The Mozilla Foundation is supporting high-speed Internet access by awarding grants to development projects taking advantage of existing fiber infrastructure that offers data rates of at least 1 Gbit per second. The organization is giving $300,000 in grants of between $5,000 and $30,000 each to software projects based in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Kansas City, Kansas, via the Mozilla Gigabit Community Fund. The fund is also backed by the US National Science Foundation and US Ignite, an organization that fosters the creation of next-generation Internet applications. Grant recipients must be working on real-life open source applications for gigabit networks that they want to turn into viable pilot projects. Successful projects are expected to support education, learning and/or workforce development in the community. (WIRED)(Mozilla)(National Science Foundation)(Mozilla Gigabit Community Fund)
Friday, March 14, 2014
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Tactile glove provides subtle guidance to objects in vicinity
Finding an object from a complex real-world scene is a common yet time-consuming and frustrating chore. What makes this task complex is that humans' pattern recognition capability reduces to a serial one-by-one search when the items resemble each other.
Researchers from the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT and the Max Planck Institute for Informatics have developed a prototype of a glove that uses vibration feedback on the hand to guide the user's hand towards a predetermined target in 3D space. The glove could help users in daily visual search tasks in supermarkets, parking lots, warehouses, libraries etc.
The main researcher, Ville Lehtinen of HIIT, explains "the advantage of steering a hand with tactile cues is that the user can easily interpret them in relation to the current field of view where the visual search is operating. This provides a very intuitive experience, like the hand being 'pulled' toward the target."
The solution builds on inexpensive off-the-shelf components such as four vibrotactile actuators on a simple glove and a Microsoft Kinect sensor for tracking the user's hand. The researchers published a dynamic guidance algorithm that calculates effective actuation patterns based on distance and direction to the target.
In a controlled experiment, the complexity of the visual search task was increased by adding distractors to a scene. "In search tasks where there were hundreds of candidates but only one correct target, users wearing the glove were consistently faster, with up to three times faster performance than without the glove," says Dr. Antti Oulasvirta from Max Planck Institute for Informatics.
Dr. Petteri Nurmi from HIIT adds: "This level of improvement in search performance justifies several practical applications. For instance, warehouse workers could have gloves that guide them to target shelfs, or a pedestrian could navigate using this glove. With the relatively inexpensive components and the dynamic guidance algorithm, others can easily build their own personal guidance systems."
The research paper will be presented at the 25th ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology UIST'12 in Boston, MA, USA on 7/10 October, 2012.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Helsingin yliopisto (University of Helsinki), via AlphaGalileo.
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