The 2009 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is the hottest ticket in town for the second year in a row. Apple quietly posted notice that the conference had sold out on its WWDC site earlier this week. The conference, buoyed by the success of the iPhone, sold out in 2008 ...
Originally posted at iPhone Atlas
Now you see it, now it's augmented.
(Credit: Marco Tempest)For decades, slightly cheesy sleight-of-hand artists around the world have promised that "you won't believe your eyes!" before demonstrating ageless moves handed down from generation to generation.
Now that an ever-accelerating cascade of eye-popping visual technology such as augmented reality has threatened to steal some of the magic dust from old-fashioned magicians, along comes a pasteboard prestidigitator who folds augmented reality into his own YouTube-ready routine.
Enter Marco Tempest, a renegade cardsharp and AR artist who assembled an open-source, real-time theater of the future for your entertainment, called Augmented Reality Magic 1.0.
Is this, ladies and gentlemen, magic of the future?
...
(Credit: Moto Labs)A new touchscreen table top computer display brings together the unlikely combination of technologies popularized by Apple and Microsoft.
It's called the Scalable Multitouch display, and its touch technology is similar to the iPhone, but it would scale up from handheld device size to dimensions more like Microsoft's surface. The prototype measures just 19 inches right now, but it aspires to cover an entire 50-inch table top one day.
The Scalable Multitouch has been in development at Moto Labs in San Francisco for the past two years, and on Tuesday the company released an updated video as a peek of what they're working on, which can be seen in the video below as well as the photo gallery below. Like Microsoft's Surface, it's intended to be used as a group workspace where information on the screen can be manipulated by hand. But Moto Labs CEO Daniell Hebert says what his company is doing is different than Microsoft and others because it does not use cameras or projectors underneath the surface of the display to project images. And by nixing the inner camera/projector, it allows the display to be thin--perhaps some day as thin as the LCD screen you're likely reading this on.
The display instead uses multitouch technology--which means you can use more than one finger as an input device. Moto Labs likes to say that you can used as many fingers to control the device as you want, and that you're only limited by the number of fingers you have on each hand.
It also employs capacitive touch--same as the iPhone--in which a finger touching a sensor grid (just below the screen) causes a change in signal. That relays exactly where on the screen the finger is. But while the iPhone uses a solid solution known as ITO (indium tin oxide), Moto Labs employs a grid of super thin wires that pick up on the signals from each finger.
The thin-wire grid is used right now in single-touch displays, but has yet to be used on multitouch, and that's where Moto Labs' work on the inner electronics and the software to take advantage of multitouch comes in.
Touch screen technologies are trendy right now and, as discussed at last week's Interactive Display conference, the industry is in the process of figuring out how to push forward their technology while not becoming a passing fad. ...
The concept of a GPS-enabled asthma inhaler emerged less then a month ago, and already it is very nearly a reality.
SiliconSky GPS announced Tuesday that is has successfully developed a prototype of the first-of-its-kind asthma inhaler with built-in GPS tracking.
GPS-enabled inhaler.
(Credit: Asthma Blog)This is the result ...
Watch what you say. Scientists in England have developed a computer that can not only read lips, but can tell the difference between languages.
Mouth movements can differ according to the language spoken.
(Credit: University of East Anglia)Researchers at the University of East Anglia's School of Computing Sciences ...
Originally posted at Military Tech
One day, your computer will be a big-ass table with pictures of other people's kids all over it. We know it, Microsoft knows it and--judging by its fancy X-Desk surface computer--Epson knows it too.
The X-Desk works in much the same way as ...
(Credit: PediSedate)Sometimes we hear about gadgets that are made for good but could definitely be used for evil. Take the PediSedate, a combo gaming device and sedation machine.
It's essentially a Game Boy system modified to distract kids ages 3 to 9 with Tetris or something while they'...
(Credit: PediaSedate)Sometimes we hear about gadgets that are made for good but could definitely be used for evil. Take the PediSedate, a combo gaming device and sedation machine.
It's essentially a Game Boy system modified to distract kids ages 3 to 9 with Tetris or something while they'...
Rochester Institute of Technology President Bill Destler tries out the banjo with Alex Lifschitz, a second-year game design and development major.
(Credit: A. Sue Weisler)A couple of years ago, I bought an Xbox 360 for the sole purpose of playing Rock Band. I'd played it a few times ...
