SideBySide projection system enables projected interaction between mobile devices

ScienceDaily (Oct. 20, 2011) — Researchers at Disney Research, Pittsburgh, and Carnegie Mellon University have devised a system called SideBySide that enables animated images from two separate handheld projectors to interact with each other on the same surface.

The system, suitable for games, education and a variety of other applications, is self-contained in special handheld devices. No external cameras or other sensors are required, which enables people to use the projectors to interact with each other anywhere and at anytime. SideBySide also can be used to exchange contact information, or even share data files. The technology can spur a more participatory and intimate style of interaction than is possible with computers or overhead projectors.

"Smartphones have made it possible for us to communicate, play games and retrieve information from the Web wherever we might be, but our interaction with the devices remains a largely solitary, single user experience," said Karl D.D. Willis, a Ph.D. candidate in computational design at Carnegie Mellon and a lab associate at Disney Research. "Now that handheld projectors have become a reality, we finally have a technology that allows us to create a new way for people to interact in the real world."

The handheld projectors are hybrid devices that emit both visible and infrared light and contain a camera for monitoring the projected images, a ranging sensor and an inertial measurement unit.

The infrared channel plays a key role in enabling interaction. It is used to project markers that help the system recognize when the images are moving or overlapping and to communicate information between the devices.

The researchers have developed a number of applications to demonstrate the capabilities of the technology. Games include Boxing, in which matches are performed without a ring; Cannon, in which players knock a stack of bricks off a platform by firing a cannon ball from one screen to another; and Gorilla, in which one player uses a plane and a net to catch the other player's gorilla. They also have developed a 3D viewer, which allows two users to control and explore a 3D model together, and applications for exchanging contact information and transferring files. A question & answer application can be used to teach basic vocabulary to young children.

A video demonstrating SideBySide can be viewed at http://www.disneyresearch.com/research/projects/hci_sidebyside_drp.htm

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Communication Between People and Objects: A Symposium

The Museum of Modern Art's exhibition "Talk To Me" explores the complicated interactions between machines and their humans in a fun and fascinating way. Next week, the museum's holding an all-day symposium, open to the public.

It will feature discussions and presentations by curator Paola Antonelli and some 20 other luminaries, including chef Marcus Samuelsson, artist Natalie Jeremijenko, and performer Sputniko. Subjects covered will include "design and script writing, cognitive science, gaming, augmented reality, and communication." The keynote address will be delivered by Radiolab host Jad Abumrad, who just received a MacArthur grant.

Hopefully the adorable Tweenbot (seen below) will put in an appearance as well.

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Water's surface not all wet: Some water molecules split the difference between gas and liquid

ScienceDaily (June 9, 2011) — Air and water meet over most of Earth's surface, but exactly where one ends and the other begins turns out to be a surprisingly subtle question.

A new study in Nature narrows the boundary to just one quarter of water molecules in the uppermost layer -- those that happen to have one hydrogen atom in water and the other vibrating freely above.

Such molecules straddle gas and liquid phases, according to senior author Alexander Benderskii of the University of Southern California: The free hydrogen behaves like an atom in gas phase, while its twin below acts much like the other atoms that make up "bulk" water.

The finding matters for theoretical reasons and for practical studies of reactions at the water's surface, including the processes that maintain a vital supply of nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

"The air-water interface is about 70 percent of the Earth's surface," Benderskii said. "A lot of chemical reactions that are responsible for our atmospheric balance, as well as many processes important in environmental chemistry, happen at the air-water interface."

He added that the study provided a new way for chemists and biologists to study other interfaces, such as the boundary between water and biomembranes that marks the edge of every living cell.

"Water interfaces in general are important," Benderskii said, calling the study "an open door that now we can walk through and broaden the range of our investigations to other, perhaps more complex, acqueous interfaces."

In their study, Benderskii and his colleagues used techniques they invented to test the strength of hydrogen bonds linking water molecules (from the hydrogen of one molecule to the oxygen of another). These are the bonds that keep water a liquid at room temperature.

Specifically, the researchers inferred the bond strength by measuring the hydrogen-oxygen vibration frequency. The bond gets stronger as the frequency decreases, similar to the pull one feels when slowing down a child on a swing.

In the case of straddling molecules with one hydrogen in water, when compared to bonds below the surface, "the hydrogen bond is surprisingly only slightly weaker," according to Benderskii.

Likewise, the bond for the hydrogen atom sticking out of the water is similar in strength to bonds in the gas phase.

The researchers concluded that the change between air and water happens in the space of a single water molecule.

"You recover the bulk phase of water extremely quickly," Benderskii said.

While the transition happens in the uppermost layer of water molecules, the molecules involved change constantly. Even when they rise to the top layer, molecules for the most part are wholly submerged, spending only a quarter of their time straddling air and water.

The study raises the question of how exactly to define the air-water boundary.

If the straddling molecules constitute the boundary, it would be analogous to a wood fence where three of every four boards are missing -- except that since water molecules always are moving between submerged and straddling positions, the location of the fourth board would change millions of times per second.

If the boundary were the entire top layer of water molecules, the analogy would be a fence where one in four boards is sticking out at any one time.

A physical chemist, Benderskii began the study at Wayne State University in Detroit before joining the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences in 2009 as an associate professor.

Benderskii's collaborators were lead author Igor Stiopkin, formerly at Wayne State and now at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; Champika Weeraman, also previously at Wayne State and now at Canada's National Research Council in Ottawa; Piotr Pieniazek and James Skinner of the University of Wisconsin-Madison; and Fadel Shalhout, formerly at Wayne State and now at USC Dornsife College.

The National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy funded the study.

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The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by University of Southern California. The original article was written by Carl Marziali.

Journal Reference:

Igor V. Stiopkin, Champika Weeraman, Piotr A. Pieniazek, Fadel Y. Shalhout, James L. Skinner, Alexander V. Benderskii. Hydrogen bonding at the water surface revealed by isotopic dilution spectroscopy. Nature, 2011; 474 (7350): 192 DOI: 10.1038/nature10173

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Quantum simulation with light: Frustrations between photon pairs

ScienceDaily (May 6, 2011) — Researchers from the Vienna Center for Quantum Science and Technology at the University of Vienna and the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information (IQOQI) at the Austrian Academy of Sciences used a quantum mechanical system in the laboratory to simulate complex many-body systems. This experiment, which is published in Nature Physics, promises future quantum simulators with enormous potential insights into unknown quantum phenomena.

Already the behavior of relatively small quantum systems cannot be calculated because quantum states contain much more information than their classical counter-parts. However, if another quantum system is used to simulate the quantum system of interest, then answers about the properties of the complex quantum system can be obtained.

When is a quantum system frustrated?

Currently, many international groups are focusing their research on frustrated quantum systems, which have been conjectured to explain high-temperature superconductivity. A quantum system is frustrated if competing requirements cannot be satisfied simultaneously. The Viennese research group realized for the first time an experimental quantum simulation, where the frustration regarding the "pairing" of correlations was closely investigated.

Using two pairs of entangled photons, a frustrated quantum system could be simulated that consists of four particles. "Just the recent development of our quantum technology allows us to not only rebuild other quantum systems, but also to simulate its dynamics" says Philip Walther (University of Vienna). "Now we can prepare quantum states of individual photons to gain insights into other quantum systems," explains Xiao-song Ma (Austrian Academy of Sciences).Therefore, two in polarization entangled photons exhibit in many ways the same quantum physical properties as for example electrons in matter.

Conflict over partnerships

The research team of international scientists from China, Serbia, New Zeeland and Austria prepared single photons that were facing the conflict over partnerships between each other. Each photon can establish a single bond to only one partner exclusively, but wants to get correlated with several partners -- obviously this leads to frustration. As a result, the quantum system uses "tricks" that allow quantum fluctuations that different pairings can coexist as superposition.

The work of the Viennese group underlines that quantum simulations are a very good tool for calculating quantum states of matter and are thus opening the path for the investigation of more complex systems.

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The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by University of Vienna.

Journal Reference:

Xiao-song Ma, Borivoje Dakic, William Naylor, Anton Zeilinger, Philip Walther. Quantum simulation of the wavefunction to probe frustrated Heisenberg spin systems. Nature Physics, 2011; 7 (5): 399 DOI: 10.1038/nphys1919

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