While flash cards with larger and larger capacities are inevitable, at one point I would have scoffed at a 64GB SD card as being completely unnecessary. But with more and more DSLRs using SD cards, getting bigger sensors and gaining the ability to capture hi-def video, a 64GB card not only makes sense, but is almost necessary. So congratulations to Toshiba who are the first to launch a 64GB SDXC card with 35MB per second write speeds and 60MB per second read speeds. The new card will also be available in 32GB and 16GB capacities (yawn!) and are set to go into production early next year.
A new iPhone based payment system known as ‘Square’ is currently being alpha tested at the Self Edge store which recently opened in New York City. The payment system uses a custom app as well as a small credit card reader that fits in the headphone jack of an iPhone or iPod Touch. The card’s swipe data is transferred to the app where the payment is processed, complete with a digital signature confirmation. Besides keeping the whole process paperless thanks to email-friendly digital receipts, the Square system even allows someone like a hot dog vendor on the street to process credit card payments as long as they have a wireless data connection.
Most photographers will tell you: regular camera flashes are horrible. They tend to reflect off people’s skin amd create unwanted white spots, they give you red eyes in some pictures and they also blind you. NYU researchers have developed a way around this by creating a flash that uses light that is outside the visible spectrum, thus invisible to us.
It works like this: first the camera takes a picture with IR and UV light which produces a monochrome image. In quick succession a second image is taken without any flash, using only ambient lighting. Typically this will result in a dim, noisy, grainy image. The magic happens when the software combines both images using the first monochrome picture as a reference point to de-noise the image with natural colors. Once combined, the result is nearly indistinguishable from a long-exposure shot.
Every now and then you see a product and you just assume that it’s a concept. I mean, heck, it’s just too smart for anyone to be producing it! And every now and then you’d be entirely wrong, like now. The Orb is an actual Bluetooth headset that transforms into a ring and vice-versa. Wear it like a ring and its Flexible OLED (in the Deluxe edition) will display caller info, calendar items and voice-to-text info. Feel like answering? Twist it off and hang it on your ear. Sound is transmitted through bone conduction, so there’s no need to even insert it in your ear. It’s really just brilliant.
The best part is that it’s supposed to be available for purchase in early 2010 for $129 for the regular edition, $175 for Deluxe and going up from there depending on what gemstones people might choose to have embedded into it. It is after all, also a ring.
Thanks to companies like Eye-Fi, WiFi equipped SD cards are readily available allowing you to upload photos or videos from a digital camera to your PC or online sharing service as you take them. But KDDI has just shown off the first WiFi equipped microSD cards at Wireless Japan 2009, which is currently running until the 24th.
The company actually showed off two different cards, one manufactured by Mitsumi Electric Co. Ltd. and one by Renesas Technology Corp. and while both used different wireless hardware, they were each IEEE802.11 b&g compliant. And while there aren’t any digital cameras that use microSD cards, non-smartphones that don’t feature built-in WiFi should benefit from the new cards, though pricing, availability and even storage capacities have yet to be determined.
The sound of an air raid siren is what most people associate with natural or man-made disasters, but Germany’s extensive network of sirens was dismantled after the Cold War and replaced with a satellite based warning system (SatWaS) that alerts the population via TV and radio. The only problem is that if people aren’t watching TV or listening to the radio, those warnings go unheard. Over the years many alternatives have been considered, like using the cellular networks to alert everything from phones to smoke detectors, but they still don’t ensure the entire population gets the message. And replacing the siren network would end up costing the government hundreds of millions of Euros.
So researchers at the INT (Fraunhofer-Institut für Naturwissenschaftlich-Technische Trendanalysen) have come up with a more clever alternative. As of September 2010 all new cars in Germany will be equipped with something called the eCall emergency system, which functions a lot like OnStar does in the event of an accident. However, this system could also be used to trigger the horns of parked cars in the event of a disaster that the public needs to be aware of. Because the eCall system also features GPS, the warnings can be limited to a specific geographic area, and while they won’t provide info on exactly what’s happening, it will at least let citizens know they should turn on their TVs or radios for more information.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I usually don’t like to write about concept devices, but every once in a while something comes along that I hope becomes a reality. Like the Peepo, which is essentially a GPS navigation device for the visually impaired who rely on a guide dog. So instead of attaching it to the dashboard of a car, the Peepo attaches to a guide dog’s handle, and instead of providing navigational feedback via an LCD display, the Peepo can steer someone who’s visually impaired via subtle vibrations felt in their fingertips.
It also features a handheld unit that uses voice recognition to set and confirm the destination, while the navigation directions are wirelessly communicated to the vibrating unit on the guide dog’s harness. Now unfortunately the Peepo isn’t available for sale just yet, but it’s currently one of the entries for the James Dyson Award which also features a ‘People’s Choice’ winner. So if you’d like to see this come to fruition, that’s probably a good place to start.
Even with the new Wii MotionPlus add-on, the Wiimote still provides a somewhat limited motion tracking experience. Sure you can sword fight, or swing a bat, but if you had inspirations to do anything beyond that, you’re out of luck. Unless you were willing to shell out $500 for the Acceleglove that is. It was developed by a company called AthroTronix and features accelerometers on each finger allowing intricate hand motions to be tracked in 3D space.
Now out of the box the Acceleglove can only really be used to track limited hand movements like gestures or pinching motions, allowing you to trigger events on a connected device (as is demonstrated in the video included below) but the glove also comes with a handy open source SDK which means if you have the coding know-how there’s no reason it couldn’t be used to track 1:1 motion.
It’s uncertain what affect file sharing and ‘piracy’ has really had on the movie industry, but it’s obvious the studios are concerned and have been trying to find ways to get people back into theaters. Thanks to technical advances 3D has finally become a popular gimmick, and now a Montreal (Longueuil) based company called D-Box is hoping theater-goers will be just as interested in a more moving film experience, quite literally.
Last night I had a chance to try out D-Box’s Motion Theater Seats at the Canadian launch in Toronto which, as their name implies, are special theater seats that can move and rumble alongside the action in the film providing an enhanced movie-going experience. While I don’t think the technology will add much to talking head flicks or anything adapted from a Jane Austen novel, it does give you a good reason to endure the sticky floors of your local cinema when it comes to Summer blockbusters. More after the jump…
Related Tags: Innovation, Storage
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