Poster Presentation

I have to admit that despite my initial reactions upon starting this project; I really ended up enjoying this. It was much different than any other presentation I have presented given I couldn't use my traditional medium, power point. Moreover, I was very close to many other people presenting at the same time and sometimes I would get distracted and forget what i was saying. Thirdly, I had to present my entire presentation in under a minute so I really had to speak fast, efficiently, and get my ideas and points across very quickly. One thing that did catch me off guard was since I was positioned near the back, for the first 25 minutes or so there was nobody coming back to look at our presentations because everyone would start near the front, send their 3 tweets and leave so I was a little disappointed I didn't get to present my ideas to more people. I found out many interesting things that people presented and I believe the class as a whole did a very good job and took this project seriously. It was a lot of fun and I would definitely have your class do this again next year. Here is a picture of the technology I chose to talk about and shows someone playing guitar hero via the use of just his hands! i.e. (air guitar!) Here is a link to the full length video.

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/23813/?a=f

E-Voting... Good idea?

A while back during lecture we were presented with the idea of how voting might work within a century from now and how voting might take place all online. At first I did not even like the sound of this for many reasons. The first one being, how reliable could this new e-voting technology really be? If everything is done online, how would we have any physical evidence of who voted and verification? Meaning, e-voting to me seems to put the all America's trust with computers and the I.T. department running these systems and who's to say these guys aren't getting paid off to add a couple million votes? After all, the way I see it, there really isn't any way as of now to trace who actually voted. Call me a skeptic but are we getting that lazy that Americans simply cannot wait in line to cast votes? Do not get me wrong, for the physically disabled I believe this would be a great idea but for everyone else, we can wait in line. There are some good things that come with this like reduced paper consumption, most likely a huge increase in voter turn out, and no lines but i really do not like the idea that we put our trust into the hands of computers and the "people" handling these votes. They would have to come up with some way to physically make it impossible for anybody, including the guys running these computers, to add any extra votes and prevent any inside jobs. So until this is developed I am completely against E-Votoing.

Purdue Envision Center

Today we had lecture in the Purdue envision center and to be honest I was quite impressed with all the latest technology we had. What I was most impressed with was the immerse 3-D technology and the CAVE technology. I wasn't quite sure what to expect but when I put the glasses on it made a world of a difference. At first it gave me a headache and I wasn't sure how to react but after a while I got used to it. The graphics weren't all that impressive given an x box 360 or play station 3 had three to four times more impressive graphics but the 3-D effects and real life feeling was very good. It really seemed as though chairs were popping out at you and all sorts of things could be reached out and touched like ordinary objects in real life. I was most impressed with the immersed feeling you got when just looking around at the 3D environment as a whole. I cant wait to see how this system will keep improving with age.