Video: Floating touchscreen lets you feel virtual objects

Now thin air can be a touchscreen. Yasuaki Monnai and his team at the University of Tokyo have created a virtual screen you can feel. Called HaptoMime, it uses reflective surfaces to create a holographic display.

“It’s like touching a toy keyboard,” says Monnai. “You only have to reach out your free hand onto the floating image.”

An infrared sensor detects when a person tries to touch it, at which point ultrasonic vibrations are focused on to the fingertips, giving the impression of physical contact. Changing the ultrasonic pressure gives a range of sensations, from the feeling of wind to a rigid surface.

The floating image is sophisticated enough to let users play a virtual piano or read a 6pt Times New Roman font easily in mid-air, says Monnai.

He believes secure password entry at ATMs could be the first of many applications. Other possibilities include browsing the web, checking for recipes with wet or dirty hands, or enabling doctors to interact more freely with interfaces during surgery. It would also eliminate the risk of shared interface in public areas spreading any infection or disease.

HaptoMime was presented at the in Hawaii earlier this month.

TIME to flex our muscles against mussels. Since they first arrived in North America in 1988, have made themselves at home. The small molluscs, which attach themselves to boats and clog underwater pipes, cost the US billions of dollars in pipe cleaning and repair, lost hydroelectric power, damaged boat hulls and other headaches.

In a bid to stem the tide of invasive aquatic species like these, a team at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana have designed software to identify hubs in the global shipping network that have outsized roles in spreading interlopers. All told, invasive species are estimated to cost the US $120 billion a year.

The paths of ships, their ballast discharge, and ecological and environmental factors all influence the spread of species, says Nitesh Chawla, a leader of the project. By analysing all of these factors across hundreds of ports worldwide, the team has shown which places are the biggest spreaders of species and thus which would be best to target.

“Singapore alone contributes to 26 per cent of total species flow among the 818 ports in the Pacific,” says Chawla.

“Singapore contributes to 26 per cent of total species flow among the 818 ports in the Pacific”

Asking every port to implement strict control measures, like testing and treating ballast water, could drag down productivity – but focusing on just those places most likely to spread invaders would have a large effect, say the researchers. “By assuming species-control policies were implemented on the top 20 per cent of the most connected ports, we showed that it would be at least twice as difficult for species to propagate,” says Chawla.

What’s more, says the team, container ships are more likely to transport invasive species than passenger carriers or barges. That means that in some areas, only large, bulk carriers need to be subject to the strictest inspection and prevention measures, and other ships can pass unhindered.

Kelly Pennington, who studies invasive species at the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, says the work could inform global policies, and be adapted to the regional or state level as well.

The team presented a paper on their work last month at the in New York City.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Pinpoint key ports to stop aquatic invaders”

THE eyes have it. Somaliland’s election commission is trialling an iris-based biometric system that it hopes will put an end to duplicate registrations. This would make it one of the most advanced voter registration systems on the planet.

“Multiple registrations and multiple voting are a big issue in Somaliland,” says Mohamed Ahmed Hersi Geelleh, chairman of the National Electoral Commission (NEC) of Somaliland. “Most young people look for an opportunity to vote more than once to enhance their candidate’s chance of winning the election.”

Authorities had previously tried incorporating fingerprints and facial recognition when compiling voter lists, but still found a large number of duplicate registrations. So, on behalf of the NEC, election specialist Roy Dalle Vedove approached Kevin Bowyer and his team at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana for help designing a system using iris recognition, which is considered more accurate than fingerprint or face recognition.

“As the Somaliland experience indicates, fingerprints can be less powerful than iris for creating a national registry,” says Bowyer.

To test it out, 1062 trial voter records containing iris images from people in the Hargeisa and Baki areas were sent to Notre Dame for analysis. Bowyer’s team had to identify duplicate registrations intentionally introduced into these records.

They used algorithms to look for distinctive features in the iris patterns in each record, such as furrows, rings, ridges and freckles, to generate an iris “fingerprint”. Each iris fingerprint was checked against all the others to determine duplicates. Bowyer and his team were 100 per cent accurate in identifying the 457 duplicate registrations in a report to the NEC, which was made public last month.

If a full-scale version of the iris system is put in place for the national elections next year, “Somaliland would have the most technically sophisticated voting register in the world”, says Bowyer.

The team’s algorithms are able to identify people who have previously registered even if they are wearing different types of coloured or textured contact lenses. The team plans to present this at the UK Biometrics Working Group meeting in London in October.

“The system can identify registered voters even if they are wearing coloured or textured contact lenses”

This article appeared in print under the headline “Eyedentify duplicate voters with iris register”

Snap out of it. Those who find themselves daydreaming when they’re supposed to be reading a report may soon find a device is telling them to pay attention. A detector can now figure out when a person’s attention shifts from their task and get them to focus on it again.

People are thought to zone out about 20-40 per cent of the time; these instances have been found to result in performance failures, poor memory recall and low reading comprehension (Science, ).

To combat the issue, Sidney D’Mello and Robert Bixler at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana hit on the idea of making interfaces intelligent enough to spot a user’s waning attention and take action.

Their software tracks a person’s eye movements with a commercial eye tracker. The system figures out if the person’s mind is on the task by observing specific features in the way the eyes move, such as how long they fixate on words, where the eyes move next, their overall movement patterns and other contextual cues.

If it thinks the user is no longer concentrating, the system can pause the session, notify the reader, highlight the content or even display the missed content in a different format. “This can lead to improved learning,” says D’Mello. “For high stakes tasks such as military or aviation, this can prevent catastrophic disasters.”

The detector could also be used to evaluate study materials on the basis of how well they engage students.

The first version of the mind wandering detector is expected to be ready in a few months’ time. It will be used to develop an intelligent text presentation system that intervenes when it detects a wandering mind.

This type of interface reflects our increasing sophistication in yoking computational technology to cognitive and neural science, says neuroscientist James Giordano of Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington DC. “Such technology could be utilised to improve cognitive focus and performance, and perhaps affect creativity, and this may incur provocative ethical, legal and social questions of how, to what extent, and in whom this technology can – and should – be used.”

The system will to be presented at the User Modelling, Adaptation, and Personalization (UMAP) conference 2014 at Aalborg, Denmark, this week.

IRIS images may soon be able to do more than just verify your identity – they may confirm your race and gender too.

The iris controls the size of the pupil and gives a person’s eyes their colour. It grows into a complex and unique pattern as a fetus develops and remains the same throughout a person’s life. This fact has been successfully exploited in iris-based biometric systems, which work on the principle that each iris is completely different to any other.

But that is not strictly true, as Kevin Bowyer at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana and his colleagues have found. They have developed a system that can pick out similarities between irises, instead of differences. Initial tests show it can distinguish between people of two different racial backgrounds and shows promise in determining gender.

“You might assume that there is no similarity in iris texture,” says Bowyer, “but you would be wrong.”

In a typical iris scan, a camera snaps an image of a person’s eye while it is bathed in near-infrared light. Software identifies the iris portion of the eye, and then analyses 1024 sample regions, looking for patterns in the way the delicate filaments of tissue, known as the stroma, reflect light. This unique information is then used to generate a code of binary numbers.

Bowyer’s team’s method adds a layer of complexity. For each of the sample regions, their software identifies features such as lines or spots in the stroma, and saves that information. It also records how brightness varies across each region.

This richer set of attributes allowed the researchers to train an algorithm to look for common features among irises of known ethnicity and gender. When they turned the system on a database of unknown irises of 1200 people, it predicted whether a person was Chinese or Caucasian with over 90 per cent accuracy, and correctly identified gender 62 per cent of the time. The team will present the research next month at the IEEE International Conference on Technologies for Homeland Security in Waltham, Massachusetts.

“An algorithm looks for common features among irises of known ethnicity and gender”

The reason for the low success rate in predicting gender, Bowyer says, is because the team have not yet fully worked out which textural features of the iris correspond to gender. He says that the fact that the results are better than chance means it should be possible to improve the system’s ability to determine gender. The team has also not yet tested the system on people with other or more complex ethnic backgrounds.

Aside from making it difficult for people to fabricate a false identity in which they have a different gender or race, the method could speed up searches within large iris databases by reducing the data subset to be searched. It would also be possible to count the number of people belonging to different ethnic backgrounds coming into a country without recording their identity.

“It is interesting work that does fly a bit in the face of conventional thinking,” says Vijayakumar Bhagavatula of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Iris patterns are generally considered to be highly random; even a person’s left and right iris are different. Still, he says, “in the absence of an established biological connection between iris pattern and gender or ethnicity, there is no way to know if the features being used by Bowyer are the ‘best’ ones to use. There may be other features that give better prediction rates.”

An intelligent video surveillance system that automatically scrambles people’s faces to protect them from unwarranted monitoring has been developed by a Swiss company.

Developed by EMITALL Surveillance, based in Montreux, Switzerland, the technology singles out any people in a video feed, on the basis of their movement, and disguises them digitally while leaving the rest of the scene intact. Video clips of the system in action can be viewed , and (Windows Media Player required).

The system can be used as an add-on to a normal video surveillance feed. At its core is an algorithm that scrambles the relevant parts of a video feed using an encryption key that can be kept secret. This means the resulting video can then be viewed by anyone, but only those in possession of the encryption key can unlock the scrambled regions and identify the people shown on-screen.

CCTV abuses

Its developers say the system could let law enforcers use closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras without invading the privacy of those being watched. For example, a video stream could remain anonymous until its operators realise that a crime has been committed. The video could then be unscrambled by authorities with the necessary encryption key.

“If the system works as described, it’s certainly a big improvement over video surveillance systems that allow arbitrary monitoring of people’s behaviour,” says Ian Brown of Privacy International and the Foundation for Information Policy Research in London, UK.

Brown cites the prosecution in the UK of two CCTV operators in January 2006 for spying on a woman in her flat. “Masking the appearance of individuals until explicitly requested by the courts under a search warrant would reduce some of the CCTV abuses we have seen recently,” he says.

Different faces

The system can even use different encryption keys to scramble the identity of particular people under surveillance, says Touradj Ebrahimi, founder of EMITALL Surveillance and a researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.

“Imagine you have scrambled the faces of three persons in a video under surveillance,” Ebrahimi says. “Unless you have the secret key for face number two, you cannot unscramble that face.”

Ebrahimi adds that a descrambling key can be broken up and shared between different authorities to reduce the odds of misuse. He says two European governments plan to use the technology for public surveillance, but he declines to name them as the contracts have yet to be signed.

However, some experts are not impressed by the new system, saying the real issue is government accountability. “In the end, if people are opposed to government video surveillance, making the government decrypt its own video images prior to viewing them doesn’t make citizens less wary of official abuse,” says James McQuivey, an expert on surveillance at Boston University in Massachusetts, US.

An interactive computer display that keeps track of multiple users by differentiating between their touch could lead to safer vehicle controls and smarter video games, its makers claim.

The DiamondTouch (DT) system, developed by Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) in Massachusetts, US, consists of a touch-sensitive screen that can be operated by several users simultaneously.

The system transmits distinct electrical signals to different areas on the surface of the screen. When a user makes contact with the screen the relevant signal is sent through their body and picked up by a receiver located in their chair.

This harmless connection tells a connected computer precisely where the screen was touched and by whom, allowing it to respond accordingly. It also means the screen can correctly pinpoint and distinguish between many different touches at once.

“Most touch screens only permit one touch at a time,” explains Paul Dietz, a researcher at MERL. “A much smaller number allow multiple, simultaneous touches, but none of these can tell you who is touching where.”

Access control

By distinguishing between different users, the system can track a person’s input and control their access to certain functions. A video produced by the laboratory shows the system (4.1MB mov). “The key point of DiamondTouch controls is identity,” Dietz says. “If the controls know who is operating them, they can behave appropriately.”

The MERL researchers say the identification technology could be inexpensively added to many types of physical interface. It could, for example, be used in a vehicle dashboard to let a passenger, but not a driver, access its navigation system when the car is in motion, preventing driver distraction.

The system could also be used to help limit access to certain controls at power station or in the cockpit of an airplane, the researchers say.

Whack-a-Mole

Jeff Han, a user interface researcher at New York University in the US, says DT could have useful applications in certain environments. “The main drawback is that the user must be situated on a receiver antenna,” he told żìĂš¶ÌÊÓÆ”

“However, the application scenarios envisioned [by the system’s designers] are wonderfully practical and appropriate, because they side-step this limitation beautifully.”

But the technology could also be used to create smarter games, says Clifton Forlines, a researcher at MERL who is testing simple gaming applications. “Consider the Whack-a-Mole game,” he says. “If it were augmented with DT, two or more players trying to whack the same moles would have to race one another and a whacked mole would know who whacked it.”