Hasta La Gadget!

Have you been lapping up every pixel Curiosity sends back, but wishing you could somehow see those panoramas as nature intended? Well, thanks to kind 360 Cities user Andrew Bodrov, you can. The controls take a little getting used to, but persevere and you’ll be rewarded with a view as if you were atop Curiosity itself. We’re already imagining the fun if this was in the next Google Maps update, who knows what might turn up. Land on the source for the mind-blow.

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets, Science

Visualized: Mars’ Gale Crater in seamless 360 degrees originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 14 Aug 2012 06:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If Samsung’s first dedicated gaming laptop wasn’t built to your liking, you’re about to get another option — the Series 7 Gamer is due for a refresh. The company’s Samsung Tomorrow blog pegs the new build as the Series 7 Gamer Yellow 3D, which outshines the subtle design we praised in our review of the last model with — you guessed it — a bright yellow finish. Style aside, the new oversized notebook will swap out its current GPU for an AMD Radeon HD 7870M and, as the name implies, a 14.3-inch SuperBright (400 nit) 3D LED display. The new configuration will also split its twin drive bays between a 1TB HDD and a fast-booting 128GB SSD. There’s no word yet on international availability, but folks in Sammy’s homeland can pick up the rig on August 14th for 2.99 million Won, which rings up to about $2,643 here in the states. Check out the official announcement at the (translated) source link below.

Filed under: Gaming, Laptops

Samsung refreshing Series 7 Gamer with 3D display, AMD Radeon HD 7870M originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 13 Aug 2012 01:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The minds at Disney Research aren’t only interested in tracking your face — they want to map, shave and clone it, too. Through a pair of research projects, Walt’s proteges have managed to create systems for not only mapping, digitally reconstructing and removing facial hair, but also for creating lifelike synthetic replicas of human faces for use in animatronics. Let’s start with the beards, shall we? Facial hair is a big part of a person’s physical identity, a quick shave can render a close friend unrecognizable — but modern face-capture systems aren’t really optimized for the stuff. Disney researchers attempted to address that issue by creating an algorithm that detects facial hair, reconstructs it in 3D and uses the information it gathers to suss out the shape of the skin underneath it. This produces a reconstruction of not only the skin episurface, but also of the subject’s individual hairs, meaning the final product can be viewed with or without a clean shave.

Another Disney team is also taking a careful look at the human face, but is working on more tangible reconstructions — specifically for use on audio-animatronic robots. The team behind the Physical Face Cloning project hope to automate part of creating animatronics to speed up the task of replicating a human face for future Disney robots. This complicated process involves capturing a subjects face under a variety of conditions and using that data to optimize a composition of synthetic skin to best match the original. Fully bearded animatronic clones are still a ways off, of course, but isn’t it comforting to know that Disney could one day replace you accurately replicate your visage in Walt Disney World for posterity? Dive into the specifics of the research at the source links below, or read on for a video summary of the basics.

Continue reading Disney researchers can now digitally shave your face, clone it for animatronics (video)

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets, Robots, Software

Disney researchers can now digitally shave your face, clone it for animatronics (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 12 Aug 2012 03:15:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink PhysOrg (1), (2)  |  Disney Research (1), (2)  | Email this | Comments

Our SIGGRAPH demo of the ARM Mali-T604 GPU gave a brief preview of Samsung’s upcoming Exynos 5 Dual CPU, but now all the details of the company’s next great processor are ready for us to view. Other than that GPU which includes support for up to WQXGA (2,560 x 1,600) resolutions — perfect for the 11.8-inch P10 mentioned in court filings — and much more, the white paper uncovered by Android Authority also mentions support for features like Wi-Fi Display, high bandwidth LPDDR3 RAM running at up to 800MHz with a bandwidth of 12.8GBps, USB 3.0 and SATA III. It also claims the horsepower to decode 1080p video at 60fps in pretty much any codec, stereoscopic 3D plus handle graphics APIs like OpenGL ES 3.0 and OpenCL 1.1. All of this is comes courtesy of a dual-core 1.7GHz ARM Cortex-A15 CPU built on the company’s 32nm High-K Metal Gate process and Panel Self Refresh technology that avoids changing pixels unnecessarily to reduce power consumption. There’s plenty of other buzzwords and benchmarks floating around in the PDF, you can check them out in the PDF linked below or just sit back and see what tablets and phones arrive with one of these — or the competition from Qualcomm’s S4 and NVIDIA’s Tegra — inside starting later this year.

Filed under: Cellphones

Samsung Exynos 5 Dual white paper confirms new high marks for mobile graphics, memory performance originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 10 Aug 2012 00:12:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink The Verge, Android Authority  |  Samsung Exynos Blog, White paper (PDF)  | Email this | Comments

Following Google’s announcement in June to bring 3D imagery on Google Maps for mobile devices, the Mountain View-based tech titan is now expanding the coverage to Denver, Colorado and Seattle, Washington. Now, folks in the aforementioned areas can now better explore and tour both cities via their iOS and Android devices. In an announcement today, Google pointed out the many things that users can do with the newly added feature.

Using the app, users can either head on over Safeco Field, reminisce the Pike Place, the Seattle Public Library, and the Space Needle, as well as the Denver Art Museum – all in a spectacular 3D imagery fashion. “We hope you enjoy these new additions to Google Earth for mobile. Being able to provide you with this comprehensive 3D experience is possible because of advanced image processing and the use of 45-degree aerial imagery,” Google said.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Google Earth 6 Adds Realistic 3D Trees, Integrated Street View, New York City In 3D Thanks To Google Earth,