Hasta La Gadget!

I’ve had relationships with many hand-held digital objects, but none as intense as the one I had with the iPhone. It became so addictive that I exchanged it for an iPod touch. Now I’m shopping for a new addiction. More »

No one was all that surprised when Samsung announced plans to fight the injunction granted by a German court that banned the sale of its Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Europe — what is perhaps surprising, however, is how quickly the wheels of justice are spinning on this one. The hearing, which was initially expected to take four weeks to get started, will be held on August 25th. A decision on overturning the ban is expected to arrive a few weeks after that date.

Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 European ban hearing to be held August 25th originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Aug 2011 09:42:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Xbox 360 beat out Wii and PS3 for control of the console market with 277,000 units sold in July, but Microsoft experienced its first year-over-year sales decline since December 2009.

Originally posted at The Digital Home

So, let’s set the stage. You’re walking down a semi-busy street in a semi-foreign city. You’re curiously hanging close to the middle of the sidewalk. You bust out your smartphone and figure out that your so-called engagement just got “Complicated.” Your gait has an irregularity. You look up and spot what appears to be a local, eerily perturbed and somewhat flummoxed by your current position. You dodge left. So does he. You dodge right, knowing full well that it’ll only complicate matters when he follows suit. Before long, you’re tiptoeing around a stranger while a full-on traffic jam builds up behind you. You’ve just ruined the universe, and that’s not doing anyone any good. The solution? The University of Electro-Communications’s Vection Field, which hones in on large moving visual cues that “induce a sense of self-movement.” Funny enough, the lenticular lenses pathway here at SIGGRAPH actually worked — we never expected an optical illusion to solve such a monumental issue, but we’ll take it. Vid’s past the break, per usual.

Continue reading Vection Field controls traffic at SIGGRAPH, fictional cities from the future (video)

Vection Field controls traffic at SIGGRAPH, fictional cities from the future (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Aug 2011 09:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A guy named Ben Wu sent us this video recently and it sort of blew our minds. Wu, an engineer and self-described dreamer, has spent the past year developing a program he calls Quantum Phantom — an Iron Man-inspired system that allows users to control a computer’s cursor using only an ordinary webcam. With his Windows software onboard, Wu can draw, write and move onscreen icons or widgets, simply by waving his camera in front of a set of dual monitors. The prototype is even sophisticated enough to recognize his own webcam-produced handwriting and automatically convert it to rich text. In most cases, the sensor relies upon an ordinary cursor to navigate a screen, but Wu has also developed a pointer-free solution, as demonstrated toward the end of the above, three-part video. Be sure to check it out for yourself and get lost in the magic.

[Thanks, Ben]

Quantum Phantom prototype lets you control your computer screen with a webcam (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 12 Aug 2011 08:53:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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