Have you ever yearned for more immediate control over your surroundings? No, we don't mean Magneto car-flipping abilities. We mean more like wrangling all of the gear in a room into some kind of understandable and connected system. If you said yes -- and you're a
Sims aficionado -- you'll want to check into CRISTAL. We're not talking expensive champagne here, we're talking about the "Control of Remotely Interfaced Systems using Touch-based Actions in Living spaces" system (c'mon, it sort of makes sense). The premise is simple: instead of having to juggle multiple remotes and input systems to deal with a room full of technology, CRISTAL merges a
Surface-like touch area (your coffee table in this scenario), an overhead camera, and connected devices to form a frighteningly intuitive control scheme. The idea allows for all sorts of handy arrangements, like being able to virtually drag media from a server on one side of the room to your TV on the other, dim lights in a particular area by swiping on that location, or draw a path for a Roomba to clean using the overhead view. Right now this is just a research project, of course, but the team working on the concept believes costs could move down from the astronomic $10,000-$15,000 the setup would cost now to a more affordable range. Until that happens, you'll have the video of CRISTAL in action after the break.
posted August 15th 2009 11:09AM
Amazing.
Next up in production: World of World of Warcraft!
Where you play as a fat guy in a dark basement who plays World of Warcraft! It's technically an MMO, but nobody ever sees each other.
Warcraft has been done before: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5O1bTNbbWk4
(but not WoW, that's waiting for the holodeck)
What money...
How long till someone hacks into your overhead camera and spies on you and your girlfriend making out?
(Yes, geeks have girlfriends. Sometimes.)
cool
I dunno. From the looks of it, the video feed of the living room is projected from a upper camera located in the ceiling (look at the hand shadows). This means one thing: once everything is set up there is absolutely no way you can move the table around anymore or change the room's layout since the video projector is fixed in place.
Usually they use projectors to project images.
Also, that's the display technology for the display, it doesn't have to be that way always.
I think the software is supposed to know what a device is. So, if you move the room around I would think it would automagically update the camera orientation and location of electronics. If this is not how it works, I would not see the point either.
It's kind of sad that the image is proyected from the ceiling instead of the surface itself. The shadow of the hand ruins everything. But I'm sure they'll fix it in the future. Impressive tech anyway.
Ah, but the entire point is that it will be projected from the ceiling. Otherwise, you wouldn't also have an image of the room. Looks fantastic, though - can't wait until this kind of thing is available in mainstream.
I'm pretty sure this could be adapted to work on microsoft surface tables...
Nice, but...Ice Age 3 isn't exactly out on DVD *cough*
Well, it was on the computer. And we know what computers can do. *winkwinknudgenudge*
Yes, they can download trailers, which is what that was.
I love brasero... but all those 4.5 and 9 GB .iso files can start to take up some serious space once you amass hundreds of them.
@ethana2,
Yes, a preview...with a 92min running time and chapters! You are correct that it starts with the usual green Preview splash screen, but the guys is selecting chapters and the "preview" on the table also shows 92min on the upper right when the play progress bar is shown. Is it live, or is it Memorex?
Well, the image could be projected from the table itself, the image being provided by the camera in the ceiling sent wirelessly to the table/screen. Regarding Ice Age 3, I think they only showed the trailer, which is available legally ;-) It was just to show the mechanism imo.
Any which way, it's a WANT for me...
Touch screen Sims 3 (full version) would be fairly amazing.
nice tech, i think this is what ive always wanted =D
This does not even compare to the MS Surface. Look at the huge dark shadow under the guys hand. This method of touch screens is cool, but is not in anyway the most elegant. Even at a fraction of the cost its still worthless to me.
Jason you've missed the point completely. Its not about the hardware or implementation. Its about the software and proof of concept.
There's no reason why this software couldnt be used on a MS surface computer. Or any other touchscreen interface, maybe even a tablet computer or touchscreen phone android, symbian, win7 mob, iphone. Its the software that is very impressive here, nothing really to do with the hardware.
Interesting. In 10 years this might be something worthwhile. What's going on with surface nowadays anyway? That isn't going mainstream any time soon.
"Finding the right remote and remembering the different layouts can be a challenge..." (From the video) Really? I agree it's a pain to have a bunch of them but it's not that hard to know what each of them do.
ok. one point. the projector should be under the table, like any other surface display. this just looks like shit. the projector doesnt not have to be above the table to display an image of the room. duh. thats what a camera is gfor.
You are right, the projector would be better off underneath. However, it is easier for the projector to be set up on top, and they are demonstrating the software, not the projector. In the future, they will probably change the setup.
This would probably require some hardware altering, but I could definitely see some standard surfacing in a few years.
Because we really need an excuse to move less.
the voice they used was stupid
I have to use my hands?
SIMS you say? So this thing let me randomly set the kitchen on fire while cooking?
If it went commercial it wouldn't have the layout of your room it would have a
preset layout. Maybe a few to choose from or each controllable item is a
widget you can place anywhere thus u can rearrange the room u want
it would still work. I'd like to see this on an iPhone.
I've seen user interfaces like this about 10 years ago. At that time, the main purpose was use in public places because the screen is "vandalism-proof". Might apply to the childres as well...