Hasta La Gadget!

OMG look at this LEGO diorama that turned up at Brickworld Indianapolis 2017. It’s an incredible scene inspired by Star Wars and features a massive battle set to take place complete with multiple flying ships, wheeled vehicles, hordes of robots, and lots and lots of stormtroopers. It’s build from a massive number of LEGO bricks, including about 2,000 minifigs. The battle is raging over a droid assembly plant that looks to be well defended.

Built by Doug Davis and his pals, the diorama looks fantastic from afar when you are looking at the outside of the droid factory. Once you scoot around back and realize that the droid factory is actually lit and motorized on the inside, the diorama is even more amazing. Beyond the Brick captured the scene in all its glory in the video below:

Look at that droid assembly line go! Just the factory on its own would have been awesome, but coupling that with the massive amount of other elements, makes the diorama even more impressive.

You may have heard of China-based TCL. It produces and sells smartphones under the Alcatel and Turing brands. It’s also the exclusive contract manufacturer for BlackBerry-branded devices. The company also produces TVs for Samsung, owns the Palm brand, and co-brands TVs with Roku. It has now entered into a new partnership with luxury mobile phone brand Vertu to supply it with smartphone technology.

All Vertu smartphones are hand-built in the United Kingdom and are adorned with expensive materials and fine jewels. They do cost a pretty penny so they’re not for everyone.

Now that this $40 million deal has been completed, it appears that underneath all of the leather and the jewels, what customers will simply be getting will be a smartphone from a Chinese manufacturer. According to the press release, this deal will put TCL’s “innovative technology” in Vertu’s next batch of 30,000 luxury smartphones.

The press release doesn’t really go into a lot of detail about the partnership between the two companies but on the face of it, it appears to be a supplier deal for TCL.

Be that as it may, supplying technology for a brand that has long been associated with luxury is great for TCL’s own brand. TCL has been working hard to establish itself in the market and its strategy of leveraging other brands appear to be working for it very well.

Vertu’s Expensive Phones Will Now Have TCL Technology , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Startup Varjo Technologies (Finland) is coming up with a VR product that provides something that the industry didn’t think would be available for years of not a couple decades in the future: human-eye resolution VR experiences. We tried this new VR display technology, and it shows immense potential.

VR does provide a type of experience that users cannot get anywhere else. However, the way VR works today distribute display resolutions in a way that make things look low-resolution and fairly pixelated. It is fair to say that for the first time, current VR technologies bring the whole VR experience to a level where it’s “good enough” to be useful.

A VR view of a bombardier cockpit

Up: Varjo’s resolution Bottom: normal VR resolution

But with current headsets like the HTC VIVE or the Oculus VR is great, but we all agree that the visual quality could use rather large improvements to fulfill VR’s end game: a complete, believable immersion into a virtual world. Simple things like being able to read text, or see smaller details from intricate materials such as brushed metal of far-away bricks seem essential to further immersion.

More importantly, professional applications such as architecture and industrial design *must* have a higher level of visual details to be truly productive. It’s true that architects can “get by” with today’s tech, but mainly to get the ball rolling.

Varjo uses a very interesting high-resolution projection technology that can display a high pixel density image at the most interesting location: where your eyes are looking at. For that, it also needs to use gaze tracking, but we know that this technology already works well enough to be used effectively with rendering technologies such as Foveated Rendering.

“VARJO AUGMENTS DETAILS IN THE AREA YOU ARE LOOKING AT”Although Varjo relies on Gaze Tracking, it is in fact the complete opposite (and complementary) of Foveated Rendering. Foveated Rendering lowers the rendring details in the peripheral vision while Varjo augments details in the area you are looking at (gaze area).

Varjo claims to bring an effective resolution of 70 Megapixel to VR, while the rest of the industry is currently at 1 or 2 Megapixels. Varjo doesn’t have a 70 Megapixel display, so what does this value mean?

In the future, it is well possible to have a 70 Megapixel display, but the technology is simply not possible today. So Varjo decided to use a projective technology to essentially project a very sharp image where your interest is, and reply on a classic VR display for areas outside of your direct gaze. By being to move the projection to anywhere your eyes can look at, they effectively have the benefits of a 70 Megapixel screen — that is the theory.

The prototype headset (augmented existing tech) that I have tested didn’t have gaze tracking on, so the gaze was assumed to be at the center. The details experienced in that location was amazing. Although just a little under what we could consider being a normal eyesight (in my opinion), the ability to read fine text was enough to enable decent experiences with virtual Windows Desktop and other things that we expect VR to be good at “some day.”

“THE ONLY BELIEVABLE PATH TO ACHIEVE VR WITH HUMAN SIGHT DETAIL TODAY”At the moment, the integration between the high-resolution projection and the background “standard” VR display is still visible. But with some improvements in the size of the projection, blending at the edges of the two display technologies and proper gaze tracking, things could get to a point where it’s not too noticeable, or not noticeable at all. At the moment, there are too many moving parts for me to estimate how good it will be in the end. However, it is today’s only believable path to achieve the objective of having VR with human sight.

Before you get excited, Varjo will start by addressing the professional market, for customers such designers, architects, and others. The price of a headset isn’t yet defined because it will depend on the volume and final design. However, the Varjo team is confident that it will be well under $10,000. It not unreasonable to think that $2000-$3000 is possible.

In conclusion, there are still a few things that Varjo needs to prove, but their product is based mostly on proven technologies put together with really smart engineering, so I think that they can pull this together and make it work. I enjoyed talking to Urho Konttori (Varjo/CEO) and Jussi Makinen (Head of Marketing) and see how passionate they are about computer graphics. I can’t wait to try the demo again when the developer version is ready for prime-time.

Varjo Demonstrates 20|20 Human Eye Resolution VR: Hands-On! , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Ring today announced the launch of its new outdoor home security product, the second-generation Ring Video Doorbell. It’s the company’s flagship product and according to Ring, the most popular video doorbell on the market today. The new Ring Video Doorbell brings a handful of improvements, the chief being its ability to record video in full 1080p HD.

“Over 1 million users, who we call ‘Ring Neighbors’, trust our innovative and industry-first security products to reduce neighborhood crime in a meaningful way,” said Jamie Siminoff, who is the founder and chief inventor of Ring.

The second-generation Ring Video Doorbell can record video in 1080p. It also features a removable, rechargeable battery, improved night vision, interchangeable faceplates, and more in the same sleek design.

Much like the original Ring Video Doorbell, the new version offers two-way audio and motion detection. It can connect to existing wired doorbells as well.

The camera inside the doorbell has a 160 degree field of view and a 180 degree horizontal motion detection angle. It’s compatible with 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi networks.

The second-generation Ring Video Doorbell is available for purchase starting today from more than 15,000 retail locations across the country, including Best Buy and Home Depot stores. It’s also being sold at ring.com for $199.

New Ring Video Doorbell Records 1080p Video , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Nintendo has delivered a new system update for the Switch, pushing the console to version 3.0. At first, Nintendo was quite vague with its changelogs, usually distilling them down to a single sentence that really didn’t tell us much. With version 3.0, however, Nintendo has changed its approach, giving us a fleshed out changelog that actually goes into a lot … Continue reading