Requirement to change the Monitor

We had initially bought Benq 18.5" TFT (LED) Monitor which had only VGA port. However, when Beagleboard arrived we figured out that it would not be a feasible idea to convert HDMI to VGA (Beagleboard-xm had HDMI connectivity while our Benq monitor supported VGA). Fortunately, the vendor agreed to replace the Benq Monitor with Samsung LCD monitor which supported both DVI-D and VGA. In order to use BeagleBoard with this new monitor we simply had to use a HDMI-DVI-D converter. We even checked XBOX360 connectivity with the Monitor and it worked perfectly fine. Thus, finally we found the appropriate monitor for the project.

Initial Findings

On being given the initial idea, we started to find more about the latest inventions going on these fields. After some study we found that all the big universities across the world have a haptics division which are pursuing research in the domain of our present interest including MIT Media Labs, Stanford etc. Further, since the release of XBOX360 Kinect in November last year, almost all these haptic departments have started projects for leveraging Kinect's capability for making various haptic interfaces. Even though the release of Kinect has still not completed one year, vast applications have already been developed centered around it. Even the present study of work given to us belongs to that category. Even various applications are already existing in the labs/markets which make use Kinect for making assistance technological devices for the visually impaired people. 

Keeping in mind the above stated facts, we are now fully aware that our task would not be to simply emulate what already has been done at various places but to go few steps further to make an innovative product which helps the society to grow.

All excited for the first meeting with Prof. Rahul (Our mentor)

Few days back we got the news that Prof. Rahul Mangharam from UPenn will be mentoring us as part of our ELM@YIF. Since then we have been very excited to meet Prof. Mangharam . Prof. has come up with an initial idea to assuage our thirst for doing research in the areas of HCI, embedded systems and robotics while adding value to the society. The initial idea was as described in the blog: http://kinecthesia.blogspot.com/ . This was a 3.5 months project taken up by undergraduate students at UPenn early this year.

Since our ELM is of 8 months, the task given is to deliver a viable product taking 'Kinecthesia' as our premises. The idea statement has been stated as follows by the Prof. - "To develop a Haptic Belt with the XBOX360 Kinect for visually impaired persons" where the initial technical effort needs to be taken to develop some relatively low-cost technology pieces and integrating them into a socially useful application. Although this is just an initial idea, we hope to do effective brainstorming with the Prof. when we talk to him for the first time. We all are geared up to officially start the project from today. Yippeee :-)