Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on June 14, 2011
Air-Blowing Robot Makes Ping-Pong Balls Jump Through Hoops
Sure, you can make a ping-pong ball float just by blowing at it through a drinking-straw, but wouldn’t a ball-levitating robot be so much more fun? Luckily for us, University of Illinois grad students Aaron Becker and Robert Sandheinrich answered “yes” to this question, and built this incredible machine:
It’s called the Robo-Air Blower, and while the principle is pretty simple, the physics behind it are complex. A gimbaled nozzle fires compressed air at 620 kPa of pressure. This jet creates a fast-moving, low pressure area around the ball, trapping it. The jet is powerful enough to lift balls of between 24mm and 194mm in diameter, and up to 188-grams of mass.
But the tricky part is control. Fluid dynamics are a chaotic thing, and the programming of the robot control multiple balls, as well as non-spherical objects, like the water-bottle in the video, is complex. The robot’s brain is fed by two stereo cameras which track the balls’ movements and adjust the jet based on an algorithm.
Despite this somewhat dry explanation, the results are spectacular. The robot can push the balls sideways and diagonally, and make them jump through hoops. It looks like some kind of iPhone or Android video-game brought to life, or an up-to-date version of the old loop-and-live-wire game we played in school.
Robo-Air Blower Makes Ping-Pong Balls, Apples Defy Gravity [Automaton / IEEE Spectrum]
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Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on January 3, 2011
Updated Xbox and WinPhone7 Get Updated Netflix, ESPN, and More
Xbox 360’s long-awaited dashboard update is here, bringing a slew of new features, including a nice bonus from Netflix: an improved search UI and support for Netflix streaming on Windows Phone 7.
Let’s take the Xbox first. Xbox Live’s Major Nelson writes that the 360 dashboard update is available today and rolling out to everyone (regardless of your geography!) over Xbox Live.
That was penned this morning; if you’re reading this now, you’ve probably gotten the update. If not, signing in again might work, but bear in mind this warning: “If you keep signing out and then back in again, this will NOT force the updateit will only anger people on your friends list who will keep getting a notification. every. time. you sign. in…Be patient, everyone will eventually receive the update.” Well said.
The headlining features of the Xbox update are the new ESPN hub and Zune music. You’ve got to be an Xbox Gold subscriber to take advantage of most of them. Zune Music or ZunePass is exactly what it sounds like: subscription-based streaming music, with baked-in search.
The ESPN hub promises 3,500 live, on-demand and DVRed global sporting events from ESPN3.com annually. The selection is arguably stronger than any other digital set-top box: college basketball and football to US pro baseball and basketball and international soccer, golf and tennis, whether they’re in or out of your local market. No NFL or NHL, but sports junkies are one step closer cutting the cable cord. If only it could have rolled out in the summertime: we’d all be watching baseball, tennis and soccer and it would have taken everyone three months to notice.
ESPN also gets to leverage some of the Xbox Live social networking features, including group chat while you’re watching a game. (The chat software itself is also reportedly improved.) English Premier League fans won’t even have to leave home to heckle their friends. That is, assuming you’ve all got Xboxes.
And then there’s Netflix. Xbox Live Gold users have had discless Netflix streaming for a long time now, and it’s only been in the last few months that other consoles have caught up. Now the original Xbox gets an update too, with an improved search UI.
Plus, Netflix put a cherry on top: just like the iPhone, Windows Phone 7 is getting Netflix Watch Instantly too via a free application, which will be available at the phone’s launch.
One last Xbox 360 detail that I think is important: the new dashboard overhauls the parental controls and family programming settings. Netflix, Sports, Chat, Kinect, the casual Xbox games on WP7: all of these together suggest that Microsoft is strongly re-positioning the Xbox as a living room hub for the entire family, not just where college kids and devoted gamers blast away on Halo while their friends and families leave to do something else.
Some of those gamers are already reacting, saying that the new games for WP7 and Kinect are too watered-down, don’t offer enough of what they’re used to. I think it’s a really good thing, based on the premise that the value of any box attached to your television set increases proportionally with the number of valuable things you can do with it.
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Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on November 1, 2010
New PS3 Model Has Bigger Hard Drive, Still Awfully Expensive
For the holidays, Sony is releasing a standalone Playstation 3 with a 320 GB hard drive, retailing $350. The same PS3 with a Playstation Move controller, Eye camera and Sports Champions game will cost $400; a standalone unit with a 160 GB hard drive costs $300.
The extra hard drive space is purportedly for games, video and other content distributed over the Playstation Network, but I’ve got to say that I agree with this Playstation Blog commenter:
You know I understand that with DLC content increasing at an alarming rate, we do need the extra space. What I dont understand is why you dont just keep all systems across the board with the same amount of memory and have consistent price drops (as technology gets cheaper) instead? 160GB would be ample space for most owners and for those who do a lot more downloading, Im sure those are the people fully capable and comfortable swapping out hard drives. Honestly if I were a basic user, Id prefer to spend $300 for a 160GB PS3 than spend $350 for a 320GB. It also causes more confusion for many non gamer types. What is the difference? Hard drive size. Really? Thats it?
Many other commenters point out that it’s easy to upgrade the internal hard drive of the PS3, making the savings relative to the 160 GB model nominal. On its own, the Move Starter Pack (controller, camera, game) costs $100.
Meanwhile, Nintendo’s offering bundled units at steep discounts and Microsoft Xbox is selling Kinects and new Xboxes like crazy. Either Sony’s margins don’t permit a price drop or they think they’re fine with the price points they have.
Offering a new package with a bigger hard drive makes sense if you’re cutting prices across the board. All this does is make the high-end bundle with the Move controller look like a marginally better deal.
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Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on October 28, 2010
Three Futures of Remote Control: Apple, Sony, and Samsung
Image via Apple/iTunes
Today, Apple updated its iOS Remote application to version 2.0. The free Remote app is now optimized for the iPad’s larger display and supports streaming from shared libraries over wireless networks with computers running iTunes and the new Apple TV using AirPlay.
Earlier this week at CEDIA 2010, Sony showed off AV Receiver Remote, a similar (and similarly free) iOS universal remote application for its wide range of media appliances. While Apple’s Remote application allows you to control profiles for speaker volume, Sony’s allows you to do that, control room lighting, and stream internet, satellite, or broadcast radio. Christopher MacManus was able to record a hands-on for Sony Insider:
Just as Apple’s remote application leverages its strength in high-end computers and media players, Sony’s app leverages its strength in home theater appliances. Apple can send a movie to your television, but it didn’t make your television (or the receiver your TV might be connected to).
Last week at IFA 2010, Samsung used its new Galaxy Tab to demonstrate its Home Watcher app for Android, which leverages the Korean tech maker’s even more ubiquitous position in home appliances:
As Vivian Kim observes, writing for Apartment Therapy Unpluggd, Samsung’s “washers and dryers, refrigerators, microwaves, ranges, and home entertainment devices” can allow them to position their phones and tablets not as Apple imitators, but as genuine home automation solutions. You’ve never had a remote control for your refrigerator before — maybe you didn’t even know you wanted one. But once it’s within the realm not just of the possible — it always has been, for high-end early-adopters — but reasonably attainable for Samsung’s global middle-class consumer base, something has changed.
How much will we want to do with a single remote when that remote is not an infrared box wrapped around two AA batteries, but a powerful computer with an intuitive interface? In different ways, that’s the future towards which Apple, Sony, and Samsung are all pointing.
Source:wired.com
Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on September 28, 2010
Android App Uses Cellphone Camera to Measure Air Pollution
If you think there’s something in the air, you could know for sure by just pointing your Android phone at it.
An Android app called Visibility, developed by researchers at University of Southern California, lets users take a photo of the sky and get data on the air quality.
The free app is currently available for phones running Android 2.1 version of the operating system.
“Airborne particulate matter is a serious threat to both our health and the environment,” say the researchers on their blog. “We are working towards an optical technique to measure air visibility, and hence an estimate of some kinds of air pollution, using cameras and other sensors available on smartphones.”
It’s a neat idea and it’s interesting to see how smartphones are giving rise to the trend of citizen science and crowdsourced data.
As smartphones become ubiquitous and increasingly powerful, researchers are increasingly using the devices to do complex computations and use it for crowdsourced data gathering. For instance, as part of a project called ‘Common Sense’ Intel’s research labs developed sensors that could be attached to GPS-enabled phones and measure air quality. The data gathered from these sensors would be brought back and processed to help researchers understand pollution levels.
The Visibility Android app hopes to offer something similar but make the process more user friendly.
With the Visibility app, each user photo of the sky is tagged with location, orientation and time. The data is transferred to a server where the calculations take place. The level of air quality is estimated by calibrating the images sent and comparing their intensity against an existing model of luminance in the sky, say the researchers.
The result is sent back to the user and the data is also used to create pollution maps for the region. An iPhone version of the app is in the works.
Photo: Mobile Sensing/USC Robotics
[via TreeHugger and Gizmag]
Source:wired.com
Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on September 24, 2010
Why Xbox Might Be Microsoft’s Future — and Computing’s, Too
It’s easy to dismiss Xbox’s new Kinect controller-free sensor as a “Wii Too” product.
But I wonder whether Microsoft is onto something much bigger, something that will take the innovations introduced for the Xbox into the broader sphere of personal computing.
Sure, from the perspective of gaming in 2010, it doesn’t offer much that Nintendo’s Wii doesn’t already have — as we pointed out in our review of Kinect in June.
But for one thing, Kinect doesn’t just record your movements. Its system of cameras, microphones, sensors and software algorithms also records (and recognizes) your voice, and can recognize faces and objects. For another, it didn’t come directly from the gaming and entertainment division at Microsoft, trying to copy the Wii. It grew out of Microsoft’s research labs, from a combination of teams already working on alternative input systems for computing devices. Gaming is a high-profile test case for their implementation.
Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft, told Computerworld on Thursday that Kinect “portends a revolution in the way people will interact with computers.” Bill Gates suggested something very similar at the D5 conference in 2007: The real transformation of the desktop metaphor for the PC would come through innovations in three-dimensional imaging. PCs and games were both held back by their reliance on the mouse/keyboard and the controller, Gates said:
[The Wiimote is] a 3D positional device. This is video recognition. This is a camera seeing whats going on. And, you know, in the meetings, like youre on a video conference, you dont know whos speaking, you know, theyre audio only, things like that. The camera will be ubiquitous. Now, of course, we have to design it in a way that peoples expectations about privacy are handled appropriately, but software can do vision and it can do it very, very inexpensively. And that means this stuff becomes pervasive. You dont just talk about it being in a laptop device. You talk about it being part of the meeting room or the living room.
For a useful analogy and some historical perspective, let’s go back to October 2001. On October 25, Microsoft released Windows XP, still the most popular desktop operating system in the world. Two days earlier, Apple introduced the iPod, the most successful digital music and media player ever. Over the next nine years, what happened?
One of Apple’s shrewdest moves in the past decade was to embrace the iPod as the technological and commercial driver of its core businesses. The iPod was universally hailed as the top device in its class, technologically sophisticated and culturally cool. iTunes gave Apple footholds in retail (first for music, then other media) and on the PC platform. It was the first post-PC device that along with digital cameras and video, let Apple remake the personal computer from a workstation into a digital media hub by way of iLife. Then, in rapid succession, the iPod begat the iPhone, Apple TV, and the iPad. Apple brought multitouch interfaces to its laptops, and now its desktops via the Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad. It’s a huge, diversified company, but it all springs from the success of the iPod.
Over the same period, Microsoft lost a lot of its reputation as an innovator, especially in the retail market. It settled its antitrust case with the DOJ. Its web browser and new Windows OS were widely reviled. It tried (and largely failed) to get strong positions in search, smartphones, and music players.
But the Xbox is different. Critics and fans love it; it has sold (and continually grown) like gangbusters; it’s been widely perceived as both serious and cool; it’s had landmark games like Halo, BioShock, and Final Fantasy XIII; and with XBox Live it arguably did more than any other product to actually bring proper networked computing into people’s living rooms.
Apple’s iPod, and then the iPhone, have given the company a direction for the future: innovative cloud and boutique retail, selling handheld computing devices driven by multi-touch interfaces. It’s a very different path than if Apple had continued to follow the roadmap offered by the Mac.
If Microsoft follows the Xbox rather than Windows and Office, or rather than chasing after Apple in tablets or Google in search, we’ll see it become a company less defined by enterprise solutions and spreadsheets than by ubiquitous, large-scale, multi-surface household computing.
Source:wired.com
Posted under Gadget Reviews
This post was written by Journalist on August 2, 2010
