Progress update

This week I've mostly been working on the business plan part of my project, which is going quite well. I've also found an interesting article on BBC News about humans and computers becoming closer together. It says; "The keyboard, mouse and monitor will increasingly be replaced by more intuitive forms of interaction and display, including tablet computers, speech recognition systems and fingertip-operated surfaces." This is exactly what my project is setting out to achieve, blurring the boundaries between physical and digital.

I've also been working on getting Wiimote input working, along with some general refactoring of the code to make it a bit nicer. I'm using the WiiremoteJ library along with Bluecove and my Macbook (as it has bluetooth built in). Bluetooth is a massive pain and took me ages to get it working nicely.

However, the Wiimote input now works; it picks up the IR light and pressing the button "clicks" on things. I'm not quite sure yet how it will work with finding the angle of point since both the IR light position and the accelerometer are affected by the pointing direction of the controller. I'm going to get some IR LEDs hooked up later this week so hopefully will be able to get a better understanding of how it will work then.

Next tasks are to get the shelves cut and get the internal lighting sorted in the bookcase as this will really allow me to see how everything works together.

I've also knocked up a quick webpage at http://duality.benorgan.co.uk

Some more screenshots should be posted later this week as I've made a few more tweaks to the GUI.

Double standards

Now don't get me wrong, I'm all for equal rights and less prejudice in this world, however, there seems to be a growing amount of double standards with regards to equal rights.

This article (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/6697469.stm) on BBC News recently explained how an Australian gay pub has banned heterosexual people. Fair enough, straight people were intimidating the customers. However, what were to happen if you were to ban homosexuals from a "straight" pub. There would be outrage, people would moan, there would be a petition against you and you'd probably get taken to court.

Equal rights are all well and good, but only if they really are equal.