Read the part about AdMoveo or you may want to have a look at all these inventions.

Semantic Connections

For the EU project SOFIA (Smart Objects For Intelligent Applications), Bram van der Vlist and Gerrit Niezen created a demonstrator for one of the use cases: semantic connections. “The demonstrator consists of a set of devices; surround sound-set, mobile mp3 players, an ambient lighting system and interaction device(s). The interaction device is a tile-like interactive object that allows for both exploration of the Smart Space in terms of connections and manipulation of these connections and information/data streams. Coloured LED lighting and light dynamics visualize the connections and connection possibilities between the various devices. By means of putting devices close to one of the four sides of the tile, a user can check if there is a connection and if not if a connection is possible. By simply picking up the tile, and shaking it a user can make or break the connection between the devices present at the interaction tile.”

More at www.sofia.id.tue.nl

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LightAndThePerceptionOfCleanliness (PDF, 379KB)

That's me.

I am Jun Hu. In case you are wondering, Hu is my family name. But being a Chinese, I can’t help being more pleased if someone call me hujun /who june/ instead of Jun Hu. But after many years of explaining about my 5 letter names, I am OK with any composition of Jun and Hu or even Ju and Hun.  I am from Jiangsu Province, the southeast of china, where the Yangtze River opens to the sea.

I started my university life as a Math student who was more interested in computer science. Graduated with a bachelor degree in Computational Mathematics, I taught myself programming and worked for an oil exploration company and then a construction machinery company, with qualified titles of Senior Programmer and System Analyst. For 6 years, I was working on digital signal processing algorithms and software packages, management information systems and networks, and computer aid design systems. In 1996, I decided to go back to the university to refactor my knowledge on computer science so that I could “make things better”. During the 3-year study, I also worked as a research assistant for professors and a team leader of a group of programmers. Among several other projects, a system for facial reconstruction from a skull and a 3D visualization system for virtual medical operations were my favorite. The final work for the Master’s degree,Content-based Retrieval of a Medical Image Database, used images to search similar images in a huge database. The result was promising and it had been used by the doctors in a hospital happily ever after.

However when I finished my computer science study, I found the most important was not just to make things better, but to make people’s life easier. So I moved to Holland in 1999, and joined the 2-year postmaster program User-system Interaction here in TU/e. My final project, Distributed Interfaces for a Time-based Media Application, was done at Philips Research. As the best from the USI program that year, this project was nominated for the OCE prize, although it did not make to the top prize at the end. I was so interested in interactive media that I decided to continue the research as a PhD project, focusing on the design of the software architecture for distritributed interactive media, especially for home environments.

I started teaching at ID in 2003. Since then I had been involved in project and competency coaching. I am now a researcher in the designed intelligence group, and a tutor for Master students in the Intelligent Spaces track. I am giving two assignments “Object Oriented Animals” and “Gooey: Soft and Sticky”, and running a master’s module “Formal Specification in Action”.

Aside from my professional life, I am a relatively good Chinese calligrapher, inheriting some calligraphing genes from my father. I don’t have much taste of music, but I do like Jazz and Blues very much, and hate Urban and Hiphop stuff. Digital photographing is also a lot of fun for me. I sometimes pretend to be a professional table-tennis player, if there is no one really professional around.

WifiBlock

As a result of the Master class “LEGO beyond toys”, Sjef Franse, one of our master students, created a lego brick “WifiBlock” that connects the NXT to the Internet. The complete hardware and software design is described in his report:

connectLegoNXTtoInternet

17 december 2009 – Er is veel kraamvisite, veelal gewapend met camera’s, aanwezig bij de geboorte van Medsim op donderdag 10 december. Medsim is niet zomaar een baby; het is het eerste bevallingssimulatiecentrum ter wereld. De trainingsruimtes zijn gevestigd op twee verdiepingen in Kennispoort en minister Maria van der Hoeven kwam het lintje, in de vorm van een buikwand, doorknippen. De TU/e is niet alleen verhuurder van de locatie, ze levert ook de nodige techniek. [Read more:  HTML, PDF]

Serge in Cursor

The new game designed by Serge Offermans featured in Cursor. The game is the result of his final master project “Blurring the boundaries”. In his final report,

“Digital virtual worlds are important to the people living in them. They allow people to use other means to exploit their capabilities. Who they are, what they can do and what they experience in these worlds however, is hardly ever valuable outside the virtual. This project aimed to create an integration of the qualities of the virtual and the physical world, and in doing so allow benefit from one world in the other.

The result is a virtual world, designed specifically with integration of the worlds in mind. It literally draws the virtual world into the physical by bounding it to our physical reality and effectively placing virtual, invisible characters and objects in our physical world.

Interaction with the world is made possible by a device that channels audio from one world to the other and allows you to ‘feel’ and manipulate the world through movement and touch.

The specific world that has been worked out is designed for the use by children and their parents who can now benefit from the dynamic-ness of the virtual world without the closed medium of the PC.

Children and parents can now together experience the virtual world and spend time together while they are engaged in activities that also benefit the childs educational development. Because the world can only be perceived through touch and audio, the world stimulates the child’s imagination.”

Abstract – Lego Mindstorms NXT is a platform highly suitable for prototyping in the field of interactive social robotics. During a technology masterclass at Eindhoven University of Technology students from the department of Industrial Design have developed five novel extensions (sensors and actuators) for the Lego Mindstorms NXT which extend the ability of Lego to prototype for robotics even further. Applications include a water-pump, GPS sensor, wireless sensor bridge, optical mouse sensor and a magnetic grabber. In this paper we will present these extensions and showcase applications in which these extend possibilities of Lego Mindstorms NXT to a new level.

Keywords: robot, Lego, Mindstorms, NXT, social, prototyping

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