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New & exciting things are happening in the computer world.

What’s Cooking
June 2010 • Vol.10 Issue 6

Under Development
A Peek At What’s Brewing In The Laboratory

 A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Computations

At a time when form and design have become as integral to digital cameras as their ability to point and shoot, the bulky looking “Frankencamera” may not be the prettiest new gadget on the block. But as Professor Marc Levoy and his team at Stanford University inch closer to realizing their vision for the world’s first open-source camera, the implications for the world of photography are nothing short of monstrous.

The Frankencamera represents the opening salvo in the coming revolution in computational photography, a method that goes beyond simply digitizing a captured image to perform extensive computations on the data, as well. Levoy likens it to having the manipulation capabilities of Photoshop at your fingertips the moment you take a picture.

The Frankencamera will let users command all the camera’s functions—a feat that had previously never been done. It currently utilizes Canon EOS lenses and runs Linux, with a slew of programmable functions that include metering, focusing, de-noising, de-mosaicing, and other post-processing algorithms.

Levoy says the camera’s name was inspired by prototypes that were constructed from a mix of off-the-shelf parts and in some cases even resurrected from dead cameras. “It’s also ugly,” he adds.

Levoy has been working to bring costs to a minimum (the current price tag is around $900) and plans to distribute the platform to computational photography researchers and courses around the world.

In the future, the possibilities of computational photography will be as varied as the imaginations of the photographers who use it. Amateurs will be able to fix the focus in poor snaps after they’ve been taken. An array of filters normally found in a computer artist’s palette will be able to turn a photo into a pointillist painting or a 3D image with a single click.

Mind Control On A Cellular Level

The ability to move things telekinetically has always been on the short list of many folks’ sought after superpowers. Now, thanks to a new mobile phone game called Brain Maze, that dream is a step closer to reality (though don’t expect to start using that noggin to move mountains just yet).

The Brain Maze phone game application utilizes an EEG monitor to allow players to control the game with brain waves.

Developed at InfoLab21, Lancaster University’s research facility, by mobile games researcher Dr. Paul Coulton and Ph.D. student Will Bamford, the game employs an EEG monitor interface that allows a player to open and close pathways on the phone screen based on brain activity.

“Players use both ‘tilt’ controls and a brain wave-reading headset to progress a marble around a course,” Coulton explains. “At key checkpoints ’round the maze, the phone uses the electromagnetic waves from the player’s brain from the headset to open the ‘mind gates.’ Brain Maze uses Alpha waves, which are associated with a meditative state, and Beta waves, which are associated with an attentive state, to control access through the mind gates.”

The game was designed specifically for Nokia’s N97 phone, coupled with NeuroSky’s MindSet (a low-cost EEG monitor), but the technology involved could become ubiquitous, as the Brain Maze’s unique features are adapted to more common uses. “The challenge will be to extend the types of control available to players, and hopefully develop non-gaming applications whereby users could control more general features of the phone,” Coulton says.

In the meantime, data gathered from initial test runs of the device should lead to refinements in the game that are more responsive to personal cues. “In terms of the research, we are analyzing the results from user trials by creating mind maps of the players’ emotional responses at each point in the game to allow us to develop more complex control methodologies,” Coulton says.

Sketching The Future Of Interactive Whiteboards

While advances in interactive tablet and touchscreen technologies have led to a recent onslaught of new products, a smarter system that can interpret sketches would mark a welcome leap forward for scientists, mathematicians, and engineers.

A team at MIT has been working on such a system, developing a new form of sketch technology that can interpret chemical bonds to identify molecular structure or decipher and even color-code the circuit diagram of an electrical schematic. Such sketches could then be used to search for existing research on similar bonds and molecules or determine if a particular circuit would perform correctly.

“It searches for things that look like the symbols it understands and uses knowledge about the common relationships between symbols to help refine its interpretation,” says Ph.D. student Tom Ouyang, who developed the system with Professor Randall Davis at the school’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. “In this it is similar to what people do. When someone looks at handwritten text they may believe they can detect, for example, the letters ‘C,’ ‘L,” and ‘E,’ or perhaps it’s actually ‘D’ and ‘E.’ They then look around at the surrounding letters and words, to help determine whether the text says ‘clearly’ or ‘dearly.’ Because we work with diagrams, we have to deal with much more than just handwritten characters, but some of these basic ideas carry over.”

Though the research is currently being done on Windows Tablet PCs, the ultimate goal is to build sketch-enabled software for a variety of devices, from smart whiteboards to handhelds. Before that can happen, however, the team has to overcome a few of the challenges associated with “noise and ambiguity” in the drawing process.

“Real-world sketches can be messy just like how real-world handwriting can be messy and barely legible,” Ouyang says. “However, in the case of sketches, the problem is even more difficult because we can’t exploit many of the temporal and spatial cues that help us in understanding.

“One of the major contributions of our research is developing a general sketch recognition framework that combines appearance and context and is able to work effectively on real-world sketches in multiple domains.”

How that might translate to the commercial marketplace remains to be seen, but the team has received a lot of interest in the system and is working hard to ready it for a future release. Meanwhile, Ouyang is already thinking about new iterations of the technology. “Imagine a smart whiteboard or tabletop device that you could draw, speak, and gesture to, and it would not only understand you but also respond in the same manner.”

War Games Gain Culture

Though the idea of “war games” typically denotes anything from Matthew Broderick hacking government computers to the latest version of Call of Duty, a new program could help ongoing efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan by giving soldiers an invaluable cultural component to add to their military training.

The FPCT (First Person Cultural Trainer) videogame developed at University of Texas at Dallas helps soldiers learn the values and mores of Afghan and Iraqi cultures.

Dubbed the FPCT (First Person Cultural Trainer), the game was developed by a research team from the ATEC (Arts and Technology) program at the University of Texas at Dallas. Its virtual environment is meant to recreate interactive social scenarios and help soldiers learn about the norms and values of Iraqi and Afghan cultures.

The project is supported by the U.S. Army TRADOC (Training and Doctrine Command) G-2 Intelligence Support Activity and will be used as a full-fledged model soon. Since much of the cultural data the game uses can be developed in real time by the military, the FPCT can stay as up-to-date as the daily news.

Dr. Marjorie Zielke, an assistant professor in the ATEC program and principal investigator on the project notes in a UT Dallas release that certain areas of the game can be developed “on the fly.” As soon as fresh data is delivered, the content can be changed virtually overnight.

In the game, the player enters a foreign community and must interact with villagers to determine who the most influential members are while the community forms opinions about the player based on these interactions. After establishing a rapport, the player must discern issues and gather intelligence to help resolve those issues.

Where previous cultural training models relied on costly real sets and actors to portray the locals, FPCT provides a truly immersive (and less expensive) experience—one the U.S. Army hopes will give an extra edge to soldiers entering their theaters of operation for the first time.

by Anastasia Poland

Windows Secrets Newsletter • Issue 242 • 2010-05-06 • Circulation: over 400,000

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