French juggler Lindzee Poi is a wizard who basically turns a set of juggling rings into a mind warping finger dance. Poi is so fluid that your mind really thinks the rings are moving on their own. I love it when my brain can’t process what’s in front of it.
Juggling might be the most fun useless skill to have. People who can’t juggle see it as some impossible trick while those who have mastered the skill can see through the flying orb planets as some easy math problem. Just check out the view from a juggler’s perspective. For me, a non-juggler, it looks like the ball is going to smack me in the face. For the guy in the video? It ain’t no thang.
I don’t think I am as good at anything as these guys are at juggling. Seriously, like not even walking or sleeping or eating or brushing my teeth. They’re so good at throwing multiple random objects in the air and then catching it perfectly that they must be able to use their minds to control inanimate objects. Or be able to freeze time. It’s truly impressive.
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It’s entirely possible for robots to juggle or play catch. They’ve usually been relegated to playing with their own kind, however, which is as good an excuse as any for Disney Research to experiment with a ball-tossing robot tailored to games with humans. The animatronic creation uses a depth-aware motion camera — there’s conflicting mentions of using both the Microsoft Kinect and ASUS’ Xtion Pro Live that we’re hoping to sort out — to track any mid-air balls as well as throw them back to a human participant. Disney’s robot does more than just move the robot’s arm to account for imperfect tosses, too, as it knows to feign a dejected look after a botched reception. The company suggests that its invention would ideally bring two-way interaction to theme parks, so it’s more likely to show up at Disneyland before it stands in for a parent in the backyard. It’s just as well; when the Robopocalypse comes, the last thing we’ll want at home is a machine that can toss grenades.
Update: Team member Jens Kober has filled us in on just why both cameras are mentioned. The team started off using the Kinect and switched to the Xtion Pro Live, once it was available, to get hardware-synced timing between a regular camera and the depth camera. The project didn’t require the panning motor or microphone array of Microsoft’s system.
Filed under: Robots, Microsoft, ASUS
Via: Gizmodo
Source: Popular Science
Everyone’s let it happen at some point — that moment where we’re desperately trying to use our smartphones in one hand while juggling groceries or coffee in the other. There’ll be no way to recover those social graces, but six researchers at the University of Calgary have developed a software technique, Fat Thumb, that should at least keep the contortions and dropped phones to a minimum. As the name implies, it’s all based around pressure: a light touch performs the usual commands, while squishing the thumb’s wider surface area against the screen allows the equivalent of a multi-touch gesture, such as a pinch to zoom. The advantages for comfort and grip virtually speak for themselves; what’s surprising is that Fat Thumb may well be faster than other one-handed gestures. Work on the project is so far confined to a research paper stemming from experiments with an iPhone, although it’s easy to see this spreading to other platforms and real products before too long. Catch a glimpse of the cleverness in action after the break.
University of Calgary’s Fat Thumb trick allows one-handed phone use, jugglers are thankful (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 05 Jul 2012 04:23:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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