I found an interesting article about research on Piezoelectric Nanowires.  This continues a trend of harvesting power from alternative energy sources.  Related technology has included generating power from the footsteps of subway passengers.  This research in particular is interesting because it presents a way of having mobile electronic devices powered.  I'm not sure if this particular technology will be bendable in its current state or could be after further development.  Some of the pictures on the site lead me to believe that it is at least potentially bendable.  As an alternative to batteries it has significant appeal and could be an enabling technology for more lightweight portable electronics.

Tags: bendable, power, piezoelectric, electricity, battery, power generation

Pacific Northwest Laboratory has issued a press release which states that they have found a way of improving the power efficiency of blue LEDs.  This is significant because OLED offers the potential for energy efficient lighting and displays.  OLED is one of the most promising future display technologies.

Tags: OLED, LED, display, lighting

Samsung has an Organic LED powered Passport program.  A prototype video of a project which may have come out of is available.  This is interesting because it presents deformable user interfaces which may be available in the future.  Deformable surfaces are what we've been working with in the lab lately.  There's a lot of potential and it'll be fun to see what if any of the research we do works its way into these projects.

The editorial on the last page linked to also brings to light an interesting point.  Often the kinds of things we're working on really do look like they've come right out of movies such as Harry Potter and Minority Report.  I'm pleased about this because it makes it really easy to explain what it is I'm working on to people.

http://www.securitydocumentworld.com/public/news.cfm?&m1=c_10&m2=c_5&m3=e_0&m4=e_0&subItemID=1330 via http://www.oled-info.com/samsung/samsung_shows_a_passport_with_a_thin_and_flexible_oled_display  via http://www.oled-info.com/couple-short-videos-id-card-oled-display-and-tl320-amoled-camera via http://www.ubergizmo.com/15/archives/2009/03/id_card_carries_oled_display.html

Tags: OLED, OUI, organic, user interface, photo, ID, camera

I found an article about a hands free portable music player remote control.  It is a pair of earbuds that sense tiny movements of the ear from different facial expressions.  I think this is an interesting device with broader potential applications.  Existing control systems which are similar tend to be very expensive and specialized (one example is the wheel chair Professor Stephen Hawking uses).
 
Via Slashdot.

Tags: ear, music, hci, industry

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Microsoft has released their vision for what computing will look like in 2019.  The video features several technologies that we are already working on in the lab including deformable displays and large interactive walls.  Their vision also includes environmental initiatives which I have personally been involved to some extent in advocating such as green roofs.  I am pleased with their vision both in terms of the validation of usefulness it gives my current work and as an eventual consumer for the types of devices shown.

Source: http://www.istartedsomething.com/20090228/microsoft-office-labs-vision-2019-video/

 

I've recently discovered a short paper which is relevant to my current project.  The short paper is basically the Gummi system applied to EBooks.  It seems fairly incremental and doesn't reference a very similar paper which was published a month before.  The paper goes into elaborate detail about how their prototype system was constructed including model numbers of programmable integrated circuits used.  It is however reassuring that other researchers are also having trouble obtaining flexible displays and have to resort to prototyping without the most ideal technologies in order to perform experiments and usability evaluations.  Hopefully in time there will be less difficulty associated with obtaining flexible displays since this would be beneficial to research efforts.

The papers mentioned are:

Tajika, T., Yonezawa, T., and Mitsunaga, N. 2008. Intuitive page-turning interface of e-books on flexible e-paper based on user studies. In Proceeding of the 16th ACM international Conference on Multimedia (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, October 26 - 31, 2008). MM '08. ACM, New York, NY, 793-796. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1459359.1459489

Watanabe, J., Mochizuki, A., and Horry, Y. 2008. Bookisheet: bendable device for browsing content using the metaphor of leafing through the pages. In Proceedings of the 10th international Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (Seoul, Korea, September 21 - 24, 2008). UbiComp '08, vol. 344. ACM, New York, NY, 360-369. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1409635.1409684

Tags: page-turning interface, e-paper, e-book reader, bend sensor, OUI

Christian Jarrett posted an intriguing research paper summary titled "Forget brainstorming - try brainwriting!".  The review is of Peter A. Heslin's 2009 paper "Better than brainstorming? Potential contextual boundary conditions to brainwriting for idea generation in organizations." published in the Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology.  This study suggests that brainstorming is a process which is well liked by people but is not the most effective in generating many ideas and doesn't compare favourably to people working alone generating ideas.  The paper aims to raise awareness of the brainwriting method and suggests that further studies of the effectiveness of the approach are warranted.  Brainstorming is currently one common method we use in the lab to come up with new ideas and potential projects to work on.  It sounds like this brainwriting approach could be an alternative methodology worthy of a trial run in our lab.

Tags: brainstorming, creativity, psychology

TED2009 themed "The Great Unveiling" is happening now in Long Beach, California.  This is the 25th year of the conference which covers the themes Technology, Education and Design.  This year's program features speakers including Bill Gates and Tim Berners-Lee.  The TED conference is always interesting and the lineup for this year looks impressive.  High definition videos of the talks are released online gradually after the conference ends.  Speakers at past sessions of TED include Stephen Hawking and James Watson.  Attendance at the conference itself is restricted to a very elite group of people with registration costing $6000 USD and an extensive application procedure including multiple essay questions.

Tags: TED, Gates Foundation, Web

The University of Illinois has developed the smallest working fuel cell in the world. This is very neat from my perspective because this is the type of technology which will allow the real world realisation of the prototypes we've been building in the lab.  Battery life and battery inflexibility is a limitation of current technology.  It's an easy thought experiment to imagine a set of fuel cells in a mesh being embedded into fabric or a flexible surface and to see just how much more bendable this setup would be than one with bulky batteries.  There's still some way to go for power output and before manufacturing at scale happens; but, combined with low power flexible displays such as E Ink or OLED this opens up a lot of possibilities.

Tags: fuel cell, OUI, no batteries, eink, OLED

The Lego company, famous for it's toys and innovations in manufacturing and system for letting people build their own custom sets, has begun using augmented reality in some display boxes setup in their retail stores and select toy stores.  It's nice to see industry adopting things we've been using in research labs for a while now.  I suspect they used ARToolkit to build this.  Aside from the "cool" factor this is significant because it demonstrates that there's a market for innovative technologies and interaction paradigms.  Hopefully they find this is an effective marketing device and expand the program further.  I wonder how long it'll be before we see good examples Organic User Interfaces used this way in the wild.

Tags: lego, augmented reality, ARToolkit