Hacking Felica

Felica, Sony's most successful RFID chip technology, has been used in many countries in the world.

In Japan, most of the national railways, JR, and several subways in major cities adopted Felica a few years ago, and currently in operation.

The largest electric money system, known as Edy, also built with Felica technology.

Of course, Sony has released the Felica SDK for business, but there are some ways to read information inside a felica chip.

felicalib(Japanese only) handles directly the DLL of Felica Stack, and provides the data structure for each commercial product, like Suica, Edy, etc.

I tried this library and successfully read my riding history of Suica-like railway card.

Now we can take attendance in the lab meetings with Felica cards, haha.

Content-Preserving Warps for 3D Video Stabilization

Anyone who tries to make a production-quality video with Adobe Premiere or similar softwares?

One of the most stressful situation you might have in editing videos is struggling against camera shaking to make it smooth. It is totally a dull work.

A latest research paper about video stabilization, published by the researchers of University of Wisconsin-Madison and Adobe Systems will successfully cope with the problem.

It does not only smooth camera shaking, but also smooth the camera path, like "dolly shot", made by the camera movement in parallel.

It seems to produce a fairly good result. I guess it would be slotted in the next version of After Effects, Adobe CS5.

Content-Preserving Warps for 3D Video Stabilization

http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~fliu/project/3dstab.htm

Project Natal & PS3 Motion Controller

At the E3 Conference 2009 , Microsoft and Sony both revealed their state-of-the-art game controller prototypes. Project Natal and Motion Controller.

Project Natal, Microsoft's latest demo reel, looks very impressive.

It seems to recognize user gestures with a kind of simple laser range finder.

These type of recognition must be difficult.

Few papars proposed so far, as far as I remember.

It may takes years to become a commertial product.

Sony's controller, on the other hand, is more practical.

They adopted stable technologies, like marker-based motion capture system.

So, tracking speed and quality is pretty good and the most important is they announced the release date(the spring of 2010).

I wonder if we can use its controller from PC, like wiimote. I really hope that.

Microsoft Office Labs 2019 (Future Vision Montage)

At the Wharton Business Technology Conference, Microsoft’s Business Division president Stephen Elop unveiled the latest production from Microsoft Office Labs called “2019″(website), depicting the next-generation of communication, collaboration and production technologies.

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-GB&amp;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:a517b260-bb6b-48b9-87ac-8e2743a28ec5&amp;showPlaylist=true&amp;from=shared" target="_new" title="Future Vision Montage">Video: Future Vision Montage</a>


Apparently, this video looks like interpolating their state-of-the-art technologies like Surface and famous blockbuster Sci-Fi films. Mostly impressive, but not new concepts.
Maybe that's why they called this work "2019".

I'm looking forward to having a look at these works for real.

on the fly - a tangible multitouch display

Hisato Ogata, a product designer at Leading Edge Design Ltd., exhibited his latest work at minimum interface exhition, Japan.

In this work, a sheet of paper is introduced as a haptic IO device.
In general, there are not so many kinds of interaction techniques on a multitouch screen. (Everything people do on it is zooming and rotating images.)
However, introducing real objects to interaction like this expands the capability of tabletop device.



on the fly @ minimum interface from Hisato Ogata on Vimeo.


via as3.org - on the fly @ minimum interface (Japanese)

IDEO Global Chain Reaction

Ingenius!
This is why IDEO is known as one of the most creative companies in the world.

Recently, they built some prototypes of Rube Goldberg Machine, but not just standard ones. They connected them with the Internet, and extended the chain reaction.
They did it, in part, by tring geekey things, such as clicking a mouse button with a toppling Tickle-Me Elmo, or .

Check out the film below.



IDEO Global Chain Reaction from IDEO Labs on Vimeo.



And I found some nice CMs using Rube Goldberg Machine.
One is from Honda Accord Campaign, and another from Guinness.


Honda Accord




Guinness




via IDEO lab - The Incredible IDEO Global Chain Reaction Experience

Magic Spheres

If a wall of my room was a speeker, I could listen music more excitedly.
Magic Spheres, designed by Morteza Faghihi, an Iranian designer, is an artwork that plays as a wall speaker, and consists of a dozen of speakers and an illuminant wall. The light patterns displayed by the set go in sync with the rhythm and beats of the music being played.