Imagine a cookie that changes flavor on the spot or a furry computer display that your stroke when you miss your cat. It might sound like fantasy but visitors to the SIGGRAPH computer graphics and animation conference in Los Angeles. This month have experienced nothing less from the new technologies on display. Here, New scientist brings you some of the extraordinary computer displays on show a preview of how we could interact with computers in the future.
Future on display: the flavor changing cookie
Imagine you could dip your hand in the cookie jar and be guaranteed to pull out whatever flavor you feel like. For cookie lovers visiting the SIGGRAPH computer graphics and animation conference in Los Angeles, this dream was turned into reality.
We are all used to seeing, hearing and increasingly, touching computer displays but there has been little research into how computers can successfully stimulate taste. Part of the problem is that taste is generated by a combination of factors working together, including vision, smell and memories. The university of Tokyo in Japan decided to tackle this problem with a display that exploits several senses. Their testbed? The humble cookie. The device is worn over the users head and can transform the taste of plain cookie to any of seven flavors. It combines augmented reality technology with smells released by an air pump to trick the users senses.
Follow the cookie
To create the effect, the team branded a plain cookie with a distinct logo that the headset track via a built in camera. An air pump sprays out the smell of the chosen cookie, increasing its concentration as the system sees the cookie approaching the wearers nose
Meanwhile a visual display in the headset shows an image of the chosen cookie, suggesting the correct texture for that flavor. That combination of smell and visual texture combine to fool the users sense of taste into thinking they are eating a flavored cookie instead of the plain one.
Future on display: Desk lamp turns table top into 3D
Switching on a lamp is all it takes to turn a table top into an interactive map with this clever display, on show at the SIGGRAPH computer graphics and animation conference in Los Angeles. Multi touch table top displays project content through glass and respond to touch imagine a table sized smartphone screen.
But the National Taiwan University in Taipei wanted to make these types of screens more appealing for multiple users. The idea is that several people could look at the same images and get more information about the areas that interest them. Users viewing an image such as a map projected onto a table top display can zoom in on specific areas seeing street names for example simply by positioning the lamp device over them.
The Lamp is fitted with infrared cameras and can use the hidden markers to compute its position tn three dimensions. It then uses this information to control the projection of high res images onto the correct place on the table top.
Window on 3d
The team have also created a tablet computer which lets viewers see a two dimensional scene in 3d. If you hold the computer over the area of the map you are interested in 3d view of that area will appear on the screen.
The lamp also comes in a handheld flashlight design which Chan thinks could be used with high res scans of paintings in museums. Using the tablet computer to show up areas of a 3D map would allow several users, each with their own tablet to examine and discuss the map at once. This could be useful for the military, when examining a map of unfamiliar territory and discussing strategy.
Future on display: Technology you will want to stroke
Whatever you might expect from the latest computer technology, fur is unlikely to be one of them.
An unusual display at the SIGGRAPH computer graphics and animation conference in Los Angele's this month is all about the senses and uses optical fiber to create a surface that feels furry.
Humans are naturally inclined to stroke furry objects, say Kosude Nakajima from Osaka University, japan and colleagues. so, they say , we will need no instructions to interact with a furry display. The surface of the Fusa2 display is covered with the front of the display, they begin to touch its surface without any suggestions and instructions.
When you stroke the display, it changes color, creation stroke marks. In order to detect the touched area, the fiber optics surface has many infrared LED,Explain Itoh. Underneath the display, half the fibers lead camera and the other half to projector. when a hand strode the fibers, the infrared radiation is reflected and travels down the fibers to the camera.
He believes there are practical applications for a screen that users intuitively want to stroke. Because people are naturally drawn to it.
Future on display: 3D touchscreens made for two
Two of today's most popular technologies, 3D imagery and multi-touch screens, are brought together for the first time in this display.
The images in 3D movies seem to be coming out at you, but trying to touch them would would ruin the illusion, as your hand will pass straight through. Now Jean-Baptiste de la Riviere and colleagues fro Immersion, a visual simulation company based in Bordeaux , France, have at last managed to combine the two technologies into an interactive 3D table-top display.
Better still, two users viewing the same model city at the same time from different sides of the table could each see the 3D effect with the correct perspective for their position. That's because the glasses are wired to position and orientation sensors that track the wearer's gaze and the system uses this information to alter the image accordingly in real time for each user.
users can also interact with the display when they touch it, to zoom in or rotate.
The system makes images that seem to rise above it when a person is simply looking at it. The display knows when a hand is coming near it thanks to infrared sensors.
