Sunday 6 May 2012

Bar Camp Calgary Touch Voting Platform & Zyris Multi-Touch Technology

Yesterday's Bar Camp Calgary event was a success, lots of presenters all with great topics. For those not familiar with a Bar Camp, it is categorized as an 'un-confrence', meaning unlike a traditional conference where speakers are pre-selected and announced in advance. An unconference allows attendees to post their topics on a board which are then voted on. 


Above: One of the guest speakers, Shawn Abbott

The winning topics are assigned an area and time to present, anyone that wishes to attend the presentation simply goes to the appropriate area at that time. It seems like a pretty wild idea initially, but having experienced it yesterday, it is a very effective method.

Above: A quick interview with Boast Capital's and
Start Up Calgary's Lloyed Lobo about Bar Camp 2012


There was actually one presentation that was inspired by our voting platform and lead us to the introduction of Zurb Foundation. A multi-platform, multi-browser, mobile ready front-end framework that dramatically decreases the time needed to create front end user interface.

Above: Mike Tighe showing an alternate front end interface
to the Zyris voting system. (Made in under 45 minutes)

The Zyris Touch Voting platform made its debut, processing around 150 votes, while this may not seem like a large achievement we have already begun to analyze the data generated during the voting process. This paired with the feedback we received from the community has been invaluable in making improvements and additions for next year, while there was only one exception of a dis-satisfied user, all other users reported an acceptable level of functionality for the short timeline we were granted. We hope there is a demand for this system and will be trying to get it utilized by Bar Camp's worldwide. We encourage anyone interested in the technology or system to contact us.

Above: Attendees using the voting interface.

This week we also made alot of progress in our multi-touch research, our preliminary findings show that our technology will provide the ability to have bio-metric data acquired at the same as the touch points are detected. This solves a huge user interface issue involving how to validate access to a multi-touch platform. It seems that using this technology would allow a new level of active security that was completely transparent to the user, conciser the bar camp voting system as a case study. This would of allowed us to ensure that an individual was voting once and only once, and to prompt or ignore any additional votes on an item. The video below shows a quick overview of our discoveries. 


While we see tremendous value in this, it is understandable that such a technology may be challenged by a fear of the system collecting fingerprint data of users, as such we believe it is critical to ensure security of the data collected and the highest privacy standards are adhered to when designing such a system. Therefor research into various techniques that will not only satisfy but exceed these requirements is a must.


The image above shows the epidermal ridges as seen by the camera. Multi-touch software will then process this image and provide an API/SDK to pair the touch point telemetry with a bio metric token or reversible hash used to identify the user.

Well that's it for this week! If you are interested in any of the technologies mentioned in this post please contact us.

3 comments:

  1. The Zyris UI looks a lot like a search engine field with scalable grids. It struck me as it is, but there is more to that as I have a vague idea about its back-end coding.

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  3. With the advancement of technology, everything has become a lot more transparent and convenient, then why is this technology not being used to carry out easy and fair elections?https://sweepstakestips.cabanova.com/

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