Future of Humans and Computers

In August issue of Computing Now:

• BCI, Virtual Reality, and Videogames: gives an excellent summary of leading edge research in Brain Computer Interfaces, allowing humans to control computers with their brains directly via ECG electrodes (one or more).
• 3D Social Virtual Worlds: gives an excellent summary of the breadth of human activities occurring in 3D virtual worlds such as Second Life and points out the many questions that require research for better undstanding, from how virtual appearance could affect virtual sales of real objects, to legal responsibilities in virtual world, etc.

Audio and Video over Cat5

Looks like it is possible to use one twisted pair for each of L and R audio and the Video channels, over about 50′, with acceptable degradation. This means 3 of the 4 for a CAT5 cable, so that leaves one pair for a phone line or IR signal.

See for instance http://www.digitalhome.ca/forum/showthread.php?t=73338

PC VGA to TV over wireless

Device type called “PC2TV”. Main features:

• must be wireless,
• accept VGA input,
• input at UXGA resolution (1600×1200)
• no drivers needed to use it

Note that very different from Digital Media Streamers which allow TV to display video, photos and music that are stored on a computer accessible via your LAN or WLAN. Also contrast to USB VGA extenders; pluging that into your PC basically adds an external graphics card to your PC, allowing you to extend or mirror your desktop to the display attached at the other end of the USB VGA device. However, one major limitation with USB VGA: no hardware acceleration, so that playing games on your PC and showing on TV is not an options. So PC2TV has a major advantage over a USB VGA device in that it just takes the video output from the builtin graphics card of your PC and transmits it; all capabilities of your graphics card, such as OpenGL acceleration, etc, are already in the signal transmitted, perfect!

So far only two vendors make wireless PC2TV:

• GrandTec USA GWB-4000 “Grand Ultimate Wireless” http://www.smarthome.com/7743B/Wireless-VGA-TV-Converter-GWB-4000/p.aspx
• Kworld “PlusTV Wireless” http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3557002&CatId=1430

Only the GrandTec meets the requirements since Kworld doesn’t go higher than 1024×768 input resolution. But Kworld comes with a remote, which allows to select tranmission channel, useful is signal has interference from other devices. Not sure if it would be possible to use several Kworld devices to stream to several receivers, as there doesn’t seem to be channel selection button on each device (transmitter and receiver) like there is on GWB-4000 system.

Web Conferencing: DimDim v5, short review

DimDim is a web conferencing tool. Its capabilities and pricing scheme are appealing, having the ability to present to up to 20 people, record, not require software installation, etc. The paid version (Pro) is still very affordable and improves performance and security.

I gave DimDim a test run and found that in practice, it would not be very useful to my team, in its current form. Web conferencing should involve the seamless integration of following:

1. sharing presenter’s desktop,
2. sharing audio and video playing on presenter’s desktop
3. sharing microphone of all attendants (so everyone can be heard)
4. ability to switch presenters
5. easy to setup so no firewall config, apps to download etc
6. ability to give control of desktop to any attendant to move mouse and/or keyboard
7. recording of all meeting activity of whole meeting at full resolution, regardless of change of presenters
8. encryption of all communications
9. good performance so that lag/latency minimal

I would NOT expect a free application to do #8 and 9, and perhaps not the “full resolution” aspect of #7. But DimDim, while it does #1 to #5 quite well, doesn’t seem to support #6 or #7 in any useful way in any of its versions. That could possibly be fine for the free version, but not for the Pro version. None of the DimDim versions appear to support #6, and for #7, recording is at a low resolution, only shows screen (chat is separate), and only for one presenter; so if presenter changes during meeting, the recording must be stopped, started on another machine and… it can’t be started again on the first presenter’s machine because only one recording is allowed! It was also impossible to scroll the playback to a couple minutes from the end of the meeting but this might have been performance related (I was using free account) so I’ll ignore that problem.

For DimDim to be used as a web conferencing tool, rather than just a presentation tool, the recording should show whose desktop is being displayed, the list of attendees at all times, and the chat window being updated as the meeting takes place, and all audio spoken should be heard. Those, rather than corporate branding and other fluff, should be the focus of future development.

DimDim looks good, but I look forward to seeing if new versions will support the above before I can make real use of it. I would be willing to spend a couple $100 a year for that tool if it had those features because the rest seems to be well thought out.

Touchscreen Add-ons for Displays

From http://www.touchscreens.com/products-addon.html:

Touchscreen Add-ons
for Monitors and Notebooks

Very handy when you already have the screen, price in spring 2009 is around $200 for a 15″ display and $300 for a 19″.