Like it or not, most of the time when you take a picture, a significant portion of the image is (for lack of a better word) useless. Or rather, there are lots of areas of the image that aren’t conveying any important information. Obviously this excludes you artsy-picture types, but if you’re just trying to show and/or explain something (which most of the images on the Internet, excluding porn, are probably trying to do) wouldn’t it be useful if you could make images smaller by selectively removing the least important pixels? Ariel Shamir of the Efi Arazi School of Computer Science in Israel has developed some software to automatically do just that, in realtime no less. Watch and be amazed:
So it’s obviously still a work in progress, but it’s already pretty clever and seems to have a working automated mode as well as a decent user interface. What with the population of itty bitty mobile devices capable of Internet browsing exploding like a rabbit warren underneath a Viagra factory, a little piece of software that can work behind the scenes to dynamically re-size images (in the same way that HTML dynamically re-sizes) could have a huge range of applications.
Fun little piece of non-news: If you’re using Apple’s Safari, changing your homepage to any website in the world is a breeze; but if that site is Google, the browser throws this prompt at you:
“Are you sure you want to switch your home page to Google search? You can do a Google search directly from Safari’s search field without going to Google’s webpage.”
Of course, the likely reason this is happening is that Apple gets paid every time someone does a search through Safari’s search field, but it’s interesting behavior nonetheless.
It’s possible that this has been around for some time (and we hear it does the same thing with Yahoo!), but it’s the first we hear of it.
I wish I could discuss voice art on a personal level in the context of music, but by federal law I’m only allowed to sing out loud if all vertebrates within a 50 foot radius are wearing military grade ear protection. Artist Pierre Proske has made it possible for me to share my voice with the world anyway through software which translates vocal patterns into visual art, in sort of the same way that your WinAmp or iTunes visualizer does. Everything that comes out of your mouth involves a unique (to you) combination of frequencies, which Proske’s software is able to turn into a pattern of shapes. Each resulting piece of art is therefore a digital voiceprint of sorts, that looks different depending on who said what when it was created.
Proske was inspired by Japanese textiles, and ultimately sees his software being used for textile design. What could be more sentimentally geeky than creating a blanket for someone that happens to be a voiceprint pattern of you saying “I love you snookums”? Although the software is clearly operational, it sadly doesn’t seem to be available for download.
The folks at Warelex have come up with a way to stream video feeds from your Symbian phones to Windows, and the video quality matches or even surpasses that of many high-end USB webcams, like the Logitech Ultra QuickCam. Is there a reason to rejoice? Yeah, especially when you have purchased a phone as pricey as the Nokia N73 or N93. You may as well put the 3.2MP camera with Carl-Zeiss optics to good use. Warelex’s Mobiola Web Camera consist of two pieces: the client app residing on the Symbian phone and the Windows driver that interfaces with Skype, MSN, YouTube, etc… The list of compatible phones includes 3250, 5500, E50, E70, N71, N73, N80, N91, N92, N93 and N95. Warelex provides a demo (although extremely limited) if you want to try before you decide to drop $20 on the software.
Last year we introduced you to Microsoft’s Photosynth, which is a powerful piece of software based on research at the University of Washington. There is now a beta version available for public use, and it looks pretty sweet. Essentially, photo tourism software lets you browse through Internet snapshots that have been arranged into virtual 3D space by finding similarities between the images. The software looks through sites like Flickr to build a database of a given place from hundreds of different pictures, enabling you to browse through views from many different locations and at varying levels of detail, all integrated into a smooth interface. This video is from the University of Washington, the guys who wrote the software in the first place:
For a slightly techier, more detailed explaination, a full version (5 minutes) of the demo can be found here; it’s well worth watching, if just for the additional locations. Microsoft is currently working on place collections, user submissions, and even some browser friendly plugins including a beta version for (gasp) Firefox. You can see a slick Microsoft video illustrating how they’re planning on packaging the software here, and try it out here (although Firefox is supported, anything less than XP SP2 isn’t). It’s projects like these that give me faith in Web 2.0.
It’s far removed from gadgets, but crap if it isn’t fascinating. An enterprising Flickr user by the name of Pierre Tourigny has been scouring the website Hot Or Not for pictures of women. There’s plenty of that, and then some. But what Pierre then did with the pictures is what’s so amazing. He grouped them by average attractiveness (users of the site get to rate the pictures they see), and then blended them together using a program called SquirtzMorph. The result is the image you see above.
He claims he did this as a study on attractiveness, but we just think we was having fun. Can’t blame him either. He also grouped and morphed images based on age and ethnicity, and you can see those two pictures after the jump.
Today, once more, we could talk about the true top story: Yahoo! posted Q4 and 2006 earnings. Everyone’s talking about that, but it’s kind of boring. This is all you need to know: they beat expectations, they’re happy, but a little cautious about 2007. Semel’s putting small fires out, but there’s nothing to get anyone’s panties up in a bunch.
The more interesting news is that Blu-ray technology has been cracked. A while ago, HDDVD fell under the prodigious hacking of one “muslix64″, from the Doom9 forums. And he’s at it again, this time successfully extracting “backup” video from Lord Of War, from Lion?s Gate Films. A small, Alpha (meaning barely tested and potentially unstable) utility has been released, and it’s called BackupBluRay.
Of course, the issue of whether there is a demand for HD backup files is another topic altogether. These files will be difficult to distribute via P2P for various reasons: they’re extremely large, so less people will want to wait. Less people will want to seed them. Less people will want to have them on their hard drives. Not to mention that it’s not yet possible to burn them back into Blu-ray, so you have to watch the HD film on your PC.
Today, a new version of Wordpress came out. Version 2.1, named Ella after the famous jazz singer, comes with a truckload of new features that will eventually make even the most die hard non-upgraders want to take the plunge. Aside from fixing over 550 bugs, here’s a quick rundown of the new features that we feel are important.
- Autosave.
- Tabbed editor to go from WYSIWYG to HTML editing easily.
- The ability to set any “page” to be the front page of the site, making it easier to use WP as a CMS.
- New upload manager.
- New version of anti-spam king Akismet.
There’s a bunch more stuff, of course, so head on down there and grab yourself a copy. Or, wait a little to see what everyone is saying about it, then upgrade. Just to be safe. That’s what we’re going to do; the ole wait-and-see.
If there’s anything more fun than riding a roller coaster, it’s watching a roller coaster plow through a large crowd, at high speed. Trust us.
Now, we’re not homicidal maniacs. No worries. We’re talking about virtual roller coasters, of course. Just watch this video, and witness the hilarity of creating a roller coaster massacre in Roller Coaster Tycoon.
By Evan Ackerman
Related Tags: Photography, Software
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By David Ponce
By David Ponce
