Technology is like an evolving mass form. It continuously grows and expands, changing the way we do things drastically. As companies strive to give users a seamless and simple way to connect with it, here are three technologies that help move the needle forward on human-computer interaction.
Super Resolution
You have probably seen a fair number of sci-fi tv shows play around with this concept. The “Enhance button” tv trope is a staple of several crime dramas too, allowing our heroes to zoom in on and enhance a small, tiny image into a clear one. It is often seen as an unrealistic crutch that show writers lean on to keep the story moving forward and requires some suspension of disbelief.
What If I told you that current technology can pull that off?
Super Resolution is a term used to describe a technique whereby software can improve the quality of a low-resolution photo drastically. What is the secret? It is everyone’s favourite buzzwords these days – AI and machine learning. Using this method, you can boost the resolution of a small 10-megapixel file to a 40-megapixel one. You can even take a small cropped 128x128 image and blow it up to be big enough for a large print that you can put up on a wall.
Michael Gharbi and Richard Zhang developed this core technology for Adobe research. They trained the AI by feeding it millions of photos, showing it various possible combinations of patterns, bricks, fabrics, and other examples from various real-life objects. When you press the button to enhance the image, the algorithms immediately start scanning the pixels in the low-resolution image. It then compares and analyses all the surrounding pixels of the image and then upscales it by using context from its vast database of sample images.
If all of this sounds complex, it is. There is a lot of math and algorithms going on here, stuff you will not even see because all you need to do is press one button. Turns out those cheesy crime dramas were right after all.
Facebook's wrist worn AR interface
One of the ultimate goals of technology being worked on for the future is to be as invisible as possible. The objective is to lessen the divide in how we communicate with technology by making it simpler. Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) are already showing us ways at how this is possible with smart contextual interfaces that appear when you want to interact with something.
Imagine walking towards a switchbox and being prompted with additional actions you can take with an AR pop-up. You interact with it using simple gestures and taps like you would on a smartphone.
Facebook’s Reality Labs have come up with an interface that is a natural, intuitive way to interact with the world around you with the help of AR. They are doing this using a wrist-worn AR interface that is smart and contextual enough to know what real-world object you are interacting with.
Why the wrist? Facebook feels like it is a good place to start because it provides a large enough real estate to build a device with the required sensors. The electromyography (EMG) sensors on the device interpret signals from your brain by tracing the position of the neurons that travel down your spine when you give your brain a command to do something, like move your hand for example.
The end goal is to build a natural, neural interface with a perfect synergy between human and computer interaction. Imagine walking up to your phone and not having to pick it up to see all your missed notifications. The interface could just pop-up a small box that hovers over the phone with all your notifications. You can interact with it, dismissing the ones you do not want and simply walk away to end your interaction.
Real-time audio and video captions using Machine Learning
If you have ever turned-on live captioning for a video on YouTube, you will have probably seen what I am going to talk about. It is not perfect, but it is something to marvel at when the service gets it right. Google’s machine learning algorithms can listen to and analyse video or audio to generate captions or subtitles.
This is useful when you want to keep the video muted or useful for people with disabilities. Google has now rolled this feature out to the Chrome browser and it will work with any video or audio that you open on it. It is not perfect, but it is great for providing you context to understand what you are viewing. For now, this feature works with English only but expect more languages to be added in the future.
To try it out for yourself, open your Chrome browser and click on the three dots in the top right corner next to your account logo. Click on settings and then look for “Advanced” on the left. Click on the box to expand it and choose “Accessibility”, you should now see a toggle for Live Caption.
You know what else is cool? This works completely offline and stores everything on your device.
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