Hasta La Gadget!

One of the hacks at Disrupt NY’s Hackathon this year employed hardware startup Leap Motion’s new 3D gesture controller, which unfortunately just ran into a delay. Leap Motion’s issues aside, this project, the combined effort of Chao Huang, Cedrich Pinson and Jorge Martinez, brings a Facebook Home-style experience to the desktop.

With “Leap in Time,” Leap Motion is used to navigate through a Facebook timeline via hand gestures that are intended to be as natural and intuitive as possible. You swipe left and right to go through photos and posts, and there’s inertia built-in to make it feel even more immersive. Then there’s a motion to pause and focus on a particular piece of content, with a palm outward gesture, and you can simply make a thumbs up to like a post.

Working with the Leap Motion was fairly simple, the team said, but does seem to experience difficulty with some environment issues like changing lighting conditions. It’s also crucial to maker sure that the Leap Motion app you’re building is cued to pay attention to certain things at certain times and to ignore specific motions in different settings. You have to cue the app to not pay attention to sideways hand waving when you want it to be able to recognize the thumbs up, for instance.

The hack was surprisingly smooth given that it was built in fewer than 24 hours, and Huang said there’s plenty more they could do given more time, but they wanted to focus on what they considered the core Facebook experience. The project is also reminiscent of a recent concept design making the rounds of a Facebook Home app for Windows 8.

Leap in Time is a simple enough implementation of Leap Motion, but it does act as a pretty solid example of how gesture control might actually work well for navigating apps and software that we use every day. I know that Leap Motion is eager to get as much software as possible into Airspace, the app store for the controller, but this team said they weren’t sure whether they’d actually pursue this any further.

Finally, the flash of newness is wearing off. It’s taken a few days, but the initial novelty of Glass, enjoying wearing it simply because I could wear it, is running thin. The haze of new gadget excitement is clearing and we can truly get down to brass tacks — but that doesn’t mean I’m not having fun. In fact I’ve had the opportunity to take Glass with me to do something very fun indeed: ride a Ducati 848 Streetfighter on some of the most amazing roads in the world.

Even as I did this, a jaunt more focused on gathering some exciting footage than truly evaluating the device, I learned some things — including the fact that a Google Glass headset doesn’t really fit underneath a full-face helmet. Not comfortably, anyway.

Filed under: Wearables

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It goes without saying that after you have forked out a fair amount of money for your spanking new iPad or iPad mini, taking months of savings along the way, that you would want to do your very best to ensure that it does not garner scratches whenever possible, and of course, it also makes perfect sense that you would want to coddle the iPad from knocks and even worse, drops. What’s one to do then? Well, getting a decent tablet case for your iPad is a no-brainer here, but with so many models to choose from, what do you do then? Case Scenario might have something right up your alley, with the Pantone Universe Bookcase for iPad Mini and iPad been announced.

This trendy Pantone Universe Bookcase has been crafted from premium soft nubuck leather, where it boasts of a front cover in order to keep both the front and back of the iPad Mini and iPad protected from those unwanted details – namely scratches, dust and dirt. On the front cover of the Pantone Universe Bookcase for iPad Mini and iPad cases, you will be able to fold these into a couple of standing positions – catering for both landscape and viewing angles, which makes it ideal for FaceTime chatting, typing and browsing the internet.

When it comes to color choices though, the Pantone Universe Bookcase for iPad mini can be said to be rather limited, where one will be able to pick from a couple of sleek colors, namely Scarlet Sage (19-1559) and Tap Shoe (19-4004), for $50 a pop over at Ron Robinson. If you do not own an iPad mini, but an iPad instead, you would be in a far better position, where the Pantone Universe Bookcase for iPad would come in a wide array of bright and stylish colors, namely Green Flash (15-0146), Azalea Pink (16-2126), 19-1663 (red), 15-4101 (grey) and 19-3939 (blue) – for $70 at Fred Segal, Ron Robinson and Nordstrom.

Press Release
[ Case Scenario Pantone Universe Bookcase announced for iPad mini and iPad copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

Efforts to hack Google’s Glass have already seen unofficial Android apps running on the wearable, as Explorer Edition early-adopters get to work tweaking and modifying the headset. Google recently released the kernel source for Glass, but Mike DiGiovanni already has regular Android software up and running, as per this blurry screenshot through the compact lens block.

Google had always been clear that Glass was Android-based, but it was uncertain how much the OS had been modified in order to rework it for wearables duty. In fact, DiGiovanni discovered, “pretty much nothing has been stripped out” and the Glass functionality is simply slapped on top of the core platform.

That opens the door for modifications outside of what Google expects through its official Mirror API, the cloud-based system that funnels apps and services through to Glass as a display of sorts. Regular APKs can be loaded on the Android wearable itself, but if services want to take advantage of the inherent advantages of Glass that Google has on offer, they have to operate within the company’s relatively strict guidelines.

When a native Android app is side-loaded, meanwhile, the regular Android theme shows itself, complete with the usual drop-down notification bar. The touchpad on the side of the headset works for navigation, going left and right through the interface with side-swipes, and back with a downward swipe, just as per Glass’ own UI cards.

What remains to be seen is how the battery of the headset holds up when running native code. One of Google’s aims by treating Glass’ display as a window on the cloud is apparently to minimize just how much processing the device needs to do: that prolongs battery life. As we’ve already seen from other early reports, heavier use of the local hardware – such as when recording video clips – quickly takes its toll on runtime.

Still, the Explorer Edition is intended to be just that: an early iteration of the gadget for developers to pick apart, and Google undoubtedly expected just this sort of tinkering to take place. That should mean a far better product for the consumer market by the time the mainstream Glass edition arrives, tentatively predicted to drop in 2014.

Glass hack runs native Android code on wearable is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Considering Microsoft’s efforts to rebrand, redesign and rebuild its Windows platform, it’s no surprise to hear the company is tweaking the visual aesthetics of its other brands, too. Speaking at Design Day 2013, Wolff Olins creative director Todd Simmons and Windows Phone design studio manager Albert Shum talked about the challenges of rebranding a company like Microsoft. “We’re still trying to figure out how to put a consumer face on this brand, as an ecosystem,” Simmons said, explaining how the team wanted to get away from the idea of Microsoft being a top-down, monolithic entity. The discussion touched on the creation of the Windows 8 logo, but also shed light on efforts to revamp other Microsoft brands. “Other brands are coming along too,” Simmons explained, teasing the audience with a pair of sketches. “Bing, Skype, Yammer, Xbox — everything is under development.” With Microsoft’s next generation gaming hardware lurking just around the corner, the time for a new logo might just be nigh. Read on to see the pair’s full 45-minute presentation for yourself. Sadly, the presentation was deleted from Vimeo a few hours after we wrote this article. Check out the source links for a brief summery of the presentation.

Filed under: Misc, Microsoft

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Via: Verge, Travis Lowdermilk (Twitter)

Source: Vimeo, Design Day 2013