Here is a mock-up of the EyeStop bus shelter.
(Credit: MIT Senseable City Lab)High-tech bus stops so cool they might actually entice you to take a ride will be installed next year in Florence, Italy.
The urban fixtures have been designed by a group of researchers led by Carlo Ratti, head of the Senseable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The EyeStop is a touch-screen bus shelter that monitors environmental conditions and real-time bus movement and also provides information and communication tools that can interact with your cell phone.
The EyeStop, which has touch sensitive e-Ink screens as well as LEDs, features a bus map plotting locations in real-time, e-mail and Web access, tools for planning a best route and getting directions, a community bulletin board, and, of course, a place for silent video advertisements. It will also use sensors to monitor and display local air quality.
Riders can choose to have their local EyeStop bus stop sync with their cell phone. The EyeStop you normally frequent, for example, could twitter you that your usual bus is running late that morning.
Intended for tourists as well as locals, the EyeStop tools will be accessible in several languages.
About 1,000 EyeStop bus poles will be installed in Florence, Italy, in 2010.
(Credit: MIT Senseable City Lab)A bus pole version of the EyeStop with similar mapping, info, and communication tools will also be introduced. It glows brighter as the next bus nears the stop to signal pedestrians from afar.
The design for the EyeStop was unveiled this week at the Genio Fiorentino festival in Florence, and a prototype will soon follow.
Florence residents will start testing the high-tech bus stop's usefulness, durability, and limitations in October. Following that, about 200 bus shelters and 1,000 bus poles are expected to be installed next year. The EyeStop was developed by Ratti's project team, in collaborartion with the Province of Florence and Florence's local transportation authority.
The bus shelter and bus pole versions of the EyeStop will power themselves with solar energy, but they won't be one-size-fits-all.
Each EyeStop will be customized by a computer program that takes into account the stop's immediate surroundings. As a result, each can be built to fit into the existing space using steel, glass, and gray stone local to Florence. The software also considers maximum sunlight exposure for the location to determine power generation needs.
But is it graffiti proof?
"We have looked into special glass surfaces that are self-cleaning and graffiti proof," Ratti said in an e-mail. "However, we will perform some real tests before building the prototype in October."
This is EyeStop bus shelter with an imaginary user.
(Credit: MIT Senseable City Lab)
Jeff Yan demonstrates his graphic passcode system on a PDA.
(Credit: Newcastle University)Think it's tough coming up with memorable yet secure letter/number combo passwords? Wait until you have to think of something to draw.
A system devised by computer scientists at Newcastle University in the U.K. uses human-scribbled doodles in lieu of traditional passwords.
Don't worry. One need not be the next Picasso for the graphic passcode system to work.
The Background Draw-a-Secret (BDAS) system, developed by Jeff Yan, a computer science lecturer at the School of Computing Science at Newcastle University, and graduate student Paul Dunphy, lets people choose from a selection of base images.
The image is then visually overlaid with a grid and people "trace" the image on a touch screen to the best of their ability. Their unique drawing skill for that image, or lack thereof, becomes the passcode.
Each time after that, the chosen image appears as the passcode prompt. If the person's doodle over it matches up with the original one they made, they're in. To make it user-friendly, the doodle does not have to match up exactly to the original sketch.
"Studies have shown that people find it easier to remember images than words or numbers and our system has proven over 1,000 times more secure than people's normal passwords," Yan said in a statement.
The system is secure enough to be used at cash machines, as well as for computers and mobile devices. The BDAS's subjectivity by nature makes it more secure against hackers than a system derived from a fixed set of options like numbers and letters. For example, password images that are not symmetrical and have many strokes or longer continuous strokes are more difficult for automated hacker programs to crack, according to Yan.
People would probably also be less likely to keep a cheat sheet, as is often the case with complicated passwords.
Yan is showing off the Background Draw-a-Secret software on iPhones, laptops and PDAs this week in London at the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition, the U.K.'s leading science and technology fair that's open to the public through Thursday. The fair, which showcases the latest science and engineering projects from the country's leading researchers, is hosted by the Royal Society, the U.K.'s national academy of science.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Yan's exhibit at the fair is being co-sponsored by Microsoft Research, Cambridge (U.K.). Microsoft announced in May that it will include a multitouch interface with Windows 7 that could be available in 2009 and will work with existing touch screens.
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