We received a bit of publicity around our HeadSLAM presentation at Pervasive and ISWC.
There’s a good short article on the new scientist website here. Collin Barras, the author of that article had a few extra questions on our work and we had a really good e-mail conversation on the subject. He also asked me if we had any video material, but he chose not to use it.
And there is a second Article on Engadget here. As the comments on the article at Engadget correctly point out, there is nothing to see in the video but Burcu walking down the corridor that we mapped. And as the author omitted the resulting map in his article, it is hard to understand our research with the article alone. As some of the commenters may not have realized that there is a link to the preprint of the article when clicking the picture, I added the resulting map here.
So here is one of the map examples produced from the data we recorded. And to limit possible misunderstandings: No this is not a product, not even a prototype, it’s a scientific experiment only. And the video is for illustration of the recording process only, this is neither an advertisement nor a “cool†demo video, it’s there to show how we recorded the data. We are perfectly aware of the fact that this needs hardening to be used by firefighters, that the infrared LIDAR is of no much use in real smoke, that there is no smoke in the video (would have been a bit pointless to show a video recorded in thick black smoke, right?) and that using a normal notebook computer is not really wearable. This “just” shows that the principle works and that it could also work with smoke-penetrating sensors such as Radar or Sonar.
We will continue to add some material to http://www.cubeos.org/headslam/
And apart from that, I would have appreciated if Engadged would have contacted us before using our video on their site.
Holger