Kevin Technology

I’m making the table (seriously)

You guys seen this LEAP thing? Check out the video:

So cool! The company behind LEAP is offering developers the chance to receive an SDK (including a free LEAP) if they pitch an idea on their website. I just submitted my application where I pitched my infamous restaurant table idea:

A pet project I’ve been wanting to work on for a while is an interactive touchscreen table specifically for the application of dining at restaurants. Basically that one Microsoft Surface video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QST6Hz12mOk) where the guy orders food at a restaurant. Imagine that you can browse an interactive menu with more pictures/videos/information available than a paper menu, order directly from that menu, play interactive games with other tablemates, browse the web, share webpages with a flick that sends it to someone else at the table, call for a waiter for more water/napkins/etc with the push of a button, and pay for your meal using a really nice interface that makes bill-splitting and electronic payments super easy. That Microsoft Surface video is from 2007. It’s 2012. Where is my awesome interactive restaurant experience?

Previously I planned on doing this using a projection-based system with an array of infrared LEDs to detect gestures, but with the LEAP I believe I can pull this off more easily and at a much lower pricepoint.

So here’s my offer. Send me a free LEAP development kit and I’ll make the software interface for restaurants including:

*previously described user interface with a minimum baseline of 1) interactive menu, 2) web browser, and 3) payment system (initially supporting cash, Venmo, and Stripe credit card payments)
*toolkit for a restaurant to import their menu into the system, add pictures/videos/etc, create the table layout of their restaurant, and choose their payment methods
*”server” interface for the kitchen that receives orders from tables

Thanks for your consideration, I really hope I hear back from you!

I also detailed some of the past projects I’ve worked on, including HAWK, uWave, Autoplug, smspersonfinder, SEPTA Now, and NEStalgia. Here’s hoping they decide to pick me. And if you’re from LEAP and you’re reading this, please please please pick me! :)

(Source: leapmotion.com)

Optimizing Buying Soda from Wawa

Off and on, I drink a lot of soda. Wawa is open 24/7, so I buy a lot from them. Tonight I asked, “How should I buy soda from Wawa to minimize my spending?”

So I went off to Wawa and took some pictures of their price offerings. This is from the Wawa on 38th and Spruce. I limited my data to prices involving Coke and Pepsi, which cost the same. Here’s the data:

The 67 oz datapoint there is for a 2L bottle.

So the goal is to minimize the ratio (price/oz) column. Certainly the lowest entry is the 2L bottle of Coke/Pepsi, which has a 0.0327 ratio. This surprised me a little; I guess to some extent I always thought the fountain soda cups were a better value.

Here’s a graph of the above data, for the visually inclined:

Of course, price and quantity aren’t the only two factors. Soda can taste differently depending on the mixture of carbonation and syrup, so if you want consistency you may be better off buying a bottle. And 2L bottles are rarely chilled, so if it’s a hot day and you want a cold drink, you may buy one of the more expensive options. Plus at this particular Wawa their soda fountain machine lets you add as many flavor shots (vanilla, cherry, chocolate, etc.) as you want for no extra cost.

Haskell Final Project

For my Haskell final project, I contributed to Chris Done’s Haskell library for the Kinect (https://github.com/chrisdone/freenect) that wraps the functionality of the open-source libfreenect library. My contribution was adding support for the video camera (previously only support for the depth camera was built-in).

Here’s a link to my github repo with video support added in: https://github.com/kevincon/freenect

And if you’re interested in reading the report write-up, I’ve uploaded it to my website here: http://static.kevintechnology.com/docs/cis194.pdf

Here’s a picture I took with the Kinect once my project was completed: