CES in Las Vegas is on and like every year I am jealous of everybody who can go to it.
But nevertheless I still get to see all the cool new gadgets and while I have seen prototypes of this before, but this seems to be ready to be installed in my house.
The Samsung Smart Window – a transparent display that is touch enabled and a one sided pane which means people on the outside can’t see what you are seeing.
here are some videos of it in action:
I love the blinds, also word on the street is that mass production is starting in the next few month, but no word on price yet.
I am very excited about the forthcoming Windows 8 and I have been playing around with it since the Developer Preview was released.
We have a big touchscreen in the office here so it is perfect for the Metro UI, but I have to say that the mouse interaction on a laptop without a touchscreen is very average.
Along came Tobii and at first you think it is just another gimmick, but everybody on the net who has actually tried it is blown away by it.
Tobii comes with an eye control device, a rectangular glass obilisk that is attached to the hinge of the laptop. It requires a personal calibration and off you go. It also controls all the swipe gestures available in Windows 8.
We have seen some cool stuff in the past that could bring us closer to the Star Trek HoloDeck, e.g. the HoloDesk
And now Microsoft Research has pushed a little further and gives us a 3D hologram that is floating in mid air at 15 frames per second and is viewable from 192 different points at a time.
reminds me of Star Wars
Of course Kinect is involved here and the depth sensor makes it possible to interact with the hologram – you can basically touch it.
It is still a long way off from 3D hologram telephony or a full size HoloDeck, but for now this is pretty cool.
As a massive fan of the DJ deadmau5 and an ex-Londoner this footage of the recent Nokia product launch was always going to excite me.
That said you certainly don’t have to be a supporter of either to appreciate the sheer awesomeness of this video. Well executed and totally awe inspiring. Nokia successfully bring together the world’s most advanced 4D technology with great music to create an amazing free light show at Millbank Tower in London.
What happened?
“Each of the 120 metre high building’s 800 windows were covered with vinyl as 16 powerful projectors, stationed 300 metres away on the other side of the river, beamed 3D images onto the structure. Huge butterflies flew across the London skyline and the tower was twisted, pulsated and even fell down. Billed as the “future of live events” the spectacular show was accompanied by music from super producer deadmau5, who created exclusive remixes for the performance — adding the 4th dimension.”
Prepare yourself this is a light show like never before!
Not sure if this a PR effort to promote the Sony Xperia play or the new album of Kasabian, but nevertheless it is a pretty awesome execution and a lot of effort would have gone into it.
2 “users” control real life football players by selecting commands on their Sony handsets that are then send to the players who are wearing ear pieces.
I like how the headband lights up when a player gets selected!
It seems a bit lagging at times, but it is a pretty impressive attempt
Amnesia is always happy to support local talent and we are proud to show you a concept from one of our Interns, David Montero
David has been helping us with one of our Kinect internal projects while he was working hard on his own university project called dOh
Ever had a doh! moment?, that moment when the door slams behind you and you slap your forehead realising you left the house without taking the keys with you?
dOh will help you remember your keys, wallet, phone or anything else you could possibly forget.
All you have to do is “tag” your items and when you try to leave your apartment your doorknob will tell you, by flashing a coloured light at you, that you forgot a tagged item.
A really nice idea and I am sure it will help people in the future not to forget their things anymore. It could potentially even tell you that you lost your phone when you come back to your home
we have seen how Nokia wants to bend the future of phones with flexible displays and now Nokias future lab showed us a concept video on how it could all work together.
nanotechnology, with a bendable transparent display and a fully touch sensitive casing are only some of the visions that Nokia cooked up.
Check out the video:
not sure if I agree with all of it, but there are some nice ideas in it.
I have been writing about Microsoft Research quite a bit and lately it seems that they are showing off our future every few days.
Last week was no different and they gave us 3 different projectors that allow you to interact with them through shadows and augmented reality.
3 devices, split up into camera, room and SLAM models, incorporate pico projectors, coaxial IR cameras, inertial measurement units (IMUs) and the company’s Kinect to project augmented visions onto surrounding surfaces. The environmentally aware systems allow for shadow- and touch-based interaction with the CG overlays, offering pinch functionality, icon selection and even painting.
Pretty cool you think? Check out the video
One day we might all have one of those to check out the latest furniture and what they will look like in our home.
We have seen bendable displays in the past from Samsung, LG and Toshiba, but none of them have really put it into a functional prototype.
Now Nokia had their Nokia World in London and Tapani Jokinen, Head of Design at Nokia showed off their bendable phone and how it would react when you bend it different ways.
The user will control this flexible Nokia Kinetic phone by bending, twisting and even squeezing it. Different bends will result in different functions on the phone and he had a good point when he said that it makes it much easier to use in the cold winters in Finland when you are wearing gloves.
cLast week it went around all the blogs and I don’t know how many times I watched the video below. If I had a cool $650000 dollars laying around I would buy one myself.
here is the teaser we saw last week
And then the gadget show aired a few days ago in the UK, but unfortunately if you are not in the UK you can’t use their streaming and catch-up services. Luckily they uploaded it to Youtube so if you have a cool 17 1/2 min to spare check out how the best FPS simulator was build
Microsoft Research has given us some coolstuff in the past and they don’t seem to be stopping any time soon.
Today its the HoloDesk, a tool that lets you manipulate virtual 3D objects with your bare hands. Looking through a transparent display, the objects react nearly instantly, rolling from a sheet of real paper into a real cup and falling into shadow if you block the virtual light-source.
Check out the super cool video of it in action:
If you haven’t guessed it, there is a Kinect sensor at its heart. Super awesome.
The University of Sydney has a great bunch of interaction design students and one of them is Stephen Davis.
As you all know Amnesia Razorfish is always trying to stay ahead of the curve especially when it comes to new technologies so when Stephen had the idea of the BrandTable we were able to help him out a little.
Together with Publicis Mojo we were able to get him first hand insights into Paypal and Google and what they are planning in regards to mobile payments. We were also able to help him with the build of his prototype that shows how NFC could be used in future.
Check out the video:
Here is what Stephen has to say about his creation:
Brand Table is a product designed initially for shopping centre food courts that takes in an order via a mobile device in where item selection and payment will occur.
Today Google and Samsung finally had their Nexus event where they released the next version of the Nexus phone series as well as the announcement of their new iteration of Android, Ice Cream Sandwich.
So let’s start with the phone: Samsung Galaxy Nexus
Obviously it will be running ICS and it will have some very impressive specs:
– a huge 4.65-inch HD Super AMOLED screen with a resolution of 1280 x 720
– 1.2 Ghz dual-core processor
– 5 Megapixel rear camera with LED flash
– 1.3 Megapixel front facing camera
– 1080p full HD video recording
– 1 GB of RAM
– Wireless N network
– NFC capabilities
– the usual accelerometer, compass, gyro, proximity sensor
– a barometer
and to power it all a big 1750mAh battery
It will be released in November, but so far we haven’t heard any carrier announcement or if it even hit AU shores any time soon. No price yet either.
Love this idea. Throw the ball in the air and it takes a 360 shot when it reaches the highest point. Wouldn’t it be great to see this technology inside a football as a live stream during the game.
having worked in IT before and now working on lots of cool emerging technologies and experiences, I always seem to have multiple PCs on my desk that I am simultaneously working on.
At some stage I had 4 keyboards and 4 mice on my desk and no more space for my lunch. So I am constantly looking for solutions for that and I have played around with software and hardware KVMs. Most of them are buggy and the hardware ones just add too many cables to my desk.
Today I came across a little tool build by a developer in the Microsoft Garage project called Mouse without borders.
Simply put it is a software kvm that can connect 4 of your PCs that are on the same network and you can use your 1 keyboard and mouse for all of them.
A simple installer and setup process and you are up and running. It works quite seamlessly and you can easily configure the location of your physical machine – just drive your mouse out of the screen towards the next and it will appear there.
Other feature are copy and paste, drag files across
I finally had the time to read about this “little” screen at SIGGRAPH, the article has been open in my browser for about 6 days.
And it was well worth the wait.
A projected capacitive display is nothing new, multiple smartphones, including the iPhone has one, but having an 82 inch one is something very special.
check out the video below and dream about having one of these puppies in your living room some day.
Right now this kind of screen is still really expensive ($120 000) and even the CEO said that consumers will see this in the market as soon as it is more affordable.
We all remember the original 8bit Outrun Game from 1986. I remember playing it until my fingers were bleeding.
So what would it be like if you could have this in real life? That is what the people at the University of California Irvine ask themselves and they created a system that, with the help of cameras and some customized software, looks in front of the vehicle and reproduces a map of what lies ahead of you onto the screen in 8bit rendering just like Outrun.
All you have to do now is follow the route. Simply awesome.
Promoting the launch of Cosmo For Guys, Viral marketing company Thinkmodo thought it would be a great idea to put a girls head in a 4 iPad contraption and turn heads. Some people will call it awesome, some will call it creepy, I am just wondering how she is seeing where she is going and if that guy touching her “face” is really annoying her.
Cosmo for Guys is a new digital magazine that is exclusive to the iPad.
What do you get when you combine Star Wars and a 20 foot multitouch screen?
The most awesome and most fun real time interactive strategy game ever.
It was designed by computer science grad student Arthur Nishimoto and developed at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois in Chicago.
It allows players to control cruisers, destroyers, corvettes, fighters, bombers, and even a Death Star in attempt to destroy the other side. Sound effects from the movies immerse those behind the wheel of some of the most infamous vehicles in the classic sci-fi movie trilogies.
Check out the video below:
So now it just needs to be picked up by someone and made available commercially. I will already clear my living room wall for my 20 foot multitouch screen
what if you could treat an audio file the same way you could treat a photoshop file?
Spectral Layers which at the moment is in Alpha Stage 2 promises just that. The software has the ability to use multiple layers, work with multi-channel audio as well as surround sound, and extract individual voices, instruments, or any other noises.
Posted by stephanlange 
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