IDEA: New gadget design based on ARToolkit

Before start, I assume that you guys have known ARToolkit before. If not, you can find some details here. I've also included a video below for you.

ARToolKitで初音ミクも『ｳｯｰｳｯｰｳﾏｳﾏ(ﾟ∀ﾟ) 』

The video showing above is a realtime overlay virtual imagery (Hatsune Miku) on a real world background. Briefly speaking, ARToolkit is a technology concerning viewpoint tracking and virtual object interaction.

The most obvious application for the technology can be making it available on a handheld device, eg., a mobile phone, psp, etc. To bring the whole system to work, only a camera and a fast enough microprocessor are necessary. Recently, someone had managed to make it work on an iPhone.

To bring it further, maybe we can have a look at this at first:



As you may guessed, I should tell you the picture is a fake. By using a so-called Green Screen magic, you can even make a fake video of that kind of "transparent monitor". However, for the following picture, it's a real.



Though it may not be what you might expected. In fact, it's a holographic projector named "HoloPro", rather than a translucent display.

What I'm proposing is to make a handheld gadget by bring them together, ie., a translucent ARToolkit gadget. One typical use for that kind of device could be as following:


"Mobile Search Device From The Future"

Though I'll advise you to imagine the virtual dancing girl can be seen through a "magic mirror". By intergrating with microphone and touch sensor, the virtual avatar can also react to our actions.

Hopefully, perhaps we can get them from online stores in the very near future, ie, 3~5 yrs later.

PS. BTW, I was confused by the search result whenever I try to find something new. Most of the time, I can find nothing but a bunch of "US Patents" which are neither feasible nor usable. I begin to agree to the idea proposed by the guys from Pirate Bay, at least to some extent.

True Randomness: Does It Exist At All?

These days I found a website providing service to generate random numbers. What I actually need was a randomized sequence generator, which I was about to use for my user study purpose. However, I was shocked by a statement of the website saying: "In reality, most random numbers used in computer programs are pseudo-random, which means they are a generated in a predictable fashion using a mathematical formula. This is fine for many purposes, but it may not be random in the way you expect if you're used to dice rolls and lottery drawings."

It's interesting to think about what we are expecting about our random numbers. Although we all know the computer programs generated random numbers are pseudo-random, what kind of numbers are true-random? How can we generate them and distinguish them from those pseudo ones?

What they offered is a TRUE random number generator which shown below. They do that by recording and interpreting atmospheric noise with several radios.



However, how can we prove the generated numbers are truly random? It's a rather difficult question then you might have imagined, in fact, it's impossible to prove randomness definitively. A visual analysis approach can be found from that website, which visualize the generated numbers into image and decide their randomness with human eyes. Besides, you can find some other methods from the same page.

Meanwhile, though most random number generator program are actually pseudo-random, it's not always possible to predict the generated numbers. Most of these programs rely on 2 points: the generating formulae, and an initial number (seed). In most of cases, the system time is used as seed. Thus, in order to predict the resulting numbers of a specific program whose algorithm is already known, we'll have to know the time when it generated them as well, which could be difficult to determine. In this way, pseudo-random number generator can obtain some true randomness by involving the randomness from the physical world, which is also exactly what the true random number generators do.

But, since we can't prove a truly randomness, it's also impossible to say the numbers genererated in that way is truly random or not. After all, how can we prove the randomness of the world, while the world itself could be deterministic? How can we say the atmospheric noise is definitely random?

We don't have to. What's the problem of those pseudo-random number generators? Simply because patterns can be spotted in the results, which made them predictable to some extent. Nevertheless, what we really need is unpredictability, rather then true randomness. Regarding to the theory about deterministic universe, it's even hard to say the true randomness ever exist at all.