Google started the smart glasses wave with Google Glass. Those glasses are in the hands of a few developers and end users around the country and have proven to be … Continue reading
Before a story about toys, before monsters went corporate, before anyone went searching for Nemo, and before twenty seven Academy Awards, Pixar was a high-end computer hardware company whose clients included the government and the medical community. The story of Pixar isn’t exactly full of superheroes, adorable robots, or talking bugs. The tale of the most profitable and critically adored animation studio in the history of the world (yes, by sheer gross numbers, more so than Disney) is one filled with financial difficulties, fired Apple employees, digital printers, and an animated left hand. And it all started with a Mormon graduate student at the University of Utah.
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Sharp has been showing off an 85-inch 8K TV for years, and now the company is taking absurdly high-resolution to an ambitious new level with a prototype of an 85-inch 8K TV with Dolby glasses free 3D. That’s a lot of unproven tech in one concept.
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As curved cell phones and wearables enter the market and companies develop technologies for rounded displays and such, Gorilla Glass, the protector of all things fragile and glass, has had … Continue reading
If you’re in the mood for some next-generation action on your past-generation emulated games, a fellow by the name of plotor has just the bit for you. What this hacker/developer … Continue reading
A couple of years ago we got a peek at what several NES games might look like if they were rendered in voxels instead of pixels, courtesy of deviantART member John Buonvino. Programmer ProcyonSJJ was inspired by John’s renders and decided to take them a step further, making a voxel engine for the NES emulator FCEUX.
According to ProcyonSJJ, “[t]he renderer takes the color in the upper left corner and treats that as the clear color while at the same time ignoring any pixel in the image buffer composed of that color (no voxel).” In very simple terms, the engine will make voxels out of all the pixels, except for the ones with the same color as the “background”. This makes his engine work best with games that have single color backgrounds, as you’ll see in his demo video:
Sadly, it doesn’t seem likely that we’ll be able to toy with NES games using the voxel engine. Zeromus, one of the lead programmers of FCEUX, refused to integrate ProcyonSJJ’s engine into the Windows port of the emulator. Then the two had an argument and I don’t think the engine was incorporated into any version of the emulator. I’m not going to simplify their points here since you can read their messages for yourself on the TASVideos forum. As for the rest of us, we’ll just have to cherish the video.
[TASVideos via Tiny Cartridge]
There is less difference between our work and home devices, our tablets and our mobile phones. They are not meant for “work” or for the “home.” We just use them wherever we are. The idea of a balance or even the concept of an enterprise hardware manufacturer seems quaint.
The difference, really, is in the applications we choose to apply with these things we wear over our eyes and hold in our hands. Hardware like Google Glass and Atheer Labs 3D Augmented Reality glasses are all badass, of course. But the data is the special sauce that makes these tools work for us. Like the smartphone, augmented reality is also something neither for work or at home. Instead it’s a layer that can be applied to our home and work life.
And now just as we saw with smartphone and tablets, examples are emerging that show how augmented reality is applying in universal ways.
For example, in the workplace the complexity of repair gets simplified when the various mechanical parts get treated as something digital. An animated wrench can be shown how to be used on a piece of heavy equipment that has also been rendered into a data object. Like smartphones, augmented reality can be used anywhere to get work done.
ResolutionTube, a TechStars Seattle startup, has raised $1.5 million in seed funding for an augmented reality app that helps the technician fix everything from a heating vent to sophisticated medical equipment. Madrona Ventures led the investment with participation from TechStars CEO David Cohen and other angel investors.
The company is targeting the field services market with a knowledge base and a smartphone app that a technician can use to fix things without needing to call a toll-free number for help. Instead, the technician can use the app to scan the serial number that connects to the ResolutionTube knowledge base. If the technician gets stuck, the app can be used to contact an expert who connects with the the technician over video. The technician uses the smartphone camera to show the expert the machinery in question. That is followed with some advice and use of a whiteboard to draw and show what the technician needs to do for the issue to get resolved.
ResolutionTube will use the funding to develop new advanced product features like as superimposing 3D models into video. The vision is to create an augmented reality experience that instructs people how to repair items simply by pointing a device at whatever needs to be fixed. Currently the app listens to the worker and the expert. It then pulls out keywords that gets stored in the knowledge base. The next step is to use natural language processing so the entire conversation can be added to the ResolutionTube information network. The transition will help ResolutionTube answer questions more so than provide a search capability.
The company is also creating a prototype app on Google Glass. With wearables they can work and get the instructions without having to use their hands to hold a device. Companies like Vuzix have even developed their own eyewear, showing how the market is expanding for augmented reality technologies to serve a workforce that has almost universal connectivity.
Metaio provides another example for how augmented reality is changing the way people work. The company developed an augmented reality app for technicians to do service and repair work on the Volkswagen XLI, the company’s latest concept car. The app shows the technician how to repair the car without any prior training.
Devices now enable augmented reality in the way people have always wanted to experience it, said Occipital Co-Founder Vikas Reddy in an email interview. The company has developed Structure, a 3D sensor that customers can strap to the back of their iPads. The 3D sensor, small enough to fit in your pocket, has an SDK for developers to build consumer-facing apps that take advantage of 3D data.
The future of augmented reality is tied to devices like the iPad. But that’s just the foundation for a next generation of apps. These apps will leverage endless stores of data that will take the form of physical objects and provide people with expert knowledge that will be immediately available. This will allow us to see the world in whole new ways and forever transform how we live and work.
Computers love to think in triangles
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Wearables startup Meta has revealed its latest headset, the MetaPro, a consumer version of its Meta 1 developer device that amps up Google Glass by overlaying full digital graphics over the real world. Expected to ship in June 2014, for the not-inconsiderable price of $3,000, the MetaPro glasses look far less geeky than their dev-focused […]
This week the folks at IZON have made an early push to get in on the CES 2014 action with word that they’ll be bringing their own 3D TVs to CES 2014 without a need for 3D glasses. These units will be released in 32-inch, 47-inch, and 55-inch iterations and will not just be prototypes […]
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