A salute to the Flag: "जय हिंद" : Happy Independence Day

“India is, the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend, and the great grandmother of tradition. Our most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India only.” ~ Mark

Today on 15th Aug 2013, we are celebrating our 67th Independence Day. India has been a great country till date and it’s not only because of the history but the people it keeps. I believe that on the face of this earth India is the only place where dreams of a common living individual found a home from beginning when man began the dream of survival. Independence Day of India is a moment of glee and dignity but this is not something which was easily achieved, India had to put up a long battle for over years against the British Empire. On August 14, 1947 at midnight, Mr. Jawaharlal Nehru said that ‘Awake to freedom’ "Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially.” At the stroke of that midnight hour, the world was sleeping but India was awaken to life and freedom.

On that precious day of 15th August 1947, Mr. Jawaharlal Nehru asked one question to India that “The achievement we celebrate today is but a step, an opening of opportunity, to the greater triumphs and achievements that await us. Are we brave enough and wise enough to grasp this opportunity and accept the challenge of the future?" And today after 66 years of Independence I presume that India got its own respect and identity throughout the globe for its incredible success in various facets like economy, science, technology and engineering. 

Today India stands 2nd in the world for its substantial success in Technology. India has the largest technical and professional talent pool in the world. It’s said that Adaptation is the key of success and that’s where India started its journey. When asked about India Mr. Bill Gates said “India is in an interesting position: It has both a deep understanding of the challenges and great capacity to help solve them. India’s cities are flush with highly educated people working in well-funded labs, as well as extremely poor communities like the slum in Uttar Pradesh that I visited last year. That makes the country an ideal place to understand both the problems and the solutions. This is one reason why I try to visit at least once a year”. In recent survey 80% of European and US IT companies outsourcing firms ranked India as their number one destination. The National Association of Software & Service Companies (NASSCOM) also reported that almost half of all fortune 500 companies choose to outsource software development to Indian outsourcing firms. Even there are large competition for India like China, Mexico, Ireland etc., India has managed to outmaneuver all others and emerge as top outsourcing.

Well, there is a lot to write and my aim behind this is not to show off what India is but to inspire all upcoming developers, IT companies that it’s just the start of the journey and there is a lot to do for us. All I want to conclude with this, be the change you wish to see in this world! Lead the country with pride and honor!

You have the freedom, Respect It and Value It !

Harshal Modak wishes you a very Happy Independence Day !

Leap Motion ~ A glimpse into the innovative future of computer interaction !

LEAP MOTION CONTROLLER - Since the beginning of graphics enabled computers in April 1981, interaction has tremendously evolved over the past thirty years to include different interface metaphors like mouse and keyboard, pen computing, touch screens and recently multitouch screens. These continuously enabling developments have made the view of interaction more accessible and natural. But despite of the broad range of technologies in these development area, they all rely on two-dimensional plane. So as a qualifying technology, Leap Motion has very important and motivating platform to encourage further improvement and it helps to improve the naturalness in this interaction metaphors. What motivates me to use Leap Motion is a problem of wasting time and inconvenience by duplicating same keyboard and mouse events to extract information from same source, in which I am interested in accessing same kind of information using hand pose signs given by me. Due to real-time operational requirements, I am interested in a computationally efficient algorithm and probably hardware. And here it is, the revolutionary future of computer interaction Leap Motion. Leap Motion is first and unique mainstream contender for a high fidelity gesture peripheral. The first question everybody asks is, "So what can it do?". The short answer is, today, very little. Tomorrow? Well, I for one am a believer. What we have here is a limitation of imagination, not of technology. That is usually a catalyst for innovation.

The Leap Motion controller is a small USB peripheral device which is designed to be placed on a physical desktop, facing upward. Using two cameras and three infrared LEDs, the device observes a roughly hemispherical area, to a distance of about 1 meter (3 feet). It is designed to track fingers (or similar items such as a pen) which cross into the observed area, to a spatial precision of about 0.01 mm.

Leap Motion CEO Michael Buckwald said:

"We want there to be world-changing applications that fundamentally transform how people interact with their operating system or browse the Web.... The goal is to fundamentally transform how people interact with computers and to do so in the same way that the mouse did, which means that the transformation affects everyone, both from the most basic use case all the way up to the most advanced use cases you can imagine for computing technology."

I love the idea of controlling computers by waving my hands. Using the Leap is a novel experience, it is very user friendly but there are still some flaws which will be resolved soon.