What is a Computer? Depends When You Ask
10.26.11 | What is a computer? That question was posed to kids on “Sesame Street” back in the 1980s. While their answers ranged from it’s something you can use to write and make designs to it’s something that helps you to read, most fascinating was how they described the differences between computers and humans.
“People don’t have buttons and a computer does,” said one student. “A computer doesn’t have eyes,” responded another.
Ultimately, the children reached the conclusion that a computer could not think for itself.
It makes you wonder what those kids would make of the work underway at the MIT Media Lab. Here, for instance, is a video of Boxie, described as a “mobile interactive robotic camera built with the goal of actively capturing stories about its environment and the people within it.”
MIT Technology Review recently held its annual Emtech conference on emerging technologies, sparking plenty of gee-whiz coverage. Dan Rowinski writes:
It is hard to keep track of everything that is happening at the MIT Media Lab without being an insider. There are teams working on prosthetic limbs that reduce the impact of missing legs and let a person move around normally. There is a storytelling center looking at new ways to present digital media. There is a camera center that is working on how best to utilize the powerful cameras now attached to every person’s hip via cellphone. There are teams working on creating different densities of material coming through a 3D printer that can make the building blocks of structures with concrete. The innovators behind Rock Band came from the MIT Media Lab. These days, the music group is working on robotic operas.
And remember that comment about people not having buttons? Jon Brodkin of Ars Technica looks at a project called OmniTouch that would likely cause kids to say, “Whoa.”
OmniTouch turns body parts and nearby surfaces into touch interfaces. Users can read and reply to an e-mail by touching their hands or a nearby wall, or even use multiple applications at once on multiple surfaces. The results from a user study “suggest our prototype system approaches the accuracy of conventional, physical touch screens, but on arbitrary, ad hoc surfaces,” the researchers say in a video.
The project is led by Carnegie Mellon student and former Microsoft Research intern Chris Harrison and Microsoft researchers Hrvoje Benko and Andrew Wilson. “We wanted to capitalize on the tremendous surface area the real world provides,” Benko says in a Microsoft research article. “The surface area of one hand alone exceeds that of typical smart phones. Tables are an order of magnitude larger than a tablet computer.”
Continue reading about it and check out the images here.
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