life = life; kludge = workaround
An excellent example of the life enhancing benefits of life kludging.
Randy “N0M4D” Fitzgerald, is a tournament gamer born with a rare muscle & joint disability called Arthrogryposis and uses a custom modded x-box controller.
iPhone Hacks blog has the low down on the problems of styluses on capacitive touch screens in a post titled New Apple Patent Talks about Stylus for Capacitive Touch Screens.
The relevant bit:
According to the inventors, modern day capacitive touch sensors are not optimized to receive inputs from styluses. This is because, unlike a finger input, the small tip of the stylus can often get in contact with a region that is in between adjacent touch sensors hindering normal usage. In order to solve this, the stylus shall come with a conductive disk that will enable sufficient electrical interaction with at least one of the adjacent touch sensors.
The Whamberry is great mini keyboard/input pad that connects to your computer simply with a USB plug-in dongle. It is wireless and can be used more than 30 feet (10m) away from your computer.
You can control the cursor using the touch-pad that is built-in or type with the full keyboard. The size of the Whamberry means it is small and light weight enough to carry with you and can be held in the hand or used as a complete input device if movement is limited.
The device is recharged using a provided USB cable. There is no installation needed, simply plug in the USB key to your computer and the Whamberry is ready to use.
I was unable to find specifications to ascertain what type of touch pad it uses so am not sure if it will work with a stylus/mouthstick or only a finger.
Mouse parts mounted on a glove.
This is interesting as alternate input is can’t grasp a mouse. You only need to place your hand on any surface and start mousing.
[via hackaday]
Interesting article on Computerworld talks about the emergence of open-source hardware and the ways it seems to be moving towards more mainstream acceptance.
Open-source hardware developments offer great hope and advantages for the adaptive technology field where there is not a huge mass market need and such specialisation and individualised needs exist.
Here’s a snippet synopsis.
Could the same philosophy — the free and public dissemination of underlying code and specs, with multiple developers from disparate sources contributing to the design — work for tech gadgets as well? Will we one day commonly use smartphones, netbooks or other gadgets that have been developed under an open-source model, maybe even preferring them over proprietary products like the iPhone?
.. the idea of organizing an open-source project online to build a device isn’t far-fetched, nor is it one that requires millions in start-up funding.
“Open source is about commoditization,” [Mark Driver, a Gartner analyst who specializes in open source] says. “These products are taking a market where there really isn’t a lot of concrete differentiation … between what’s out there and providing an alternative, which is exactly what open source does right. Linux got wildly popular not because it did something new; it’s because it did what Unix did, but did it in a much more open fashion.”
Image: ‘setup waterfigures with color injector‘ by fotoopa
There’s always going to be different options required for alternative input devices according to differing abilities.
So it’s great to see the research and experimentation going on around this area, mostly driven I suspect by the need for different control of mobile technologies.
Here’s one using acoustics of taps on the body.
[via: Make - Skinput: projecting a UI onto your own body
]
Thought: Feedback can be turned to alternative input if inverted.
Fabian Hemmert does research through and about design and creates projects like shape-changing-mobiles, weight-shifting-mobiles, breathing and pulsating ambient-life mobile device feedback.
The mobile concepts are designed to provide different feedback mechanisms that are physical.
I’ve often written about the importance of feedback when operating all manner of devices and manipulation the environment for those with disabilities to compensate for a loss or lack of some ability.
The interesting thing about some of these projects that hit me is that maybe if you inverse the ideas behind these feedback projects you could actually change their function and use them as different, alternate input devices.
Just a thought.
One project that does have this “input” focus more was the basis of his thesis which involved closing your eyes to enrich your visual media [eyesclosed.org].
[via Making Digital Content on the Mobile Phone Physically Graspable - information aesthetics]
Touchco was a New York company that, according to it’s now closed website title, was developing “IFSR* multi-touch resistive sensors”. It has now reportedly ben bought by Amazon.
The impressive thing about this technology is this.
“Unlike the more common and more expensive capacitive touchscreens, Touchco-equipped screens can be used with a stylus as easily as a finger, are sensitive to different levels of pressure, and can detect an unlimited number of simultaneous touch points.”
[Amazon reportedly gets its hands on touchscreen tech for Kindle | Good Morning Silicon Valley]
[Hat tip @ccarfi]
*Interpolating Force-Sensitive Resistance technology [link]
Last year I captured this video, and has been on my youtube channel, yet seems I never posted it here.
iTouch iStick iKludge
From: lifekludger | August 10, 2009
The iTouch/iPhone needs skin so it doesn’t work with my mouthstick. In this video I show use by running copper wire down the stick from mouth. Contact to the device is using a pogo stylus. Taping the stylus to the stick and the wire to the stylus with sticky tape, the wire conducts whatever it is in my skin that the iTouch needs.
This kludge was an experiment and is not very serviceable and therefore unsatisfactory as an end solution.
The video alsio shows the lack of ability to perform the pinch gesture to zoom in and out when only having one point of contact.
For more of the ongoing “Touch Barrier” issues see these past posts.
Meanwhile, over at the ATMac blog is a good post on the way one person’s overcome the ‘Touch Barrier’, based on my mouthstick experiments.
I’m concerned about the way the pervasive use of (capacitive) touch on all manner of devices is causing increased inaccessibility to those who can not use their hands. In essence we are seeing the options decreasing that are available for controlling devices as everyone moves towards ‘skin based’ touch. This again puts more barriers up and less choice with yet another thing to kludge our lives around.
The feeling of technology turning from being an enabling to disabling I wrote about on this Lifekludger blog in this post : http://bit.ly/touchbarrier
While we can find work arounds with wire and tape, I’d like to see some more sophisticated solution maybe coming via material sciences to deliver a material/substance which emulates the properties required to use a capacitive screen without the requirement of conducting from skin.
Wireless door access using the TI hackable watch
What seems “novelty” can often be essential in a different context. This type device could be great for access.
The TI Chronos development kit will allow many great projects that cleverly exploit the resources of the Chronos watch.
This video shows a hack that wirelessly unlocks a door using the built-in accelerometer to detect coded taps on the watch.
[via Hack a Day]
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Closed Caption symbol
The goal of the Mac Video Tutorials Subtitle Project is to caption the Apple video tutorials that help users learn to use the Mac.
To make this great resource available to non-English speaking users, and to those with hearing impairments or language processing problems.
A great use of crowd sourcing.
[Mac Video Tutorials Subtitle Project via atmac.org]
Make has put together a list of Open Source Hardware projects.
These are projects in which the creators have decided to completely publish all the source, schematics, firmware, software, bill of materials, parts list, drawings and “board” files to recreate the hardware – they also allow any use, including commercial. Similar to open source software like Linux, but this hardware centric.
Wikipedia: Open Source Hardware
m.lifekludger.net
