All I wanted to do was send a string to Skype and have it dial a phone number.

Search engines continuously gave me 500 lines of code solutions, mostly made by someone called Overlord where the comments about how you shouldn’t use his code was 4 to 5 times as long as the actual code itself.

SkypeForComLib
Skype Kit
C#
Dial a telephone number.

This is a very simple solution that gets rid of the prefix ([Skype:]) problems as well.

No this would not be a good enterprise solution, but for just dialing a telephone number from any app using your Skype account it does what others seem to require 100’s of lines of code to do.

public static void MakeUSSkypeCall(string areaCodePlusNumber)
{
var skypeUri = String.Format(“skype:+1{0}?call”, areaCodePlusNumber);
Process.Start(“”C:\Program Files (x86)\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe””, skypeUri);

}

A cloud storage that holds information saved about an area by others. Some could be official others could be personal. However when you enter an area you can get an alert to let you know there is more information about this spot. Maybe someone famouse grew up in that house etc. Furthermore, it could go as far to to do statue face recognition and tell you about statues, building structure edge detection and tell you about buildings in that area. Rather than having to distinguish between billions of objects, it would cut that number down by knowing where you are in the world.

Imagine, you enter the Martin Luther King Memorial, an alert appears.  100’s of stories are available to listen too, left by People who knew Dr. King.   You turn to see the statue, as soon as you do the device recognizes the statues face based on a facial recognition file and the I have a dream speech starts playing in your ear.

Now imaging this about a cabin you build next year.  Telling your grandkids about how you built this place by hand and if they visit the spot they can hear your words and see what you saw as you recorded it.  Since we have the devices we can record ourselves when we speak or record exactly what we see when we recorded the audio.   Digital Ghosts

Working on my new device on Vacation.   I have found that adding 1 additional mirror allows the device to work in a forward facing but without the need for reversing screen. Between this new functionality and the Gyration Air Mouse  I have been able to create a device that I think surpasses the original creation by allowing the device to work on Linux, Apple or Windows.  Also this kills the need for any Software shell for now. Each app can have it’s own shell now.  I still believe this is carrying on the spirit of Pranav’s “interactive life enhancing-computing”.  Just moving the goal post a few yards.

My Device taking a vacation : 

The red arrows show the direction of the projector reflection.

I went back to my old reliable peice of plastic and just added another flat mirror for the first mirror to bounce the projection off of.

The Device working with Windows 8.

Adding some real code tomorrow, where it can capture images randomly and give you information about your surroundings.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/kinectforwindows/develop/new.aspx

It Looks like a lot of tracking improvements overall.

also VS2012, Server 2012 and an updated .Net 4.5

In a similar concept to Digital Graffiti:

http://thomaskcarpenter.com/2009/10/08/airpainter-augmented-reality-graffiti/

I was thinking of digital dimensions.  With the glasses that could see these dimensions : Google glasses.  To projector based technology that could shine over and show anyone: Sixth Sense, Kinect for Phone, and Single Cell (See previous post).  To camera technology like shown above in the air painter.

With Altimeter, GPS, Compass and Picture you could store the exact information and capture exactly what you write with your finger in real time.  We can easily store an entire digital dimension in the cloud.  I could walk up with my finger and graffiti someone’s house and never get in trouble because I never did a thing to it.

Now let’s say your daughter and her friends wanted to have their own dimension.  Let us then suppose there are other groups of friends who want to share.  They can paint the house colors, turn the sky green or purple.  Mixing and matching friends dimensions.   Instead of sharing posts with friends you’ll share your dimension with others.  I have 540 dimensions!

From an ease of life perspective,  lets customize the dimensions we want to see so we can have exactly what information we want at any time we want at any place.  Maybe someone writes an app for restaurant reviews. So over each restaurant in the air you can see the ratings of that restaurant as you pass by or projected onto the windshield corners or from a projector or a passenger looking through a phone into this dimension.  On the front door your friends left a 5 Stars, “They serve mean coffee” on the door. Map directions as an arrow at your feet.

I can also see this as a possible abuse.  In my day it would have been “Toilet Paper and egg this house guys” and assisting in negligent or harmful activity.  Since you can’t control where the data would be stored you can’t control that the dimension programs wouldn’t be able to scan an area.  This technology is in its infancy.  But I can see these overlapping Digital Dimensions as a way of life.

The picture sucks, but gets the point across.

Design started from Sixth Sense Device: from the guy who started this movement Pranav Minstry, if this doesn’t get you fired up. I don’t know what will.
http://sixthsense.github.com/sixthsense/

1. Removing Sixth Sense Application while not removing the “spirit”.  There is  much work to do.  I would rather write these things as  libraries so that other applications outside of the SS  can use it.    “Separate Augmented Reality Libraries”. By combining each of these libraries would cover everything demonstrated and a heck of a lot more. These are complex when you see them on screen. However, if you sit down and look at what you need for each step, then it is easy.
      a. Speech (Includes text to speech, speech to text, sounds.)
      b. OCR Libraries (Using EGNU: http://www.emgu.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page)
      c. BarCode, ISBN and QR code Readers.
      d. WebQueriers – Bing or Google about one of the returns from the OCR, QR, barcode or ISBN captured.
      e. Video Flip or Unflip to support mirror or no mirror.
2. Removing need for color fingers, due to real life testing I have found color markers to be undependable. Using Kinect and depth motion I have found the devices to be too bulky. Replacing with www.leapmotion.com . (Kinect 2.0 (2015?) or for Kinect phone could change my mind).
3. Creating reusable interchangeable libraries for all developers to use rather than one program that must be open in windows. This is where myself and most of the sixth sense team differ. I have passion for Pranav’s IDEA.  However, I am about “what fits the puzzle best”.  I honestly believe he would have the same outlook.  Interacting with real life is the goal. 4. Removing any need for any specific hardware. Since Leap is the new “Mouse” and promises to work on apple and Linux devices, then NOTHING ties this device to any OS, to any HARDWARE, furthermore no need for Direct X. Finally, using the API’s I will be building you should be able to create the functionality we all saw in his videos on any device in any program.

Very easy to use, used my own custom .pat file.

In the end it did very well.

I ran into a couple of errors, 1.  Don’t host inside of a web app.  2. Copy the DLL’s to a FAT32 drive then back and re-reference. It’s like the power point and word unblock, but for DLL’s and for some reason there isn’t a way to do this. If you don’t have access to a FAT 32 drive you can just use sysinternals stream.  Just Bing that.