king talk

3D projections you can touch. Sounds like sci-fi to me, but has been presented at the Siggraph 09 in New Orleans. Scientists from the University of Tokyo developed this so called »Airborne Ultrasound Tactile Display«. Basically this adds tactile feedback to a floating image trough ultrasonic waves. Looks very high tech, but in fact they have utilized two wiimotes to track the hand movement.

via crave & Shinoda Lab

Today I received my birthday present. It´s a Kosmos Xplorer Kit with a metal detector for self assembly. The functionality of this detector is pretty simple. It generates quick electrical fluctuation of the current, a search coil is one part of the oscillator. The number of the vibrations per second (frequency) depend on the properties of the coil. If you hold it close to metal (iron, aluminum, nickel, copper, silver …) the frequency will be influenced by that. A small sensor mounted at the board recognizes this state and sends a signal to a piezo speaker (beep!) and to a red led (blink!). This little and cheap piece of technology looks like it wants to be hacked   ; )

Yesterday arte showed a documentation about cyborgs which was very interesting and sometimes a little bit scary. This clip about a brain-controlled rat was the one which retained in my memory. A laptop computer is used to wirelessly send signals to a rat’s brain, scientists found that that they could control the decisions of the rat by stimulating the part of the brain that controls its movement. The rat does have a choice but is rewarded for a correct decision with a hit to the pleasure center of the brain.

You just have to hit the right button and the rat will do so. This project reminded at our remote controlled robot, which was developed by envis some weeks ago. We thought about mounting a camera to the top of the robot, but we never would thought about to replace the robot by a tiny little pet like a gerbil or something. What is the next step? Should we hack our neighbours bobtail. Go to the zoo and brain-control the pinguins? This seems to be wrong.

The american computer developer Apple wants to patent a technique, which allows the transmission of the user motion to the screen. Apple submitted an application in December 2007 at the US patent office.  The patent was published last week, it´s officially called “Motion Tracking User Interface”.

This technique can match the movement of defined objects like your head, hand or an ordinary object like a cup of coffee to a virtual object at your desktop. Apple mentioned that e.g. the motion of your head could rotate a 3-dimensional teapot on your screen. Nowadays we use mouse, keyboard, graph tablet or trackball to interact with our computers, but for every device the hand of the user is needed. This technology should help the user to navigate without using both hands.

Apple published a patent some weeks ago, where they merged a display with image sensors. This could be the fundamental technology for the motion tracking. The whole patent is the answer to the 3D tracking system of 3DVsystems called Z-Cam, which was actually aquired by competitor Microsoft and will be used in the Natal project, which was shown at this years E3 gaming conference in Los Angeles.

via heise

While we were searching for a current, refurbished, low cost iPod Touch for developing multi-touch applications we heard a lot of rumours about the new iPhone going through the blogosphere the last days. One of the main reasons was the latest article from iPhoneApps.com. Due to the news they had to suffer from an extraordinary amount of traffic that has overwhelmed their servers. They´ve had to redirect some traffic to a separate server to avoid a longer downtime. They juste reported about some of the new technical features according to insider information. Here are the rumored specifics:

- 32GB and 16GB to replace current capacities
- $199 and $299 price-points to be maintained within a 2-year contract
- 3.2 Megapixel camera
- Video recording & editing capabilities
- Ability to send a picture & video via MMS
- Discontinuation of the metal band surrounding the edge of the device
- OLED screen (AMOLED)
- 1.5X The battery life
- Double the RAM and processing power
- Built-in FM transmitter
- Apple logo on the back to light up
- Rubber-tread backing
- Sleeker design
- Built-in compass
- Revolutionary combination of the camera, GPS, compass
and Google maps to identify photo and inform about photo locations.
- Turn by turn directions
- July 17th, 2009 release date

We will see which features will pop out and we will compare the new iPhone to these speculations. A tutorial for getting started with the iPhone Development can be found at WebDeveloperDepot.

via iPhoneApps.com & MacRumours.com