Posts

I’m excited and happy to be one of few non-Japanese researchers to receive a JST Presto (Sakigake) project grant, on the Topic Open Collective Eyewear.

It’s a strange feeling to have UbiComp and ISWC so close to my home. Amazing organization and impressive research and meeting old friends.

back @ this year’s CHI 2016. We just have 3 Late Breaking Work submissions accepted and it seems they are currently for free download at the ACM website

We took a risk in organizing the Eyewear Computing Seminar as we deviated largely from the standard model, yet I believe it payed off.

It felt nice to be back in Kansai for the biggest conferences in my field.

Overall very pleasant and inspiring event, nice to see some old friends and meet new ones.

I'm impressed mostly by the Hacking/Making Studios and the interactivity/demo exhibits. Siggraph is my new favorite research conference.

Katsutoshi Masai, one of my Master students had the idea to track facial expressions using low cost sensors in glasses. Quite nice work ;)

I’m getting more and more fascinated by augmenting Blind Soccer. After 3 blind soccer trainings, we had now a couple of meetings to discuss how to extend and enhance the play experience.

For me there are 3 interesting points about blind soccer:

1. It’s very hard to learn. Can we make it easier for blind people to learn it? If you can play it, it’s very fast and empowering. We train with a soccer player from the Japanese national team. He plays better than me without being blind folded (ok … that’s maybe not really an achievement, I’m terrible at soccer).
2. Can we make it easier for seeing people learn blind soccer and in turn understand more about the blind and improve their hearing skills?
3. Can we level the playing field making it possible for blind and seeing to play together using tech?

However, the most interesting point, I think blind soccer can teach us that “disability” is a question of definition and the environment.

If you can play it, it’s very fast and empowering. We train with a soccer player from the Japanese national team. He plays better than me without being blind folded (ok … that’s maybe not really an achievement, I’m terrible at soccer).

The biggest take-away for me, I rely too much on vision to make sense of my environment. The training made me more aware of sounds. I find myself to listen more and more. Sometimes in a train on the street etc., I now close my eyes and explore the environment just by sound. It’s fascinating how much we can hear. This opened a new world for me. Looking into it more, I believe sound is an underestimated modality for augmented and virtual realities, which is worth exploring more. I stumbled over a couple of papers about sonic interface design. Looking forward to applying some of the findings we get out of the blind soccer use case to our lives ;)

If I have some more time, I’ll write a bit more about the training and the ideathlons we did so far. In the mean time, I recommend you try it sometime (if you are near Tokyo, you can maybe also join our sessions).

Here are the video and slides from my talk. Hope you like it. Please if you have some critique write me a mail.

I got tremendous, positive feedback. Thanks a lot! Even Heise had a news post about it. http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/31C3-Mit-smarten-Brillen-das-Gehirn-ausforschen-2507482.html (Although I cannot and don’t want to read your thoughts, as the article implies ;-) ).

Video on Youtube:

Slides on Speakerdeck:

I got mixed some feedback on twitter. Some people mentioned that I’m working on spy wear helping the surveillance state… I believe that the research I do is necessary to be out in the open for the society to discuss the merits and problems. I want to make sure that we can maximise the benefit for the individual for the tech I develop and minimize abuse from military, companies and governments. Please contact me if you want to discuss privacy issues or found concrete problems with my work.

Finally, I have a little time to write about the congress. As the last couple of years, I attended the 31st Chaos Communication Congress between Christmas and New Year.

Here’s my talk selection in random order (I definitely forgot some as I haven’t watched all):

The Machine to be Another great research and talk. Mesmerizing, I’m thinking about how to use this effect for my work ;)

From Computation to Consciousness. Nice “Philosopy” talk by Joscha.

Rocket Science David Madlener gives a nice, entertaining intro in why it’s important to go to space and how to build rockets.

Why are computers so @#!*, and what can we do about it?.

Traue keinem Scan, den du nicht selbst gefälscht hast In German, yet I think there’s a translation. Extremely funny, hope the translation captures it.

Don’t watch the keynote. I wonder who picked the speaker … terrible.

This year, I spent a substantial amount with at the Food Hacking Base. Interesting talks. I’m thinking more and more to do some research in this direction. Especially after I listened to the new Resonator Podcast about the connection between our gut and our brain (recording is unfortunately in German).