Tag Archives: Tech News

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Shadow touch! – Media art that fools the senses – 7 February 2011

At the 14th Japan Media Arts Festival, an interactive artwork called Shadow touch!, which uses a Wii remote control, was exhibited as an award winner in the Student CG Contest. Shadow touch! uses media technology to fool the visual and other senses.

“The way it works is, you use this flashlight to search for shadows in empty spaces. Shadow Touch! enables you to play with the shadows, by touching, holding, and throwing them.The flashlight-like device used in Shadow Touch! doesn’t use actual light. It contains the infrared camera from a Wii remote control. The device measures which way it’s facing by using a recursive reflector, which can reflect light back the way it came. Through this means, Shadow touch! generates pictures synchronized with the device’s motion in real time, and displays them using a projector. In the mode where users hold and throw the images, recursive reflector caps are attached to the fingertips. They reflect infrared light, and the Wii remote control on the front of the system detects the position of the reflected light.

• Teruaki Tsubokura
• 14th Japan Media Arts Festival

Techno pundits and industry experts at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF), held in August were hailing 3D films as the next big thing.

At the forum, animation supremo and CEO of DreamWorks Jeffery Katzenberg, said 3D filmmaking was the “greatest innovation to occur in the movie business in 70 years.”

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/09/12/future.cinema/index.html

A few years ago, I posted about an exciting new technology developed by Hartmut Neven at USC’s ISI lab that has been described as a ‘ visual google’. With Hartmut’s help, we eventually used it for some location based experiences in one of our mobile experience design classes. He started Neven Vision to commercialize it and soon after, we heard the company was acquired by Google – but not a word since. Until today. Just saw an announcement that the software is now part of Google’s Picasa photo sharing app, and is used to automatically tag faces in your stack of snaps:

Thanks to Web Monkey for pointing out the Neven Vision connection.

From Technology Review:

Hundred-dollar laptop, revisited: The next-generation version of the One Laptop per Child machine will dispense with keypads. It can be folded flat to make one larger screen (left); here, two children could play a game, each using the touch-screen capability. Or it can be held on its side and used as an electronic book (right).

Credit: One Laptop per Child

Perhaps the true sign of maturity of a medium is the decision to stop selling it with the same strategies as porn.

The video game industry’s annual showcase is saying goodbye to scantily clad booth babes, extravagant multimillion dollar exhibits, blaring lights and pounding music. Celebrity appearances from the likes of Paris Hilton or Snoop Dogg are a thing of the past, too.

This year’s version of the Electronic Entertainment Expo, renamed the E3 Media & Business Summit, will be a toned-down affair as organizers hope to have a far less flashy discussion on new and upcoming video games.

more here

So my shiny April copy of Communications of the ACM read ‘Flow in Games’ on the cover and I thought, “hmm…I wonder if Jenova knows about this…” and then I turn to the page of the article and whaddayaknow? Jenova Chen wrote the article. Phew…

Published under the Viewpoints Column, you can find “Flow in Games (and Everything Else)” by Jenova Chen and several familiar sentences and graphics from Jenova’s past presentations when he was a student.

Game Developers Conference expands–but too far?

For Patricia Pizer, a longtime developer of online games, GDC has been a chance to keep abreast of the latest thinking and developments in making games.

But Pizer, who traditionally hosts a gathering of her industry friends and acquaintances, said she’s seen the nature of the conference change over the years.

“It’s gotten so big,” Pizer said. “It used to feel more like a community of my peers, and now it feels more like a frat party. On the other hand, it has also gotten more corporate. It’s a funny contradiction. It will continue to get progressively more commercial and less academic.”

read the whole article here

We are now fully functional after a scheduled powerdown of all servers due to facilities repairs this weekend. If you didn’t check your email, I turned everything off yesterday afternoon around 6pm as a precaution and Diana Hughes turned everything back on today at 12.30pm. We would have been up sooner but Cinema operations was unavailable. Our apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Hey, let’s get a bunch of these for the ZML:

Jack PC from Jade Integration – a computer in your wall!

The Jack PC is a revolutionary new ‘thin client’ computer made by Chip PC Technologies. Thin clients are effectively desktop computers designed to connect to a ‘terminal server’ or Citrix based environment where processing is handled by servers instead of PCs. Thin clients have been getting smaller and smaller over the years however this is the world’s first Windows-based thin client small enough to fit in a network wall port. The benefits to business are massive since there’s no longer a need for desktop PCs at all – your monitor, keyboard and mouse just plug into the wall!

via adlab

This is perhaps the funniest thing I have read in long time.

The “Hug” technology involves the pet fowl wearing a wireless, sensor-rigged “jacket”, moving inside its coop in the “home” set-up, and being tracked by a video camera.

The information is transmitted via the internet to the “office” set-up, wherein a 3D model of the pet moves exactly like its live counterpart.

When the owner touches this model, the instructions are translated into data and reproduced as a series of vibrations, on the jacket worn by the hen.

Teh said that the system which is being tested, will give the chicken the feeling of being touched by its owner. Teh has been working on this project for 2 years, along with center director – Adrian David Cheok and center manager – Lee Shang Ping.