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Author Topic: The Leap - A Minority Report-style computer interface done right?  (Read 16872 times)
WaspKiller
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« on: May 21, 2012, 01:32:34 PM »

About the technology:
http://live.leapmotion.com/about/

A demonstration:
http://leapmotion.com/
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RMF
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« Reply #1 on: May 29, 2012, 01:57:07 PM »

Somehow I believe your hands will be incredibly tired at the end of the day... I don't even like touchscreens, let alone this, or GOD a Wii.
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grey matter
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« Reply #2 on: May 29, 2012, 02:16:40 PM »

http://youtu.be/A22JB7xrzAE?t=6m
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WaspKiller
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« Reply #3 on: May 29, 2012, 07:15:55 PM »



Oh you're a cheeky one.  Let's hope that post was in jest and not a true Luddite inclination.
« Last Edit: May 29, 2012, 07:32:18 PM by WaspKiller » Logged



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WaspKiller
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« Reply #4 on: May 29, 2012, 07:21:48 PM »

Somehow I believe your hands will be incredibly tired at the end of the day...


You might not be old enough to know this... but they said the same thing when texting first came to phones.  Never underestimate human adaptability especially to anything that has the potential to be addictive.  Besides, Italians and Latinos (yes, I am making a generalization) are extremely expressive with their hands from the time they wake up until they go to bed and yet somehow they persist in their daily gesticulations.
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« Reply #5 on: May 30, 2012, 01:08:04 AM »

I think this will cause a lot of RSI-like complaints in peoples shoulders. Gesturing in front of a display for a few minutes might be nice and intuitive, but I think lifting your arms without support for about eight hours every day will put a lot of strain on your shoulders (just like with people who use a mouse without resting their arm on the desk). Rotator cuff tears like a boss conductor...
« Last Edit: May 30, 2012, 01:49:32 AM by 7 » Logged

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GrosBedo
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« Reply #6 on: June 03, 2012, 05:50:00 AM »

@7: following your reasoning, then sport should be harmful to humans too, right?

RSI is when the same gesture is overly replicated. With this kind of device, it should be possible to design various gestures to do different things.

So for gaming: clearly no, the Gorilla arms effect will take over the benefits of this device.

For other usage: clearly better than a mouse, which produce RSI problems already. Better than a touchpad? Not sure about it, but if it works on any screen, then hell yeah, that's a great device.

Also, the Touché device is quite promising:
http://www.disneyresearch.com/research/projects/hci_touche_drp.htm
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« Reply #7 on: June 05, 2012, 06:07:21 AM »

I think the number of gestures that can be differentiated by the hardware (and the brains wetware) is limited, so I figure you'd be repeating a limited number of gestures over and over for hours on end. I don't know about sports, but musical conductors have been suffering injuries caused by exactly this sort of movement for ages.
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« Reply #8 on: June 06, 2012, 11:13:25 AM »

7, I think your analogy to Music Conductors is a bit off.

Owing to the nature of the type of music that they conduct, whether operatic, marching band or other, conductors have to make dramatic forceful gestures.  Moreover these gestures then come to sudden emphatic stops or make joint wrenching directional changes that would cause much more stress than required for normal computer activities or even the kind of activities demonstrated in the video that accompanied the 1st post.
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« Reply #9 on: June 07, 2012, 11:11:01 AM »

Well, conductors use both arms differently (the hand with the baton to indicate beat/tempo, the other hand to indicate dynamics and for cueing) so the strain is different too, but that's not my point. My point is that just like with using a mouse, it's the long hours of repetitive movement combined with a wrong posture (or technique) that does the damage; not the force or speed of the movement in itself.

With very forceful or rapid movement you'd expect muscle or even tendon tears by the shear force applied, while with repetitive 'soft' movement you'd expect damage caused by rubbing tendons against other tissues and/or carpal tunnel-like syndromes caused by pressure on nerves in or near the afflicted joints.

Mind you I don't think everyone's arms are going to come off or something drastic like that, it's more that gesturing is just another primitive/physical/indirect way of inputting data into computers and just like with other physical means, hardcore users run a certain risk of physical damage. Now what would really interest me would be a direct brain/computer interface, and I'd be willing to take some mean headaches in experimenting with that... Wink
« Last Edit: June 07, 2012, 11:39:24 AM by 7 » Logged

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GrosBedo
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« Reply #10 on: June 13, 2012, 03:11:54 PM »

Indeed what is promising with these new human-computer interfaces is the possibility to add many different gestures, and even the possibility to make variations (eg: to slide your photos you could either move your whole arm or just rotate 2 fingers to the right/left, etc..).

But of course, if there is only a limited set of recognized gestures, it won't be a lot better than mouse and keyboard.
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« Reply #11 on: June 14, 2012, 06:57:17 AM »

There are new developments in brain/computer interfaces also, a fuel cell on a silicon chip that runs directly on glucose from the hosts body (so no batteries needed). They're talking about neural prosthetics, but if a chip can interface with the brain to control a prosthetic limb that implies it can control a computer also.

Quote
Sarpeshkar’s group has worked on all aspects of implantable brain-machine interfaces and neural prosthetics, including recording from nerves, stimulating nerves, decoding nerve signals and communicating wirelessly with implants. One such neural prosthetic is designed to record electrical activity from hundreds of neurons in the brain’s motor cortex, which is responsible for controlling movement. That data is amplified and converted into a digital signal so that computers — or in the Sarpeshkar team’s work, brain-implanted microchips — can analyze it and determine which patterns of brain activity produce movement.

So what I wrote in my last post is not as far out as many of you might think...
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GrosBedo
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« Reply #12 on: June 14, 2012, 08:40:27 AM »

@7: If by "direct brain/computer control" you mean being able to move the mouse by just thinking about motor sensations, yes that's possible. However the technology is still fairly basic and you cannot yet bind "fine motor movements" (such as when you're moving your fingers to write on paper or type on keyboard), and it's not yet possible to bind as many movements you can as with a prosthetic arm (because with this technic doctors directly "attach" human's nerves to the prosthetic mechanics, it's not the same at all as decoding the brain functionning, which is a lot more cryptic).

We are still far from controlling directly the computer with the brain in the real sense, meaning by binding real thoughts (and not only motor sensory areas) and converts them to computer's actions (and anyway our computers still don't possess any software that would make good use of that possibility, our two hands are already enough :p Maybe when ZUI will be implemented?).

But personally I think that even if we are far from completely decoding and understanding the brain, we will relatively soon see breakthrough technologies that will change the way computers interact with the brain and inversely, like the Matrix-style effortless learning.
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« Reply #13 on: June 14, 2012, 11:04:56 AM »

Quote
it's not yet possible to bind as many movements you can as with a prosthetic arm (because with this technic doctors directly "attach" human's nerves to the prosthetic mechanics, it's not the same at all as decoding the brain functionning, which is a lot more cryptic)

Well the doctors would connect a brain/computer interface directly to your nerve endings also. The brain is hugely adaptive, so after a while it would interpret the connection as an "extra limb to control", and you wouldn't have to do a lot of brain signal-decoding  because the brain would adapt its output to gain motor control of the "virtual limb". This is not science fiction but has been achieved experimentally in monkeys already, and better still it's a two-way experiment so the monkeys weren't only able to use their virtual limbs to move simulated objects in a computer, but also to feel the texture of the simulated objects.

Watch a monkey move its virtual arm to touch virtual objects and select the right one by sense of touch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTTTwvjCa5g
« Last Edit: June 14, 2012, 11:20:33 AM by 7 » Logged

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GrosBedo
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« Reply #14 on: June 14, 2012, 08:58:57 PM »

Decoding the brain is not the same than reprogramming the brain. Indeed there are already a lot of experimental devices to reprogram a section of the brain to another cognitive function (potentially more useful for the person). And it already works on humans.

For example, Tongue Vision aims to convert the gustative cognitive region to a vision region. There's also a similar device but using auditive regions instead of gustative.

So here, we force the brain to adapt, we don't really control what's happening nor fully understand. But I agree, it turns out this works quite well already.

And thank's for the link, I didn't know about this experiment, quite inspiring.
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