The Future of Computer Interfaces?

Check out this short video by Johnny Lee, a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University. Using a Wii remote, a small LED array, and some reflective tape, he shows how you can have an interface which tracks the movement of your fingers.



Cool, huh? He talks about how the interface is similar to that used in Minority Report, though I was also thinking about the bit in Jurassic Park where the researchers manipulate virtual strands of DNA using their hands. Lee says that using your hands might not be practical because it's tiring. As the sole method of interacting with a computer, I'd think so. But as a peripheral to compliment existing means of interaction, or for certain special applications (e.g. computer-aided design), I think it would be extremely useful.

They should give this guy his PhD and someone should hire him so he can get this stuff to market.

Google Chrome

So I just downloaded Google's new open-source web browser, Chrome, which you can download here.

I'm pretty happy with the latest version of Firefox, but I thought I'd give it a spin anyway. I've done my daily browsing with it, and I'm actually pretty impressed.

The good things:

1) It looks very clean, and maximizes the page viewing area.

2) The first page that starts up defaults to some of your most recent sites, which is pretty cool. But it can also be set to a permanent home page.

3) You can just click and drag the current URL to your bookmarks bar. In general, the interface is very slick and intuitive.

4) The address bar can be used to either enter URLs or as a search engine.

5) Incognito mode is pretty neat. It lets you open a window which lets you browse without accepting cookies or recording browsing history. The guide says this is to allow you to "plan birthday parties in secret" (in other words, it's for guys who want to look at videos of mules having sex with midgets, and not have their wife stumble across it).

6) It's open-source, which means that any programmer can get in under the hood and modify it. Some of the next-gen iterations of the product will probably be really cool.

The not-so-good things:

1) It's not very customizable, which is also kind of a good thing. The menus are uncluttered, but there aren't many options. For example, I'd like a new window to open full-screen, but I don't think that's possible.

2) Speed. Chrome is supposed to be faster than other browsers, but so far I haven't noticed any change in speed. I think the bottleneck for the vast majority of users is their internet connection speed, so I don't really see that page rendering speed is all that big a deal. And yet they're hyping it.

3) It is a beta version. I've already had it freeze up on me a couple of times. Waiting for a bit solved the problem, so it didn't crash the program. The program takes several seconds to recover after closing one of the windows (I prefer new windows for content, rather than tabs). It's annoying.

4) Apparently, one of the main reasons Google even put out a browser was to...make more money. But the way they're doing it with Chrome is apparently that the new browser makes it easier for them to gather information on browsing, advertising, and buying habits. I don't consider this a big deal (unless it impacts my browsing experience), but some might.

Anyway, so far there's more good than bad. I'll keep using it for another day or so before I decide to stick with Firefox or make the switch. My very first impression was not all that positive, but it's starting to make me warm to it, so we'll see.

Photorealistic Human Modeling is Here

The way the rendering of humans in movies and video games was going, you wouldn't think it would be long until they were pretty much indistinguishable from real people. Well, it looks like we're there.

Check out this story and the accompanying video.

Engineering Biofuels

Fareed Zakaria interviews Craig Venter, the leader of the successful private initiative to map the human genome, about his current efforts to engineer microorganisms to produce fuels.

Zakaria: How are you going to create the fuel of the future?
Venter: We think multiple fuels of the future are going to come out of biology, by manipulating the genetic code of simple organisms to convert things like sugar or sunlight or carbon dioxide into fuels that people are very familiar with, like diesel fuel and gasoline.

...

How close are you to creating an organism that can produce fuels in this way?
We think the first fuels are maybe one to two years away. We're definitely thinking in terms of years, not decades.

You always have to take predictions with a grain of salt, but this guy has gotten results before. I hope they really are making good progress.