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Youtube:  Through the combining glass

Diego Martinez Plasencia, Florent Berhaut and Sriram Subramanian will present their paper on how semi transparent mirrors blend together the spaces in front and behind them. The paper investigates this further and highlights a whole new range of interactive experiences enabled by it.

In a museum, people in front of a cabinet would see the reflection of their fingers inside the cabinet overlapping the exact same point behind the glass. By directly pointing at the exhibit with their reflection, instead of pointing at them through the glass, people could easily discuss the features of the exhibits with other visitors. Pop-up windows can also show additional information about the pieces being touched.

Combining this approach with different display technologies offers interesting possibilities for interaction systems. By placing a projector on top of the cabinet, fingertips could work as little lamps to illuminate and explore dark and sensitive objects. When a hands reflection cuts through the object, the projections on visitorsí hands could be used to reveal the inside of the object, which would be visible to any user.

We also demonstrated artistic installations that combine this approach with volumetric displays. Musiciansí record loops in their digital mixers and these appear as floating above the digital mixer. Musicians could then grab these representations, to play them or tweak them with different musical effects.

Daniel Schien and Christopher Weeks were part of a group awarded joint first place at the recent Green Hackathon held as part of the ICT4S (ICT for Sustainability) conference in Stockholm.  Spending a day underground at a dismantled nuclear reactor at KTH, the teams competed to develop a project around the theme of “food”.  Britons throw away the equivalent of 6 meals a week, leading to over 7.2 million tonnes of household food waste a year.

The winning project was “Eat Exchange”, an app to allow people to share their not-quite-past-date food with others.  Just about to go on holiday but have a nearly full container of milk in the fridge?  Or maybe you stocked up on a 2 for 1 offering last week, but it’s now about to go out of date?  The app allows you offer the item to a network of trusted friends, family, and neighbours, and get text notifications in return when something is being offered.

Although currently in the design phase, watch this space – perhaps a fully functioning prototype will make its way to ICT4S 2015!

Congratulations to Hannah Limerick whose first paper as a PhD student has been accepted for publication in the journal Frontiers of Human Neuroscience:

• Limerick, H., Coyle, D. & Moore, J.W. (2014). The Experience of Agency in Human-Computer Interactions: A Review. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 8:643. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2014.00643.

Hannah has also given presentations on agency in speech interfaces at two international conferences on cognitive science: ASSC 18 and ICON 2014.

ISMB 2014 has just announced the winner of The Best Artwork Award of this year goes to the ‘supraHex’ by Dr. Hai Fang and Prof. Julian Gough from Department of Computer Science, University of Bristol. Full details of the winner are available here.

The Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) is the world’s largest bioinformatics/computational biology conference. ISMB 2014 was held on Boston, attracting top computational biology researchers from around the world. As part of this annual conference, the Art & Science Exhibition displays images and videos (called ‘artworks’) that are supposed to be results of creative efforts that involve scientific concepts or tools. This exhibition aims to open our eyes and minds, both scientifically and aesthetically.

Based on real-world genome-wide expression data, the artwork ‘supraHex’ is automatically produced by an open-source R/Bioconductor package under the same name. This artwork is inspired by the prevalence of natural objects such as a honeycomb or at Giant’s Causeway, also capturing mechanistic nature of these objects: formation probably in a self-organising manner.

Apart from the artwork itself, the package can do more, outlined as follows: i) the supra-hexagonal map trained via a self-organising learning algorithm; ii) visualisations at and across nodes of the map; iii) partitioning of the map into gene meta-clusters; iv) sample correlation on 2D sample landscape; and

v) overlaying additional data onto the trained map for exploring relationships between input and additional data. It is freely available at http://supfam.org/supraHex.

BIG lab members proudly demonstrated Ultrahaptics at the prestigious Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition as part of ‘The hidden world of ultrasonic waves’. The exhibit is a collaboration with the Department of Mechanical Engineering at University of Bristol and Electromechanical Research group at the University of Southampton.

The Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition is an annual display of the most exciting cutting-edge science and technology in the UK.  This year’s exhibition which ran from 1 to 6 July attracted over 10,000 members of the public and 2,000 school students. The team also presented at the Royal Society’s Evening Soirée which is an invite-only black-tie event for VIPs and distinguished fellows from the Royal Society.