Final Blog

From the time I first started blogging about The Glass of Tomorrow until now, my ideas have grown tremendously. At first, my product was just a vision. All I had was a concept. I didn’t really know how to transform my thoughts into a tangible item. I wasn’t aware of the technology that already exists in this world that could be used to make my product into a reality. A few things changed this for me.

            By researching similar products, I was able to gain immense insight into the technology used in the making, and ways to build upon and improve The Glass of Tomorrow. For example, upon researching the Microsoft Surface, I came across  “PixelSense,” which ”allows a display to recognize fingers, hands, and objects placed on the screen, enabling vision-based interaction without the use of cameras. The individual pixels in the display see what's touching the screen and that information is immediately processed and interpreted.” (Microsoft.com) Before reading about this, I, knowing very little about the in’s and out’s of advanced technology like this, had no idea how such interactive input was possible. However, after reading about the Microsoft Surface and the technology they use, I now understand how something like this could be implemented into my product.

            Since the beginning of my blogs, The Glass of Tomorrow has evolved immensely. It is still the same product, but now everything down to privacy, social media, hardware, input and output, bits and bytes, and digital color and audio has been considered. This product is an interactive technological surface that is glass. This interactive glass can be anywhere from your home, to your workplace, to your car, to stores… The categories of glass would include appliance veneer, automotive display, large format display, photovoltaic, LCD TV, architectural surface, wall format display, etc. It would be thermally durable, ultra thin, highly efficient, have advanced functionality, and be weather resistant. The purpose of this glass is to be able to sync your mobile device or computer with any surface that this glass is found, that way your life can follow you wherever you go. For example, if you are in the kitchen, but need to check your calendar on your phone, you can connect your phone to the kitchen counter made of this glass, and your calendar would pop up.

            I have a lot of faith in my product, and although some of the technology is still in the making for every vision that I have for The Glass of Tomorrow, I know that through the use of today’s technology, a lot of my ideas are possible. I enjoyed blogging about my idea, and I have no doubt in my mind that you’ll be seeing it one day in the near future!

-                         Emily Key

Blogs I Commented On:

http://hillarydz.blogspot.com/2011/09/week-2-social-media.html?showComment=1320030796929#c5733389031940204688

http://imagesyoucanuse.blogspot.com/2011/09/initial-idea-for-images-i-believe-you.html?showComment=1320031212182#c6125401662202168554

http://scoffeecup101.blogspot.com/2011/09/week-1-smart-coffee-cup.html?showComment=1320032065122#c5861176507123543342

Blogger Review

For my professional blog review, I chose to review a blog about Bill Gate’s home, known as a “Smart House,” due to its entirely interactive system. The author of this blog is Amit Agarwal, who holds an Engineering degree in Computer Science from IIT and has previously worked with clients such as ADP, Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch. In 2004, Amit quit his job to become India’s first and only Professional Blogger. Amit authors the hugely popular and award winning Digital Inspiration blog where he writes about computer software, consumer gadgets, and web applications.

Upon reading his blog, I learned a multitude of information about Bill Gate’s house, located in a suburb of Medina, Washington, on the side of a hill overlooking Lake Washington. In this house there are miles of communication cable, largely fiber optic, running throughout, linking computer servers powered by the Windows NT operating system. Lights automatically come on when you come home. Speakers are hidden beneath the wallpaper to allow music to follow you from room to room. Portable touch pads control everything from the TV sets to the temperature and the lights, which brighten or dim to fit the occasion or to match the outdoor light. Upon entering his house, you are given a microchip, which sends signals throughout the house, and the conditions of the house such as lighting and temperature will change in accordance to the users preferences. And these are just naming a few of the features…

         This blog was very informative to me because of how closely it relates to my product, The Glass of Tomorrow. Seeing that a house like this has already existed for so long gives me much more hope that a system like this can be implemented in mainstream society. The ideas are all the same, having a system that controls everything you do through touch panels. The only difference is that the surfaces of the touch panels will be everyday items like a mirror or a countertop. This blog gave me a lot of insight about the possibilities of my own product, and was interesting to read as well. 

http://labnol.blogspot.com/2005/05/inside-bill-gates-home.html

Digital Color

As mentioned in previous blogs, the graphic aspect of The Glass of Tomorrow is incredibly important. This product has to be visually flawless, whether it’s the clarity of the digital pictures that are on the surface of your interactive refrigerator, or the video images of your friends and family that you are video chatting with on the surface of your mirror.

Since The Glass of the Tomorrow is largely visual, pixels are very important to consider in the making of this product.  The pixels contain information about the brightness of the colors, the intensity of reds, greens and blues, and the chrominance, which consists of the pictures hue and saturation. Display devices generally use the RGB model, which stands for Red-Green-Blue. These are the primary colors of light, which computers use to display images on your screen.  Since all of the visual for the Glass of Tomorrow is displayed on a computer, then they are in RGB form.

The hue, which is a specific color within the visible range, and the saturation, which is the intensity of color, is encoded by the images displayed on the Glass of Tomorrow for various uses. The hue scale for The Glass of Tomorrow ranges from 0-360, but is normalized to 0-100%. The product has default settings that set images and digital video to the ideal level of “purity” and clarity, however, under the Settings, the users of the Glass of Tomorrow would have the ability to adjust the saturation, value and hue of the videos and images that they are viewing. The lower the saturation of color that they set, the more “grayness” is present and the more faded the color will appear.

While the idea of proper value, saturation, and hue is pretty basic, and can almost always be recognized and adjusted by the naked eye, they are crucial to this product’s success. We want our surfaces to be as clear, crisp, and bright as possible, ensuring maximum user happiness.

Bits and Bytes

        One of the biggest upsides and marketing strengths The Glass of Tomorrow has is visual interface. It’s clearly appealing to the modern eye-- the eye that is trained to view, manipulate, and eventually project images that it sees. The Glass of Tomorrow incorporates all of the media we have today, be it audio, video, or photos-- and the quality of these multimedia files is at the forefront of the idea of The Glass. In this blog, I'll discuss the importance of image, video, and audio quality with respect bits and bytes.
       Photo and video files are the first important thing we need to look at. The majority of domestic users (i.e. homemakers, children, and families in general) will immediately use The Glass of Tomorrow as a decorative and image-viewing source. This might come from the ability to have photo and scrapbook albums as a type of “screensaver” or even as far as editing photos taken with your personal devices. It will be able to have the RAM for whatever imaging the user needs and will be able to have updates that allow a user to correctly suit his or her needs when it comes to photos. This works for video files and streaming as well-- considering we’ve moved from a still-image world to a video-based technological society, The Glass will be based around video and the user. Whatever the byte value, The Glass can handle it.
      Audio files are another important topic. The Glass of Tomorrow has the capability to be used as an audio device as well-- not just television and talk, but the ability to access digital music libraries at the touch of, well, glass. These files will all be formatted into WAV files to ensure the best audio quality available, and if a user has mp3 files saved on a digital library, The Glass can sync those files automatically into WAV-- all behind the scenes. The audio is top of the line, just like the rest of the product.
      Quality is the base of the system, especially when it comes to the quality of the three most important multimedia. Audio, video, and imaging all tie together in The Glass as the basis of it’s extremely likable and easy-to-use visual interface

Week 4- Input and Output

           When considering such a complicated product, the question of application comes into play. In other words… how is this going to work? There are intricate input and output processes that need to be considered, due to the fact that this product is entirely touchscreen. Upon researching the Microsoft Surface, I came across  “PixelSense,” which ”allows a display to recognize fingers, hands, and objects placed on the screen, enabling vision-based interaction without the use of cameras. The individual pixels in the display see what's touching the screen and that information is immediately processed and interpreted.” (Microsoft.com) By using this, or something similar to this, input and output is made easy for The Glass of Tomorrow.

            Here is a run-down of how Pixel Sense works: First, a contact such as a finger or object is placed on the display. Then, IR back light unit provides light through the optical sheets, LCD and protection glass, that hits the contact. Then, light reflected back from the contact is seen by the integrated sensors. Sensors convert the light signal into an electrical signal or value. The values reported from all of the sensors are used to create a picture of what is on the display. The picture is then analyzed using images processing techniques. Then, the output is sent to the PC. It includes the corrected senor image and various contact types. (Microsoft.com)

            Other things to consider to make The Glass of Tomorrow the best it could possibly be are voice recognition and NFC technology. This product would utilize voice actions as a means of input. When we speak, a microphone converts the analog signal of our voice into digital chunks of data that the computer analyzes. From this data, the computer extracts information to interpret what word is being spoken. Similarly, Near Field Communication (NFC), technology would come in handy. Like the new Google Wallet, the Glass of Tomorrow would use the same system of encrypting data and storing it on an NFC chip to connect to a device. That way, your phone can act as a portal between you and all other technology around you, especially if you use the Glass of Tomorrow at home, in the workplace, and socially. 

Week 3- Hardware

When people first see our product, they question whether this technology is even possible. Although we are still in the drawing-board phase for a few of the more intricate features of The Glass of Tomorrow, most of the technology already exists. It is just a matter of syncing the different hardware and software together to work seamlessly. The hardware for this product is key. Although it uses some of the same hardware as your standard PC, the glass is the essential material of this product.

Transparency is the most important thing in this newly visual world, so glass is imperative. Displays require materials that are flexible, durable, stable under the toughest of environmental conditions, and have a cool, touch-friendly aesthetic. This product requires materials that are strong, yet thin and lightweight, that can enable complex electronic circuits and nano functionality, that can scale for very large applications, and that are also environmentally friendly. Besides this advanced hardware, The Glass of Tomorrow also utilizes basic hardware still, such as a CPU and RAM.

Many of the features of The Glass of Tomorrow requires that the device be interoperable, giving it the ability to share data between different computer systems, especially on different machines. Near-field communication will soon make all of this easier to carry out. Such real-time information also depends on communications networks with massive bandwidth capacity. Although a lot of the hardware involved is still in the working, it will definitely be able to be mass-produced in the near future.

Week 2- Privacy in the Social World

In this day and age, social media is a vital part of any company’s successful growth and expansion. If your product is not on Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and various other social media websites, your product might as well not exist. In the same way, everything that was once on paper is now electronic. Newspapers, books, calendars, address books, bills, banking statements, etc., are all online. While the possibilities are endless with this new technological breakthrough, the worries about online privacy have risen drastically. With a product like the Glass of Tomorrow, online privacy is definitely an issue to consider.

With the intricate features of the Glass of Tomorrow, people will wonder how they can use everything that it has to offer while still keeping their privacy in tact. Since this glass reacts to any phone that is put on it, people will wonder how secure the VPN connection is when they send confidential documents from their home to their office, or when they send pictures to their family. In order to ensure that our customers are fully protected, there will be a series of privacy settings put into place. There will be firewalls and SSL connections that make communication on the Internet safe and secure. There will be strong data encryption to keep hackers away, and everything will be on a virtual private network to ensure that people are able to communicate in the social world but still keep their privacy secure. Just like on Facebook and Twitter, our customers will have privacy settings that they can adjust themselves, and they will be updated constantly to make sure their security is at its highest capacity.

With the Glass of Tomorrow’s capabilities, businesses can have interactive meetings through this glass without having to worry about their information getting out into the public eye. People can access their bills from the surface of their mirror without worrying about identity theft or leakage of information. Privacy is of vital importance to this product, and in order to ensure its success, we will take every opportunity we can to keep our customers feeling safe and secure.