for Deep Zoom Tileset that creates a series of stitched images and some XML data that allows the image to playback on the web inside of Microsoft's SliverLight 2 browser plugin. The result is a nice pan and zoom image similar to what one gets with a QuickTime VR movie. You might have seen this in Microsoft's PhotoSynth tool. And this is all free. Grab the software and have some fun! I'm hoping to get a couple of experiments up soon, but I'm waiting on a server configuration change for the SilverLight files to run correctly in the browser. I'll post them when that happens.

The Best SIGGRAPH 2008 Overview I've Seen Yet

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 11:42:00-0600

For a fantastic overview of this year's SIGGRAPH, head on over to Hack a Day and read Eliot Phillips' post there. Waaaay better than my weak efforts...heheh. As Eliot points out in his post, most of the papers are online at various locations on the Interwebs and the links are all aggregated at Ke-Sen Huang's site. Make sure you check out "Finding Paths through the World's Photos", especially if you've been following Microsoft Labs' Seadragon implementation Photosynth. Extremely cool.

Speed, Flash, and Traffic: SIGGRAPH 2008 Wrap-Up

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 15:46:00-0600

Well, another SIGGRAPH is history. It's been a terrific creative battery recharge. Thursday and Friday highlights include a really cool Production Session on how the various visual effects companies that made Speed Racer went about replicating the look and feel of anime in a live action motion picture, a very entertaining and interesting overview on the use of Adobe Flash for animation, and an absolutely fascinating class on transportation visualization. [More]

Digital Projection, Spatial Augmented Reality, and Shape Grammar - SIGGRAPH 2008

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 00:38:00-0600

It's been an inspiring conference so far. The classes I've attended have been excellent. On Monday I attended the half-day course on projectors and spatial augmented reality for (I think) the 4th year running. Ramesh Raskar and Oliver Bimber were fantastic as usual. They were joined this year by Aditi Majumber who spoke about large-format displays and Hendrik Lensch who spoke on computational illumination for 3D scene modeling. One of the things I really get excited about in this class is what Raskar calls RFIG. In essence, this entails adding a photosensor to an RFID tag and then projecting structured light from a handheld projector on the photosensor in order to acquire a relative position for the tagged item. With the unique identifier and the relative position, we can query a database and then project useful information about the identified items directly on the items themselves using our handheld projector. All this is made possible by very small and relatively inexpensive handheld computers with wireless network access and attached projectors. You can check out their work, including the full-text of their book, Spatial Augmented Reality, on the supporting website: SpatialAR.com. Great stuff. [More]

SIGGRAPH 2008 in Los Angeles

Sun, 10 Aug 2008 21:49:00-0600

I arrived at the Los Angeles Convention Center today and picked up my credentials for this year's SIGGRAPH Conference. If you're unfamiliar with the organization or the conference, it's a part of the Association for Computing Machinery; SIGGRAPH is the largest SIG (Special Interest Group) in the ACM. The full name is the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques, which is more than a mouthful. [More]

Tag Galaxy 3D Flickr Visualization

Tue, 20 May 2008 09:49:00-0600

Just heard about a really cool flickr visualization called Tag Galaxy (Thanks, Mike!). When you visit the site you can search flickr for a particular tag and then build a stack of related tags to narrow a search. Related tags are displayed in a 3D visualization in the style of a planet with each related tag displayed as a smaller satellite object orbiting the original "planet." As you click through each additional tag in the stack, the process repeats narrowing the search. When you are finished narrowing your search, you simply click the central "planet." Images meeting your search are arranged as the outer surface of the sphere. You can click and drag to rotate the sphere and click on individual images to pull them out and show them in front of the rest on the sphere. Another click brings the full image up and provides some of the flickr metadata and a link to the flickr page for the image. As a visualization that provides an easy way to browse a large number of related images quickly, this tool is very successful. Often, 3D interfaces do not provide the most efficient means to accessing data. But in this case, there's and excellent fit. Take a moment to check out the site. It's definitely worth the bookmark. http://taggalaxy.de/

Collaborative Reading with Book Glutton

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 16:07:00-0600

I just saw a post on TeleRead that mentioned that Book Glutton is up for a Webby award. I'd heard of Book Glutton before, but I haven't checked it out until now. It's a really cool idea for a community website. The idea is that you create an account on the site and then access public domain works or user contributed texts using a slick little browser-based book reader, called The Unbound Reader. The twist is that you can open a pane on either side of The Unbound Reader that lets you chat with other readers of the current book in real-time or make annotations that are stored for your own access or shared with other users. In addition, the community aspect of the site includes reading groups that share interest in particular topics or authors. You can join already existing groups or create your own group, which might include your friends or colleagues. The idea reminds me of the WordPress theme called CommentPress. These tools are really exciting from an instructional technology point of view. They really allow people to work together in close collaboration on a shared text. And they both provide a mechanism that brings together the strengths of wikis with the close reading of a shared document. There's some great potential here from an educational perspective. It's hard to beat this kind of active engagement.

NMC Symposium on Mashups

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 13:40:00-0600

I'm attending another excellent New Media Consortium online symposium. This time the topic is educational uses of mashups. As with any subject covered by academics, there's been significant effort and time spent in the symposium on defining the topic of the symposium itself. Several of the presenters have spent time trying to put a finger on just what a mashup is. For the most part, the focus is on new tools and structures that combine data from multiple and sometimes disparate sources in novel ways. Often the product is a visually interesting website or Internet-based tool. But, in its broadest sense, almost any cultural artifact can be seen as a mashup. In a real sense, everything that is a cultural product takes the current cultural landscape as a given upon which it can then build, borrowing more or less from previous cultural artifacts. The movement of mashing up and remixing is transforming how we experience culture and its products. And because educational institutions are situated in culture, it is unsurprising that this movement is being embraced by educators. The topic is fascinating from a technological as well as philosophical point of view. So far, one of my favorite presentations has been "Confessions of a Mashup Un-Artist" by Brian Lamb of the University of British Columbia. Brian's presentation was itself a masterful mashup, more a live performance employing images, video, music and text than a traditional presentation. In addition, the NMC folks did something really excellent by having Brian perform in Second Life and then streaming the performance out to the web using Adobe Connect. That setup allowed the performance to be recorded, which is how I was able to experience it because I had a class during the actual time the performance was given. Take a peek at what it looked like:

It was absolutely fantastic. Some of the symposium participants really had no idea what to make of it. And many others really got into and started dancing in the amphitheater. Really great stuff.