Category: Technology

The Making of "Tron: Legacy" May Be Cooler Than The Movie Itself

6/1/2011

It’s definitely a digital age in movies as more and more are trying to meld real-life with computer generated effects to find the happy medium. There are those who believe that the trend is damaging the industry. We won’t explore that here.

What we will look at is a pretty darn cool video from a movie that demands the need to be digital. Tron: Legacy was born from one of the original fully-digital movies and in many ways carried out its charter splendidly. This video that shows some of the ways that the graphics were created takes us into a world that few get to see. When the veil is lifted, it’s clear that the technology used to create the movie is almost as amazing as the movie itself. Perhaps more so. But be warned, their are some light spoilers up ahead.

The Pioneer DJM-2000 DJ Mixer Review

5/1/2011

You know that feeling you get when you hop into a car you'll never be rich enough to own? It's full of fascinating technology, everything works great, it's solidly built, it definitely won't fit into the "compact" spots at 7-11 -- and it just doesn't care. If you're a DJ, entering the world of Pioneer's DJM-2000 is a little bit like that. Read on Engadget.com for more impressions of the multitouch-laced behemoth to see if it'll have you raving all the way to 2012.

An Iphone App that Translates Words Inside your Camera. Yes Really!

18/12/2010

Ever been confused at a restaurant in a foreign country and wish you could just scan your menu with your iPhone and get an instant translation? Well as of today you are one step closer thanks to Word Lens from QuestVisual.

The iPhone app, which hit iTunes last night, is the culmination of 2 1/2 years of work from founders Otavio Good and John DeWeese. The paid app, which currently offers only English to Spanish and Spanish to English translation for $4.99, uses Optical Character Recognition technology to execute something which might as well be magic. This is what the future, literally, looks like.

Founder Good explains the app’s process simply, “It tries to find out what the letters are and then looks in the dictionary. Then it draws the words back on the screen in translation.” Right now the app is mostly word for word translation, useful if you’re looking to get the gist of something like a dish on a menu or what a road sign says. At the moment the only existing services even remotely like this are Pleco, a Chinese learning app and a feature on Google Goggles where you can snap a stillshot and send that in for translation. Word Lens is currently self-funded.

Good says that the obvious steps for Word Lens’ future is to get more languages in. He’s planning on incorporating major European languages and is also thinking about other potential uses including a reader for the blind, “I wouldn’t be surprised if we did French next, Italian and since my mom is Brazilian, Portuguese.”

Says Good, modestly, “The translation isn’t perfect, but it gets the point across.” You can try it out for yourself here.

A DJ's Dream Come True -Touchscreen Action!

2/12/2010

"Imagine a futuristic transparent touch screen in a club - it is an instant magnet for attention," says Alan Smithson, co-founder and CEO of Smithson Martin Inc., the company that developed the Emulator system exclusively for the professional DJ scene. "At our launch party, everyone wanted to touch and play with it, there were 3 people deep trying to take photos of it."

The technology was developed by Pablo Martin, an Argentinean-based DJ with a passion for technology and the CTO of Smithson Martin Inc. He partnered with Alan Smithson, a DJ in Toronto, to create fully functional multi-touch Emulator packages. Their company, Smithson Martin Inc., provides the first and only professional DJ application for multi-touch technology available in the world. And Smithson Martin is the exclusive global distributor of the Emulator Multi-Touch screens for the DJ and Music Production market. Early buzz was created in August when a user released an Emulator YouTube video. DJ's from around the world were amazed and were asking how they could get their hands on this technology. While that video showed only the pre-release software, it generated over 1.3 million views, making it obvious that the DJ community is ready for this technology.

Emulator is multi-touch MIDI software that presents everything the DJ needs on a high-resolution transparent multi-touch screen; the only screen accurate enough for professional use that doesn't generate false or ghost touches. The current version of Emulator interfaces with Traktor Pro, but future releases will include compatibility with Virtual DJ, Ableton, and Serato. Emulator currently runs on Windows 7, but Mac OS software is scheduled for release in 2011.

www.smithsonmartin.com

The next 'Lady Gaga' could be a hologram!

14/11/2010

If you're an aspiring musician, stop reading now, this will be painful. Japan's Crypton Future Media has unleashed upon the world what may be the future of pop music in the amazingly realistic, holographic singing idol called Hatsune Miku.

Hatsune is a product of Japan's popular Vocaloid software scene in which fans can create their own songs for fictional characters to sing. The twist here is that Crypton took things to the next level by making the character into a hologram and actually putting their avatar on tour, playing to huge enthusiastic audiences. The spectacle of a hologram performing on stage, with a live backing band in front of thousands of screaming fans is pure science fiction brought to real life. To really process exactly how amazing (and hauntingly creepy) the Hatsune Miku music tour is, take a look at the HD video below. And just one more thing to add, this definately reminds me from the Manga "Macross Plus" with Sharon Apple!

Former Google Engineers Launch New Search Engine: Cuil.com

27/7/2010

According to eWeek.com, former Google engineers have launched a new search engine that could index even more sites than that of Google. The name of the search engine is Cuil (pronounced “cool”) and has already gone live.

Cuil is said to index sites online faster and cheaper than that of Google, but that is yet to be seen. Can a new engine in the market really compete against Google? Yahoo which is the 2nd largest search engine in the U.S. is having a very tough time competing with Google in search, thus an agreement has been made public with both companies forming a partnership within the search sector, having Yahoo outsource search to Google.

“Our significant breakthroughs in search technology have enabled us to index much more of the Internet, placing nearly the entire Web at the fingertips of every user,” Tom Costello, Cuil co-founder and chief executive, said in a statement.

As eWeek describes it, “Cuil clusters the results of each Web search performed on the service into groups of related Web pages. It sorts these by categories and offers various organizing features to help identify topics and allow the user to quickly refine searches.”

Doing a search for traffic on Compete.com, it looks like in July, the traffic of cuil.com was a little over 2 million visitors. Forget about competing with Google, look at the other two giant search engines, you also have to compete against them.

Source: Search Engine Journal

Lagoa Multiphysics teases us with reality

25/7/2010

A guy by the name of Thiago Costa over at Lagoa Technologies Inc have released a “teaser” video of it’s very promising graphics engine, Lagoa. This demo video shows off a multiphysics simulation performed by the engine and I must say it looks to be a very very impressive piece of kit. It’s definitely one of those “seen, to be believed” type of demos. This isn’t your average pre-rendered video either. Instead all the tasks are performed virtually on the fly and solely relying on the calculations of the Lagoa engine. The types of things simulated in the engine are things like plastic deformations, liquid movement and things generally breaking apart and/or melting. What’s for sure is that in the not too distant future, we’ll be creating physics engines that will be so realistic, we won’t be able to tell them apart.

Photography is dead, long live photos

12/7/2010

Portraying the digital still camera as an endangered species has been a popular pastime for years in the cellphone industry, and with the high-resolution stills and high-definition video capabilities of the latest round of smartphones, the argument is more convincing than ever when applied to the casual snapshot. But this week at the World Expo in Shanghai, Canon -- a name synonymous with high-quality photography -- offered a vision of a device that not only supersedes the digital still camera, but will likely eliminate photography as we know it.

With an estimated arrival date two decades in the future, the Canon Wonder Camera concept device has an incredible focal length from macro to 500mm with a single, integrated lens. It boasts massive (unspecified) storage, ultra-high (also unspecified) resolution, multiple facial recognition capabilities beyond that available today, and the ability to keep everything viewable in focus at the same time. But perhaps the most radical thing about this camera is that it's really a camcorder. Rather than take individual stills, Wonder Camera owners would simply have their pick of perfectly crisp photos as frames grabbed from video.

Instead of waiting to fire the shutter when someone smiles, one could simply indicate a point (or range) in the video to pluck later. The camera's resolution might even enable multiple high-resolution photos from different parts of a frame. Imagine creating portraits of every member of a grade school class from just a few video frames of the group.

Read more.

"Point & Grab" motion sensing tech coming to laptops

26/6/2010

Yeah, so we haven't been the biggest proponents of motion sensing laptops -- it's sort of hard to see the point when you've usually got your hands on the keyboard or touchpad to control the screen -- but apparently Pointgrab's software is gaining some traction. The software, which works with any 2D webcam, is currently being shipped on Fujitsu Lifebook AH laptops in Japan, but it'll be expanding to other markets soon. In addition, we were told another laptop maker would be preloading it "before the end of the year." Interesting. We got to spend some time with the Lifebook AH500, and we have to say the software / webcam combo does work quite fluidly -- all we had to do was wave at the screen to bring up the company's menu for opening programs or controlling media. And it was super responsive to our wax-on / wax-off movements to control the volume. But regardless, it's still really hard to imagine when we'd actually use this on a laptop... though, get it on a nettop, HTPC or all-in-one and we'll be all ears (or hands in the air!). It'll be interesting to see which laptop manufacturer feels differently and snatches up Pointgrab's tech soon, but until then check out the gallery and video after the break to see us (awkwardly) wave at a 15.6-inch screen.

Via Engadget

HTML5s' Ultimate Speed Test!

25/6/2010

Curious to see how the latest preview release of Internet Explorer 9 stacks up against the competition when it comes to HTML5 performance in Windows? So was Download Squad, and it's now revealed its findings in some vivid, if not entirely scientific tests. The end result is that Internet Explorer 9 and Firefox 3.7 were well ahead of the pack in the 1,000-fish stress test (with Firefox about 5 or 10 percent ahead of IE), while Opera was stuck somewhere in the middle, and Chrome placed a distant last (and maxed out the CPU) -- all with hardware acceleration enabled, of course, although that had to be done via command line switches in the case of Chrome. Head on past the break to check out the four-way showdown for yourself, as well as an earlier test with just IE9 and Chrome.