Augmented reality is getting more attention, and the Google phones seem to be the platform of choice. Christchurch’s HITLab has done a lot of work like this.
People in Amsterdam who download a free application called Layar on their cellphones can look through the camera and see information about nearby restaurants, A.T.M.’s, and available jobs displayed in front of buildings that house them… Applications like Layar… use a phone’s global positioning technology to determine a person’s location and use the phone’s compass to discern the direction the device is pointed. In this way, the phone can guess what the user is seeing. The augmented-reality application then pulls in information about points of interest in that sight line and displays it on top of the camera view… Novarama has developed a game called Invizimals that makes it appear as if the world is populated by formerly invisible creatures that can interact with one another. Sony plans to release Invizimals for the PSP handheld device this holiday season…
Tech is going feral in China. A cottage industry has sprung up to aid cheating students in exams for college places and the civil service.
The devices uncovered were reminiscent of those seen in spy movies: transmitters embedded in pencil erasers or watches, wireless microphone gadgets the size of a bean, earplugs as thin as a vein, and high-definition cameras shaped like buttons. The devices were able to bypass wireless shield and metal detectors… The spy devices are not cheap. One set of devices and answers was sold for 20,000 yuan (US$2,900), the average yearly income of a blue collar worker in a Chinese city… The industry is present in almost all major exams, from national English-level tests and college entrance tests to lawyer’s qualification tests and civil service tests… Selling spy-gear to exam cheaters could result in up to three years in jail…
The Spirit Rover lost the use of one wheel, and is stuck in sand, but a random wind gust cleared its solar panels of dust and it lives on, 2,000 (martian) days into a 90 day mission.
First consumer data-glove – the AnthroTronix AcceleGlove, for $499.
It comes with software that lets developers use Java to program it for any application they wish… When the user’s hand moves, the accelerometers can detect the three- dimensional orientation of the fingers and palm with respect to Earth’s gravity. Measured to within a few degrees, this information allows programs to distinguish even very slight changes in hand position.
The Guardian is claiming initial success in ‘crowd-sourcing’ the auditing of MP’s expense claims. Faced with over 457,000 pages of documents to sift through, they decided to enroll their public by distributing the documents to interested readers. So far 20,900 or so readers have scanned 175,000 pages looking for anomalous claims which they flag as requiring further investigation. I believe this will become commonplace in open democracies with nothing to hide.
Australian researchers have achieved storage densities of 1Tb per square centimetre in a matrix of gold particles that respond to lasers of different frequencies and polarization.
The material is being developed by researchers led by Min Gu, director of the Centre for Micro-Photonics at the Swinburne University of Technology in Victoria, Australia. The material is made up of layers of gold nanorods suspended in clear plastic spun flat on a glass substrate… Using three wavelengths and two polarizations of light, the Australian researchers have written six different patterns within the same area. They’ve further increased the storage density to 1.1 terabytes per cubic centimeter by writing data to stacks of as many as 10 nanorod layers…
A simple guide identifying any tree from its leaves is in prototype on an iPhone. This guy was just featured by Apple in one of its TV ads, and the business has exploded.
A team of researchers financed by the National Science Foundation has created just such a device — a hand-held electronic field guide that identifies tree species based on the shape of their leaves… The field guide, now in prototype for iPhones and other portable devices, has been tested at three sites in the northeastern United States… The tree guide, and other electronic guides to nature being developed, may be used one day not only by backyard botanists, hikers and children on field trips, but also by scientists and volunteers to compile data for environmental inventories, or as part of species discovery… The program will probably show up first in educational kiosks at, for example, the Smithsonian, where people will be able to bring in a leaf to have it identified automatically…