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Suddenly after one travel, I went with Tomas almost spontaneously to Hannover to look around at “CeBIT” – the fair of information technologies. The technologies didn’t go much further than I saw two years ago. But I took a chance to find how things work.

It was not that amazing to see phlegmatic robots recognizing objects and putting them into boxes as well as others talking with the spectators about the objects. The direction of technologies is clear – robots will help us in daily life some day in the future. A lot of science fiction movies have already shown that as well as different possible drawbacks of robotization. Actually, I don’t expect robots to be used massively in daily life in the next five years, because their current speed is kinda bad joke. Robots associate with Bender.

“T-Mobile” have been surprising me for a while by using multi-touch-screen systems in their stands. Once I saw a long black wall at “IFA” in Berlin, where white texts of different sizes as well as windows with images were flowing from right to left and reacted to the touches of the passers. You could read some advertising texts, watch music videos, or subscribe for newsletters in the windows. Using two fingers, you could move, rotate, zoom-in till one meter diagonal and -out till shrinking and disappearing. This time the multi-touch screen in “CeBIT” was integrated on a table and imitated a lake. Each touch on the screen raised waves and frightened fishes swimming in the illusional water. The zoomable windows with advertising information were floating in the screen too. It was a nice effect perfect for advertising. I hope I’ll see more similar magic in the nearest future. They associate with “Easyweb” projections.

The company “Get Into the Game” let me try a 3D monitor iZ3D viewed through polarized glasses. The effect was the same as in the “3D Max” Cinema in Potsdamer Platz – the characters of a movie or a game as well as all other objects were seen in a space in front and behind the screen plane. The monitor is attached to NVidia or ATI graphic card by two cables. After installing special drivers, any modern game using DirectX might be played in three-dimensional space. The drivers split the camera point of view into two points for each eye. The 3D depth which is the distance from the view for the left eye and for the right eye, can be adjusted in configuration. Incorrect settings not fitting to the distance at which you are sitting from the monitor, makes the effect of flat bas-relief. The linear polarization (thin straight scratches on the glasses and the monitor) ensures that you’ll see horizontally produced view only by one eye whereas the vertically produced view by the other. The price of 3D monitor is about half thousand Euros. Additional glasses might be purchased for a couple of Euros. 3D monitors associate with “Unity” – the tool for game development.

The representatives of “Tobii” told me something about monitors with integrated sight detection system which are still not released for mass production. The similarity of costs was illustrated saying: “If you bought a car, you would spend as much money as for such a monitor”. The system is mostly devoted to disabled people. They could move a mouse just by eyes. Holding sight at a button for a few seconds triggers a pie showing progress which activates the button when completed. You can do some arithmetical calculations, browse the web, send emails, or play simple games using special applications with large buttons. The monitor is calibrated for each user in seconds. During the demonstration of functionality, a half-naked woman is shown to a spectator. In a few seconds the areas where it was watched mostly, are colored on a new layer. You can’t hide anything from computers anymore.. The primitively intuitive controls associate with the “Don’t Click” website.

Finally, here is the filmed material from Hannover:

The weather is rainy. Perhaps there will be many mushrooms. And Dzūkians have probably already taken their baskets and knifes and have been wandering in the woods. They are searching. I also search. And that happens almost every day. I open a new tab, activate the search field, type in a word, and press ENTER.

I hope I won’t lie saying that nowadays all browsers have search fields. So neither you have to open a search website before looking for something, nor you need to install additional search bars. The coolest part is that you are not restricted to just one search engine as Google, Yahoo, or Live Search. You can install additional ones, change the default engine, and also remove the unnecessary ones. For example, I don’t need the Amazon search engine, because I don’t use their services. So I simply deleted it in order not to keep unnecessary item in the daily view. Then additionally I installed the search of IMDB movies and some others.

The installation of search engines is usually compatible with different browsers, because a common OpenSearch format is used. So the Firefox search plugins also fit for IE 7 as well as for the recently released Chrome, which has been very hot during the last days.

One can use the search field not only when looking for some articles or things online, but also when you want to learn the meaning of an unknown word. Once I created the plugins of Urban English and English-Lithuanian-English dictionaries for the convenience of others and me as well. I am using those dictionaries quite often at home and at work too. I wrote them on the basis of other plugins in a text editor, but Microsoft even provides a tool for a quick producing of search plugins (unfortunately, you can’t attach an icon to the search field using this tool).

It’s trivial to install the plugins for the dictionaries. Using Firefox just click on the link and confirm your will of installation in the popup dialog.

And now let’s talk about the Google browser Chrome. Among all its features, it is also special in having just one input field for both – the location addresses and the search. Various properties of the search or of the address can be selected from the popup menu.

The installation of search engines to Chrome is alike. At first you have to click on the link of the plugin… Ups.. What’s that?

Chrome thinks that the search is necessarily related to the website from which it is being installed.. That’s a bug! Nevertheless, I can rename it to something context-related. The keyword will be necessary later when choosing the search engine, so let it be as short as possible, but also identifying enough. Let’s say, I chose the keyword “urban” for the urban dictionary.

Then the usage is like a piece of cake. If I want to look for a word in the urban dictionary, then I type in the search-engine keyword into the input field…

… press the TAB key…

… type in the word to find, and press ENTER.

The meanings of the searched word get listed in the page.

How often do you search? What search engines do you use? When did you last time were mushrooming in a forest?

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:

After plenty of requests by different people and a pathetic longing, finally Yahoo! published the new webmail, which lets me read and write Lithuanian letters without stripping accents.

The user interface of the updated webmail is also much more convenient and, in my subjective estimation, it has already exceeded the user interface of Google webmail. The look and feel reminds me MS Outlook or Mac OS X Mail. The daily tasks are fastened by new features such as dragging letters to the folder, shortcut keys for the main functions, and much more based on AJAX technologies.

Finally, I can be proud that I have Yahoo! E-mail.

To save my time, I usually read various articles, essays, documentations and other texts about computer game development in public transport. To read paper printouts is the most convenient way for me, because I waste my eyes at computer screen the rest time of my day. The largest problem of the printouts is that the URLs of the links are invisible on the printed paper. And I save the sources of the articles very rarely.

To solve that problem, I wrote a bookmarklet (favelet), which is made shared with you. When you activate it, all the links of the opened page will be supplemented with indexes [URL #X], where X will be the number of the link; and a list of indexes together with the appropriate web addresses is footnoted in the page. Just get it and try yourself.

Do it so: grab the button URL List with a mouse and drag it to the bookmarks bar. That’s it. You have a bookmarklet. Now, while being in any website, you can click on the newly created bookmarklet and the page will be prepared for printing, writing down the list of all URLs in the bottom of the page.

Why are you pouting? Are you still using Internet Explorer? No problem. Press the right mouse button above the button “URL List”, choose “Add to Favorites” in the popup menu, and add the link of the button into the Links folder in your favourites. That’s it. You have a favelet.

Bon appétit!