Disney’s ‘acoustruments’ can control phones using their own sounds

Disney Research is apparently developing plastic accessories that can control phones, which might even be more far-out than MIT’s thumbnail trackpads. They’re called acoustruments, and they can control phones with sounds from their own speakers. How? Well, each acoustrument comes with a U-shaped tube that feeds ultrasonic sound from the phone’s speaker to its mic. You can control the phone with that setup by disrupting the sound, say, by blocking holes on the tube like you would on a flute. Its controls don’t necessarily have to be holes, either — they could be buttons, switches, knobs, wheels, sliders and anything else that can alter the sound wave to indicate an action.

Thus far, the researchers have already developed an acoustrument that integrates with a phone case and acts as a camera shutter, one that acts as an alarm controller, another that turns a phone into a toy car and one that transforms a device into an interactive doll. They believe the accessories can be especially useful whenever you don’t have access to the touch screen, such as when you’re using your phone as a virtual reality device (like in the picture above). We doubt we’ll see acoustruments being sold on Amazon or elsewhere anytime soon, but the good news is that they’re reportedly cheap to manufacture. Hopefully, that means they’re also affordable if they do come out, so you can try the curious controllers without breaking the bank.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile

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Via: TechCrunch

Source: Disney Research, Carnegie Mellon University

Scientists can build an early-warning system for trolls

Almost every website with comments suffers from trolls, people who like to spout obnoxious and irrational gibberish just to offend others. Since you can’t just ask people to behave like human beings, a lot of time and effort is spent monitoring and policing this idiocy. Thankfully, the internet’s long national nightmare may now be at an end after researchers from Stanford and Cornell developed an early warning system for trolls. After conducting a study that examined close to 40 million comments, it was found that trolls can be algorithmically identified before they’ve written 10 posts.

The team took the comments sections from websites CNN, Breitbart and IGN, looking at the contributions of 1.7 million users over 18 months as well as the up and down votes each post got. The team then dug in to work out what differentiates a banned user from those who are deemed to be worthwhile members of the community. it turns out, perhaps unsurprisingly, that trolls are pretty easy to spot.

For instance, trolls are more likely to write less coherently and often with more profanity than other users. They’re also found to concentrate their discussions in a narrow group of threads and often generate more responses than less inflammatory comments. The team thinks that this latter point is because they’re adept at “luring others into fruitless, time-consuming discussions.”

Naturally, while a little obnoxiousness when a new user joins a community is tolerated, this patience is worn out over time, leading to an increased rate of post deletion and banning. Familiarity also breeds contempt, and trolls are understood to post significantly more frequently than other members of a site. For instance, one candidate for banning had written 264 missives on CNN, far in excess of the average, which was 22.

Loading all of these characteristics into a computer, the team was able to cook-up an algorithm that they claim will identify trolls with a success rate of 74 percent. Now, the researchers believe that a lot more work needs to be put in before comment services will be able to shoot down negative comments before they’re read, but it is, at the very least, a promising start.

Filed under: Internet

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Via: Quartz

Source: Arxiv.org (.PDF)

This box transmits emotions to your hand

This slightly unwieldy looking machine can apparently deliver emotions to your hand through “mid-air haptics”, pinpointing areas on your palm that are attuned to certain emotions, and stimulating them. A study from the University Of Sussex used an Ultrahaptics system to communicate emotions between test groups, with the haptic group stating significantly higher stimulation compared to a test group that was only shown a picture. (Mere optical stimulation? Pssch.) Dr Marianna Obrist, Lecturer at the Department of Informatics, has apparently figured out that stimulating different areas of the hand conveys different things: hot bursts of air to the area around the thumb, index finger and middle part of the palm generate excitement, while sad feelings can be delivered by slow and moderate stimulation on the outer palm and areas around the little finger.

Dr. Obrist has now received a million-pound research grant from the European Research Council for a five-year project to expand the research. It includes efforts in both taste and smell, aiming to setup a framework for multi-sensory experiences that inventors will be able to tap into. She said: “Relatively soon, we may be able to realize truly compelling and multi-faceted media experiences, such as 9-dimensional TV, or computer games that evoke emotions through taste.” No The Walking Dead remakes, please.

Filed under: Science

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Source: University of Sussex