The eagerly waited Leap Motion controller is now out, and reviews are pouring in. Most of them see the promise but find the current experience frustrating:
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The eagerly waited Leap Motion controller is now out, and reviews are pouring in. Most of them see the promise but find the current experience frustrating:
The growth of mobile web users is staggering. While some of us have been browsing the web on mobile devices for nearly ten years, most of the world population is only now getting there.
The growth of mobile web users is staggering. While some of us have been browsing the web on mobile devices for nearly ten years, most of the world population is only now getting there.
I’ve been working full time on my Android workstation for over a month now, and it is time to write an update about it. How has it worked out?
iPad is three years old now, and many tech blogs are writing stories to reflect what has changed. More than 100 million of them have been sold, alongside other popular tablets like the Kindle Fire and Nexus 7. But originally the reception was quite sceptical.
Google Glass is coming this year, a wearable display that can keep you connected at all the times and supply information and instructions when you need them. And it can record video or take pictures of whatever you see, when you want it to.
As mentioned in my post Hacker-nomad’s toolkit, 2012 edition, the lease period of my lovely — Linux-driven — 11” MacBook Air expired this month, and I had to consider what kind of gear to go with next.
This week has been a busy one for a hacker-nomad. Weekend in Paris for the JS.everywhere conference, then on Monday a talk at the Hamburg JavaScript meetup. And now I'm in Helsinki. Slush, the conference I'm attending, is the biggest start-up event in Nordic countries. But even at that, it seems the Jolla announcements of today have been able to hijack most of the buzz around the event.
Tablet usage is growing rapidly. Ars Technica wrote about an interesting study today:
Much has been written about the emerging Post-PC era, about the new possibilities it brings, and the limitations it imposes on developer creativity.
If today's Google I/O keynote where they parachuted to the conference center from a Zeppelin while streaming the whole experience on a Hangout via Project Glass wasn't enough future for you, here is another thing.
As part of the SmarcoS project, we've been working on making the Kinect work as an input device for Qt applications. Basically you move your hand in the air, and are able to grab and drop things on the screen.
We call this the Air Cursor. Here is a quick video of manipulating a simple HTML5 application with it:
Now, this may not be the way you want to control the computer you're working with the whole day. Instead, we see this sort of interface as very useful for large displays in meeting rooms and public spaces.
Instead of a touchscreen that easily gets messy and requires people to stand in front of it, with the air cursor you can use a regular TV or projector, and use your hands to manipulate the information on it. The gestures we use are natural enough that everybody we've had trying the tool has figured them out in matter of seconds.
Our Qt Air Cursor is free software under the LGPL license, and is built on top of the OpenNI library, with OpenCV used for recognizing the grab gestures.
I believe this is a great start for using natural interaction to control information software or multimedia applications. Simple gestures like grab-and-drop and swipes work, but there is still a lot of UX territory left to explore.
If you have ideas where this sort of new input techniques could be used, feel free to get in touch. Or simply to integrate the Qt Air Cursor library into your applications.
The Qt Air Cursor was demoed for the first time in this year's Qt Contributor Summit in Berlin. Our simple "Grab to the Future" example game gathered quite a large audience, with the high score ending up at a respectable 18. You know you're doing something right when the event catering staff also wants to try your input device demo.