vs_covid19

Activities Related to the COVID-19 Crisis

Small projects I started, wondering whether information technology could contribute something.

• Face-touching Detector
  • A web application that tells you when you are about to touch your face with your hand. It works on a computer or a smartphone.
  • We are told to avoid touching our faces to prevent infection. How much it helps to avoid touching your face while working in an office is unknown, but I think it at least helps to build the habit, and to make you notice that you touch your face more often than you thought.
  • It runs in a web browser; Chrome is recommended. It is intended mainly for office work, so mainly for a computer with a webcam, but it also works on a smartphone.
  • What it does is warn you when a face and a hand appear together in the camera, so it does not strictly detect touching.
  • If you use a tabbed browser, keeping it in its own window lets it run in the background.
  • A quick hack of Google's PoseNet demo.
  • A webhook is provided, so it can be extended in various ways by connecting it to IFTTT or Internet-of-Things devices.

• PublicDice
  • An online die, using a blockchain, that can be shared even with people you do not fully trust and that cannot be tampered with. It works on a computer or a smartphone.
  • PublicDiceが有効活用できるのは以下のような局面です。
    • Use it as a trustworthy die when betting online with someone with whom you have not established much trust.
    • Choose one person from an unspecified crowd, in an open way that everyone can accept.
  • Some may say a dice bot on Slack would do, but that is a little different. People inside a Slack workspace already share the trust of being members of the same group. They trust the Slack system and have agreed to follow the group's rules. And a bot is acceptable because everyone has agreed that deciding by dice bot is acceptable.
  • つまり、オンラインでサイコロを振るということを行う場合、以下が必要になってきます。
    • (1) A shared basis for communication
    • (2) Trust in the randomness of the die
    • (3) The power to enforce the reward or penalty once the outcome is decided
  • As for (1), PublicDice is a static website, and you interact with others through a URL alone. So you can share a die with anyone, as long as you can exchange text through chat, e-mail or social media. As for (2), the blockchain hash used to generate the random number is hard to tamper with and unique in the world, so it can serve as a trustworthy value. (It is not a perfect pseudo-random number, so a little care is needed, although for ordinary use it is hardly a problem.) As for (3), PublicDice is not a smart contract, so it has no power to enforce the reward or penalty once the outcome is decided. It should be used where enforcement is straightforward: for instance, having participants declare on Twitter, under the pressure of public view, that they will take part and abide by the outcome, or a draw among applicants where the organizer clearly holds the right to decide.

• Zoom Web Browser
  • A tool that uses the Zoom virtual background as a web browser and displays a website of your choice. In short, it lets the virtual background change over time, and lets you design it with familiar web technologies.
  • In Zoom, the host of a meeting can show anything by sharing the screen, but ordinary participants have few options. If we could hack the virtual background, remote communication would be richer: showing an emoticon such as a smiling face or a no-entry sign, showing short text such as "I agree," or showing one's own state and information as a graph or a photograph. I built this prototype believing it is worth trying such things.
  • Thinking about the best mechanism for handling multimedia content that changes over time, I arrived at the idea of a web browser, which handles web content. It works by opening the website at a given URL in a headless Chrome browser, taking a snapshot image, swapping it in as the Zoom background image, and refreshing it by momentarily switching the background off and on again through keyboard automation. It is a quick hack: macOS only, command line only, and in practice the refresh rate is at best about once every ten seconds. I would like to think about how to use it, and to make a better implementation, together with others.
  • Remote work has brought more occasions to use Zoom. May everyone have a comfortable video-chat life. VS_COVID19

• The Universal Background Filter for SNS Profile Picture
  • A service that turns your social media profile picture into an animation of the flags of the world, in the hope of world peace. It was made earlier as social satire on how the world responded to terrorism, but now is truly the time to pray for peace across the whole world.

For reference: information from the overseas safety site of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The risk level for the entire world was raised to level 2.

(c) Kazutaka Kurihara