July 2010 - Notes of Genius

History

Steve Mann is the father of SixthSense who made a wearable computer in 1990. The SixthSense technology was first implemented as the neckworn projector+ camera system. He was a media lab student at that time. There after it was used and implemented by an Indian who is the man has become very famous in the recent Pranav Mistry. There will be a long future rather than the short period of history for the SixthSense technology.

Development

Software

Pranav Mistry says the SixthSense software will be open source. As far as this seems to be a little set of items, there will not be user interfaces or much advanced programs for the users. There will be much harder and secured coding inside the device to make sure the security of the software. It will be interesting to know the new language for coding for a sixthsense device.

Hardware

In order to control the SixthSense, it requires some advance hardware as it appears to be. In some of the public presentations, the presenter was wearing some controlling devices including color markers, Camera and projector. When the product come to the real market there has to be lot of improvement for these hardware. They has to be compact and easily controllable. How ever the hardware integration of SixthSense technology is quite innovative since they have manage to develop camera and pen like day to day objects.

Applications

In Pranav Mistry’s demonstration, he showed several applications that can be made using the SixthSense technology. It would be a great achievement for the Information Technology as well. Since it is the beginning of the SixthSense applications, there will be lot of tough problems ahead the SixthSense application developers.

Motion Capture

The innovative camera is something that got applauds of the crowd in the demonstration. Four rubber rings in the four fingers two in each can be used do draw a rectangular. It will be the area covered by the photograph. Then the photos can be taken to any interface for editing, managing the galleries and sharing. This is much controversial. There is an inbuilt storage device where the data can be stored. When using a surface, the whole data is taken into that surface and stored in the device after the editing. The data can be hacked during the editing period. That is a serious issue in this camera application. And also the capturing device being so small like 4 rubber rings can be used to capture the photos of any location.

There are so many new applications to be developed in the near future. A remote controller for media devices can be implemented to be worked with fingers using this technology. Except having the remote controller to send fast forward, rewind or next or previous options, a SixthSense device can be used. The current process of sending fast-forward or rewind with advanced options. For example, using 2 fingers to send 5 seconds, 3 fingers to send 10 seconds likewise it can be done.

Many games can be made using this technology. A car race using an imaginary steering wheel will be an attractive application. The player will have to drive the vehicle as a real one using his arms. The SixthSense tool kit will be a good replacement for the XBOX game kit and it will not be much expensive as it is said.

3D Drawing

A pencil that enables users to draw in 3D is good innovation. It will be a good tool for the beginners to the 3D modeling world. Also it will help a lot for the engineers as well. Another implementation is the physical Google map. It provides the all data that is provided by the Google. The map available on a surface and when you keep something in it, it detects the place where the options available. Dragging and dropping hardcopies to the computer will be a good and efficient replacement for the scanner. This is much more advanced because this can take 3D objects as it appears.

Future Development

It seems to be that there can be a good future for SixthSense technology applications. There are several things that designers must pay their attention. The digital cameras came into the market with a promising call. But it did not provide the real quality for the photographers at a reasonable price. Therefore most of the professional photographers still use the analog cameras. Nano technology came into the world, but the general consumers do not use that technology so far. The reason is the extremely high price. SixthSense devices are very much different from the computers, this will be a new topic for the hackers and the other people also. First thing is to provide the security for the SixthSense applications and devices. Lot of good technologies came and died due to the security threats. There are some weaknesses that can reduce the accuracy of the data. Some of them were the on palm phone keypad. It allows the user to dial a number of the phone using the keypad available on the palm. As far as the palms are different, there will be some problems regarding some issues such like the sensitivity, and several other facts. Also 3^rd party attacks can be possible.

In addition to that Microsoft is developing a controlling environment whore the user doesn’t even have to touch the controller device named ‘Project Natal’. This will be a significant market competitor to the SixthSense technology since it still required some hardware involvement with the user.

Cascading style sheet is a popular technology used by web developers to separate content of the web pages from its design. CSS provide wide range of features to control the look and feel of the web pages without even touching main HTML design. The standards for CSS are developed by World Wide Web consortium also known as W3C. That makes a CSS a universal web styling language with consistent syntaxes with improved cross browser compatibility. Most importantly CSS file can be totally separated from the main HTML design as well as it can be embedded with it. Most of the popular web designing tools including Adobe Dreamweaver support CSS by its default configuration. In order to cope up with the modern demands of we design CSS has evolved drastically with in past few years. As a significant result of that improvement the CSS3 standards are developing by W3C. The progress they have made is displayed in here which is in official W3C web site. However at this moment most of the proposed features have been implemented by major web browsers, so we can already enjoy the power of CSS3.

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History

CSS1

CSS1 is the first edition of Cascading Style Sheets which were introduced in 1996. It came with the support for several properties. Introduction of unique ‘id’ for each property and introduction of classes to properties that should have the same styles attributes were the most important things there were. Margin, border, padding and positioning also powered by style sheets although they could be done by using the HTML elements. Spacing between lines and rows of tables are also easily done using the stylesheets. The W3C stated the importance of using CSS instead of having the html as the giving the ability to optimization and making it easy for the designers to design and settle down the design easily.

CSS2

CSS2 was published in 1998. Positioning of index with several property values such like fixed, absolute, relative and indexing were the commonly highlighted ones among them. Bidirectional texts and some other new front properties such as shadows were introduced by this edition of CSS. Two updates and features came in to fix the errors in CSS 2. CSS 2.1 was the last 2^nd generation edition of CSS.

CSS3

CSS3 is the latest edition of the CSS Stylesheets. There are several new functionalities have been provided through CSS3. Functions such like opacity, Text-overflow, media queries and box shadows are some of the much attractive introductions.

Rounded Corners

As there are much new features, the simplest and easily useable one is that the rounded corners. The previous CSS2 stylesheets did not allowed users to make this available in one step. They had to add four circular images for the four edges of the div and make the border rounder. The “-moz-border-radius” and “-webkit-border-radius” properties enable the users to be those borders round. Male the border image availability is another great introduction as it lets the user to add custom and decorated images for the borders.

Background Decoration

The background decoration is available with the possibility of customizing it. ‘background-origin’ and ‘background-clip’ gives a customized display for the content background. It has also enabled to have multiple backgrounds to the same content through the CSS3 styles. In addition, there is a new feature which is called background-image-size to resize the size of the background image of the divs.

Colors

There is a huge variety of colors available with the new CSS edition. HSL, HSLA and RGBA are the new color schemes. The new ‘A’ value stands for the opacity. With this value, the divs can make transparent and give a much attractive look to the appearance. In early editions, the transparency was obtained by adding a .png or .gif image as the background.

Text Effects

Most of the occasions when it is need to add customized text effects such like the shadow; the designers used graphics made using the Photoshop like software. With the latest edition of the CSS, it can be done without adding a weighted image to the content. The ‘text-shadow’ property comes with making them possible and providing a better image than the CSS. Text overflow control has made it easy to give good boundaries to the content while having the two values which are ‘ellipsis’ and ‘clip’. ‘Word wrap can be used to mark the boundaries of a particular text area while giving the options to mark the boundaries even by the number of letters or words.

Attribute Matching

Attribute matching made the styles available for some tags which are named with some starting part of a string. For example, the ids’ which are named as ‘sosa’ and ‘sopa’ can be easily applied with styles by making the tag name starting value as ‘so’. The outline property can be used to make an outline for the content. In earlydays, it was done by having two separate divs and applying the border to the outer one in which the width and height values greater than the inner one.

Box Model

Box model is a new property which was introduced with the CSS3 edition. With this, it can be easily assigned with customized div appearance. There should be two inner divs and a single outer div with the width of each inner div being 50%.

Web Fonts

A new collection of web fonts was introduced with the CSS3 edition. The multi column layout view also can be applied to the content as it can be used to provide multi column paragraphs. Media boxes are also a new implementation that could help to give a good view to the end user.

Suggestions For Future Development

One of the most expected further implementations are that the ‘Math’ functions of the CSS. It can be used in a vast area if it was introduced with mathematic functions. Aural Stysheets also expected to released but the W3C has not made a clear statement about that. There will be a set of properties for creating charts in the near future. Although CSS can be used now also to draw these charts, it is expected to be more convenient way in the near future. Image processing functions will be a good implementation to future. The page size could be removed from a large capacity. Though W3C has introduced universal standard for CSS, different browser engines have slight variation of interpretation. This can be identified as a major drawback of CSS standards. Due to this developer still have to think about using CSS in some special development scenarios. Furthermore in future releases CSS might contain advanced image processing techniques too. When thinking about far future CSS might be able to control HTML tags beyond 2D layout. Even at this moment there are some demonstration of 3D image gallery made using CSS3 with the aid of HTML5. They will be even improved most importantly to work on any browser platform.

References

7 Awesome CSS3 Techniques You Can Start Using Right Now. (n.d.). Retrieved 06 07, 2010, from Mashable: http://mashable.com/2010/06/04/awesome-css3-techniques/
Cross-browser CSS3 border-radius (rounded corners). (2010, January). Retrieved June 2010, from dimox.net: http://dimox.net/wp-images/css-border-radius.jpg
CSS3 Modules. (n.d.). Retrieved 06 08, 2010, from CSS: http://www.css3.info/modules/