gesture interface

Sweetness. It's like even better than minority report. So you've got a phone with no screen and just a power button..how does that work?

http://http//www.technologyreview.com/communications/25380/?ref=rss

Oh of course, it has a projector and some gesture recognition software equipped to a camera. Amazing. This is very similar to the SixthSense technology developed at MIT. SixthSense is different in that it projects a sort of augmented reality to what the user is seeing, whereas the above hardware is only for interaction with the device. Here are links to a video and an article about SixthSense:

http://www.technologyreview.com/video/?vid=386

http://www.technologyreview.com/tr35/Profile.aspx?TRID=816

eye control mobile device

When I saw this video, I was extremely excited. It seems a little dull, but for the past year and a half or so, I have been commited to the idea that this would soon be a viable interface for device control. I even bought a book that was way over my head on openCV, a computer vision software, in order to get some idea of how this was possible. Sadly, I'm as good as illiterate with that book. Here is the news though, researchers have enabled a hand-held device to be controlled by eye movements and blinks alone. This has been done and nearly perfected on desktops, but has not been shown successful on a mobile device yet. It is much harder with a small mobile screen because the movement of the phone distorts the angle of perception at a much higher rate than when a user movs their head around a large screen in their immediate view. With the advancement of this and gesture user interfaces, researchers of today will revolutionize the devices of tomorrow
.

http://www.popsci.com/gadgets/article/2010-05/eyephone-new-cellphone-software-tracks-users-eye-movements

Kant's Noumena

Kant's use of the term Noumena is in classification of things in themselves, outside of the view of the perceiver. All that we can know is phenomena - conceptual knowledge of the world formed through experience. Our idea of a dog only consists of what we know about dogs through experience. We learn that a dog has certain physical features through observation and actual physical interaction. We know it's bark through what we hear as it barks. We do not know what dog experiences are like. We can form some idea through experimentation on dogs. Think specifically of Pavlov and his realization of a dog's uncontrollable anticipation for a meal or treat. We've also somehow been able to determine that the visual experiences of dogs lie in a much smaller spectrum of light than humans, leaving them with a dull black and white conception of the world. But all of this we have learned through our own sensory experiences aided by knowledge and prediction. Each of our conceptualizations of the world can be classified as purely phenomenal according to Kant.

i am a strange loop

Douglas Hofstadter's I am a Strange Loop is a follow-up to his original,