tongue vision

Report from ABC news

Mike Ciarciello has been blind since birth but says that in his dreams he can actually see.

"I have had dreams where I have been flying, you know, like in the air. I am not even bumping into any obstacles whatsoever. I am actually free, in my dreams," he said. His dreams are closer to reality than you might imagine. He is about to participate in an experiment in which he will "see" by using his tongue.

At the University of Montreal, researcher Daniel Chabat prepared Ciarciello to walk for the first time through an obstacle course without his cane. Chabat began by mounting a small camera on Ciarciello's forehead. The camera sends electrical impulses about what it sees to a small grid placed on his tongue.

"It's a concept in which you replace a sense that was lost by another one that is there," said Maurice Ptito, the neuropsychologist supervising the study. "They sense the world through their tongue, and that gives them the feeling of seeing. You don't see with your eyes. You see with your brain."

read about the Tongue Vision project

who wants a stylus!

as Steve Jobs says 'who wants a stylus, ughhh'?

Multi-Touch interaction research.
While touch sensing is commonplace for single points of contact, multi-touch sensing enables a user to interact with a system with more than one finger at a time, as in chording and bi-manual operations. Such sensing devices are inherently also able to accommodate multiple users simultaneously, which is especially useful for larger interaction scenarios such as interactive walls and tabletops.

Mobile and wireless

It seems like the wireless and mobile computing world is starting to become, well, mobile and wireless, with new products demoed at Macworld and CES like :
iPhone - Full OS and also wireless connectivity on a portable device. Apple even chooses to rename the company Apple Inc, losing the word 'computer' to reflect the shift in focus
Autonet - wifi for your car
ModBook - a tablet PC with GPS
and gestural/haptic interfaces seem to be merging such as the wii and the pinch gesture on iPhone (see minute 4.40 in the Youtube video for an idea of how this works.)

The telephone box is still alive and well

In this radio programme the presenter, rings telephone boxes, picked at random. A passing stranger picks up a public telephone which is ringing. On the other end of the line is Alan Dein, asking them to tell the story of their life. The conversations that come out of this are fascinating.
There was also a radio programme a few years ago on Resonance FM , where a woman walked theough South London, wheeling her baby in a pram, and simultaneously playing her saxophone. All live. As she came a across a phone box, she gave out the number on air, and asked listeners to ring and talk to her.

All the places I've never visited but my GPS tells me I have

In my latest map, I've extended my boundaries out of Europe to southern Egypt in the south, and fairly far North to Helsinki. I plan to visit the US in spring, so this will truly distort the scale of the drawing.

The map also includes a series of lat/long co-ordinates for places I've never visited (must be an error during a cold start?). These include:

Univisited place A - Lat: 49 09 38,75 N Long: 5 43 35,84 E : on the outskirts of a small village in the South of France called Parfondrupt

Univisited place B -Lat: 48 36 34 N Long: 4 41 08 E : on the N4 road in the south east of France, nearest town Ecriennes

Univisited place C - Lat: 48 33 26 N Long: 4 35 34 E : again in South East France, near a small lake not far from a town called Arrembecourt