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Posts Tagged ‘Surroundings’

Motorola shows off Kopin Golden-i wearable computer

Our dreams of an actually useful wearable computer have still yet to materialize, but the second-generation Kopin Golden-i concept — now inconspicuously Motorola-branded — is an interesting attempt. It’s based around a head mounted, magnified SVGA LCD that is meant to be “glanceable” while the user remains aware of their surroundings. The Windows CE-chugging, OMAP3530-powered computer onboard is voice controlled and also motion sensing (for cursor control), and can hook up with other devices over Bluetooth, WiFi and USB. Of course, it remains to be seen if software can make something like this truly usable, but it certainly looks like the hardware is all there — and the form factor isn’t pure tragedy either. Check out the Charbax-infused video demo of the device after the break.

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Motorola shows off Kopin Golden-i wearable computer originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 23 Feb 2010 21:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Is Apple Going to Support Augmented Reality, After All?

The cranky elves that run the iPhone App Store may be warming up after all to the emerging field of Augmented Reality (AR). AR app makers, who are building sci-fi-like interfaces for viewing data about the physical world on top of the mobile phone’s camera, were beginning to feel spurned.

Today Apple both approved the most eagerly anticipated Augmented Reality app yet, Amsterdam’s AR browser Layar (iTunes link), and made its primary challenger, Wikitude (iTunes link), a featured app in the iTunes App Store.

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Those moves came a month after many AR-watchers were dissapointed that Apple didn’t offer big support to Augmented Reality when launching the latest version of the iPhone OS. Some critics complain that even if some forms of AR are being permitted by Apple, the company still has a tight grip on APIs that could enable whole new methods of displaying data on top of the phone’s camera view if made publicly available. It’s not a happy relationship, but perhaps that’s beginning to change.

Layar is a browser that displays geo-located information like real-estate listings and restaurant reviews on top of a mobile camera’s view of its surroundings. The company has used well-made demo videos to stoke excitement among iPhone owners for months. The app has long been available on Android handsets but just emerged from the dark and mysterious iTunes App Store approval process this morning.

Its competitor Wikitude displays Wikipedia data (as Layar does) as well as user-generated Points of Interest input through its website Wikitude.me. Wikitude was made a featured app in iTunes today, just hours before Layar went live in the store.

A long list of AR companies were at the edge of their seats waiting for a big announcement in September, believing that Apple would make public all the technical hooks they needed to created an Augmented Reality experience. Instead of the expected opening-up and perhaps some publicity for this very eye-catching software niche, Apple opened up only some of the APIs needed, didn’t make any public mention of AR and has slowly let AR apps trickle into the App Store with no fan-fare over the last month.

All of this creates a very different experience for startups compared to the way they can launch apps on Android phones. They simply post them to the Android App Store, no approval process needed. Application developers are also working on AR for Nokia, a handset with far greater user numbers than the iPhone has – but everyone’s been waiting for AR to bloom on the much-hyped iPhone and Apple hasn’t been very supportive.

Robert Rice wrote in an open letter last week that:

“One of two things needs to happen. Either Apple needs to quit screwing us around and make [all] the APIs public so we can get back to the business of innovating and building a new industry, or the respective communities of developers and venture capitalists need to abandon Apple entirely. There are good alternatives out there that may not be as shiny, but are certainly as powerful and definitely more open for us to work with.”

It’s also possible that Apple hasn’t been offering AR apps meaningful support because so far they are a little dissapointing once consumers get their hands on them. GPS data is clumsy, data sets are incomplete and the user experience still hasn’t been nailed yet by anyone. It’s also borderline embarrassing to wave your phone around in the air when out in public, surrounded by people you don’t know. That’s quite unlike the usual experience Apple tries to associate with itself.

Perhaps things are changing, though. It’s exciting to think about bringing latent geo-located data out into a view accessible through a mobile phone. It would be nice to see Apple help advance this early field, instead of giving it the cold shoulder and silent treatment. End-users should recognize as well that the super-wow but controlled experience of the iPhone could be holding back other, even more exciting innovations.

Discuss

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Fire-fighting robots head to South Korea, could face conflicts of interest
Fire fighting robots have been put to work for little to no pay once or twice before, but it seems as if the exception is slowly becoming the rule. Just recently, a smattering of fire stations in Daegu (just south of Seoul, South Korea) enlisted the help of two robotic firefighters to jump into “the center of blazing infernos” if need be. The Fire Spy Robots are fully automated and equipped with wheels, though it should be noted that their help is currently labeled “a trial run.” Both of the critters were constructed by Hoya Robot and can be maneuvered via humans watching the surroundings through an onboard camera, and while the company claims that these guys can shake off temperatures as high as 500 degrees Celsius for over an hour, there’s no mention of what kind of mental meltdown it would surely have should it arrive to extinguish the work of its cousin.

[Via FarEastGizmos]

Filed under: Robots

Fire-fighting robots head to South Korea, could face conflicts of interest originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 08 Oct 2009 11:13:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Augmented reality browser Layar puts 3-D objects around you

Childhood fantasies of playing Pac-Man in the real world are about to be fulfilled.

Augmented reality browser Layar will let developers stick 3-D graphics and information onto your surroundings in a way that’s viewable from a phone this November.

The nascent field of augmented reality can make a phone’s viewfinder resemble Terminator-vision, with information overlays covering the area around a user.

Up until now, Layar, from Amsterdam-based SPRXMobile, has focused on more practical applications like using augmented reality to find restaurants or real estate listings. This would represent its first serious foray into gaming and entertainment, which is a territory more well-trodden by competitors like Germany’s Metaio. (Metaio released its own browser and tagging service call Junaio last week.)

The company will use a combination of a smartphone’s accelerometer, GPS and OpenGL (which is an industry standard for developing 3-D computer graphics) to create the effect. To accommodate limited processing power on phones and data connections, Layar recommends limiting the complexity of 3-D objects to 1,000 polygons.

SPRXMobile has about 15 employees and is angel-funded.

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CRISTAL combines ‘The Sims’ and Surface for full room control

Have you ever yearned for more immediate control over your surroundings? No, we don’t mean Magneto car-flipping abilities. We mean more like wrangling all of the gear in a room into some kind of understandable and connected system. If you said yes — and you’re a Sims aficionado — you’ll want to check into CRISTAL. We’re not talking expensive champagne here, we’re talking about the “Control of Remotely Interfaced Systems using Touch-based Actions in Living spaces” system (c’mon, it sort of makes sense). The premise is simple: instead of having to juggle multiple remotes and input systems to deal with a room full of technology, CRISTAL merges a Surface-like touch area (your coffee table in this scenario), an overhead camera, and connected devices to form a frighteningly intuitive control scheme. The idea allows for all sorts of handy arrangements, like being able to virtually drag media from a server on one side of the room to your TV on the other, dim lights in a particular area by swiping on that location, or draw a path for a Roomba to clean using the overhead view. Right now this is just a research project, of course, but the team working on the concept believes costs could move down from the astronomic $10,000-$15,000 the setup would cost now to a more affordable range. Until that happens, you’ll have the video of CRISTAL in action after the break.

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Filed under: Home Entertainment, Household, Networking

CRISTAL combines ‘The Sims’ and Surface for full room control originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 15 Aug 2009 11:09:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Researchers teach ASIMO and HRP-2 a bit of real life Frogger

Some George Costanza-types at Carnegie Mellon have repurposed their own hard earned knowledge of Frogger maneuvers at the university arcade into useful object avoidance techniques for robots. They’ve outfitted both ASIMO and HRP-2 with versions of the technology, which allows the robots to detect their surroundings, create 3D maps of obstacles and plan routes accordingly (and actually has nothing to do with Frogger). If you check out the two videos after the break, you can see that these guys really put the bots through the ringer, including some death defying spinning obstacles that ASIMO avoided with ease, and the “real life” environment the HRP-2 is faced with… but seriously, couldn’t they just let ASIMO have the blue dot already?

[Thanks, Poly Bug]

Continue reading Researchers teach ASIMO and HRP-2 a bit of real life Frogger

Filed under: Robots

Researchers teach ASIMO and HRP-2 a bit of real life Frogger originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 04 Aug 2009 10:48:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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