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Posts Tagged ‘Prototypes’

GM shows off sensor-laden windshield, new heads-up display prototype

Heads-up displays are undoubtedly novel, and downright useful in the right circumstances. Trouble is, few of these prototypes ever make it beyond the lab, and we’re stuck using these same two eyeballs to experience the world around us. General Motors is evidently tired of the almosts, and it’s now working in concert with Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Southern California in order to concoct one of the most advanced HUD systems that we’ve seen — particularly in the automotive world. Setting out to create “enhanced vision systems,” GM’s R&D team has created a windshield packed with visible and Infrared cameras along with internal optics that keep a close eye on the driver’s retinas. In the images and video below (hit the ‘Read More’ link for the real action), you’ll see a solution that utilizes lasers in order to highlight road edges, speed limit signs and all sorts of other vital bits of data during a fog-filled commute. Best of all? We’re told that some of these technologies “could end up in GM vehicles in the near-term future.” Granted, the Volt was supposed to set sail already, but we suppose we’ll give ‘em the benefit of the doubt.

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GM shows off sensor-laden windshield, new heads-up display prototype originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 18 Mar 2010 04:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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iDongle hardware iPhone jailbreak tool makes hacker life a little simpler

If you needed any more proof that Apple’s lame cat-and-mouse game with the iPhone jailbreak community has only served to increase the scene’s resourcefulness and creativity, look no further than the iDongle, a slick piece of hacker-made hardware that can jailbreak and activate an iPhone 3GS or iPod touch running OS 3.1.2 just by plugging it into the dock connector. What’s more, it allows a jailbroken iPhone to be rebooted away from a computer, which is currently a problem for on-the-go hackers — just stick this guy in your bag and you’ll be good to go. There’s only a dozen prototypes right now, but pre-orders are being accepted to raise funds for production — we’ve got a feeling quite a few people are going to be interested. Video after the break.

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iDongle hardware iPhone jailbreak tool makes hacker life a little simpler originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 11 Mar 2010 17:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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OCZ cranks up the performance on Vertex Limited Edition SSD

CeBIT gets going next month, but OCZ Technology’s not waiting around for the show to begin. Instead, it’s pushing out details on its swankest SSD ever ahead of time, which will hopefully make room for some fancy prototypes to take up space in Germany. The Sandforce-based Vertex Limited Edition (LE) is based around an all-new architecture, and the company claims that this drive is its “fastest, multi-level cell (MLC), performance-based drive yet.” How fast, you ask? How’s about 270MB/sec on the read side and 250MB/sec on the write side, not to mention 15,000 IOPS. Unfortunately, it’s still stuck on the SATA 3Gbps interface, but for those indifferent to that lingering 6Gbps alternative, you can be on the lookout for these to ship in 100GB ($399.99) and 200GB ($829.99) flavors for a limited time.

OCZ cranks up the performance on Vertex Limited Edition SSD originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Feb 2010 01:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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iPad SDK allows you to take photos and other insights

Filed under: Software, iPhone, App Store, SDK

Turns out a camera in the iPad may have been closer than we thought — Engadget has been diving into the SDK released yesterday (NDAs be darned, I guess?) and discovered that the ability to “Take Photo” is still hidden in the iPad’s code. Of course, the device doesn’t actually have a camera, but the fact that there’s code written for one could mean that prototypes of the device did have a camera, and/or that we’ll eventually see one in a future revision.

There’s a few other interesting things sneaking out of the SDK as well, including the fact that “popovers” (those windows and menus that were popping up in the video yesterday) are listed in Human Interface Guidelines as iPad-only flair. That would make designing for the two platforms pretty different — while it’s certainly possible, as we learned yesterday, to run iPhone apps on the new platform, it seems like Apple is telling developers that iPad apps will have a very different feel than their smaller predecessor’s versions. A year from now, the two platforms may end up being different markets entirely.

Update: The “touch to return to the call” bar made the trip to the iPad, too. Makes it more likely that this is just vestigial code.

TUAWiPad SDK allows you to take photos and other insights originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Thu, 28 Jan 2010 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Frog Design outs the Apple tablet that could have been… in 1983

We don’t know about you, but back in 1983 we were still playing in the mud with sticks and learning how to read. Frog Design, on the other hand, well, they were busy creating zany gadget prototypes. The company — which helped create such august products as the Apple IIc (which was unleashed in 1984) — also worked on a tablet pc for Apple around that same time, and its recently let slip some photos of what might have been. The tablet you see in the photos (there’s another after the break) was called Bashful, and it’s a pretty slim character considering its birth date, boasting a full physical keyboard and stylus to boot. Several prototypes of this little lover were made, including one with a disk drive and even one with a phone. So that means, by our count, Apple’s been mulling this whole tablet deal for… twenty-six years. Hit the source link for even more photos.

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Frog Design outs the Apple tablet that could have been… in 1983 originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 24 Jan 2010 08:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Ultrathin, algae-based batteries could charge things you never thought possible
Somehow or another, we’ve figured out how to send mere mortals to the moon, create (and mass produce) a laptop thin enough to floss with and add multitouch capabilities to a mouse. But for whatever reason, we’re still stuck using AA batteries that last approximately one-fifth as long as you need them to. Outside of a few breakthroughs here and there, the battery industry at large has found a holding pattern that digs at consumers and likely fattens the wallets of those in charge. Thanks to new research surrounding the use of Cladophora (green algae) in a flexible, ultrathin alternative, it looks as if we may finally be onto something good. Researchers purport that these super skinny cells could be placed in areas where batteries are currently unable to go — think of perpetually charged wall sensors, energized clothing or even light-up wrapping paper. Better still, prototypes have shown the ability to hold a significant charge, but unfortunately for us all, no specific production date has been pegged. A boy can dream though, yeah?

Ultrathin, algae-based batteries could charge things you never thought possible originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 29 Nov 2009 02:07:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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SPDY: Google Plans to Speed Up the Web With New Protocol

Google just announced that it is working on a a new protocol that will minimize latency and speed up the web experience for users. SPDY (pronounced “speedy) is not meant to replace HTTP, the protocol that allows web servers and browsers to talk to each other today, but it does augment HTTP. The new protocol incorporates features like multiplexed streams, request prioritization and HTTP header compression. Google has already developed a prototype web server and a version of Google Chrome with built-in SPDY support.

Sponsor

Google claims that pages loaded up 64% faster in lab tests where the research team downloaded the top 25 websites. Now that the SPDY team has developed workable prototypes, Google decided to open up the process and is soliciting the “active participation, feedback and assistance of the web community.”

In today’s announcement, Google stresses that SPDY is not a replacement for HTTP. It uses HTTP methods and headers, but it overrides the parts of the protocol that manage connections and data transfer formats.

Google will soon release an open-source SPDY-enabled web server. The source code for the SPDY-enabled version Chrome can be found here.

Creating a Faster and More Secure Web

According to the SPDY white paper, the project’s goals are to reduce page load times by 50%, minimize deployment complexity and to avoid the need for website owners to make any changes to their sites to implement SPDY. Instead, all the hard work will happen in the client and the web server.

The team also wants SPDY to allow many concurrent HTTP requests to run across one TCP session and to make SLL the standard transport protocol.

According to Google, these are the basic improvement of SPDY over HTTP:

• Multiplexed requests. There is no limit to the number of requests that can be issued concurrently over a single SPDY connection.  Because requests are interleaved on a single channel, the efficiency of TCP is much higher.
• Prioritized requests. Clients can request certain resources to be delivered first.  This avoids the problem of congesting the network channel with non-critical resources when a high-priority request is pending.
• Compressed headers.  Clients today send a significant amount of redundant data in the form of HTTP headers.  Because a single web page may require 50 or 100 subrequests, this data is significant. Compressing the headers saves a significant amount of latency and bandwidth compared to HTTP.

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Microsoft multitouch mouse prototypes in action (video)

This week the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) went down in British Columbia, and among all the pointing and the clicking the gang from Engadget Japanese were on hand to take a closer look at those wild and wooly multitouch mouse prototypes that Microsoft Research has been working on. Apparently Orb’s hemispheric touch sensor supports a healthy helping of gestures (just the thing for point-and-shoot gaming), while Arty and FTIR certainly seem to know when you’re clicking something. These are just prototypes, of course, but the video provides a fun look at some of the things you might soon see integrated into your computing experience. Peep for yourself after the break.

Gallery: Microsoft multitouch mouse prototypes in action

[Via Engadget Japanese]

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Filed under: Peripherals

Microsoft multitouch mouse prototypes in action (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 07 Oct 2009 16:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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