Ramblings | Anirudh Sharma | touchaddict

Travel plan tip: Unplanned ones are better

2012-12-06T19:46:00.002+05:30

I had forgotten what darkness looks like, what is it to walk under the quiet of the moon by the roar of the waterfalls.

Boston has been beautiful so far, so were the cities I lived in back in India. But the problem with cities is that they're cities-loud, fast, and always well lit- even when you don't want! I remember being a child looking at the nightsky and looking at stars more than I could count. This trip made me nostalgic. The sheer pleasure of looking at white blobs as they patterned stories in my empty head ;)

'Even at nights we've artificial light polluting the unforseen farthest of skies hiding what's celestial and what isn't.'

'Its hard to find darkness these days, we're all so well lit. Is darkness becoming extinct? Will I again be able to see the night sky as I used to being a kid?'

We didn't know what to do for Thanksgiving day-esp. when most Americans visit back to their families. Hyperloop still doesn't exist that I can afford going home back and forth.

Hence- Swati, Pragun and me were thinking of doing a trip for Thanksgiving weekend. The planning never worked out - as most people are obscenely busy during the weeks.

Thursday night we booked the car off Advanced Car Rentals that was supposed to be picked up from Boston's Logan International Airport 9AM in the morning.

Swati suggested we could go to Maine Huts and Rentals, 45 emails were exchanged in a day amongst all prospective hikers. Friday morning out of 12 people who were in the loop 7 were confirmed. We quickly rented a big seven seater.

The drive was 350 miles away from Boston. We were going to a trek a jungle with no cellphone signals, no city lights and no American with us. Icing on the cake- We didn't reserve our accommodation at the hut due to Thanksgiving holidays. However, since we'd rented the car there's no going back!

With Maine temperatures showing 0-1 Degrees, it was quite difficult to convince myself travelling without a sleeping bag. But the adrenaline rush made us take a chance and go for it!

Friends were convinced, we picked up everyone and started our ride at 12noon sharp from Boston. With GPS we navigated our way to Maine Hills. Enroute we bought torches, gloves, food etc.

Shopping for stuff midway

The evening was getting colder. We had 150 miles still to go. Shivering, I thought of calling up Maine Huts again on a emergency contact number given on their website! The phone rang, noone responded. I recorded a voicemail, like a frightened kid calling for late night entry permit- we're so used to reservations. In two hours I got a call back from there, and the caretaker of the hut said we were welcome! I said to myself- even if we weren't there's no going back. I shared the news with two friends- who just smiled like 'WE GOT PLACE'.

We reached Maine Hills around 8PM in the evening. The highway was dark with density like two/three huts/buildings per mile. Got out of car, loaded torches with batteries, got the bagpacks, divided load amongst each other. We started walking, in a misbelief that the map we had is taking us into the right direction. 7 of us marched a mile on the highway looking for the entry point into the jungle!

' Devil' and 'god' can show at the most uncertain places. A beautiful girl on a gas station shop, named Niki(i hope i got her name right) told us that we're 8 miles off the right path. Lesson number one 'When in doubt, ask'. All of us waited at the secluded gas station, Swati and Patil ran to get the car, picked us up again, and there we went again!

We managed to park the car at seemingly the right spot at 10PM. It was pitch dark, with little bit of moon showing through the clouds.

First mile of the uphill climb was done using torches, led by Patil and his headmounted torch. Sergi and Maria suggested insisted we turn the lights off and navigate using natural moonlight. I remember how beautiful it was to hear the sound of waterfalls without being able to see them.

I wish I could capture the pictures in dark, but sadly our DSLRs dont see the dark or the nights. And flash is too disgusting.

Next 2.7 miles we walked without lights following the trail, without GPS or the map. Sometimes intuition, aka common sense came into play. Kshitij never let his walking stick go down!

Midnight- we started seeing a bulb lit on the top- between all that wilderness. Excited we ran, and found our destination- The Poplar hut! The first reaction on entering was like that of a sinner finding heaven after a tiring uphill walk with 5kg bagpacks behind! The indoors of the hut were amazingly warm and beautifully carved. The wonderful caretaker had left pancakes and a handwritten message about our sleeping areas. :-D

Realizing that we had a place to sleep, there was a sudden pump of adrenaline. Sergi took his pack of Spanish playing cards and we played Pyramid for the next two hours. Patil was high so were we!

Playing Pyramid

Realizing that we had a place to sleep, there was a sudden burst of energy. The feeling of insecurity was no more! In that excitement Sergi and I ran outside to find this bonfire-able pit. We tried to light it up but the snowgods didn't allow. Heart broken, dreams shattered. We walked back to our quiet wooden dorm.

Bonfire spot at Maine Hills

Yet again, Sergi took his pack of convinced we play Pyramid with his pack of Spanish playing cards. Patil was high, and so were we! Several games were played! lol

Genuine hike! Worth the risk. Highly recommended.

On the way back we had tea at the hut. And trekked back, trying to see all what we had missed at the night.

Signboards on our way back!

Waterfall at the Maine!

Silence of the night

2012-10-09T12:28:00.000+05:30

The silence of the night and emptiness within reminds me to complete 14 to-do past blogposts that I wrote in my diary ;)

Looks like am gonna find some OCR goodness.

Soon...

Adding images

2012-09-21T14:22:00.003+05:30

Three images varying in direction and intensity of light

Simple submission of three

HDR using LocalContrast method. Scroll this down to read more.

Installation inspired by nature.

2012-08-08T18:08:00.001+05:30

A beautiful idea! in form of an installation. Gives me goosebumps! :)

NZM-SEC Superfast express that took my '35 hours'

2012-06-18T02:52:00.003+05:30

I usually cover my long distance travels by air- for it saves time, and is less tiring (and was affordable in the past).

Call it naivety or my callous attitude, but I completely forgot the fact that its hard to fetch a cheap ticket when your travel plans are made just a day in advance.

Owing to recent price inflations and my last minute plans I decided to cover my return journey from Delhi to Hyderabad via train. The decision was taken a day before I wanted to return, i.e. 19th May, high time when there are summer holidays in India. The night before I stood in the train line, with my father and brother, to fetch tatkal tickets. The process is hard- the HTTP fetch request by IRCTC works like a lucky draw). Hence, my attempt ended up futile.

So I decided I'll jump on the train, painful decision-no tickets, no seats, just that.

The beginning.

I left my home at 7PM. Reached Kshitij's place. Had dinner there- met Surbhi, Sonia aunty and uncle there. Kshitij's mom had packed wonderful parathas/food enough to keep me going for two days. Hence, with my bagpack and food packet I walked out looking for a rick to drop me to Nizamuddin station. Rohini was deserted that Sunday night. No rickshaws. I knew if I wanted to reach station I have to start then, else I'd miss the train. It was 8:45PM and the train's scheduled departure time was 10PM.

Rohini and Nizamuddin are 31kilometers away, which feels like 100km in Delhi traffic- Having just an hour to cover that distance it was a do or die.

I decided to wave my hands for a lift outside Pitampura road.

Never done that before in Delhi, the city I grew up in. In general perception if I were ever riding I wouldn't give a ride to stranger in Delhi-for its crime rate. Every stranger could be a thief. That's was we're taught. Two bikes waved by, didnt stop.

My heart throbbed. It was about 9:10PM. Checked on my Android phone, I was still 28 kilometers from the station. Dont' know but the feeling was the same as it was when I used to walk into exam hall with almost no preparation. I was like 'ab to lag gayi'.
Last two hours, I had two scotches, managed a lift, bribed the autorick wala, and jumped on a moving train- ticketless.

The kind of people you meet on unplanned travels can be really diverse! Though you may not appreciate that at times.

On my third attempt, a middle aged man on a scooter stopped, probably pitying at my geek face, and the backpack behind me. I requested him to drop me to nearby place where I could get an auto to Nizamuddin station. I felt relived as soon as I sat behind the scooter. My fallacies were shattered. People are nice, and helpful, if given a chance and stereotyping doesn't help. We talked on the ride, he owned a spectacles shop in Karol Bagh, and was going home after work. Curious and amused, I was speeding towards the rick stand. Managed to get a rick, we exchanged business cards and in good faith promised to meet when I go to Delhi.

The rickshaw went real fast. I promised to lend the driver a handful of 'almonds' to push him drive faster. and he did. ! We zipped across and I reached the station at 10:05PM, for the train that starts at 10PM. Dashed onto platform number 7. Kept running, saw platform number 7 and a train starting to move. Fuck! I was excited. Probably gave my fastest sprint and reached on platform and jumped on my already moving train. I was in the unreserved coach. Sweating to the month of May, I forgot all the worry, and was glad that I had finally made it to the train.

The experience

I moved around the coach, found no seat. Seats, floors, pathways everything were taken. Finally I spotted an empty area, near the train toilets a corner lied. Took courage, pulled a bedsheet out and sat there, the stink was unbearable. However, presence of other youngsters there was comforting. That time I thought of my room back in Bangalore and the comfort of my bed and wish I could crash in ASAP. There were two Army jawans on the general box. Ravi was from Chattisgarh and Rafiq was from Shimla. Both were in their 30s. As the train was moving ahead I was lured into playing Bluff (popular card game) with them.

Mingling

After two hours the train stopped at station, and I moved to a sleeper coach to try my luck for a seat. I was ranting in mind about population in India, the state of railways but ended up getting lucky again. This time, I got a better floor to sit- near a less stinky toilet. Soon two guys moved in, one had a book, and other had a steel luggage box with him. Looking at me, they also sat down, the student opened his book, and the other person asked if I had a ticket. I told no. Three of us laughed. None had a ticket. Vrutant Mathur was a sociology student at JNU, and Vicky was posted at Punjab-Pakistan border and was going to Indore for holidays. I also ended up meeting a newly posted doctor at AIIMS who was going to Indore again.

My phone battery was showing 10 percent. Saved it by putting on Airplane mode-No twitter, no email, no calls. Vrutant decided to use his Axe deo and neutralize the toilets' stink, however the mixture of the smells was incomprehensible. Vicky(the army guy) didnt speak much, and offered us a drink, looking at the condition and our tired bodies we had 90 ml of whiskey each. Vrutant- shared stories about his strikes and experiences at JNU- how JNU students can make an issue out of anything.

With 'Majorsaab' and Vrutant-behind the scenes

Vicky(we had named him majorsaab by then) showed pictures of his daughter, and ranted about the fights he had with his wife at home. He also told about his visit to Africa and EU on a peacekeeping mission.

Initially, it was a completely new experience to share stories/experiences/drinking with stangers but it wasn't so bad, for I had to bring home nothing of that, except memories.

I couldn't have done any of that with twitter/gmail/facebook pushing continuous updates on my phone. At that time I thought how technology gives a false sense of 'connectivity'.

I did not select these people - like I almost do now. I was with 'them', all the time, on the journey, while sitting, while hiding from the TC, now I find myself 'tweeting/typing tak tak tak' all the time with two tired thumbs, through my smartphone.

First night and beyond

I managed to fit myself on the floor between two sleeper births at 2AM. Owing to the spirit effect, I quickly got to sleep. I suddenly found somebody shaking me and asking to wake up. It was the Ticket Checker at 7AM. I had no tickets, TC was convinced that I was a student by the story Vrutant had just concocted . We managed to get a 'white slip' from him by paying 200 rupees each. Majorsaab didn't bother about TC.

The next day was spent looking at trees zipping by, standing on train's door, buying atleast 4-5 bottles of water, cooling them under 3rd AC's temp, as it was 45 degrees(i guess) which felt like 103.4 degrees due to heat hitting you straight in face from open windows. Even the train's fans blew fire!

We moved from seat to seat looking at various families, kids, mothers of kids who would offer us a seat just like the scooterwaala dude! None did. Shamelessly we sat with a sikh family going to Indore to check on their crops. We asked them to 'adjust' us to sit, and they didnt mind. We had an hour of sitting. We decided to cool ourselves off by going and standing near 3rd AC compartment exit-door. Sleeper coach people weren't allowed inside. There we met a Baba. Not the kinds you see on TV, newspapers. A baba with a rockstar face and kickass attitude. He was definitely 'cool'. The kinds of babas you'll meet having fun in Pushkar!

Vrutant and me with Baba. He didn't pose for this one.

Without choice, I interacted with quite a lot of people at leisure. Most didn't have a clue about social media/twitter/facebook. As soon as I stepped out of my urban/geek comfort zone, I know that facebooking/tweeting/virtualworld is not a priority in life, or in most cases, not even a part of life.

The Second night and the end

Rest of the journey was covered relatively comfortably. We stood near exit, noted people who walk to the toilet, and then would grab their seats. And when they return, ask them to 'adjust' a bit. 'Adjust kariye bhaiya please' is the most widely used term in trains I felt the other day. I moved to around 8-9 seats during rest of the journey and slept the second night on midseat area of sikh family.

Reached Secunderabad at 5AM, took a rick moved to house, I smelt like stink. Ran to shower. Was happy I had this experience. I crashed into my same old 'connected' world and slept to get some rest.

LOL SMARTPHONES

This was a ~ 35 hour train ride which I was unwilling/scared to do in the beginning. Despite no seat, I had fun. Probably no-seat was the reason of fun. :) Yay!.

I guuess, all because I had my smartphone turned OFF. Nowadays, when mostly outdoors I find myself a part of a very physically inactive activity we'll ever do: staring at a smartphone as the earth circles the sun. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not anti-tech revolution (duh), or even anti-smartphones (got one myself 3 months back).

Agreed, we have a world of knowledge in our pockets, which is VERY useful. I can now find out where to get the best pubs, malls, food within five miles. I can transfer/receive money, sync dropbox, watch videos, check PNR statuses, use Google Maps, read email, text, tweet, friend, unfriend, like, oh, and last but not the least make phone calls( :D ) – all from the comfort of my multi-core smartassphone, oh at times the most used 'tangible object' in the washrooms as well after the 'toiletpaper and soap'!

Today I just gave my smartphone to Kunal who works with me at Ducere on LeChal, and came back to using my old 20$ phone. Maybe that's the reason I could finish this blogpost which should have been posted a month back ;)

virtually social and socially null :)

2012-05-29T18:51:00.002+05:30

This is the first time I am writing a personal experience that's not design/tech/tinker related on my blog. So bear with it :)

I live alone in Hyderabad now unlike Bikaner and Bangalore where I had close to 10-15 friends around, anytime!

I've recently become a social media aficionado both, on Twitter and Facebook. A behavior change that I saw happened in me when I quit my fulltime job at HP Labs and started dedicating fulltime on lechal(period after March 2012). The lowest spikes are the time when I was busy with Mozart project. I am busy now as well, probably starting-up makes you more expressive? Not sure.

My interpretation- This is an in-house development stage and probably I am not meeting as many real people now as I used to. That's why I rant more, to the virtual world which is not real.

There is a fair relation between my work ethic and social media engagement and the relationship is mostly inversely proportional before Ducere Technologies started.

Taller spikes show higher tweet #. Each spike is a month. Taller spikes after January
when I had quit my regular job and did a venture

Le Chal: Haptic shoe for the visually impaired ;)

2011-11-03T03:54:00.003+05:30

Latest updates on development of Le-Chal shoe can be accessed here.

Touchable and holdable: Beauty of objects

2011-09-26T04:35:00.000+05:30

Here is an auto-rickshaw repair process I regularly notice during my visit to Kanakpura, Bangalore.

An image of the interaction while the repair process is on:

Image1

An image of the parts that are laid down during assembly and disassembly.

The multimodal interaction of the repairguy with the engine above is natural, rich and can't get better and we're trying to replicate this through gestures and modalities such as touch/haptics etc. This is the holy grail as I feel.

Image3

The interfaces around us are shifting hastily from CLI to more graphic and natural user interfaces. Where the graphic aspect helps bring the visual nature of the real world closer the the user's cognition, the NUI aspect makes the story fluid.

We're surrounded by objects that are means of day-to-day interaction in our lives. Image 3 (by Bret Victor )probably explains the importance of our interaction with them, and proves to be my inspiration for future work with touchable/holdable/fee-able/tangible interfaces.

Quoting Vitor below:

"Okay then, how do we manipulate things? As it turns out, our fingers have an incredibly rich and expressive repertoire, and we improvise from it constantly without the slightest thought. In each of these pictures, pay attention to the positions of all the fingers, what's applying pressure against what, and how the weight of the object is balanced"

Analysing an autorickshaw ride in Bangalore

2011-06-21T20:55:00.007+05:30

The bumpy ride on the Bangalore streets triggered a thought the other day, why not log the data and analyse it later(whackily purposeless initially).

The desire to log is esp. a fallout of my recent stint with user studies dealing with data cleaning/analysis and deriving statistical results from it: formally two-way ANOVA tests, T-tests etc. and who doesn't love clean graphs telling a story :-)

Without giving much thought, I tied my Macbook Pro equipped with SuddenMotionSensor(SMS) to the auto-rickshaw seat and used http://www.shiffman.net/p5/sms/ to log the X/Y/Z axis data in CSV format. I manually kept a record through a stopwatch about the potholes/pit occurrence during the 25 minute rick-ride. It was interesting to the see the outliers due to the sudden relative motion triggered jerks.

Ankit and I plotted a few qualitative graphs out of the sampled CSV data(6731 datalogs). I matched the spikes with the manually recorded pothole/sudden-jerk data to see the obvious but visually pleasing results :)

Red color shows the X, Orange shows the Y and Blue shows the Z displacements.

I dont know the exact use of this approach. Just that cheap accelerometers could be a good way to present the logged data as analytics to the user. Next time I'll commute the same route through a citybus and share my analysis within the same blogpost. :-) If anyone's interested in the raw manual+automatically recorded data, let me know!

Scratch Mini Bootcamp

2011-06-17T13:10:00.000+05:30

So the scratch bootcamp turned out to be fun during my 14 day break from regular research. We traveled 3 cities, 4 schools, and introduced Scratch Programming environment to 8-12 year old kids. Most kids were first time introduced to programming. The novel drag and drop based looping and the fact that other kids from around the world could re-mix, check out their projects, excited them into coming up with their own ideas, and build them into something usable. The projects involved animations, adding interactivity, and using sprites. Tapan Sharma(student of class 3rd) volunteered and shared some of the projects online.

I am highly confident of Scratch as a learning tool, and its induction in our education system, due to its learning-by-doing approach.

Basically, its negative thinking

2011-04-20T01:34:00.002+05:30

Thoughts after watching Final Destination series!

The G1 and the interface blues

2011-01-01T01:52:00.007+05:30

New year!

HTC Dev Phone1, first time Android experience!

The device felt loose, just like it would fall apart if I shake it. Why would I? Of-course the accelerometer exists, but then 500 $ should make it tough?

Although its late, in Jan 2011, I got an Android phone hands-on to try out for some prototyping. Being a iPhone user since the first gen, i found many contrasts, mostly being on the design and interface side. I had my brief stint of Android with Shreekant on his Galaxy, the interaction felt wonderful and intuitive.

I got the device last week, it was an Android Dev Phone 1 (HTC G1) with Android 1.6 pre-installed. First experience was sloppy, slow, fragmented and far from slick. After a day of usage without Googling I found myself unable to change the pre-set Google ID (the phone was being used by someone else earlier). The interface locks you down into a loop undiscovered, just as if maybe the singularity had arrived.

Then I actually figured out that the phone actually had a real QWERTY keyboard, the device was emotionless, the keys are closely spaced and won't provide as much tactile feedback as they would with the old good Nokia communicator or a HTC Touch Pro. I had to roll down my thumb for some keys to make it actually work, but then the on-screen keyboard on the iPhone was much better. Those false positives weren't expected from HTC, cheap show!

Though I am yet to upgrade to the lastest Android release. So the above post is anachronic, if you weren't interested in my first experiences :-)

I am prototyping, Take Me There, App for Blinds. More updates soon. The hopes with Android are much more than just the interface. I know the 2.3 is much sweeter! and hail NotionInk Adam.

Plans for the Mozilla Firefox Multitouch UX

2010-06-06T04:55:00.002+05:30

I am quite interested in exploring the Multitouch scenario on Mozilla Firefox for my project under Felipe's and Gerv's mentorship. Working with Mozilla Team design team members( Alexander Limi) and mentors is turning out to be a great experience so far. I am learning a lot of new things. Browsing the web is a very distributed activity with a lot of interactions possible- my aim would be to design a minimalist interface, that is slick, fast, and non-obtrusive. Hence devoted past couple of weeks researching on the topic-and doing some user study with Natural User Interface Group members.

Browsing through guidelines and advice by Dan Saffer in his book "Designing Gestural Interfaces"
was an eye opener. I'll be using the book as a ready reference before writing code portions.

- Setup Mercurial(hg) repo at Google-Code at a mirror at BitBucket
- Wrote the extension skeleton: Sidebars etc.
- Recompiled Fx on Ubuntu and Win
- Checked out Fennec's and iPad Safari interactions using simulators
- User study with NUIGroup members
- Planning UI in context with three primary tasks: Tabs Placement and behaviour, Natural Gestures library for common tasks etc.

The overall discussion with community proved fruitful deriving to a conclusion- most applications/tools that are designed for Horizontal table-top systems might not be a perfect fit on vertical Multitouch systems. Since the tablets' era is coming: iPad, HP Slate, NotionInk Adam etc. we've to keep a couple of other things at the back of our mind while designing applications- Imprecise positioning, possible problems with eye parallaxis (with pen, too), the finger may be too large for accurate pointing with small objects. Hand movements (if used with keyboard). etc. etc.
In next update I'll be sharing some diagrams and code samples, right here.

Last few days at college

2010-05-31T13:01:00.000+05:30

Just taking a moment out to dedicate some space from one of the last few days that remain at college. The experience turned out very good, and will always remain with me.
Sad and happy.

CV dilemma

2010-05-27T00:22:00.001+05:30

Looks like there's a problem with OpenCV's distributed parameterization of coordinates used during the camera calibration tasks. Three distinct sources of information on img distortion formulae apparently give three non-equivalent description of the parameters and equations involved:

(1) In their book "Learning OpenCV" write regarding lens distortion:

xcorrected = x * ( 1 + k1 * r^2 + k2 * r^4 + k3 * r^6 ) + [ 2 * p1 * x * y + p2 * ( r^2 + 2 * x^2 ) ],

ycorrected = y * ( 1 + k1 * r^2 + k2 * r^4 + k3 * r^6 ) + [ p1 * ( r^2 + 2 * y^2 ) + 2 * p2 * x * y ],

where r = sqrt( x^2 + y^2 ).

Assumably, (x, y) are the pixel coordinates (in pixel units) in the uncorrected captured image corresponding to world-point objects with coordinates (X, Y, Z), camera-frame referenced, for which

xcorrected = fx * ( X / Z ) + cx and ycorrected = fy * ( Y / Z ) + cy,

where fx, fy, cx, and cy, are the capturing camera's intrinsic parameters. Therefore, having (x, y) from a captured image, one can derive the desired points ( x-correct, y-correct ) to obtain an un-distorted image of the captured world scene.

However...

(2) The complication issue comes when we look at OpenCV 2.0 C Reference entry under the "Camera Calibration and 3D Reconstruction section". For the ease of the comparing task we begin with all world-point (X, Y, Z) coordinates being expressed w.r.t the camera's reference frame, just like the first point. Consequently, the transformation matrix [ R | t ] is of no concern.

In the C reference, it is expressed that:

x' = X / Z,

y' = Y / Z,

x'' = x' * ( 1 + k1 * r'^2 + k2 * r'^4 + k3 * r'^6 ) + [ 2 * p1 * x' * y' + p2 * ( r'^2 + 2 * x'^2 ) ],

y'' = y' * ( 1 + k1 * r'^2 + k2 * r'^4 + k3 * r'^6 ) + [ p1 * ( r'^2 + 2 * y'^2 + 2 * p2 * x' * y' ],

where r' = sqrt( x'^2 + y'^2 ), and finally

u = fx * x'' + cx,

v = fy * y'' + cy.

One can see these expressions are not equiv. to the ones presented in #1, with the result that the two sets of corrected coordinates ( x-correct, y-correct ) and ( u, v ) aren't the same. Why the contradiction? It seems to me the first set makes more sense as I can attach physical meaning to each and every x and y in there, while I find no physical meaning in x' = X / Z and y' = Y / Z when the camera focal length is not exactly= 1. Moreover, one cannot calculate x' and y' since we don't know (X, Y, Z).

(3) Unfortunately, things get even murkier when we refer to the writings in Intel's OpenCV Library Reference Manual's section Lens Distortion (page 6-4), which states in part:

"Let ( u, v ) be true pixel image coordinates, that is, coordinates with ideal projection, and ( u~, v~ ) be corresponding real observed (distorted) image coordinates. Similarly, ( x, y ) are ideal (distortion-free) and ( x~, y~ ) are real (distorted) image physical coordinates. Taking into account two expansion terms gives the following:

x~ = x * ( 1 + k1 * r^2 + k2 * r^4 ) + [ 2 p1 * x * y + p2 * ( r^2 + 2 * x^2 ) ]

y~ = y * ( 1 + k1 * r^2 + k2 * r^4 ] + [ 2 p2 * x * y + p2 * ( r^2 + 2 * y^2 ) ],

where r = sqrt( x^2 + y^2 ). ...

"Because u~ = cx + fx * u and v~ = cy + fy * v , … the resultant system can be rewritten as follows:

u~ = u + ( u – cx ) * [ k1 * r^2 + k2 * r^4 + 2 * p1 * y + p2 * ( r^2 / x + 2 * x ) ]

v~ = v + ( v – cy ) * [ k1 * r^2 + k2 * r^4 + 2 * p2 * x + p1 * ( r^2 / y + 2 * y ) ]

The latter relations are used to undistort images from the camera."

Well, it would appear that the expressions involving x~ and y~ coincided with the two expressions given at the top of this writing involving x-correct and y-correct. However, x~ and y~ do not refer to corrected coordinates, according to the given description. I don't understand the distinction between the meaning of the coordinates ( x~, y~ ) and ( u~, v~ ), or for that matter, between the pairs ( x, y ) and ( u, v ). From their descriptions it appears their only distinction is that ( x~, y~ ) and ( x, y ) refer to 'physical' coordinates while ( u~, v~ ) and ( u, v ) do not. What is this distinction all about? Aren't they all physical coordinates? I'm lost!. ( OpenCV ML)

New Multitouch Notebook, Mozilla Labs, GSoC and fun

2010-05-25T20:25:00.002+05:30

Its week two weeks since I finally bought myself a Acer Aspire 5738 pzg multitouch (actually dual-touch) notebook.

Its a welcome change, since for the past two years our multitouch experiments required a lot of background effort due to our utter dependence on our custom built MT screen. The capacitive screen is good, its responsive and precise. They've a Python apploader called Acer Touch Portal which runs a couple of cool Microsoft Surface apps (Globe, Collage, Blackboard etc.). Overall UI of the app is not so impressive though. Form-factor wise its just a laptop, so multitouch is not going to add much of functionality to the device, apart from merely being a show-off feature :) The app looks like more of an Acer's attempt to show Multitouch proof of concept! Looking at the Multitouch hullabaloo everywhere, i didn't expect that to happen atleast.
For DIY and multitouch community its a good tool for quick development and testing of apps.
I used Mozilla Firefox and IE7 which natively ships with Windows 7- the touch based webbrowsing experience was shoddy, just like i imagined when i tried HP TouchSmart PC hands-on. Both these miss the intuitive experience. I'll rate the multitouch functionality:7/10 and usability 4/10

iPad's Safari browser is a neat POC which I'll pick up cues for my Google Summer of Code- Mozilla Labs 2010 project from.
- Simple interface
- Lesser Buttons overhead
- Neat Design and immersive ux that blends right into the user's subcon
- Meant for multitouching

i wish i had other options

2010-03-21T02:00:00.001+05:30

After a lot of misery I thought no device is worth respect more than a device. Lol! not true. The reason was my bad home button. right, its the only button on the device.
- I happened to take a sharp swivel knife and pop my iPhone's case open.

The shown grounding strap had rust on it and bent slightly upwards apparently from the pressure of the tightened screw. Upon the whole back's removal, I noticed how the main control board where this tiny grounding strap fastens on to, has a contact ring(the wheatish circle in the pic) somewhat larger in diameter than the hole where the screw fixes in.
Makes good sense that the area where actually the rust had culminated is not sealed to prevent humidity, and the sweat and condensation from getting inside due to carrying it in pockets and or sudden changes in temperature. I've stayed a lot in Rajasthan, hot days and cold nights were so common there!

The task wasn't easy- emotions, fear, memories, a lot was at razor's edge. Some of the photographs from operation ripapart.

with all the summer love- The Indian iPad!

2010-03-20T21:33:00.001+05:30

I am waiting to see what happens to the indigenous Notion Ink Adam and Apple iPad. Will it even turn out to be a war? Both are not released yet- but the coming summer isn't far away too. Should i quote "breathless anticipation usually reserved by nubile nymphets for rakish rockers." :-P

Adam beats iPad hands down in all hardware specs- the hardware - the software( Yay! Android and Ubuntu combo is superawesome) but yes we know of the Apple's marketing strategies. Remember how the tech-blogs like engadget, gizmodo and macrumours assured that the Apple iPod will be a failure! Lmao! It took over the walk-man. Portable music is ~~somewhat~~ defined by it! Let's see how Apple and Adam fare in terms of Tablets. I am seriously not interested in HP-Slate running Windoze 7, as per the leaked specs on gizmodo :D

Adam touted on its website about them releasing their own SDK. Following thoughts and questions pop-up:

- It'll run Ubuntu and Android whose SDKs pre-exist. What has Notion Ink got to with realesing their own SDK ? Can someone clear this up for me :=)
- Features, yep, Adam has a lots of them? But Apple has shown in past that mearly packing a device with features doesn't make it successful. Looking at iPods and iPhones show that its not the number of features packed into one, its the overall design and vision. lol! The Chinese Phone selling out in street marts has more features jampacked than anything. Need I say more? :-D

Looks great at the moment, but this just brings up more questions. Mostly questions about the screen, but also the positioning of the touchpad on the back of the device. Add to it, Keeping it one the back will require lesser movement on hand while you hold it!

I am using a N900 lately. And yea! Maemo seems to have all the features we'd expect on a device rolled out by Nokia , and it is in all true definitions open source.

If Nokia continue to develop maemo to have the basic features of an iPhone, it'll take over the world. Till now they've not been able to. Oh and yes! Maemo stuff does proper multi-tasking, unlike the iPad by Apple or the iPhone. Its still un-understandable to me why Apple thought that it was OK to release a device like that without it. Even Windows 2.0 had some kind of pseudo multi-tasking. Apple has its own style of winning. period. Mix of thoughts :-P

Back to the NI thing. Just realized the Pixel Qi was the screen tech featured in pop-sci some time ago. Wonderful to see something from that magazine that is actually seeing some use (and some very exciting tech at that).

So I'll say NI, win win win. Please win! This is sublime, if it is as promised.

Btw, another lovely article on iPad by an Ubuntu lover.

The iPhone Photograph Recovery experience

2010-02-15T03:14:00.000+05:30

Around a week back while playing around with a friend, i took some photographs from my iPhone that were one of the most inseparable ones to me. Due to a stupid backup method, I happened to accidently delete and lose them in a jiffy.
The odds to recovering them were low, and i took some precautions like minimally using my iPhone so that disk Read+Write sessions do not overwrite the data permanently.

I started with Googling methods to recover the data off the iPhone, but found NONE working. The softwares that I downloaded from those keyword stuffed websites were total rip-offs.

What worked for me after several experiments was:
- Jailbroken iPhone
- BSD Subsystem and OpenSSH installed on iPhone
- Terminal (or MobileTerminal) installed on iPhone
- An SSH server installed on computer. I tried installing OpenSSH on Windows first, it didnt work maybe since 'dd' ain't natively supported on Windows. Fedora 12 worked fine for me. So using Fedora/Ubuntu box is the best bet here.
- Find the iPhone's IP address
- Find computer's IP address

First, make sure that your iPhone and computer are on the same LAN via WiFi. You may try pinging your computer from your iPhone (using Terminal) and vice versa.

If that worked, you should be prompted to enter a password for . If the connection times out, then you need to make sure that you have the SSH server running on your computer and make sure that port 22 (the default SSH port) isn't being blocked by your router's firewall.

Once you know that your iPhone and the computer are talking to each other, open Terminal on the iPhone and run the following command to begin transferring the iPhone's "disk" image to your computer:

NOTE: Make certain that your iPhone's screen lock is disabled first. If the screen lock comes on, it will kill the SSH connection. Also, you'll want to connect your iPhone to its charger. This transfer can take a while.

Also, be sure that you don't mix up the "if" (input-file) and "of" (output-file) in the command above. Doing so could wipe-out your iPhone.

dd if=/dev/disk0 | ssh @ 'dd of=iphone-dump.img'

The iPhone's image dumping process will take about 10 hours for a 8GB iPhone. The IMG file can be copied in a portable harddrive and bought to a different machine, so that recovery process can be continued using PhotoRec (Free and open source image recovery project)

Alternative hack for the Gesture Keyboard

2010-01-25T23:50:00.000+05:30

Long time for this post too! eh. mugging for the exams is quite a shakle to breakaway from :-P The reason I am writing this post amid the tests is being overwhelmed by Rahul Motiyar's new multitouch monitor mount hack. The thoughts from the B'lore trip and the above work culminated :-P

I happened to visit and take a look around HPL India B'lore. The way gesture keyboard solves the problem of indic languges was sure eye catcher. Its a tablet with a Stylus input interface using which a computer newbie can type in Hindi almost with zero learning curve. A big boon over the present Hindi keyboards, which work fast- but only for a very specially trained people.

The HPLab's Gesture Keyboard

A generic Hindi keyboard

The way it works makes Devnagari entry a breeze. I happened to think about some extensions that could be done with this interface. "Why not make a simple computer screen work like a gesture keyboard with almost zero hardware mods"

The point is to learn from the Optical setups that the wonderful open source community is using today. A camera mounted over a infrared laser lit LCD can easily track the touch points- add to it, it can work a multitouch input panel too.

Mount a modified PS3 eye to track infrared over the monitor. Optionally, a wiimote can also be used( tried Wiimote's IR tracking, works well for small IDs)

Write an GTK/WPM Module similar to Gesture Keyboard that would popup as soon as Hindi typing method is invoked

Align the Infrared Lasers right over the acrylic sheet such that a light plane parallel to the screen is generated.

The LLP mount when fitted over the LCD will track multiple IR points with almost zero force

Gestures are parsed accordingly using a touch tracker( OpenCV, Touchlib) , and overlapping keyboard is calibrated.

Total Cost for the hack=Rs 500 for generic webcam+ Rs 1000 for two IR Laser modules.

Pwned! FOSS event concluded!

2009-11-08T07:15:00.002+05:30

Duh! Long overdue for this post. Almost 500 students attended the FOSS Fest during Sakshama :-) Mostly undergrad prefinal and final year engineering students. We started barely 20 days before and managed to finish everything right in time! quickfire way :-)

Most of us wishfully had almost none or less than 2-3 hours of sleep for the 3 days of the event, it was fun! - Reason: The days were reserved for the FOSS talks, and the mid-nights for Hands-on DIY sessions.

Thanks to: Leslie and Ellen from Google Open Source Office, Rahul Sundaram and Shankarsan for Fedora goodies, Kinshuk for the help he provided in managing the event, kunal for the t-shirts printing, skbohra, niyam, paras, manu, chits, jdk, zugard team and all the juniors who worked hard together to make the event success :-)

The experience can't by described in this short sleep deprived post. :-) Till the longer version, a small Flickr Stream of some photographs.

Here's the FOSS GN09 Report

FOSS GN09 Coming Up Soon

2009-10-21T06:03:00.000+05:30

We've planned a FOSS event in college from 28-31st October. We'll be talking to people about enhancing their contribution to the commnity, code, and the spirit behind.

Probably we'll be having Niyam Bhushan. So we'll be talking and doing an unconference on Human Computer Interaction, Multitouch, programming gestures, why a programmer should consider design while writing code etc. We've also planned to do a hackfest on how to build a DIY multitouch table with junk hardware etc. and writing some gestures code in AS3

Other planned talks are about the future internet and Disaster management using Sahana (by skbohra), etc.

Detailed plan can be seen here in the brochure that I designed yesterday :-)

FOSS

Intuitive Gesture Pad for Hindi typing

2009-09-29T06:48:00.004+05:30

I happened to stumble across a gesture pad devised by Shekhar Borgaonkar. Needless to say, its one of the most wonderful innovations as per inputting Devnagri(Hindi) script is concerned. Due to its complexity, the Hindi based keyboards used today aren't user friendly at all. A beginner cannot think of using the same for text entry.
Interfacing the same to a touchscreen/stylus-input make it intuitive, and hence cut down the learning curve required to type hindi into Computers/cellphones.
Exactly as Shekhar says "I think this will benefit India because many people will be able to interact with computers for the first time in their life. "

The demo of the concept is downloadable here

Received the GSoC certificate

2009-09-28T04:34:00.000+05:30

Finally I got my GSoC certificate of completion- huge thanks to my mentor Pawel Solyga(solydzajs) and Google Open Source Programs Office.
The Fedex shipping had twisted and crumpled and torn it a bit on the way to Googleplex to Delhi, a little trick called "lamination" helped it look as good as a new one ( atleast in the scanned image below). yay!

Alpha Tests

2009-08-22T22:59:00.002+05:30

With the help of Soy Productions i could get a small demo video. Due to table configuration problems a good recording couldn't be done for now at my end. Soon our multitouch wall will be up and running.

Anyway,This is how camera manipulation would look as of now. Let's see if we come up with new ideas soon.

Task TBD- Make touch sensitive drawing and camera manipulation modes switch to each other. Waiting for friend- Pecan to arrive soon.