Geek deals: 20% off Wacom Bamboo Create tablet

Once upon a time when I was really bored, I would play with the most basic PC app ever: MS Paint. That’s right: eclectic combinations of geometric shapes and various colors were combined to make the crudest drawings known to man. If I actually had any creative interest in drawing, that’s when I would have realized that one of these stylus tablets from Wacom would have taken my MS Paint skills to the next level.

Therein lies the fallacy though: tablets like these aren’t just good for free-hand drawing on a PC. The next big application for Wacom’s slabs is obviously graphic work in Photoshop, for which a copy of Photoshop Elements is included, but have you thought about note-taking? I grew out of pen & paper note-taking in 2002, but I also feel you lose something just by typing notes. This tablet has a texture to help simulate a pen & paper feel and includes the highly popular Evernote software to organize and share your notes.

Another neat use I have seen for these tablets is during presentations. Whether live or in a recorded webcast, presenters can simply record their screen and voice to present easy-to-understand visuals without spending lots of time creating complex charts and recordings. It works surprisingly well and opens up a lot of possibilities for communicating ideas.

This Wacom Bamboo Create Pen Tablet is one of the best bang for the buck stylus tablets out there, with its large 9 x 5-inch work area and bundle of included software from Adobe, Corel, AutoDesk, and more. Setup is also a cinch, so you’ll be up and stylus-ing before you know it.

Visit LogicBuy for this Wacom Bamboo Create Pen Tablet deal

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Canon to patent the use of low-precision EXIF data

When we think about technological progress we generally assume things improve over time — they will get smaller, lighter, more efficient, and more precise. That’s true, but when it comes to privacy and the sharing of data, more precision is not always a good thing. Fully understanding the conflict between sharing and accurate data, such as geo coordinates, Canon plans on giving their users a way to obscure the data they record. This will be done using low-precious EXIF data that adds a degrees of fuzziness to both time and location data.

When you take a picture with a modern digital camera, a small amount of metadata is stored in the image file. This EXIF data includes basic information about the camera and the shooting conditions (shot duration, if the flash fired, aperture, etc.). The EXIF can be expanded to include the camera’s owner (the image’s copyright holder), the time and, if the camera has GPS, the coordinates of where the shot was taken. If the camera has a compass on-board it can even tell you the direction the camera was facing when the shot was made.

All this data is great if you are a major Lightroom user or if you want want more information about a certain image, but it can be problematic if you share your images. For example, you might email an image to someone about an item you have on Craigslist. Then, without any warning, a complete stranger knows where you took the shot, what time you took it, and how expensive your camera is. The same is true, in an amplified version, with images posted to social networks.

The issue of sharing too much data has only started to be noticed with cameras, but it’s much more prevalent with smartphones — after all, just about every smartphone has both a camera and GPS. Canon has taken noticed and has patented a method in which the camera will make EXIF data less accurate than what the hardware recorded. For example, rather than say the exact time a photo was taken, it could give a time range (that example uses an hour) and as opposed to an exact latitude and longitude it will give a bounding box, with the location in question somewhere inside of it.

Ultimately, Canon’s patent concerns the process of adding some degree of fuzziness to the recorded data. It’s a better solution than removing the information entirely, though it remains to be seen if the patent gets through the Japanese system.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a company work to obscure EXIF data. Adobe’s Lightroom 4 makes it possible for the user to define a certain area as a privacy zone. Any shots that are tagged with geo data inside that zone will give their location as predefined area, as opposed to an exact point.

via CanonWatch

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Geek projects: Adventures in balloon mapping

A single image, from about 500 feet high

Along with 462 other people, I backed a Kickstarter project earlier this year. The open hardware project sold balloon mapping kits to tinkerers like myself, and cost $85 for a package that included everything but the camera and the helium. I finally got an opportunity to give the kit a chance, and this article is going to run through my experience. We’ll cover the gear I bought, but the more important subject is that of hobbyist balloon mapping (a very important subject indeed).

Balloon mapping is a pretty simple concept. You fly a weather-sized balloon (about 5-feet in diameter) in the air and dangle a camera from it. If done properly you’ll get any number of overheard shots of a small parcel of land, which you can stitch together into a map without too much difficulty. It’s best thought of as a poor man’s aerial or satellite imagery, as you get the same effect, with a total investment of under $300. And due to the proximity to the ground, you can get great results with very inexpensive equipment. It’s not so much a replacement for satellite/aerial imagery as it is a low-cost, high-resolution alternative.

Upon receiving the balloon mapping kit, and resisting the urge to assemble it in my apartment, I realized that I’d need something to inflate the balloon with. In this case it’s helium, which you can get at any party store, but it won’t be as simple as you expect. I knew my balloon required 80 cubic feet of helium, but the worker at the store measured their helium tanks in terms of how many (party) balloons they could fill. In my case a small tank, about 2 feet tall, could handle 60 balloons or a more reasonably-sized tank, at about 4 feet tall, was good for 120 balloons. Opting for too much as opposed to too little I got the larger one, which cost me $50 plus a $200 deposit. The smaller size, which I now think would have been fine for a single inflation, would have been $30.

The other component mappers will need to think through is the camera. In my case I have an old Canon point-and-shoot setup with the CHDK firmware. This means I have an intervalometer on it, which I can set to shoot however I’d like (such as one shot every 3 seconds with a 5 minute delay on the first shot). This is the high-tech solution, the alternative would be any camera with continuous shooting and a rubber band holding down the trigger. This doesn’t sound like a great idea to me, but I suppose it could work.

With the hardware out of the way, it was time for the setup. There is some knot tying and light construction, but essentially you’re filling a 5.5-foot diameter balloon, hanging a camera from it, attaching a rope, and then letting it go in the air (while holding the rope). My kit included a 1000-foot spool of high-quality kite string, which did the job nicely and was totally tangle-free so long as I was careful. The documentation talked about a rope length of 1000 meters so I was disappointed with the amount of elevation I got, but I will remedy this before I balloon map again.

Once the rig is up in the air, most of your work is done. At this point it was time for some light mathematics (basically figuring out how long the memory card will last) and then directing the balloon. The balloon is completely subject to the wind so you can only direct it as far as you can walk in in a given direction. The more important part of is keeping the string away from trees and pesky power lines.

While flying, there were two things that surprised me, though both should have been completely obvious. The first was just how windy it is above the tree line. I was mapping on what seemed like perfectly still day (winds of 1-2 mph) but the whole time the balloon was being pushed to the northeast by the wind. What was nonexistent where I was standing (the tops of the trees weren’t even moving) was enough to have me mapping about 500 feet away from my intended target. There was not one point in the day where the balloon was close to directly overhead, and again, this was a very still day.

The other factor that surprised me is the weight of the rope. Even very light Dacron line weighs over a pound when you have 1000 feet of it, so when using a balloon with under 10 pounds of lift the length of the lines has a major impact. There was a noticeable deflection in the line between the endpoints, all of which was caused by the weight of the line. So it was possible for me to pull in line and have the balloon actually go higher. While I’m very happy with the Dacron, I’m considering something lighter, possibly a braided fishing line (though I have yet to explore this sufficiently).

The main downside with the kit I bought was its method for supporting the camera. It proposed the use of the top half of a 2L soda bottle, with the camera tethered inside. The rig is easy to set up, cheap, and light, but also flimsy. During my first flight I only got about 50 out of 500 shots because my camera shifted after being hit with a gust of wind. After this I redesigned the camera rig, using some of the parts I had lying around. I ended up using an insulated faucet cover, which is much more secure, protected the camera better, and is more stable in the wind. At $1.50 it’s barely more expensive than a bottle of soda.

Once you have all your pictures taken, your quest has only just begun. At this point you need to stitch them together, a task which you’ll pretty much have to do manually. MapKnitter.org has a very nice tool for this, but it won’t do the work for you, it will just give you the tools to lay out and contort your image (remember, the camera moved side-to-side a lot, so not all your images will have a perfectly flat perspective). Ultimately if you took enough pictures, and you edited through them diligently, you’ll end up with a map that you can save, print, or expand upon.

With it all said and done, I can say that I’m quite happy with my balloon mapping experience. I’ll be doing it again soon, with a few changes to my routine. Next time I hope to have more line (1000 meters maybe?), be more methodical about my mapping coverage, get the smaller tank of helium, start earlier in the day in order to avoid winds (6am or so), and I’ll attach a GPS tracker to the rig. The GPS won’t make a huge difference as the areas are easy to approximate, but I’ll appreciate having the extra data to work with.

The result of my mapping were mixed, but mostly I was impressed with what I got. The shots were of a location that will remain undisclosed (it might or might not be a family member’s home), but next time I’ll be sure to make a map available. For now you can view a single image I took (at the top) or a sample from MapKnitter directly below.

Sample map: Baseball field by anonymous

The balloon mapping kit is still available for purchase through the organization behind it all, the Public Laboratory, if you’re interesting in giving it a shot.

Baseball field by anonymous

[kit image via public laboratory]

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Grad student creates working Portal turret for his final project

A Penn State grad student has created a real-life working version of the infamous player-killing turrets from the hit game Portal as his final project for graduation. I would say that after watching the video, any professor that doesn’t give this guy a Masters degree needs to be the first target of this amazing creation.

Using an Arduino Uno and wiring to a bread board, the student who goes by the handle “kss5095” was able to achieve the motion and tracking using MATLAB, a programming environment used by robotics professionals to design algorithms for the operation of their creations. MATLAB allowed kss5095 to create a friend or foe differentiation for the turret based on the color of the shirt they are wearing, in this case anyone wearing a pink shirt is shot on sight, while others are just tracked.

Complete with the sound effects from the game asking people nicely to “come closer,” the turret is eerily accurate when it senses a foe nearby. There is even a laser sight connected to one of the USB cannons that are controlled by the laptop the whole contraption is hooked up to. As you can see from the image above, this is still a work in progress because the frame of the turret isn’t accurate to the model from the game, but I have a feeling that the man behind the whole thing will take care of that quite satisfactorily in the future.

Now to find out how to order four or five of these things to place around my house to nail my kids when they are misbehaving.

kss5095's YouTube profile, via Geekologie.

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Kylo browser for HDTVs goes open source

It’s quite likely that you’ve never heard of Kylo, but the big-screen browser made by Hillcrest Labs has been providing a great living room surfing experience for more than two years. Now, the company has announced that they’re open sourcing Kylo under the Mozilla Public License (MPL 2.0).

Going open is a logical move by the makers of the Gecko-powered browser, and it’s one that will allow developers of home theater-focused linux distributions (and other media center software) to more easily customize and adapt Kylo to suit their particular needs.

Since it’s built on Mozilla’s core, Kylo offers rich support for web standards like HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript, and it also plays nice with NPAPI plug-ins like Flash. That’s handy for those times when you just can’t avoid Adobe’s oft-maligned tech, like when you really, really need to play a game of Robot Unicorn Attack.

One bit of functionality Kylo offers that other browsers don’t is built-in support for Hillcrest’s Freespace pointing devices, which offer gesture-powered navigation controls. The Kylo/Freespace one-two punch is used by Warpia TV, the slick PC-to-TV streaming solution that was introduced at CES 2012.

Kylo is currently available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, and Hillcrest recently pushed an update that offers better support for 1080P televisions. With a full-on HD interface on board, the Kylo dashboard and overall browsing experience is more crisp, clear, and enjoyable than ever before. If you’re running an HTPC — or even occasionally hooking up a laptop to your HDTV with an HDMI cable — it’s well worth your time to take Kylo for a test drive.

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MaKey MaKey let’s you to play Mario with a banana

Two MIT students, Eric Rosenbaum and Jay Silver, have submitted their first project to the crowd-funding site, Kickstarter. Their promise is to produce the ultimate DIY starter kit. The MaKey MaKey is a simple control board that requires no soldering, no programming, and no breadboarding.

It’s a printed circuit board that hooks up via a USB connection to your computer, any object that can conduct a small amount of electricity (i.e. a person, potato, banana), and you. There’s a wide selection of input options including an old-school D-pad, Space bar, mouse buttons, and keyboard values you can assign to various objects, simply by hooking the board up via alligator clips. Think of it like an electrical circuit: when you touch the object you complete that circuit. For the expert-class inventors, the MaKey MaKey runs on top of Arduino Leonardo bootloader with an ATMega32u4 microcontroller. It utilizes a Human Interface Device (HID) protocol to communicate with your computer.

What you can do with the MaKey MaKey is up to you; the internet is your oyster. Download a game of Pac-Man, or get creative and find something a little more off the beaten path — Rosenbaum and Silver hooked the MaKey MaKey up to a beach ball to use with physics game a la Jelly Car. If this board is everything they say it is, you’re only limitations are what programs are available on the internet and, depending on the complexity of the project, how code-savvy you are.

Hardly out of the gate and this Kickstarter is almost near its goal. With 28 days to go and only a little over $8,000 away from their $25,000 goal, it’s safe to speculate that this project will be a success. More importantly, the reason this Kickstarter was created for manufacturing costs, which will bring the retail cost down significantly compared to what you might pay if this entire project was independent.

With the Kickstarter money Rosenbaum and Silver speculate they can sell an entire kit (board, USB cable, and alligator clips) for around $35, which is the least expensive donation option (if you want to get a MaKey MaKey).

via Kickstarter

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Tizen phones and tablets will run Android apps

Part of the beauty of Android is that its open nature allows non-Google developers to make its engine run on other operating systems. RIM introduced it to BlackBerry PlayBook owners in PlayBook OS 2.0, and now it looks like OpenMobile’s ACL (app compatibility layer) will bring the same functionality to Tizen and Meego devices.

The ACL will provide device manufacturers an easy way to offer their customers a way to enjoy hundreds of thousands of additional apps — sort of. Google won’t welcome these non-Android devices into the Google Play marketplace, which means users of Tizen phones will have to either head to a third-party market (like Amazon AppStore or OpenMobile’s own AppMall) if they want to install apps or wait for the dev community to hack in access to Google Play.

As you can see in the video, it’s not always a smooth experience — and sometimes the apps (like Facebook and Winamp) don’t look particularly great when scaled up to a tablet-sized screen. Often you’re left with tiny text and equally tiny UI elements that don’t work well on what appears to be a 10-inch tablet. On a phone, hopefully, the experience would be an improved one.

But why buy a Tizen phone with OpenMobile’s ACL instead of a similar Android phone that offers direct access to all the big-name apps? For users who like what they see in Tizen and genuinely don’t want their devices running the full Android OS, being able to run the apps will no doubt be a big bonus. In the end, it may all come down to price.

If someone who wants Android apps can get a cheap, open, hacker-friendly Tizen device without shelling out as much cash as they would for a comparable Android, they might just be willing to opt for the alternative — especially if Samsung and friends can prove they’re going to push updates in a timely fashion. You know, once there are actual devices out there that need them.

More at The Handheld Blog and OpenMobile

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LG Google TV arrives this month with dual-core chip and passive 3D

Google TV hasn’t exactly skyrocketed to popularity the way Android did after being introduced to the public, but maybe it’s just a matter of someone building a really good device that really shows off the OS. LG thinks their new sets do just that, and they’re excitedly showing off their new Google TV models at Internet Week.

LG will be offering up both 47 and 55-inch screens, both of which will feature LG’s customized interface running atop the Google TV core. The home screen is broken down into pages, with categories including 3D content, frequently used apps, bookmarks, and premium offerings. A dock at the bottom provides quick access to the selections you use the most — including Google Chrome and the Google Play market. LG’s new sets also feature passive 3D technology, so you won’t have to shell out quite as much cash to outfit your home theater with specs for the whole crew.

Instead of relying on a trackpad as Sony and Logitech do, LG’s Magic Remote provides Wii-like motion control for the on-screen cursor. Flip the diminutive remote over, and you’ll find a full QWERTY keyboard on the back for those times when you’d prefer to type — or rattle off voice commands when you’d prefer not to strain your thumbs.

LG’s G2 series also stands out from other Google TV offerings because of what’s under the hood. A custom dual-core ARM processor runs the show, and it has squashed concerns about performance that were voiced back when LG first unveiled the TVs at CES 2012 in January. Many are calling the G2 the best Google TV devices yet, and you’ll be able to decide for yourself soon. They’ll be arriving on store shelves by the end of the month at $1699 for the 47-inch and $2299 for its big brother.

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Touchcode aims to kill the QR code with invisible, printed multitouch commands

In a world where mobile technology permeates almost every corner of our culture, there have been many attempts to create novel interaction with our devices and to add value to the experience they offer. Armed with smartphones and tablet devices, consumers are always looking for a new way to interact with technology but have been almost jaded when the latest fad turns out to be nothing but a smokescreen.

Come and gone are things like trying to “beam” your personal information from your Palm Pilot to a friend’s PDA and the tiresome QR codes that seem to be printed on everything, yet never want to be scanned no matter how still you hold your phone’s camera. As a chronic early adopter, it has gotten the point that I have thrown up my hands and decided to sit back and wait until something truly exciting comes down the chain for me to get excited about. Which, as you may have guessed, has happened. Last week I had the opportunity to my hands on a new printing technology is a fresh take on creating meaningful interactivity for both consumers and retailers alike. Called Touchcode, it’s the brainchild of Sascha Voigt and his company, Printechnologics.

With the tagline “paper goes digital,” Printechnologics has a vision of reinventing the printed page. As you saw in the video, instead of looking to do away with paper altogether, the company has created a fusion between the print and digital mediums we are so accustomed to, and has brought some harmony to the dueling methods of information dissemination. While Amazon is proving that consumers are ready to make the move to a digital lifestyle, the sales of magazines and other print publications show that people still value actually having something in their hands to bring value to a purchase. Voigt and his team fully grasp this, a fact that’s apparent when you experience how symbiotic the two mediums can be.

Touchcode can be created on everyday printers without having to retool and reconfigure production chains, and is backward compatible with any device that has a capacitive touchscreen with multi-touch capability.

While Voigt wouldn’t go into the exact details on how his company accomplished this, he did explain that the only thing that is “special” about the Touchcode process is the ink that is used for the printing. Calling it a “reflective” ink, Voigt stated that his team had developed a way to store information in a print that would mimic a complex multi-touch gesture to a capacitive touchscreen. This allows companies to hire developers to create triggers that bring a whole new layer of experience to mobile computing.

One of the things you really pick up from Voigt when talking with him is the excitement he has about the possibilities the Touchcode presents to the world. While I can’t state everything he talked about (he tends to get excited and talk about deals that have yet to be cemented), I can get you thinking in the right direction. Touchcode is a mature technology, this isn’t some pie-in-the-sky idea that is being proposed. Printechnologics is in talks with many large companies about products using the new process. Think baseball cards, very popular card games, and large label print publications and you will get an idea of the pace of adoption of Touchcode.

While this technology certainly won’t replace burgeoning communications protocols like NFC, I think it’s safe to say that it’s compelling enough to become a standard for consumers the world over. In fact, in Israel Printechnologics teamed up with a soccer league to create a “fantasy football” game for fans using trading cards. Each pack of cards was printed using Touchcode technology and would interact with a free application for fans to download. Each week, armchair soccer managers would scan in a team of players into their tablet devices and build a team that they thought would garner the most points. To say this campaign was wildly popular would be an understatement as the company that produced the trading cards sold 3 million packs in a short period of time.

If a campaign of this nature can be so successful overseas, imagine the adoption it would enjoy in America during the football season! By now you should be understanding the excitement you heard in my video demo at the top of the post. The sky is the limit when it comes to Touchcode and the bridge that it offers to retailers and consumers alike.

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Brookstone to release butane cell phone charger from Lilliputian Systems

Everyone who owns a smartphone is well aware that the one true kryptonite of their devices is the way that it mercilessly chews through fully-charged batteries. While battery technology has come a long way in the past few years, it has continued to struggle to keep up with the increasingly power hungry devices that manufacturers release every six months. Those that seem to be tethered continually to a power outlet may be able to free themselves from their power prison with a new product that uses butane to recharge devices while on-the-go.

Created by a MIT spinoff company called Lilliputian Systems, the butane fuel cell charger will be sold at Brookstone for an undisclosed price (but being sold at a mall tech-boutique, you know it’s going to be pricey). The charger will be able to fully replenish your device’s battery 13 to 14 times before needing a refill. That’s a pretty tall order for a fuel that is most commonly used light tobacco products because of its ability to burn hot and clean. However, after working on the technology for over 10 years, it’s about time that Lilliputian brings it to market.

What makes butane charging possible is a new process places a solid oxide fuel cell onto a silicon wafer, a first for the industry. This membrane allows the conversion of the liquid fuel to usable energy that can charge through any USB port.

As mentioned above, there’s no word on what the pricing for the charging device, but both the company and Brookstone say that the refill cartridges will cost as much as a cup of coffee at Starbucks (they didn’t specify what size). I would hazard a guess that the unit itself will be around $100, with the refills cartridges being around $5.99 which would make the unit very affordable over the long run indeed. Lilliputian Systems plans to announce when the first units will be made available at Brookstone later this year.

With the ability to carry this device and its fuel cell on airplanes legally makes this an interesting development in the mobile power market. If Lilliputian’s claims hold up this will be a large step forward and a technology that will be copied and become commonplace very soon.

Read more at Lilliputian Systems, via Geekosystem

 

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ADR’s Intagram Socialmatic concept could bring hip back to instant cameras

The Instagram app is many ways a mobile imitation of old-school Polaroid instant cameras (you know, the ones that took real photos). The Instagram Socialmatic Camera brings these two worlds into an instant film camera that would integrate Instagram’s social sharing and photo-altering features.

The integration of cameras into smartphones was a hard blow to the digital camera. Why buy a dedicated camera when there’s one integrated into your smartphone? Every year the quality increases enough to satisfy the mainstream consumer anyway. But also, apps like Instagram, and the ease of posting and sharing your files seamlessly on Twitter and Facebook keep users coming back to their integrated smartphone cameras. The Instagram Socialmatic Camera, though still very much a concept, offers something new; a hip, recognizable design with all the sharing features you care about.

Creative company ADR imagines this instant camera would allow you to not only upload photos to Instagram and Facebook, but also physically print out a shot directly via a built-in ink-jet. This concept isn’t far from the available today Polaroids, like the Z340, it just has an iconic exterior that younger consumers would be drawn to and more features gauged toward that audience. The included paper would also have a post it adhesive, so you can quite literally post your photos and share them in the real world.

If anyone were to invest in such a project and sell it, Instagram/Facebook could. But would such a niche product sell, or are the camera-toting days of everyday consumers gone? Would you consider purchasing this product if it made its way to store shelves, or would you stick to your Instagram app? Leave your comments below.

ADR via CNet

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Students create watch that measures your perception time

Two students from Cornell University decided that they wanted to see if they could create a device that could actually measure the perception of time, rather than time itself. Inspired by the cliche “time flies when you’re having fun,” the two researchers, Brian Schiffer and Sima Mitra, created a chronograph that would give data to study human perception. The resulting timepiece was the TicTocTrac. While it looks like a simple wristwatch, giving you the current time is just a secondary function of the device.

Schiffer and Mitra started the design of their project with the idea that it had to be both cheap and simple. By using a case that was made on a 3D printer — a Makerbot — and readily available off-the-shelf electronics the duo was able to build the device for a scant $55.26. Consisting of a small vibration motor, Piezo sensor (a fancy name for a motion and pressure sensor) and a microSD card, the TicTocTrac is a pretty simple electronic device to build.

As far as tracking a person’s time perception, the TicTocTrac makes use of interval tasks. To start a perception measurement, you would simply tap the face of the watch to invoke the software stored on the microSD card to display a random amount of time to be estimated by the user. This is represented by the ring of small LED lights on the face. After tapping the watch once, a random interval ranging between 5 and 55 minutes will appear on the watch then disappear. The user wearing the device then taps the face again once they think the suggested amount of time has passed. The results are recorded to the microSD card and then transferred to a PC for analysis. A different researcher using the interval method for a year found that he perceived 12 additional hours had passed over the course of a year, which is a significant amount of time if you think about it.

The first guinea pig for the TicTocTrac was Schiffer himself, you can check out a chart of the results by going to his data page. A quick glance will show that indeed when he’s doing something he enjoys time does fly for him. When he’s pulling an all-nighter working however, his perception of the amount of time that has passed changes radically.

This would be an interesting science project for you to undertake with some other geeks or family members, it’s cheap enough to build and Schiffer and Mitra have provided all the plans and software in an open-source manner for you to work from. Let us know in the comments if you decide to create one yourself.

Read more at the TicTocTrac page, via Hackaday

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Samsung’s 55-inch OLED TV will be $9000

OLED displays have been on most geeks’ wishlists for years. They have been right around the corner for about a decade now, and for the past year or two they have been stuck on our MP3 players, mobile phones, and cameras, never making it much past that 4-inch mark. That is, unless you wanted to spend a small fortunate on something like Sony’s famous XEL-1 11-Inch OLED television.

Samsung has some good news and some bad news for all you home theater fans. The good news first: Reasonably-sized OLED televisions are finally going into production and will be available to consumers. And the bad news: That small fortunate an OLED TV would once cost you has grown along with the televisions. Samsung’s upcoming ES9500, the company’s 55-inch OLED HDTV, will reportedly cost $9000 when it’s made available this summer.

Aside from being a nice size (if your apartment is big enough) and having what must be a brilliant picture, the ES9500 has some nice features as well. Of course it’s 3D-ready, but it’s also capable of dual-channel 2D watching. So two people, both of whom are wearing 3D glasses, can watch different televisions programs in 2D at the same time. Samsung must have figured out the audio situation for this technology, which is known as Smart Dual View, but it’s doable. For example, maybe one person would get the headphone jack and another would get the speakers, or a wireless solution could be integrated, possibly Bluetooth, if Samsung wants to get clever with it.

At this point a release outside of South Korea has yet to be confirmed, but with an expected 2H2012 release timing, we should know more before long. Just to be safe, you’ll probably want to start saving now.

More at Samsung via Engadget

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What it takes to make a Leica M9-P Hermes Edition camera

Yesterday was a big day for luxury camera manufacturer Leica. The company announced some new gear and a few tweaks to their existing lineup. As far as the new cameras go, there was the X2, a follow-up to the fixed lens X1, and the V-Lux 40, a rebadged Panasonic point-and-shoot. New accessories included an adapter that makes Hasselblad (H-mount) lenses compatible with Leica’s S series of cameras, and also a Summicron 50mm f/2.0 lens. If you think a $2000 adapter or $7200 lens is expensive, well then sit down before you read this: Leica’s tweaks on their existing M9-P body were a $25,000 Hermes Edition and then a $50,000 variant called the Edition Hermès Série Limiteé Jean-Louis Dumas.

Leica’s mainstay digital rangefinder these days is the M9. If you are a discerning buyer who wants an upgraded display and no branding you can get the more recently released M9-P. The Hermes editions take the M9-P, which, at $8000, is $1000 more then the M9, to a whole different level of cost/value/luxury (call it what you will).

Before you judge though, take a look at the video above. Maybe you don’t think a camera — any camera — is worth $25,000, but it’s undeniable that a significant amount of care goes into these things. While some of use will have trouble appreciating the M9-P as a piece of technology, you can’t help but appreciate it as a piece of craftsmanship. The amount of highly skilled handiwork that goes into this camera — let alone the Hermes editions — is is truly impressive. And then once you get to the Hermes Editions, it’s even more incredible, although my guess is that the markup on all that skilled labor is even still more staggering.

The model featured in the video is the $50,000 Edition Hermès Série Limiteé Jean-Louis Dumas, which will be limited to just 100 units. For the hefty price, you get all the kit below, which includes 200 Dumas photographs, a custom bag, and three lenses, namely the Summicron-M 28 mm f/2.0, Noctilux-M 50mm f/0.95, and a Leica Summicron-M 90mm f/2.0. That Noctilux alone is a $11,000 lens, and it’s backorder just about everywhere, so you can barely even buy one if you hand the cash burning a whole in your handmade, Vicuña wool pants. That doesn’t make the kit a great deal, but it will soften the blow come bonus season.

For more see how the Leica M9 is made, or my hands-on with the M9.

MrLeicaCamera via Petapixel

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BlackBerry 10 to feature built-in video editing, screen sharing

RIM recently offered the world a limited peek at what’s coming in BlackBerry 10, but CrackBerry has been abuzz today with images that appear to have leaked out of Waterloo that show off several additional features. Among them: screen sharing during video calls, an integrated video editing app, and a completely redesigned lockscreen with a clever toast notification system.

The video editor is the least surprising revelation. Almost a year ago, RIM acquired JayCut — one of the first online video editing apps to hit the web. At the time, RIM noted that the BlackBerry PlayBook’s high-def cameras were crying out for better video capabilities, and a JayCut-based BlackBerry 10 app will certainly provide that.

Also on the way in the update is (for the PlayBook, anyways — no current BlackBerry phones will be getting OS 10) is built-in screen sharing. That, when paired with powerful new multiasking features, will allow BlackBerry 10 users to pipe what they’re doing on their phone or tablet to another user during video calls. For business users, this could be one seriously killer feature. Using your phone to conduct a meeting remotely? If the gang in the boardroom has a BlackBerry 10 device on hand, they can use the HDMI port to push your on-screen activities to a projector or HDTV.

What’s so interesting about the new notification system? It uses the device’s accelerometer to detect when the phone or tablet has been lifted. When an event triggers a notification, a simple bar appears with an alert. When the device is picked up part way, additional details slide down — like who it is that sent you the message that just arrived. Tipping the screen further causes even more details to spill out: the full text message, or a snippet of an email.

Read more at CrackBerry 1, 2, 3

 

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Bang and Olufsen create a $730 iPad audio dock

Bang & Olufsen is well known for premium audio products from ear buds to sound systems. Their latest iPad dock is one expensive accessory, considering it will set you back nearly $730—that’s $230 more than what the third-generation iPad costs.

The Beoplay A3 iPad Speaker is a 2.75-pound, pyramid-shaped dock that frames the iPad with three 0.5-inch tweeters and a 2-inch woofer. Its size and weight make it more likely to be a stay-at-home system, rather than an about town one. But, if you do decide to take it on the road it has an estimated run time of about 5 hours.

It has a frequency rang of 60 to 15,000Hz and is constructed from an aluminum frame covered by black polycarbonate ABS plastic. Thanks to its rubber collars it offers a snug fit for the second generation as well as original iPad, too. However, Bang & Olufsen has yet to confirm whether it will (or won’t) fit the slightly thicker, new iPad model. I’d be very surprised if they’d overlooked the current model, though.

The way the Beoplay A3 is designed, you can orient the iPad and the sound system one of several ways. The dock will be able to sense the change in orientation and activate the proper speakers to provide you with the best possible sound output.

There is currently no word on a release date, however, you can sign up on the Bang & Olufsen website to notify you when it does become available.

At $730 though, I doubt that many people will be lining up for a purchase.

via Ubergizmo

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Qumarion: a sensor-covered mannequin for 3D modeling

Creating 3D models and animating them requires a lot of skill and takes years of practice before you become a professional. Typically an artist will have a mannequin sitting next to their PC as an aid to getting a pose right. But that mannequin can only act as a guide rather than a direct input for an on-screen model in a package like Maya or 3ds Max.

Researchers at the University of Tsukuba and the University of Electro-Communications in Japan are aiming to change that by introducing a mannequin peripheral.

It is called the Qumarion and consists of a physical mannequin that can be posed in multiple sitting and standing positions. Using QUMA technology, the data from 32 sensors and 16 joints on the model is relayed via USB to the 3D modeling software on a PC. The feedback is instant, allowing an artist to fine tune the pose on the real model and see it copied by the character on-screen.

Although it looks perfect for the creation of 3D model posing and key frame animation, the creators believe it will mainly be used to create poses that then get traced over for 2D comic illustrations.

At $750 for the complete kit, it’s not overly expensive for an artist to pick up and start experimenting with. At the very least, it should offer a better starting point with a model on screen than having to manually set a pose using a keyboard and mouse.

The University of Electro-Communication isn’t new to the area of novel peripherals. Last year researchers there converted the vibration units contained in Sony’s DualShock controllers into a phantom vibration feedback system. Its aim is to make the feeling of getting stabbed or shot in a game more real.

More at DigInfo.tv

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Create 3D maps of your surroundings in minutes with Matterport

3D technology is certainly all the rage nowadays. Depicted in the video above is a new product from a company called Matterport, and depicts a handheld scanner that’s capable of creating 3D models of objects or rooms in just a few minutes. All of you avid first-person-shooter fans who love creating realistic maps for your buddies to play on should sit up and take notice as this device could make your lives a lot easier.

Currently in development, Matterport’s 3D mapping device looks remarkably similar to the wildly popular Kinect peripheral from Microsoft. In fact, the company used a Kinect during the prototype stages. It’s interesting to note that the visual aspect isn’t the only thing the handheld device has in common with the Kinect as it captures 3D content in much the same way as well.

The Microsoft peripheral makes use of two 3D depth sensors and an RGB camera to create a multi-dimensional rendering of a room. From the different demonstration videos above and below, it looks like Matterport’s device works in a similar fashion; creating a 3D wireframe then adding captured textures on the fly. While the process may be the same, it’s the speed in which Matterport’s device and software achieves the end result that’s of interest in this case.

Matterport is entering into a market that already has several strong entries when it comes to 3D scanning. Companies like Z Corp and NextEngine both have devices that do the same thing for an average cost of around $3,000. What makes the small startup’s device stand out is the fact that it can output scans almost instantly, and for a much lower cost.

While pricing hasn’t been set, one of the co-founders was quoted to say that his company’s device would be retailing at a price “eighteen times cheaper” than its direct competitors. While I think that’s a bit generous, it’s not out of the realms of possibility to see it release at a sub-$500 price point.

There’s no word yet as to when Matterport will be releasing its scanner, but the possibilities it presents are exciting. Besides being able to scan your surroundings, you could take a 3D scan of of a piece of malfunctioning equipment for a specialist to look at, or create your own how-to manuals for various projects. The sky is literally the limit with this device.

Of course, there is some trade-off between price and quality, but from the demo images we have seen, the reduction in quality isn’t a show-stopper.

Read more at Matterport, via Singularity Hub

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