Reinventing Interaction - NYTimes.com

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Reinventing Interaction

NEW YORK — If you’re wondering what to order at Adour, the wine bar at the St. Regis Hotel in New York, you can scan hundreds of wines on an interactive menu projected on to the bar. If a wine appeals, you tap on its name to summon more information. The system had worked well, except for when a particular type of customer tried to use it — those wearing knuckle-dusting diamond rings.

“As it turns out the giant diamonds on those rings — a not uncommon sighting at the St. Regis — would send light in 50 different directions, temporarily blinding our sensing algorithms,” said Jared Schiffman, co-founder of Potion, the New York interaction design firm that developed the digital menu. “We’d done quite a lot of testing of our camera vision system to make sure that the interaction would work in all sorts of configurations, but not that one.”

Potion reprogrammed the system to stop it from being distracted by bling. At a time when designers and computer scientists are experimenting with motion capture technology, brain sensors and voice recognition systems to develop a new generation of digital devices with which we can interact more intuitively, Mr. Schiffman, 32, and his fellow ...

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/29/fashion/29iht-design29.html?ref=global-home

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/29/fashion/29iht-design29.html?ref=global-home