Unitary plate electrode

The unitary electrode (10) comprises a porous sheet (12) of fiberglass the strands (14) of which contain a coating (16) of conductive tin oxide. The lower portion of the sheet contains a layer (18) of resin and the upper layer (20) contains lead dioxide forming a positive active electrode on an electrolyte-impervious layer. The strands (14) form a continuous conduction path through both layers (16, 18). Tin oxide is prevented from reduction by coating the surface of the plate facing the negative electrode with a conductive, impervious layer resistant to reduction such as a thin film (130) of lead or graphite filled resin adhered to the plate with a layer (31) of conductive adhesive. The plate (10) can be formed by casting a molten resin from kettle (60) onto a sheet of glass wool (56) overlying a sheet of lead foil and then applying positive active paste from hopper (64) into the upper layer (68). The plate can also be formed by passing an assembly of a sheet ( 80) of resin, a sheet (86) of sintered glass and a sheet (90) of lead between the nip (92) of heated rollers (93, 95) and then filling lead oxide into the pores (116) of the upper layer (118)

Wurster's crown ligands

Wurster's crown ligands comprise a macrocyclic ligand such as a crown ether in which a hetero atom is substituted with a 1,4-phenylenediamine group. The phenylenediamine group is covalently bound to the macrocyclic ligand by one or both of the amine nitrogens, the amine nitrogen thereby substituting for the hetero atom of the macrocyclic ligand. The resulting compounds are redox active. Methods of making and using the compounds are also disclosed

Evaluation of gesture based interfaces for medical volume visualization tasks

Interactive systems are increasingly used in medical applications with the widespread availability of various imaging modalities. Gesture-based interfaces can be beneficial to interact with these kinds of systems in a variety of settings, as they can be easier to learn and can eliminate several shortcomings of traditional tactile systems, especially for surgical applications. We conducted two user studies that explore different gesture-based interfaces for interaction with volume visualizations. The first experiment focused on rotation tasks, where the performance of the gesture-based interface (using Microsoft Kinect) was compared to using the mouse. The second experiment studied localization of internal structures, comparing slice-based visualizations via gestures and the mouse, in addition to a 3D Magic Lens visualization. The results of the user studies showed that the gesture-based interface outperform the traditional mouse both in time and accuracy in the orientation matching task. The traditional mouse was the superior interface for the second experiment in terms of accuracy. However, the gesture-based Magic Lens interface was found to have the fastest target localization time. We discuss these findings and their further implications in the use of gesture-based interfaces in medical volume visualization, and discuss the possible underlying psychological mechanisms why these methods can outperform traditional interaction methods

Wurster's crown ligands

Wurster's crown ligands comprise a macrocyclic ligand such as a crown ether in which a hetero atom is substituted with a 1,4-phenylenediamine group. The phenylenediamine group is covalently bound to the macrocyclic ligand by one or both of the amine nitrogens, the amine nitrogen thereby substituting for the hetero atom of the macrocyclic ligand. The resulting compounds are redox active. Methods of making and using the compounds are also disclosed

Effective Vibrotactile Cueing in a Visual Search Task

Abstract: This paper presents results from work we have done into the combination of visual and vibrotactile cues for improving user interaction in virtual environments. Using a custom-designed control system, the intensity of a large number of low-cost vibrational devices can be independently controlled. Our current task is to determine the parameters and design-space for providing this type of cueing to support effective HCI. In a visual search task, user performance was compared over three levels of visual cues and four levels of vibrotactile cue types, in an attempt to narrow the visual search field for locating a letter from a random display of letters. Our results confirm the work of others, showing that users perform significantly faster when given visual cues, and that in the absence of visual cues, vibrotactile cues significantly improve performance. We also found that the waveform of the vibrotactile cue does not seem to make a difference in performance. Keywords: Multi-modal, vibrotactile, empirical study, HCI.

The Effect of 3D Widget Representation and Simulated Surface Constraints on Interaction in Virtual Environments

This paper reports empirical results from two studies of effective user interaction in immersive virtual environments. The use of 2D interaction techniques in 3D environments has received increased attention recently. We introduce two new concepts to the previous techniques: the use of 3D widget representations; and the imposition of simulated surface constraints. The studies were identical in terms of treatments, but differed in the tasks performed by subjects. In both studies, we compared the use of two-dimensional (2D) versus threedimensional (3D) interface widget representations, as well as the effect of imposing simulated surface constraints on precise manipulation tasks. The first study entailed a drag-and-drop task, while the second study looked at a slider-bar task. We empirically show that using 3D widget representations can have mixed results on user performance. Furthermore, we show that simulated surface constraints can improve user performance on typical interaction tasks in the absence of a physical manipulation surface. Finally, based on these results, we make some recommendations to aid interface designers in constructing effective interfaces for virtual environments