A quick and final post about SIGGRAPH, before all memories of it fade… Here is a run-down of some of the other interesting applications I enjoyed, some of which relate to collaboration:

  • Shared Design Space: a collaborative, tabletop, augmented-reality application, for sharing documents, sketching, brainstorming, anything! It was amazingly intuitive and interesting to use. You interact with the tabletop with a pen which knows its exact position on the table from tiny grey dots on the projection screen's surface. Using the pen, you can draw, arrange photos, annotate digital content, and share screen views with others around the table. The pen is able to interact with any piece of this special dotted paper, so the interaction doesn't have to be only on screens, but can also be tangible objects such as physical “paint trays” that can act as toolbars would in a desktop app. They had a really nice implementation of pick & drop and translation and rotation of objects,. This is work done at Upper Austria University of Applied Sciences Digital Media and they have other interesting projects listed at their Office of Tomorrow website.
  • Mixed Reality Interfaces: an application where digital contents are being easily controlled with tangible objects. For example, a 3D model of a car can be viewed on a screen from different angles and with different lighting through the manipulation of a toy car, a toy light source, and a toy camera that you move around a physical space. It was immediately very intuitive to use which I liked. This is a product designed by the company KOMMERZ in Austria.
  • DanceDanceDance: a game like Dance Dance Revolution, but full body motion required. When playing, you see a silhouette of the position you should be in and then you see your own silhouette for comparison. The more poses you get right, the better you do. The dance moves are somewhat like Y-M-C-A and it was pretty fun to play. Thankfully, they set up their booth so that the person playing was in a relatively private corner of the convention floor, limiting the complete embarrassment factor. See a video of it in use at Siggraph. The research is being done in the Department of Computer Science & Information Engineering at National Taiwan University, but I can't find an official website. Here's an article in the New Scientist Tech
  • Invisible, the Shadow Chaser: this is totally Ghostbusters. One person has a spotlight for searching for goblins and the other person wears a backpack with a vacuum hose for sucking up the goblins. It was totally fun and definitely a collaborative activity. This work is being done at the Image Processing Lab, Nara Institute of Science & Technology in Japan.

  • Fabcell: a multi-colored fabric that changes colors when a current is sent through it. This fabric was amazing to watch, as it changed from black to red to orange to green to a vibrant blue. Its colors were like a mood ring's, transitioning towards blue as more current (or heat) was applied to it. This was developed at the Keio Univeristy Media Design Program in Japan.