It must be infuriating to be in a situation where there’s a clear problem, and all the obvious remedies continually fail to produce any legitimate result. That’s what this blog is like: every month rolls by with some half baked ideas partially implemented and barely documented. And in the last day of the month, there’s a kind of panicked scramble to fulfill an entirely arbitrary self-enforced quota just to convince myself that I’m doing stuff.

Anyway, it’s pretty rare for me to be doing absolutely nothing, but mustering the effort to actually complete a project to an appreciable extent is pretty hard. This might be in some way indicative of a kind of shift in the type of projects that I try to work on- they’re generally somewhat larger in scope or otherwise more experimental. And while I may have been notorious before for not leaving projects at a well documented and completed state, these new ideas often languish much earlier in the development process.

There’s always pressure to present things only when they are complete and presentable, because after all timing is key and nothing can be more detrimental to an idea than ill-timed and poor execution. But at the same time, I think the point of this blog is to create a kind of virtual paper trail of an idea and how it evolves, regardless of whether or not it falters in its birth.

With that said, I’m going to create a somewhat brief list of projects and ideas that I’m currently experimenting with or simply have yet to publish a blog post for.

• One of the earlier entries of the backlog is a HTML5 scramble with friends clone, acting highly performant on mobile with touch events and CSS animations while supporting keyboard based interaction on desktop. I’ve always been intending to build some kind of multiplayer real time server component so that people could compete in real time. Maybe at some point it’ll be included as a kind of mini game within protobowl.
• The largest project is definitely Protobowl, which has just recently passed its one year anniversary of sorts. It’s rather odd that it hasn’t formally been given a post on this blog yet, but c’est la vie. Protobowl is hopefully on the verge of a rather large update which will add several oft-requested features, and maybe by then I’ll have completed something which is publishable as a blog post.
• Font Interpolation/Typeface Gradients. I actually have no idea how long this has been on my todo list (years, no doubt), but the concept is actually rather nifty. With attributes like object size or color, things can be smoothly interpolated in the form of something like a gradient. The analogue for this kind of transition when applied to text would be the ability to type a word whose first letter is in one font, and the last letter being another font, with all the intermediate letters some kind of hybrid. I never did get quite far in successfully implementing it, so it may be a while until this sees the light of day.
• I’ve always wanted to build a chrome extension with some amount of OCR or text detection capabilities so that people could select text which was embedded within an image as if it weren’t just an image. At one point I narrowed down the scope of this project so that the OCR part wasn’t even that important (the goal was then just some web worker threaded implementation of the stroke width transform algorithm and cleverly drawing some rotated boxes along with mouse movements). I haven’t had too much time to work on this so it hasn’t gone too far, but I do have a somewhat working prototype somewhere. This one too is several years old.
• In the next few days, I plan on publishing a blog post I’ve been working on which is something of a humorous satire on some of the more controversial issues which have arisen this summer.
• And there are several projects which have actually gotten blog posts which weren’t themselves formal announcements so much as a written version of my thinking process behind them. I haven’t actually finished the Pedant, in spite of the fact that the hardware is in theoretically something of a functional state (I remember that I built it with the intent that it could be cool to wear around during MIT’s CPW back in April, but classes start in a few days and it hasn’t progressed at all since). Probably one of the most promising ideas is the kind of improved, vectorized and modern approach to video lectures- but that too needs work.
• I’m building the website for a local charity organization which was started by a childhood friend, and maybe I’ll publish a blog post if that ever gets deployed or something.

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Recently, I’ve been racking up on hobbyist electronics components from Sparkfun. Actually, this has been going on for quite a while, and most of that spending was justified by this project, which currently has the working name of the “pedant” (which is like at least a three-layered pun). I won’t say that it’s my very first foray into building some actual piece of hardware, but it’s probably the biggest and most original hardware project I’ve ever attempted.

I probably won’t be able to sell you on what it is, because it’s actually quite simple and uninteresting in principle. So instead of selling you on the cynical summary of its functionality, I’ll gild the concept with buzz words and try my very best to instill the same kind of enthusiasm I have for this project (which might just be because I haven’t done anything before with e-textiles or other electronics stuff).

The pedant is my foray into augmented reality, hopefully that means that it’s, at least some ways, original. It’s cheap, though actually in retrospect, not nearly as cheap as it should have been. And probably the most interesting aspect is that it skips through the whole perceived evolution of augmented reality from some bulky extremity into something sleek and unobtrusive. That’s not technically untrue, because the actual device will be fairly bulky, but it would exist in an already considerably bulky device (a shoe), so the net effect is that it’s sleek and unobtrusive.

I can’t say I was into that whole augmented reality thing before it was hip and cool. I only got interested in it fairly recently, likely due to somewhat high profile forays by Google and others. In mid-to-late 2008, I had just gotten my iPhone and I was deeply attached to it. At one point, I was on a vacation and at one point there was some arbitrary fact which came into question, at which point I pulled out my glorious first generation iPhone with its pristine anodized aluminium backing and loaded an app which searched an offline copy of all the textual content in the English Wikipedia (a concept which I had become so attached with that I ended up making Offline Wiki for the same reasons). And as the question was settled, the new subject of conversation was how incredible it is to keep all the world’s knowledge in a palm sized device.

But that’s not just an anecdote about the marvels of technology, it’s also a sad tale about how distracting it was. Somehow having access to that information allowed whatever pedantic instincts to prevail, shifting the conversation from a meaningful discussion into an artless digital query. And even forgiving that fact, it was slow and distracting, destroying the asynchronous exchange of ideas by creating this handheld bottleneck. Yes, we got an answer, but at what cost?

And I think that is a beautiful way to frame the argument for augmented reality. That whatever reality we have now is already being corrupted by the influence of the virtual world, and that only by willfully acknowledging that they both share the same space, can we start in the right direction of fixing it. That’s the direction Google’s Project Glass is headed, and I think that’s the right way.

The approach taken by the SixthSense project and by Google Glass mainly interacts with the user in a visual manner. And for the latter, there isn’t any really “good” and unobtrusive way to interact with that information. Both of the projects have extremely high output bandwidth (conveying information by projecting it into the user’s eye in one way or another), but limited input bandwidth and still fairly non-discreet (waving hands around to form shapes and sliding a bar on the frame, respectively). The Pedant takes a different approach by focusing on tactile input and output. This places the project more in the league of people who implant magnets under their skin by hijacking the sense of touch to convey information about the surroundings.

It’s going to be a tiny device which fits within the dimensions of a shoe insole including an Arduino Pro, a Bluetooth Mate, an Accelerometer, 2000mAh LiPo battery, and three or more vibration motors. By tapping the foot (or by orienting it in slightly different ways) the user can input data in a manner similar to the telegraph. However, nothing necessarily restricts it to being sent through a single “stream”, so it could end up more like a chorded telegraph (a la chorded keyboard). The great thing is that with chording, it becomes much more practical to receive information at reasonable rates.

Just like how a cell phone can vibrate to signal that the user has been left a message, the pedant would be used primarily to handle notifications, but rather than indistinguishable general sensations on the thigh, it’ll portray the type of notifications as well as the content, and the user even has the possibility to respond without changing the environment.

Without weird tactile abstract character sets, the Pedant could be interesting just as a sort of social network where users can feel the presence of other users in their general vicinity. It could monitor the footsteps of all nearby Pedant wearers and as it’s connected via a cellular data network and a smartphone GPS to trigger the specific vibration motors to evoke an awareness of how fast they’re walking and what general direction they are. In a sense, a social network of pedometers.