We describe the design of SelfReflector an internet-connected mirror that uses online facial recognition to estimate your age and play music from when it thinks you were 14 years old. The mirror was created for a specific shop (SPeX PisTOls optical boutique), within a research through design project centered on the high street as a space of vital social, economic and environmental exchange that offers a myriad of psychosocial support for people beyond a place to purchase goods. We present in detail how the design emerged as our research interests developed related to IoT and how people use the high street to experiment with, and support sense of self. We discuss SelfReflector in relation to challenges for IoT, facial recognition and surveillance technologies, mirrorness and the values of a craft approach to designing technology centering on the nature of the bespoke and 'one-off'.

This paper describes the implementation of a heart motion compensation system on the da Vinci surgical system (Intuitive Surgical Inc.) for coronary artery bypass surgery. By introducing a robot-assisted solution, this surgery could be performed completely minimally invasively and on a beating heart. In this work we describe the development of open loop controllers based on spectral line decomposition and the assumption of a periodic trajectory. This allows the da Vinci patient-side manipulators to track an actual heart trajectory with sub-millimetre error. Further, to simulate a virtually stabilized environment, we present the novel concept of maintaining the camera fixed relative to the heart target, effectively decoupling the vision tracking and arm tracking challenges. Finally, we executed preliminary experiments to evaluate surgeons' ability to perform simulated suturing and peg transfer tasks on a moving target. Performance for the simulated suturing was evaluated based on task completion time, accuracy of needle placement, and number of errors. For the suture task, the number of missed targets decreased from 37% to 13% when compensation was enabled, the number of hit targets increased from 26% to 41%, and completion time decreased. For the peg transfer tasks, again completion time and number of errors were measured. Though the margin for error was larger, there was less perceived difficulty of the task when compensation was enabled.

Developers who write code in a statically typed language are denied the ability to obtain dynamic feedback by executing their code during periods when it fails the static type checker. They are further confined to the static typing discipline during times in the development process where it does not yield the highest productivity. If they opt instead to use a dynamic language, they forgo the many benefits of static typing, including machine-checked documentation, improved correctness and reliability, tool support (such as for refactoring), and better runtime performance.

Projection methods for volume rendering unstructured data work by projecting, in visibility order, the polyhedral cells of the mesh onto the image plane, and incrementally compositing each cell's color and opacity into the final image. Normally, such methods require an algorithm to determine a visibility order of the cells. The Meshed Polyhedra Visibility Order (MPVO) algorithm can provide such an order for convex meshes by considering the implications of local ordering relations between cells sharing a common face. However, in nonconvex meshes, one must also consider ordering relations along viewing rays which cross empty space between cells. In order to include these relations, the algorithm described in this paper, the scanning exact meshed polyhedra visibility ordering (SXMPVO) algorithm, scan-converts the exterior faces of the mesh and saves the ray-face intersections in an A-Buffer data structure which is then used for retrieving the extra ordering relations. The image which SXMPVO produces is the same as would be produced by ordering the cells exactly, even though SXMPVO does not compute an exact visibility ordering. This is because the image resolution used for computing the visibility ordering relations is the same as that which is used for the actual volume rendering and we choose our A-Buffer rays at the same sample points that are used to establish a polygon's pixel coverage during hardware scan conversion. Thus, the algorithm is image-space correct. The SXMPVO algorithm has several desirable features; among them are speed, simplicity of implementation, and no extra (i.e., with respect to MPVO) preprocessing.

We discuss two volume rendering methods developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The first, cell projection, renders the polygons in the projection of each cell. It requires a global visibility sort in order to composite the cells in back to front order, and we discuss several different algorithms for this sort. The second method uses regularly spaced slice planes perpendicular to the X, Y, or Z axes, which slice the cells into polygons. Both methods are supplemented with antialiasing techniques to deal with small cells that might fall between pixel samples or slice planes, and both have been parallelized.