Well today was more of a testing day then a reel working day. I met with the yahoo group at 10:30 this morning and they handed over the pecan cam, as everyone is calling it. We had a little trouble getting it to stay in place and I am still fighting it a bit but I hope to win this one by tomorrow after noon.
The reel problem is that if I stop moving the cam goes to sleep and the whole thing does not come back like it should. We have sent e-mail to the software vender and to nnokia to see if anyone can help us stop this from happening. I will update you all tomorrow about how that goes. Everyone here loves the idea and I am starting to set up a few interviews to post when I get home or before if I get the chance. People here are having a lot of fun and really want the project to work every one wants a chance to be on the pecan cam.
Now for my basic brake down of the day.
As much of the day was spent fixing the cam I needed to step in and out of meetings. However I saw a good presentation from a Dublin university professor and grad student. They were working on a mechanism to standardize tactile graphics and there elements. The goal of their project as I understood it was having a repository that people could contribute graphics to and others could ad audio labels to and yet others could sync both and so on down the chain. This looked interesting and I will keep a better eye on it in the future. I think they had some good ideas and I liked the open mottle they were using.
Next I when to a presentation from adobe and was frustrated to see them speak about digital additions and speak frankly about how in accessible they were. I was called away before the speaker got to the answers part of the presentation. I will check in with him again to get more information. At least they are saying that they know the problem, now let’s give them a chance to fix it.
Another interesting presentation was on audio menus. I loved this presenter he really put venders in their place he did not hold back and told it the way he saw it. He has been researching different ways to present menus quickly and effectively audibly. He spoke about spear cons and audio cons and ways to use pitch and volume to get information about the menus. Check out his work at the link on the stream.
At 4 today the exhibit hall opened and the reel fun began. I was able to get a few good views for all of you. We will get much more tomorrow. Whenever we could we linked to the exhibiter I was speaking with was added. If any of you want to add more please do so thanks. Hope some of you had fun watching today.
Well the last fun thing for the day was gw micro had an announcement party and they showed a new book sense with a screen witch I will try and get one for the lab and a new voice sense as well. Gw also announced the changes to the UI of window-eyes. The new interface will be a single dialog and you will be able to make configuration changes more quickly and all at once. Sounds good I always like being able to do things faster.
Time for bed, as tomorrow looks like it will be even fuller. I hope to make the gnome presentation and a presentation about eBooks. So let’s see how that goes.
Pecan is waiting on dinner so got to run