Adventures By Design

[caption id="attachment_1026" align="aligncenter" width="397" caption="Star Trek viewscreen (notice the eye-to-eye contact? How do they do that?)"][/caption]

Talking to my mother on Skype is wonderful for how is diminishes the distance between us. I look forward to the time when Skype has become such a normalized part of our communication, that we don’t have to go through that “is it on?” stage, followed by the “wow! this is so cool” stage, and instead we can just fire up Skype and get on with the conversation. I can imagine a time when just like Captain Kirk, mom and I can chat with the same natural familiarity of sitting in the same room (did Kirk ever simply chat? Conversed? Yes. Discussed? Often. But chat… I don’t think so.).

[caption id="attachment_1027" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="Ric looking at mom's Skype picture."][/caption]

We’ll get there, but there’s a limitation with webcams that annoys me: my mom and I cannot see eye-to-eye. Ha, ha. No really, we cannot simultaneously look into each other’s eyes. If my mom is looking at the Skype image of me, the picture I see of her is with her eyes downcast. And similarly, if I am looking at her on the screen, the image of me has my eyes looking down too. The reason for this is because the web camera is mounted above our monitors, but the image we see of our dear loved ones is several inches below that. This is something like parallax error in a If I want my mom to see me looking directly at her, I have to stare at the webcam on the top of my monitor. From her point of view, I will now be looking her in the eye, however, I won’t be able to see her image, except in my peripheral vision. The subtle yet annoying result is that I feel my mom and I aren’t connecting as naturally as we would face-to-face. It’s like trying to have a conversation with someone who will only focus on your chin.

[caption id="attachment_1028" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Ric looking at camera."][/caption]

So, this problem has been bouncing around in my head for a week or so and I think I have a solution: prosthetic eye webcams. Well, ok, maybe that won’t work for everyone (unless you are willing to give up an eye). No, my solution is more low tech.

Using my mom and me as an example, if I could position my webcam in the same location as my mom’s eyes, then it would look natural to her when I looked at her face as she was speaking. If I position my monitor so it is facing away from me, then place a signal mirror in front of it, when I look in the mirror, I see the monitor screen. A signal mirror has a hole in it; place a webcam in this hole and aim it at myself. Now start up Skype, call my mom, and adjust the camera so it is roughly between her eyes. That’s it. When mom looks at her screen, she’ll see me looking at her eyes. Of course, mom would have to do the same set up with her computer, so it would look natural for me too.

So, have I done it yet? Nope, not yet. But I think it would work.

Note: In searching for images for this post, I discovered that several businesses already identified and addressed this problem (here and here). Like many of my (ahem) brilliant ideas (such as solar panel shingles), other people have had the same, and usually better, ideas. So, there goes my career as in inventor. But, at least I got the mental challenge of figuring it out, and really, that’s the best part.

We think we’ve installed a plugin that will allow Wordpress and Facebook to talk to each other. Now, whenever we write on the blog it should show up in Facebook too (but just Gin’s account).

We’re not sure if it is actually working, so if this looks ugly or doesn’t work, sorry.

[caption id="attachment_471" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="A Wordle word cloud of my strengths."][/caption]

Yesterday, I continued our redesign (or at least revision) of our blog. There are a bunch of things I want to change, although I’m not sure when I’ll have the time to do so. I wonder if this sudden need to make our blog more user family-friendly is just an online version of the fabled Nesting Instinct.

So we had a great weekend, got some shopping done, hung out with new friends, had yummy Indian food for dinner (and lots of drinks), went to the old part of Suzhou to look around. And took absolutely no photos… sorry. Maybe next time we’ll remember the camera.

While we were in old Suzhou (as opposed to the sparkly, new industrial park we live in) we went to a place called U-Town. It’s a giant electronics shopping mall thingy where we looked at cell phones (but didn’t buy one because we need our passports to activate it and the school still has those), bought a cord that should connect our laptop to our TV (but it doesn’t work, blast!) and got a new power cord for our Nintendo Wii. The power cord was necessary because last week when I (Gin) plugged the Canadian Wii (110 volts) into the Chinese socket (240 volts) it made a nasty popping noise, smelled like electrical fire, and then stopped working. Uh, I swear I thought it had a built-in voltage converter. We were pretty bummed by the death of our Wii, once we get settled into school and have more time it’ll be fun to play, and it cost a lot! We had to hold out hope that the whole system wasn’t fried and that the popping and fire-ness were just from the cord, not the console.

So back to U-Town: since we hadn’t planned on going we didn’t bring the old cord from the Wii, and almost didn’t even try to buy a new one. We figured trying to explain what we needed would be stressful and irritating. In the end though since we were already there we thought it was worth a shot so we headed to a booth that sold Wii’s, ready to pantomime. Little miming was actually necessary however, it seems this nasty popping noise must be common with Wii’s here. The girls at the booth knew exactly what we needed and pulled out a power cord that can accept up to 240 volts. Yay! (With later research I think that Nintendo Wii’s aren’t made for the Chinese market, so there must be all sorts of North American ones kicking around and requiring new cords).

We brought the cord home, still not convinced that we hadn’t fried the whole system. When we plugged the Wii in though, it worked great and I had a wonderful time playing, that is, until our TV broke… I guess we’ll have to go back to U-Town for a new one?