Who are 2010’s “Most Fascinating People?” It’s hard to argue against the inclusion of Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. The 26-year-old exec has had a rollercoaster year, between the sheer social networking dominance of his site, to the unflattering major motion picture portrayal of his life, to the boatloads of cash he’s given to charity this year.
How about Justin Bieber? Well, last week we suggested that the teenage Canadian pop start might, in fact, be 2010’s tech person of the year, so it’s pretty tough to argue against his inclusion in the list.
Okay, what about Snooki? Well, we’d argue against the inclusion of the Jersey Shore cast on Barbara Walters’s 2010 Fascinating People list, if only because we don’t think they need any more face time on TV, to be totally honest. The same goes for LeBron James–he’s the first professional sports player who’s ever switched teams before, right? No? Huh.
Kate Middleton made the list because she is going to marry a prince. I think I read somewhere that no one in the US really cares–I’ll defer to Ms. Walters on this one, I suppose. Sarah Palin made the list, not surprisingly–say what you will about her, it was certainly a fascinating year for the woman.
Also on the list: Jennifer Lopez, David Petraeus, Sandra Bullock, and Betty White.
Solid-state lasers are fine, durable and reliable and all that, but what if you want something a little softer, maybe a little more conforming to your needs and moods? Or, what if you want something that can beam light in all directions at once? Then you need to go liquid, baby, liquid. That’s what Slovenian scientists (and diacritic wunderkinds) Matjaž Humar and Igor Muševič have done, creating, in their words, “3D microlasers from self-assembled cholesteric liquid-crystal microdroplets.” Various layers of fluids form what’s called a Bragg-onion optical microcavity, including embedded crystals not unlike those that flip the tiny switches in an LCD. These blobs are self-assembled chemically and, when a little laser is applied to them, can create a 3D image by shining their light in every dimension simultaneously. Well, not every one — you know the Fifth Dimension can only be seen if you let the sunshine in.
Let’s face it, the daddy of all motion-controlled gaming is the humble art of air guitar. There’s no question about it, creationists and evolutionists all agree, the genesis of our modern craze for motion sensitivity was your uncle rocking out to Jimmy Page’s face-melting solo in Stairway to Heaven. Now that we’ve got the history lesson out of the way, someone’s gone and programmed Kinect to recognize the fine craft of your air strumming and deliver concordant chords in response. Excellent!
Earlier this month, we told you the story of a man in north Texas whose exploding Droid 2 sent him to the hospital, resulting in a blood splattered handset and a face full of stitches.
The man, Aron Embry, told the press, “Once I got to the mirror and saw it, it was only then I kind of looked at my phone and realized that the screen had appeared to burst outward.” He showed off the phone, shattered and covered in blood, a pretty convincing sight as it appeared on the local news.
Things, however, may not be quite what they seem. We got word this morning from a Motorola employee involved with Droid development that the phone may not have exploded at all. The Droid 2 in question “was a phone that got dropped,” the employee told PCMag. “[T]he guy didn’t notice the glass had cracked […]so when he put it to his ear, he cut himself.”
You know who rocks more faces than anyone else?! Zelda, that’s who.
And now, thanks to one gamer musician, you can rock out all 1991-gamer stylee. For a mere $150 ($20 shipping) you can purchase a functioning, custom-made electric guitar cobbled from a classic NES system and miscellaneous used guitar parts.
This is the kind of instrument that can only be used by two people: the developmentally arrested at the fringes of society and the ultra cool ironic hip. There’s no room in the middle here.
In patent documents filed recently, Apple reveals plans to improve voice control on its iOS devices using contextually defined commands that users select.
Djay, by Algoriddim, puts a pair of turntables and a mixer onto the touchscreen of the iPad. I have been playing with it for a day and it’s pretty awesome.
The iPad seems to be an obvious place for the app, which also exists on the Mac. Multitouch makes adjusting sliders, choosing music and — of course — scratching seem like you’re using a real (if very small) DJ setup, and an iPad full of MP3s is a lot more portable than a box of records, or even CDs.
I’m no DJ — when I used to have a bar I banned myself from touching the music as I tended to empty the place with just one song — but Djay is dead easy to use. Pick a track for each deck, in either a popover or fullscreen box, and hit Play.
You can adjust tempo up and down, cross-fade between tracks and even pick up the needle and move it to skip forward or back. The physics are faithful to the real thing: kill the power on a turntable and it doesn’t just stop dead. Instead, you hear the sound quickly slow to a halt.
And then the fancy, computer-only gimmicks begin. Tap Sync to auto-sync the tracks’ speeds (BPM), and tap the arrow next to the cross-fader to auto-mix between them. You can pick the type of transition — backspin, brake, reverse and others — and you’ll sound like a pro. Which brings us on to scratching.
Scratching properly is hard. It’s equally hard to do well in Djay. If you put a finger on the record and wiggle it, you’ll get that scratchy sound, but it sounds terrible. Switch to two fingers, though, and scratching gets smart, and Djay “automatically applies the rhythmic pattern of the currently playing song to your scratches in real time.” What that means is that you come on all DMC, again sounding like the pro you’re not.
There’s a whole lot more: When you open a track, for instance, the app analyzes it, shows you a waveform and works out the BPM. When you scratch (or just cue up a spot in the track), the waveform zooms in to help you get to the right spot. You can also set a cue-point and hit a button to skip back to it. You can even put a virtual piece of tape on the record to keep track of where you are.
Finally, it plays nice with iOS 4, with background audio (and auto-mixing!) and AirPlay support (this suffers from the usual two-second delay, making it impossible to use for actual mixing, although Bluetooth speakers fare better), and access to your full music library and playlists.
It’s a lot of fun, and kept me up to 2 a.m. this morning. Like I said, I’m a hopeless selector, but real DJs should get a whole lot from the app, especially as you can split the output and send one signal to the speakers and another to a pair of headphones. This is done with a stereo-to-mono adapter in the jack-socket, giving two mono outputs. I tried putting a USB sound-adapter (via the camera connection kit) into the dock-connector and it works, but kills the headphone output. It seems the iPad will only use one at a time.
Djay costs $20. Combine this with something like the block-rocking, battery-powered SuperTooth speaker and you have yourself a pretty sweet portable party.
November was a strong month for the gaming industry, according to new number from NPD–one of the strongest Novembers on record, thanks in no small part to stellar showings from the Xbox 360 and the Nintendo Wii. Games sales were up eight percent over the month before, hitting $2.99 billion, a $30 million increase over last November.
The Xbox 360 had a particularly good month, moving 1.37, edging out the Wii’s 1.27 million. The Xbox leapt 67 percent over last year’s number (the Wii was only up 0.8 percent), due in no small part to the recent introduction of the long-awaited Kinect hands-free controller.
Sony didn’t fare as well, however. The PS3 was down a full 25 percent from last year, down to a paltry 530,000–a fraction of the competition, even with the launch of the company’s Kinect-competing PlayStation Move. Nintendo’s DS was also down a bit, from 1.7 to 1.5 million.
The top selling game of the month was, not surprisingyly, Call of Duty: Black Ops at 8.4 million, followed by Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, and Just Dance 2. Interestingly, despite the Kinect’s success, no titles for the new controller cracked the top 10.
We know, it’s a bit odd to see the Jawbone name attached to something other than a Bluetooth headset or speaker, but Aliph is forging into the application game with a new voice messaging service for iOS. Called Thoughts, the software is basically like text messaging or instant messaging with voice. The free audio-based messaging iPhone app, which should be hitting the App Store today, lets you send short audio recordings to either a single contact or a group with a tap of a button. We got a chance to check it out at the D: Dive into Mobile conference this week and found the whole thing to be a really great way to circumvent voicemails or longer texts — all you have to do is tap the name of your contact and then leave a short voice message. There’s absolutely no ringing or waiting. If and when that contact responds it appears as a threaded message, and if you’re in an area that isn’t conducive to listening to those thrilling messages, there’s also a transcription feature. The app should be hitting today, but if you need more details before tapping install, hit the break for the full press release and a short promo video.
Remember when Pioneer’s Android minions shot laser beams from their eyes and created an awesome prototype heads-up display? It turns out those lasers came from a Microbision PicoP projector, and that prototype is inching towards reality. You see, Pioneer’s partnered with Microvision to build a brand-new laser module for the commercial version — which is set to debut in 2012 — using a brand-new display engine and the actual green laser that’s been missing from the formula up until now. We can’t wait to burn driving directions into our collective retina, so we’ll be watching this one closely from now on. PR and video after the break.
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