Johnny Chung Lee

Every time I hear someone argue that the mouse or keyboard is going away, I'm reminded of Chung Lee's ignite talk about why that's not the case. http://procrastineering.blogspot.com/2011/07/myth-of-dying-mouse.html There are human computer interfaces for different computer sizes. The mouse and keyboard are good for "human scale" devices like the desktop and laptop. Touch is great for pocket sized devices, and motion is good for even larger devices. The mouse and keyboard aren't going away, it's just that we'll have more non-"human scale" devices.

We use VGo telepresence robots at our company right now; there are a few other companies in the space as well. An engineer from Google has semi-famously made a nice homebrew rig with an iRobot base and a netbook: http://procrastineering.blogspot.com/2011/02/low-cost-video-chat-robot… I'm guessing this unit would run around 12-15k as a product, based on the hardware involved. Right now, the VGo, which I consider the best solution on the market, costs $6k per robot. The big advantage I'd see from a Segway-based solution would be stability and driveability. What's really needed is better peripheral vision and A/V qualities - not something the iPad can deliver right now, but something I think this kind of rig would really do well if it had.

from his blog, at http://procrastineering.blogspot.com/ -- "Louis Castle announced yesterday at GDC2008 that EA's upcoming title 'Boom Blox' will ship with an easter egg that allows head-tracking using the Wii remote! [...] I'm proud. If this pans out, it'll be only 5 months between the initial research prototype to integration into a major product release. Sweet! Happy to see my stuff being used. [...] Just in case you are wondering: No, I don't get any royalties or benefits for the use of this technique in games. Personally, I'm much happier impacting the state of technology on such a large scale in such a short period of time rather than struggling to transform it into personal financial gain." sigh. if we were just a LITTLE bit greedier, he could be so, so rich.

>> Violins don't have frets but experts can hit the notes. I posit that a fretless violin is more akin to a physical keypad than any traditional touch UI. I'm not a violinist, but I'd imagine these physical subtleties would take the form of neck taper, neck thickness, string pitch, string tension, etc. There's an equivalent feedback loop that stern advocates of the physical keypad simply can't discard, whereas traditional touch UIs are deadly efficient at "quantizing" such physical subtleties away. As an aside, violinists generally don't have a day-to-day multitasking dilemma, say, serenading while driving. Johnny Lee best explained[1] that the UX pays a cost whenever a UI fails to capture intent...and it's a cost that we often ignore when adopting new tech. Perhaps this cost may be insignicant to the typical low stakes consumer, but to a professional who spends much time corresponding over mobile, retaining a high level of confidence without visual verification or reducing the average number of errors per stroke or quickly adjusting to a new interface based on its tactile nuances is often all the justification that's needed to make the physical keypad an imperative. [1] http://procrastineering.blogspot.com/2011/07/myth-of-dying-mouse.html

I was hoping this was a commercialization of desktop VR head tracking: https://procrastineering.blogspot.com/2007/12/head-tracking-for-deskto… (2007) That type of 3D is limited to one viewer, but is pretty cool.

Source: http://procrastineering.blogspot.com/2020/03/low-cost-ventilators.html

He worked on the Kinect project at Microsoft as well. In fact he put up the prize money for the Open Kinect contest run by Adafruit to develop drivers for the Kinect. http://procrastineering.blogspot.com/2011/02/windows-drivers-for-kinec…

Johnny Lee has written a short post about Ceres: http://procrastineering.blogspot.se/2012/05/today-sameer-agarwal-and-k… "If I find the time, I might try to post some tutorials on using Ceres. Because I believe this is one of the most powerful tools in modern engineering, and no one ever taught it to me in undergrad or high school. It's like the difference between doing long division by hand and then being handed a calculator."