[extropy-chat] "Cool computer program"

[Eugen Leitl]

On Thu, Oct 19, 2006 at 08:50:53AM -0700, Samantha Atkins wrote:

> But yeah,  I would love one of these to play with.  There used to be  
> these screens you could mount on your computer display that would give  
> you a touchscreen.  I wonder if they still make those.  In principle  
> the same technology could be laid over any surface, calibrated and fed  
> into a computer.   The old ones were a bit simplistic in that they  
> only tracked one point at a time.  But that is how almost all mouse  
> driven GUIs work.

I'm still amazed we don't have realtime body and gaze tracking,
this being end-2006. The displays are becoming reasonably interesting
(30" @ 2560 x 1600, something formerly only available in Xinerama),
albeit not immersive (video projectors can be that, hopefully HDTV
will drive the prices down).

I'm looking forward to what the PS3 & Co will make possible. There's
certainly enough crunch in a PS3 for useful machine vision (albeit only that,
and little else). The Linux support rumour has been just confirmed,
which makes the device a highly useful cluster component.

I don't expect to need new desktop hardware until quadcores will become
common (my current aging rig is a 2 GHz Athlon 64 on Ubuntu 6.06 LTS amd64/XP,
2 GBytes RAM, RAID 1, a passively cooled nVidia 7600 GS driving a 1280x1024
dual-head, and a similiar machine as a file server/crunch box -- it's good
enough for Second Life, so it's more than sufficient for visualization).

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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