I swung by the Stanford Cool Product Expo yesterday to have a look at some of the… uh… cool products being showcased by companies from the Stanford University community (design groups, startups, etc.). I have a thing for nifty displaysystems, so BumpTop and their giant touchscreen caught my eye right off the bat. Take a look:
BumpTop is different from things like Surface for the simple reason that it’s software driven and requires no special hardware. You can use it with your mouse, or two mice to emulate a multitouch display. ‘Course, ideally you’d have a touchscreen to get the most out of the system, and by the time BumpTop launches later this year, hopefully we’ll have some affordable touchscreen computing platforms to choose from. I’m looking at you, Asus.
The prototype version (the one I saw appears to be a later beta version) showcases some neat little tricks that weren’t obvious in the above demo; you can see the prototype in action on YouTube after the jump. If you’re in any doubt how neat the little tricks actually are, you should know that the prototype demo video is ranked #10 in all time views in YouTube in the sci/tech category. So yeah, it’s cool. Read the rest of this entry »
This little web app does a fairly convincing job of turning one single 2D picture into a 3D scene that you can fly around with your keyboard. Since a single 2D picture doesn’t contain much in the way of depth information, researchers from Stanford University had to get creative to extract a depth map from an image:
“To convert the still images into 3-D visualizations, Andrew Ng, an assistant professor of computer science, and Ashutosh Saxena, a doctoral student in computer science, developed a machine-learning algorithm that associates visual cues, such as color, texture, and size, with certain depth values based on what they have learned from studying two-dimensional photos paired with 3-D data. For example, says Ng, grass has a distinctive texture that makes it look very different close up than it does from far away. The algorithm learns that the progressive change in texture gives clues to the distance of a patch of grass.”
Sure, this is nowhere near as slick as Photosynth, but you can do it with any of your pictures without any additional information. It’s free; just register on the website and give it a try. You can upload any JPEG <5mb, and after some processing (it took about 5 minutes for me at 3am PST), you can fly around your image on the Make3D website. Since it's using purely visual cues, the algorithm is far from perfect, and it works best on landscapes. Best thing you can do is be patient and try a few different images... When it gets it right, it's very cool.
I usually try to leave the timewasters until later in the week when people have had a few days to get some actual work done, but this one’s just too fun to put off. Phun is basically a 2D physics playground program created by Umeå University student Emil Ernerfeld as their Computer Science thesis. While the goal of the software is to be educational and teach physics concepts like friction and restitution, it also encourages creativity and ends up being remarkably addictive. I could go on explaining why the software is worth checking out, but this YouTube video demonstrating what you can do with it is probably more convincing.
And the best part is that Phun is available as a free download as long as you don’t use it for commercial purposes. You can find the links to the Windows and Linux beta versions here, while a MacOS version is hopefully coming soon.
This interactive touch-based multiplayer game, called Firefly, is as far as I know the first example of a game designed specifically for Microsoft Surface. The premise is simple: use your fingers to corral colored fireflies into your jar, while squishing the flies on your opponent’s side. This is just the tip of the iceberg when if comes to the possibilities that Surface offers for gaming, but as a piece of platform-demoware, it kinda looks like fun.
Digital media is all over the place, in all kinds of different formats, and it’s often a huge pain in the ass to get it from one place to another, especially if the internet is involved. doubleTwist is an attempt to make all of your media play nice, especially with other people in social networking environments like Facebook. The idea is that the doubleTwist software will read all of your media, and make it available in one integrated, web-friendly place, doing all of the necessary reformatting and transcoding behind the scenes. You can then trade media back and forth with your friends just by dragging and dropping onto their online profiles.
As for DRM… doubleTwist was developed in part by the guy responsible for cracking DVD encoding as well as Apple’s FairPlay DRM. However, stripping DRM isn’t what this software is about. It will remove DRM from your iTunes music, sort of, but all it does it play the song in the background on mute while re-recording it to MP3, which you can do by yourself. And you have to have legally purchased and be authorized to play the iTunes music before it’ll do a thing. So, despite the root of doubleTwist, don’t expect it to perform any DRM miracles. Shame.
At this stage, doubleTwist supports relatively few (albeit the most common) file formats, and a limited number of devices. Also, the file sharing limits (when it comes to size and length) are quite restrictive. It’s a good idea and it’s completely free to download (it’s in beta at the moment), but if you’re serious about your media, you’ll probably want to keep messing with it the old fashioned way. For now, at least.
If this fantastic bit of software works as advertised, getting your stolen gadgets back from the miscreants who took them will become just a little bit easier. iHound Software is a free download that, once properly configured on your device, will automatically contact you as soon as it’s plugged into another computer via USB. You’ll get an email with the IP address of the computer it’s being used on, and it will even print out a dandy report which you can then bring to a police station. Hopefully you can then get your ISP to cooperate, and help locate the twit who thought it cool to swipe your iPod.
The software works on a variety of devices (list here), and is able to track up to three devices. The company plans on keeping this free, though they may release a Pro version in the future.
Even though the RoboDevelopment Conference was primarily about, well, robots, there was a lot of potential crossover technology that has huge applications for consumer electronics. One of the most impressive of these that I saw was the ViPR pattern recognition technology, under development by Evolution Robotics. ViPR uses a camera (like the one you probably have in your cellphone) to look for distinctive patterns in an image. For example, a piece of text would be a distinctive pattern of pixels that the software could then translate into a meaningful letter. But the technology goes way beyond that: whenever you see something, your brain is recognizing a distinctive pattern of light and saying “hey, that’s a tree!” or “hey, I’m in my living room!” Your brain can do this even if it’s seeing only a piece of an object, or seeing a place from a different perspective. ViPR is capable of making the same sort of inferences. It works with >80% accuracy at recognizing objects or places, even when it’s dark or when it has to deal with distortion. It can identify an object when up to 90% of the object isn’t visible. Basically, this lets electronics “see” in a meaningful manner, much in the same way that we do.
Applications for the ViPR system are everywhere. The military is using it to look for guys holding RPGs, since an RPG has a distinctive visual pattern that ViPR can identify, even if the RPG is being held at an angle and partially concealed at a distance in low light. Current commercial uses (in Europe, mostly) include ViPR acting as a tour guide on your cellphone: take a picture of a landmark, and your cellphone will recognize it and provide information. What I’d personally like to see is the integration of ViPR with Google Street View to provide a highly accurate urban pseudo-GPS system. All you would do would be to take a picture of where you were, the ViPR system would query Google’s Street View database and find a matching pattern, and you’d get your location back. Easy, right? Well, they’re working on it… They just need to get some major companies (cough Google cough) actively interested.
The basic way in which we interface with our computers on a day to day basis is past due for a major upgrade. I mean, think about it… Computer interfaces began with binary punch cards, moved on to text, and then the GUI showed up and there was much rejoicing… But no significant progress beyond that. Isn’t Windows Vista just a gussied-up version of Windows 3.1 with some virtual desktops mixed in? The future is obviously in 3D, and that’s where the Tactile 3D interface is trying to take us. More info and a video demonstration after the jump Read the rest of this entry »
For those of you (and there were a bunch of you) who took a liking to the Smart Image Resizing technique we showed you back in August, it’s now available in Flash form thanks to rsizr.com (and as a GIMP plugin, see below). Now, I’ll be totally honest: I was blown away by the demo video in August, but I’ve been messing with this Flash thing for about an hour now trying to make a nice example image and it’s not turning out that well. From what I can tell, you need a very specific sort of image for the seam carving to work without visible artifacting unless you’re only making small edits. This could be fixed with some sort of blending algorithm, but even without one, it’s not exactly quick in the processing department. Also, if you’re picky with your pictures like I am, it takes several iterations of seaming to produce good results, especially since it’s somewhat unpredictable. Feel free to post in the comments if you have better luck.
Also, I want to point out that the authors of the rsizr site don’t explicitly state (not that I can find, anyway) what their relationship is to the inventors of this technology. They do give credit for the technique to Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir, but it’s unclear whether they received permission from the inventors (both of whom are now working for Adobe, by the way) to adopt their idea and algorithm (which was published in an academic paper) in a pseudo-commercial manner. As long as it’s free, I suppose it’s not really a big deal, but I guess I just feel like Avidan and Shamir deserve a bigger share of the awesomeness that they created, you know?
I don’t mean to rain on anyone’s parade, and it’s certainly a very well done and useful implementation of the technique. You can check out rsizr for yourself (for free); you’ll need to have the latest version of Flash installed. And if you’d rather have a version for GIMP, check out Liquid Rescale.
While the internet is full of solutions and contraptions for smoothing out a scratched disc sometimes there’s just no way to fix the damage. But instead of just tossing the disc in the trash and saying good-bye to your lost files you now have a chance to recover some of that data.
The CD Recovery Toolbox is a free piece of software that can recover damaged files from CDs, DVDs and even Blu-Ray or HD-DVD discs. The tool scans the disc and provides you with a list of all the files and folders that are intact and actually available for recovery. You then select which files you’d like to save and the software will copy them to a selected folder on your drive. The program is also very easy to use thanks to a step-by-step wizard meaning you don’t have to be a data recovery expert in order to recover your files.
And like I already mentioned the CD Recovery Toolbox is 100% free and is available for download on the Recovery Toolbox website.
Related Tags: Displays, Innovation, Software
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By Evan Ackerman
By Evan Ackerman
