Bedside table serves as Twitter interface
An art project recently displayed in Saint-Etienne, France, has an interesting interface: it uses a bedside table with a scanner built into its drawer. Place a photo (or a handwritten note?) into the drawer, and the image is automatically scanned and sent to Twitter. Could be a low-effort social networking strategy for people with limited movement.
Dude, where’s my mouse?
MIT has come up with a prototype for an invisible mouse. You cup and move your hand as you would with a standard mouse, but instead of a physical piece of plastic, there’s a camera and light source that track your movement. To click, just press on the table. Potentially useful for people who have difficulty with grasping.
Diminished Reality
We’ve covered augmented reality interfaces, where a video image is superimposed with additonal content, such as the history of a building your camera is pointed at. Now researchers at the Technische Universität in Ilmenau, Germany are going the other way — removing objects from the camera’s output, in real time. This might work well as a wayfinding interface for people with low vision or cognitive disabilities. Imagine a street scene with all the signs still there, but none of the bustling, distracting people. Like a 10 megapixel neutron bomb.
Gizmodo: Magic Software Eliminates Objects From Reality Itself
Digital measurements
The Smart Finger prototype is essentially a gesture-based system for measuring short distances. Put the paired devices on two of your fingers, and they’ll give you a readout indicating the measurement in either metric or U.S. units. Has the potential to be a good strategy for people with dexterity disabilities; could be helpful to people with visual or cognitive disabilities if what seems to be a large-print display were also high-contrast, and if there were an audio output option as well.
Eye control by earphones
NTT DoCoMo has come up with prototype earphones that can detect eye movements — without a camera — and send commands to phones, media players, etc. Your eye-rolling teen may just be doing homework. If this gets commercialized, people with extremely impaired dexterity may have a new, low-cost option for computer input, environmental control, and more.
Eye-controlled earphones let you pick up phone calls with a glance
There’s no mouse like…no mouse?
We’ve been used to the mouse for some time; grab it and move your hand to navigate a cursor around the screen. But what if a computer could just track your hand instead? Enter Mouseless, a prototype infrared system that directly interprets hand movements for cursor control; wonderful for people whose dexterity makes grasping difficult. You still have to tap your index finger on the table to click, though, which begs the question of whether a different finger or even a different strategy could be assigned.
Gizmodo: First the mouse, then Mighty Mouse, then Magic Mouse and now the Invisible Mouse
Buddy system
We’ve written before about automated Twitter messages as a communication strategy, but most examples were either hacks or left little leeway for consciously choosing a desired message. Enter Buddy Radio, a simple device currently being tested with elders by the UK’s National Health Service. Turning the dial sends one of several messages indicating the user’s mood–not clear whether this is preprogrammed or personalizable. Apparently it works not only with Twitter, but also with Facebook, email, and so on. It’s currently being evaluated as a signaling system; off-site family, friends, and other message recipients would presumably be able to interpret when a user needs some type of intervention services. But we have cause to wish it were commercially available now so that people in hospice, recovering from serious injury, etc., would have a nearly effortless way to just provide brief but treasured messages to their circles.