With the ingress in the market of products like Nintendo Wii, Apple iPhone and Microsoft Kinect, developers finally started realizing that there are several ways a person can control a computer besides keyboards, mice and touch screens. These days there are many alternatives, obviously based on hardware sensors, and the main difference is the dependency on software computation. In facts solutions based on computer-vision (like Microsoft Kinect) rely on state of the art software to analyze pictures captured by one or more cameras.
If you are interested on the technical side of it, I recommend to have a look to the following projects: Arduino, Processing and OpenFrameworks. Usage with Ubuntu
During a small exploration we did internally few months ago, we thought about how Ubuntu could behave if it was more aware of its physical context. Not only detecting the tilt of the device (like iPhone apps) but also analysing the user’s presence.
This wasn’t really a new concept for me, in 2006 I experimented with a user proximity sensitive billboard idea. I reckon there is a value on adapting the content of the screen based on the distance with who is watching it.
We came up with few scenarios which are far to be developed and specified, hopefully will just open some discussions or, even better, help to start some initiatives. Lean back fullscreen
If the user moves further from the screen while a video is playing on the focused window, the video will go automatically to fullscreen. Fullscreen notifications
If the user is not in front of the screen, the notifications could be shown at fullscreen so the user can still read them from a different location. Windows parallax
Since this is the year of 3D screens, we couldn’t omit a parallax effect with the windows. A gesture of the user could also trigger the launcher appearance (see prototype below). Prototype
With few hours available, I mock up something very quickly in Processing using a face recognition library (computer-vision).
Despite it could be hard to detect the horizontal position of the user’s head without a camera, we are in no way defining the technology required. The proximity could be in-facts detected with infra-red or ultra-sound sensors.
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En la caja ponia: Requiere Windows XP o superior... por eso instale Linux. http://www.nixlife.com.ar
Desde Canonical nos llegan interesantes prototipos que podrían llegar a implementarse en Ubuntu en un futuro. Una de las ideas más interesantes, sugiere que el sistema detecte los gestos del usuario mediante una webcam y permita saber si el individuo está cerca (o no) de la pantalla de la computadora.
Esta técnica permitiría implementar nuevos tipos de acciones relacionadas con el contexto, como por ejemplo:
Si el usuario se recuesta hacia atrás en su silla y en ese momento se está visualizando un vídeo, el sistema lo reproducirá automáticamente a pantalla completa.
Si el usuario se aleja del equipo, todas las notificaciones que lleguen (mensajería, descargas de archivos, etc.) se mostrarán a pantalla completa. La idea se basa en que si el usuario no se ha alejado demasiado del equipo, con este sistema todavía tendría la posibilidad de ver las notificaciones correspondientes a una cierta distancia.
Activar efectos de paralaje de las ventanas mediante los gestos del usuario.
Los chicos de Canonical ya han iniciado una línea de investigación este sentido, y ya podemos ver las primeras imágenes de esta funcionalidad (algo primitiva todavía) en el siguiente vídeo: