king talk

Concentrating at work feels hard if you have the possibility to play around with the new iPad. ; ) Appearance is deveiving, we got something cooking…

Controlling applications by your eyes is not a completely new technology. The known optical methods like you know it from Tobii are not user friendly enough, because the gadget always needs to be calibrated first and varying ambience conditions make it hard to track the eyes. NTT DoCoMo reveiled their latest development at the Mobile World Congress at Barcelona. Particulary this could be a good invention for small gadgets which lack of space for controls. It seems to react very directly. Maybe the next future way of interacting with tiny devices?

Narrated by Tom Selleck, and directed by Fight Club’s David Fincher, the ads began in 1993 and were (mostly) remarkably accurate, predicting: E-Books, in-car GPS, tablet PCs, E-ZPass, video conferencing and video on demand. Take a look…

via Gizmodo

Alright, so here’s our future according to Nokia: we are wearing clunky bracelets at night, are permanently stalked by some weird guy and our communication will heavily rely on emoticons. On the plus side: we won’t have to readjust our behavior because data structures will still be navigated using text menus.

So even though Nokia deserves appreciation for coming out with a future scenario in the first place, it is sad that they apparently didn’t have the will to make it coherent. To me, it seams like they had a great vision which then has been gradually watered down in order to make everyone in the company somewhat happy. This is sad, but it’s even sadder that this kind of creative destructivism is something quite common in todays industry.

(via Jens Franke)

Nearest Tube is one of the first augmented reality apps created for the new Apple iPhone 3GS. 2D tube maps are so oldschool! This one tells you where the nearest tube station will be directly displayed in your environment by using the new video and compass function. When you load the app, holding it flat, all 13 lines of the London underground are displayed in coloured arrows.

By tilting the phone upwards, you will see the nearest stations: what direction they are in relation to your location, how many kilometres and miles away they are and what tube lines they are on. If you continue to tilt the phone upwards, you will see stations further away, as stacked icons. If you are owner of a new iPhone 3GS and you´re living in Chicago, Washington DC, Paris, Berlin, Madrid or Barcelona you can join beta testing by sending an email to contactus[at]acrossair[dot]com with your iPhone UDID Identifier code and your city location.

We think that the iPhone is the perfect mobile hardware for projects like this. Six years after the Handheld Augmented Reality project at TU Graz started their pioneer work with projects like the Invisible Train, a real multi-user Augmented Reality application for handheld devices, this technology enters the mass market.

After marketing guys have found out, it could be cool to map products as rotating 3D object on markers it´s time for the real apps. It´s time for applications which help us out during our everyday life. Where is the next hospital? Where can I find a cheap accomodation? Where are my friends now?…