Question: what do you mean fun things with computer please reply

Sarah Mount answered on 18 Mar 2010:

Is this about how I’d use the money?

I’ll try to give you a couple of examples. If you’ve seen the film Minority Report then you’ll remember the bit where Tom Cruise uses a computer that’s like a transparent piece of glass floating in his office. He just grabs bits of video and other data (clues to who committed the crimes!) and moves them around with his hands. A colleague of mine is working on a “multitouch” screen like this at the moment. There are several ways of creating a touch screen, and several that let you touch several parts of the screen at once (like the iPhone does), Chris is using a technique with infrared light. At our open days I show the students how to make a slightly simpler system with a cardboard box, greasproof paper and a webcam, but it does the same sort of thing and you end up with a multitouch mouse for your PC.

There are lots of other things we could do though, with simple robotics or building games … I’d be more interested to hear what you think would be a good idea though!