Muscling in
An assortment of folks from Microsoft and academia are working on a muscle-computer gestural interface; the current examples show how you can play Guitar Hero with an air guitar, control your MP3 player while jogging, and open your car door when your hands are full. All units are wired at present, but wireless versions are in the works. Hoping this gets extended to more types of environmental control applications by people who have little or no hand movement.
Etre: Muscle-Computer Interfaces: Play Guitar Hero without a guitar
Beep-beep ‘n’ beep-beep ‘n’ yeah
Usually, there’s no such thing as too quiet…unless we’re talking about hybrid cars, which may not be heard until they get uncomfortably close to a pedestrian. This has long been a concern for blind folks, but given our plugged-in generally-oblivious society, it’s also being acknowledged as a generic issue. To introduce artificial car noise and make it palatable to the owners, manufacturers and sound-effects experts are scrambling to create the automotive equivalent of ring tones, so you can decide what your hallmark sound will be as you steer down the street. We’ll put in our request now for a medley of “Instant Carma” and “Axle’s Theme.”
New York Times: Hybrid Cars May Include Fake Vroom for Safety
Layared look
Layar is billed as the first commercially viable augmented reality service. For Android devices, aim your camera at any location or object that’s been indexed — a fort, a bar, a train station — and information pops onto the screen, with arrows and captions and everything. They’ve got content from Wikipedia and other sources, and claim to have 500 developers working on content and apps. There are some great opportunities here, as we’ve said before, for people with hearing, cognitive or visual disabilities.
Smart Mobs » Blog Archive » Layar Reality Browser 2.0 Launched Globally
Tubal location
If your wireless device has GPS and a compass, this new soon-to-be-an-iPhone-app projects info onto the camera image, showing you how to find the nearest underground station. If you’re in London, that is. Location-aware augmented reality apps like this will open up a new world of guided navigation for people who are blind or disoriented. If they’re in London.
Goaled: finger
We’ve been reporting for ages about how biometrics based only on fingerprint recognition isn’t a universal access solution. This may affect a larger population than seems obvious; turns out a particular cancer drug has the long-term side effect of literally peeling off the patient’s fingerprints. International travelers using the drug are being cautioned to “carry a doctor’s note when they travel to the United States,” but we’d rather see an emphasis on multi-option systems such as the one at the San Jose airport.
Finding your direction
One of our rare-but-irresistable DIY postings: a haptic compass that activates one of twelve motors to indicate the location of north relative to where the wearer is headed, and has the option of hooking up to an iPhone to provide destination information. Obvious applications for blind people, but let’s not forget those of us sighted folks who can’t even locate where west is during a sunset.
Has a Ford driven you lately?
Starting in 2010, Ford will be introducing cars that can maneuver themselves into a parallel park, although the driver will still need to control the transmission, gas, and brake. A sensor system will provide visible or audio indicators about proximate objects, including those in the driver’s blind spot. This should be of particular interest to the large and growing number of older drivers.