Canonical Demos Physical Awareness Prototype in Ubuntu
Prototype uses webcam to sense user activity and trigger appropriate reactions.
Over at Canonical's design blog, Christian Giordano introduced an early prototype for a user-aware framework that tracks a user's movements and responds by triggering different actions.
The blog details a few examples such as having the computer initiate full-screen mode when a user leans back in their chair. Canonical also toyed with a parallax technique that shifted the desktop's reference point depending on where the user was positioned in relationship to it.
It's one thing to try and describe these processes and another to demonstrate them. Check out the video: http://vimeo.com/14959854
No word on when or even if this prototype will make it to a future version of Ubuntu, but with this, along with the uTouch framework Canonical released a few weeks ago, the company seems to be extremely interested in new ways to interact with a PC.
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