Posts Tagged ‘Computing’

The Meta 1 is a pair of virtual reality goggles that performs some very unique and useful tricks. While they are still in beta stage, the glasses are coupled with a Kinect-like camera to sense objects in real space and allow users to interact with virtual worlds with the swipe of their hand.

The company founder, Meron Gribetz, says that the company is on track to create a mass produced solution shortly, but until then they have brought on Steve Mann, a real cyborg and wearable computing researcher, to act as an advisor. You’ll recall that Mann was assaulted in a Parisian McDonald’s for wearing a Google-Glass-like headset.

“We brought Mann on board because of his expertise in two key areas: miniaturization and mediated reality. Mann has been developing a Google Glass-like device for years but recognized now was not the right time for something of that scale, because of the limitations of such a device. Rather than a phone accessory, Mann is keen to work with us to develop a fully fledged new interface for computers,” said Gribetz.

“His scientific leadership in mediated reality will be a huge advantage for us when delivering an immersive augmented experience. Occlusion (hiding or modifying real world objects) is a key part of full augmented reality and Mann’s experience in mediated reality will allow us to bring the best solution to market in this area.”

Gribetz is a Y Combinator alum and the project, which is still on Kickstarter, is nearly funded with 26 days to go. Users can receive a Dev Kit for $ 550. Epson will be building Meta’s next-generation VR glasses which will look considerably less DIY than the beta developer version.

“The entrance into consumer wearables needs to be a high powered immersive device capable of fully replacing the computer and more. Heads up notification systems have their use cases, but they won’t be game changers. Mann’s commitment to a fully wearable future is why he chose to join us,” said Gribetz. Considering Mann has been wearing his computing power for most of this decade, it seems like a good fit.

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Controlling Robots with your Thoughts – Scientific Computing
SINTEF-scientist Ingrid Schjølberg is demonstrating her three-fingered robotic grasper. Teaching robots This is Angel Perez Garcia. He can make a robot move exactly as he wants via the electrodes attached to his head. "I use the movements of my eyes, …
Read more on Scientific Computing

Miniature flying robots
This week the successful flight of what are probably the smallest hovering robots yet was reported in Science by Robert Wood and his colleagues at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard. These robots (pictured above) are …
Read more on The Economist

Judges are not robots: former top judge – Ninemsn
Judges are not robots: former top judge. 6:59pm May 7, 2013. Judges are not robots, rather they're men and women who want to live with their consciences and sleep at night, a former top judge says. Cameras reveal amazing animals-eye-view of world …
Read more on Ninemsn

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Google has begun shipping the Explorer Edition of its high-tech headset to a select few over the past week. In a brand new edition of our e-magazine, Tim Stevens gives Google Glass the full review treatment, chronicles life behind the lens for a week and sits down with Google Ventures’ Bill Maris for a chat on the device. We also get cozy with Google Now for iOS in Hands-On, ogle more of Mission Workshop’s goods in Eyes-On and PlayJam CEO Jasper Smith tackles the Q&A. You can probably take it from here, but just in case, all of the download sources are down below for snatchin’ up a copy.

Distro Issue 89 PDF
Distro in the iTunes App Store
Distro in the Google Play Store
Distro in the Windows Store
Distro APK (for sideloading)
Like Distro on Facebook
Follow Distro on Twitter

Filed under: Announcements, HD, Mobile

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Source: iTunes, Google Play, Windows Store

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The Raspberry Pi microcomputer has already put more than a million Pis in the hands of makers, tinkerers, parents and kids in its first year on sale. Which is an impressive feat for a device that’s designed to get more people dabbling in electronics and thinking about how software works. The Pi Foundation actually wanted to create a device that U.K. kids could cut their coding teeth on. But here’s a sign of how much more potential Pi has, above and beyond its original mission: Pis are being used to power a secondary school computing lab in rural Cameroon.

In a guest post on the Pi Foundation’s blog, a volunteer from a Belgian group that raised the funds to build and equip the school writes how they took 30 Pis out to Cameroon in their suitcase and used them to create a computing lab — along with screens, keyboards and mice bought locally. This Pi-powered computing class is itself powered by an on-site generator since the school is not connected to the public power network.

The school in question — Saint Marcellin Comprehensive College — is located in a small village called Binshua, close to Nkambe in the Northwest region of Cameroon. At present the Pis are being used for teaching the children how to use office productivity software but the aim is to get the kids coding too, in time:

All of the systems run on the Raspbian image from December, with LibreOffice and CUPS installed. The Pis are currently used to teach the children the basics of working with an Office suite. But we made sure that we gave the teacher a little introduction (and a good book) on programming in Scratch. So, now we are hoping that this will get Scratch introduced in the school curriculum as well.

The school’s lab doesn’t currently have an Internet connection but that’s something the Belgian group is working to change too.

The computers are all connected in a network. The central point of the network is a router that’s ready to be connected to a WAN modem. We hope to be able to provide a connection to the internet in the near future, which would certainly bring a small revolution into this rural area. Even without an internet connection, we believe that we created an advanced computer lab in this underdeveloped area. Giving the children in the area a chance to work their way to a better future. And that is our motivation.

It isn’t a stretch to say this small, low cost, low power microcomputer has the potential to provide a first computing experience for many more people in developing countries. The Pi hardware is cheaper than most mobile phones, let alone most smartphones — the other device touted as the likely first computing experience for the “next billions”. And it’s a lot cheaper than another Linux-based low cost computing project: the one laptop per child’s XO laptop (albeit, the price of the peripherals needs to be factored it).

In the following video, a teacher at the school is shown introducing the Pi to the class, and even though she mentions Microsoft’s Windows OS the reference is not likely to put smiles on many faces in Redmond:  ”This small box is not working with Windows operating system… It works with another type of operating system. It’s Linux. It’s also very popular — and it’s for free.”

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When constructing computer circuits, most folks start with silicon and metal, but not the researchers at Stanford. The boffins in Palo Alto want to build computers out of living tissue, and to that end they’ve created a biological transistor, called the transcriptor. Transcriptors substitute DNA for semiconductors and RNA for the electrons in traditional transistors — essentially, the transcriptor controls the flow of a specific RNA protein along a DNA strand using tailored combinations of enzymes. Using these transcriptors, researchers built logic gates to derive true/false answers to biochemical questions posed within living cells. Using these bio-transistors, researchers gain access to data not previously available (like whether an individual cell has been exposed to certain external stimuli), in addition to allowing them to control basic functions like cellular reproduction.

This new breakthrough — when combined with the DNA-based data storage and a method to transmit DNA between cells the school’s already working on — means that Stanford has created all the necessary components of a biologic computer. Such computers would allow man to actually reprogram how living systems operate. Of course, they haven’t built a living genetic PC just yet, but to speed up its development, the team has contributed all the transcriptor-based logic gates to the public domain. Looking to build your own biologic computer? A full explanation of the transcriptor awaits below.

Filed under: Science

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Via: The Verge

Source: Stanford University, Science Magazine

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Netflix has a vested interest in fostering cloud computing — after all, that’s increasingly the company’s core business. Accordingly, it’s not going to just sit around and wait for a breakthrough. The subscription service is kicking off its Netflix Cloud Prize competition in the hopes that developers can move technology a little faster. Programmers who build upon Netflix’s open-source code before September 15th can win from a pool of $ 100,000 spread equally among 10 categories, ranging from performance improvements to what has to be our automatic favorite: “best new monkey.” Each winner also gets $ 5,000 in Amazon Web Services credit, flights to Las Vegas and a spot at Amazon’s user conference this November. The challenge won’t completely make up for the end to Netflix’s public API, but it does show that at least some tinkerers are welcome in the streaming video giant’s world.

Filed under: Home Entertainment, Internet, HD

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Source: Netflix (GitHub)

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It ’ s about that time. No longer simply the source of hacking experiments for enthusiasts, the Kinect is becoming a platform for genuine venture-backed companies.

3Gear Equipments is a brand-new start-up among this wave of companies. The business is creating a platform that makes use of the Kinect or additional 3D cameras to locate hand motions and motions for usage with CAD software application or in the medical business.

“ We could track the full expressiveness of your hands, your fingers and wrists and use it for applications, ” said Robert Wang, who just recently finished a PhD at MIT discovering pc vision and human computer communication.

They have a set up, which costs about $ 330 to create with parts off Amazon. It features an aluminum frame that sits on top of your work desk, plus two Kinect cameras for stereoscopic vision (you understand, like just how having two eyes is better for regarding depth-of-field than one). Kinects aren ’ t required — other 3D cameras will certainly do. But they ’ re popular and not that costly.

With this set-up and 3Gear ’ s software platform, you can detect an individual ’ s hand motions and either show them on screen or utilize them to influence 3D animations. 3Gear ’ s APIs take the raw 3D aesthetic information from the Kinects and turns it into functional information about the movement of your hands. They ’ re offered in C + + and Java, and C # and Python are coming.

Wang revealed me a demo (which you can actually see below) where he produced some kind of firearm device on a computer system display with his hands. There are additionally medical applications where you can play with a human heart, turning it and going back and forth with it.

So 3Gear ’ s approach is to construct a software platform instead of constructing one-off applications. They ’ re releasing the business in the hope that other developers will certainly play with 3Gear ’ s SDK and create intriguing use instances. The SDK is in beta till the end of next month, and they organize to keep it cost-free for enthusiasts and specialists. If a larger company utilizes it (state one that makes even more than $ 100,000 a year), they ’ ll have to work out a licensing charge on a case-by-case basis.

3Gear is backed by Manu Kumar ’ s K9 Ventures, Eric Chen at Uj Ventures, former Facebook engineering director and Dropbox VP of engineering Aditya Agarwal and Angellist ’ s Naval Ravikant.

There are a handful of other business that are based off Microsoft ’ s Kinect including gaming company Zigfu, GestSure Technologies, which focuses on medical applications and YC ’ s Matterport, which lets individuals quickly scan indoor spaces. Microsoft also hosted a Kinect-themed accelerator.

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Valve Software’s hardware branch is still in its infancy. Despite having existed for over a year, employment is still its major concern– “prototyping is virtually secondary,” longtime inventor/hacker/now Valve staff member Jeri Ellsworth told us in an interview this week. As the group ramps up, manufacturing comes to be more and more prolific, of course; Ellsworth lights up when she speaks about the work her team is doing now. She gets verbose when inquired about corporate culture at Valve, about exactly how she’s never worked at a business where risk and failure are so appropriate– also urged. She’s visibly delighted about the prototypes she’s developing at Valve’s new prototyping facility, but manages to include herself enough to not let slip exactly just what her and her group are tackling.

When asked what the group’s instant goals are, she obliquely specifies, “To make Heavy steam games more fun to play in your sitting room.” That’s the team’s one-year objective, a minimum of. The difficulty is making games that require a mouse and keyboard palatable to individuals who are used to a controller, or to individuals who just do not wish to migrate COMPUTER controls to the convenience of their sitting room. Working in tandem with Steam’s freshly beta ‘d “Large Image Method,” Ellsworth’s group is creating a hardware option to the control barriers found in lots of Heavy steam games. She wouldn’t provide any sort of tips about just what that answer is precisely, but she left no choices off the table– from Phantom Lapboard-esque options to hybrid controllers.

Regardless, it seems like gamers will certainly have a chance to give feedback on those designs, as Valve’s hardware group is organizing a beta for its various items. Ellsworth is expecting to have one for the team’s very first item in the coming year– we’ll of course understand so much more about the product by then, she says. Internal beta examinations are currently in progress, and a number of the team’s prototypes are readily available in the office for additional Valve staff members to tool around with. The next step is getting prototypes into gamers hands– she states Valve currently has a manufacturing line for short runs, making a beta feasible– and iterating on design before launch. As for just how the beta will certainly be handled, she posits it’ll be tied to Steam in some way, however no logistics are anywhere near nailed down.

Continue reading Valve’s first hardware beta starting by next year, wearable computing still far offFiled under: Desktops, Gaming, LaptopsValve’s very first hardware beta beginning by next year, wearable computing still far off originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 18 Sep 2012 17:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink