This year my purpose of visiting CeBIT was not walking around in as many halls as possible, not seeing everything available, nor taking all the souvenirs given. This year I was going to improve my knowledge in multimedia, game, and web development. And I succeeded.
I tried a few devices recognizing one’s geographical position, in the hall of GPS. I’d say, that the menu was not intuitive, but I’d like to purchase something like that for travels and maybe some web project in two-year period.
Max Planck Institute of Informatics (MPII) and some others exposed a bunch of projects about voice recognition and 3D modeling.
A female Lego robot presented a game “Guess a Word”. The robot asked a question. One could see little squares hiding the letters of the answer on the screen. Then one could try to guess the hidden letters. The robot uncovered them when the guess was correct. It’s not trivial to implement all of that, but the result didn’t seem to be extraordinary.
There was something more serious around the corner. A virtual expert of soccer answered to questions about last-year FIFA World Cup, asked in live German language. If I were interested in soccer and knew the German language better, I would certainly had tried that myself.
I talked to some representative of MPII about the following project nearby: a system let you modify some scanned 3D models of faces in real time. You could make them have more or less weight, you could make them older, you could change the facial features to more male or female. They had scanned faces of people varying in age and gender for a few months. They had models and textures. Models were smoothed not to have scanning noise. There were controlling points laid on the external corners of the eyes, the tip of the nose, the corners of the lips, and the tip of the chin. Then they calculated the statistics of different curves, how to recognize male-female features, and variations of age and weight. Basically, it would be possible to mix different facial parts and different textures of different models to get random face generation for games or animated movies. Purely and simply such a large quantity of triangles isn’t used for games.
Some good news to me! Scanning of 3D models has no bad influence for the health and you can buy the required devices for less than 30€. You just need a web cam, laser, and the free application DAVID. To try that is a plan for the next year when I know Blender better.
On my request, some other representative of MPII demonstrated the process of 3D scanning about fifty meters away, and presented another project. One device beamed light stripes onto a plastic head of a model. And then some video cam placed nearby filmed the light-striped model. All the rest was done by some software. It formed a 3D model according the projected curves of the stripes. The system presented there let you make that plastic model speak in the screen. The only things that had to be done were marking the controlling points and setting the voice record that should be said by the model. The result was the head in the screen talking with some clonus (not only the chin, like for the Canadians in Southpark, but the whole plastic facial “muscles”, were moving). Also the system could scan an alive human being who was reading some special text, and recognize how that person mouthes each syllabus. Then they can model some analogy to the talking plastic model.
The other — Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits — presented projects about real-time face detection and 3D displays. “Maybe that will be interesting” – I thought. For example, there was such a commercial showpiece where you sat down in front of a screen, looked at it normally without any additional glasses and saw 3D objects about 20 cm closer to you than the screen. Then you could press navigational menu buttons just in the air, put some product to your cart, or watch a 3D concert. It reminded me the control of computers in Minority Report (though it was not as perfect as in the movie). There was some computer nearby that detected the faces of people and tried to guess moods by the eyes and mouthes. Plenty of experimenting spectators mimed anger, sadness, or wonder.
Similar systems recognized filmed people according the photos in the database, in the hall of identification. A group of long-haired teenagers were very interested into that system. They had to give their student cards with photos for the demonstration and then the photos were scanned and recorded to the database. Then everybody was filmed and his view was compared with the ones from the database until the matching face was found. Suddenly a bug occurred: a photo of a friend was shown as a matching one for some participator of the demonstration (maybe they were alike a little bit, but I wouldn’t even call them brothers). There was much laugh for the teens and confusion for the representative.
The company Tobii presented computers with eye-tracking mechanism. One watched the screen and the computer knew what the one was seeing. To demonstrate that, they had a few games, the analyzer of watching at an advertisement (I looked at erotically hugged couple for ages, but didn’t notice the advertised logo while they were analyzing me), text editor with virtual keyboard and so on. One didn’t have to blink. Just looking longer at some object made it activated. Anyway I didn’t succeed to manage everything just by looking at one of the computers – either I was squint or there were bugs again.
A 3D printer was another impressive thing in the field of multimedia.
“What is that 3D printer? What does it do?” — I asked the man who was buzzing around.
“You see, all these things are printed in that machine” — the man showed me colorful embossed maps, bottles, art pieces, mechanical parts, artificial head, toys, etc. “Where am I?” – I thought. Then he explained me that the machine used gypsum powder and the paint of three colors. The 3D models were printed by grains of gypsum layer by layer. The result was solid and colorful. To print a 30x30cm-sized embossed map, for example, cost about 50€ and to print some very detailed model with small parts – about 100€.
I participated in several conferences. Some soon-to-retire-aged uncle enthusiastically told about blogs, wikis, rss, and convenient combination of blogs and wikis in one. He talked moaning by the trivial definitions and that made me ask myself, whether I was sitting there because of some informational benefit for myself or just to relax. At least I got a glass of mineral water there as a listener.
There was some conference about RSS in marketing in another hall. A businessman told us that RSS news were a new wave progressively changing spam, because spam came unwillingly and was deleted from the clients’ computers immediately and RSS news were subscribed by the interested people themselves. The businessman talked about ways to read RSS by various plugins and RSS readers, but he also mentioned that ways like these are not very intuitive and convenient for a common client of some company. So his company presented the new invention which was RSS readers integrated into Flash screen savers, having category settings, personalized image, or other SFX as, for example, calender. The screensaver with the brand of the advertised company regularly referred to the server to update the RSS and showed all the news pleasantly. The screensaver like this could be possible to download from the website of the company.
And then the most interesting conference that was seen by me was about hacking. A guy looking like an experienced hacker showed various practices in real time how to modify the information that didn’t belong to you. The eyes of not only the teenagers were glinting while listening. I had known most of the methods from the read literature, but anyway it was fun to see that live. He showed special google queries to filter unsecured and open lists of passwords. He showed a Trojan for mobile phones which resends receivers SMS to the owner/master of the Trojan (this virus had been developed in Germany and was sold for a large amount from 1000 till 2000 € — perhaps even the speaker himself had contributed to the development and then he wanted to trade it off). He showed the theft of authentication, sending the cookies to the hacker’s web server. He showed the usage of DNS server in open WLAN hot spots letting one show faked websites instead of some famous ones and to steal their login data.
Actually there were more interesting showpieces and even a separate blog could be written about that. But I compiled everything what impressed me mostly and what went along with my proposed objects. Technologies are pretty advanced nowadays. It’s time to dream, where all of that lead us.
BONUS! If you’ve already read everything till the end, take a few impressions in the motion:
Tags: IT
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