Aibo, Lego mindstorms, Wii remote (wiimote), iPhone & Google’s Android! March 11, 2008

What all these have in common? They will be my playground for a while …

I will have the chance to play with all of them during this samester!

As far as aibo and mindstorms are concerned, i will use them for the two robotics related courses i have enrolled in. Some possible projects I am thinking of :

• Distributed speech recognition (DSR) : enchance the limited speech recognition capabilities of the aibo by exploiting the wireless link and a  speech recognition server.
• Distributed image processing : enchance aibo’s limited machine vision capabilities by exploiting the wireless link and a machine vision server (similarly to DSR)
• robot localization using multiple input modalities : machine vision + audio
• enchanced gesture based interface or multimodal (speech + gesture interfaces)

Wiimote hacks for enchanced HCI, similar to these demos from CMU.

iPhone will be used,  to augment my speech & GUI multimodal interface prototype already  running on the Zaurus PDA, with the gesture modality.

Finally, i can’t resist from playing with Google’s  new Android platform,  for porting  various apps  I have in mind.

Whoa, my hacker alter ego will be definetely be back for good!!!

 

Trolltech releases Qt Jambi! July 28, 2006

Trolltech just released Qt Jambi, a java library for the desktop version of QT. Development with QT & QTopia (QtEmbedded) had been a really exciting experience for me in the past (well that was 2002; with my QtJim QTopia jabber client). It was a cool paradigm shift away from Swing’s mess of that time.

Sometime in 2005 i ported Qtjim to SWT in just a day! I found SWT to be also extremely nice as an API. And yes, i am still waiting for those SWT bindings for Qt/Qtopia (SWT uses Gtk bindings). Some people also proposed that IBM buys Trolltech, so it seems Jambi was a way for Trolltech to fight back!

Now, i think it’s really nice to use the power of Qt directly from Java. I recall how painful, the porting of an AWT application to Zaurus was : I had to fight different QT bindings for CVM/J9 and the worse part is, i could not use the OpenZaurus ROM (had to stick with Sharp’s original or TheKompany’s ROM).

But will Jambi be a success or just add fragmentation?
Well, time will tell

pros :

• exposes excellent QT, to java programmers (java on desktop might get finally real )

• eliminates jvm-vendor QT-bindings lock-in

cons :

• Only for J2SE 5!! (the real usefulness would be for the embedded space, trolltech folks! – hope they make it for embedded too!)

coolness factor : 4.25!