Photosynth

Sticking to the Human Computer Interface theme here, I thought I share the following link with you: Photosynth demo. The demo shows new and innovative ways to work with large datasets and is based on two main software components, namely Seadragon and Photosynth. When I watched the demo I immediately had to think about Surface which we talked about previously. I am not sure how and if these projects are connected and whether or not they share some code, but the demos are just sweet :)

I would love to get some hands on experience with either Surface or Photosynth to see how much is reality right now and how much is still vision. I don't want to imply anything here, but for me there was always a slight mismatch between what Microsoft promised and what it delivered in the end ;-)

Surface - the future of human computer interaction?

Actually I am on vacation right now, jumping out of airplanes. If you ever are in Sweden and you want to give it a try check out the Stockholm Skydiving Club in Gryttjom. It's a really great dropzone :)

But as you can see I couldn't resist the temptation to have a quick peek on the net. I am almost ashamed - I do not last for a whole week without access to the internet ;-)

A friend send me a link to Microsoft Surface and I thought I have to pass it on since we talked about human computer interaction before. I am not a big Microsoft fan, but what they show on this site is quite impressive. I cannot wait until these kind of interfaces are available. Just wondering though how they deal with fatty fingers. It seems the days where I could tell everyone off to NOT touch my screen are drawing to an end :)

"...And once you have tasted flight, you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been, and there you long to return..." - Leonardo da Vinci

Bugger - and the next time I want to write something I should FIRST read the other new blog entries since Fredrik is damn fast :)

Freebase - open source taken one step further

I finally got invited to Freebase - yet another open source content web site a la wikipedia. (Meaning user driven content.) So what's new here? Contrary to wikipedia and the web as it is today - information is typed. This is really cool. I added a topic called "Fredrik Rubensson". A topic is what OO people would call an instance. A topic can be of several types - my topic example is both a Person and a Software Developer. Every type come with a set of attributes that are smashed together on the topic page to create a united view. And - of course - every attribute can be related to a type and get its possible value from that. I tried to add Movie as a type - it worked just fine and I got a long list of attributes related to movies. The interface is intuitive and nice to work with. Text fields have auto completion that makes it easy to find types and topics.

Drawbacks? As with wikipedia - my instinctive reaction is - will this really work? It is similar to wikipedia but requires an extra level of analysis from its editors that most people just don't have. The result may be a mess of types and topics. But being normally pessimistic about people I think I will try the contrary this time and just think it will work.

Freebase is still in early alpha version. If you want to join you need to sign up at the homepage
and get invited eventually. Or you may ask me to invite you when I get the chance. The interface suggests that I will have invitations to use later.