LWF11 - Professor Blake

Professor Blake is the Managing Director of Microsoft Research Cambridge

The speaker talked about Natural User Interfaces. Talked about the development of interfaces:

Green screens and curdles
Mouse
Multiple-touch
No touch!

No touch interaction is here now but mostly in the game world.

An Anybot http://anybots.com/#front - designed to take your place at meetings you can't physically attend. The Anybot mimics you actions as you communicate with the meeting.

There are professional motion capture systems used in industries like Movies and Medicine. High end and expensive. New, cheaper way to capture motion was needed for consumer/game systems. The Kinect uses a 3D camera to separate out the person being captured from the noise in the background. Also need object recognition system to distinguish between the different body parts. (Similar to system in digital cameras that recognize and group faces when focusing. Final component is a synthetic training technology to allow the system to recognize the full range of human forms.

You can also train systems to recognize facial expressions to detect emotion - a surprise spin off from Autism research.

Computing Science is not ICT
Computing Science = intellectual challenge
The UK Needs Computing Sientists - we need Computing in schools.


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