Hasta La Gadget!

Extreme Reality‘s technology revolves around gestures, and its latest effort is to bring that movement to the masses: its Extreme Motion developer kit turns just about any off-the-shelf webcam or built-in camera on common platforms, including Android, iOS and Windows, into an almost Kinect-like system capable of tracking 3D motion. Despite missing depth cameras or other additional sensors, it’s theoretically quite accurate — the software tracks joints across the body in every frame, although it’s not quite so sensitive as to track fingers.

This author had the chance to make a fool of himself in front of a laptop’s camera to see how well Extreme Motion works. In short, reasonably well: while it wasn’t in perfect sync, it recognized with less-than-elegant moves in a Dance Central-style demo title and flagged whether a shimmy was right on target or evidence of two left feet. Of course, this experiment was conducted in a brightly-lit hotel ballroom, where body detection is ideal, so take the experiment with a grain of salt. It’s still adept enough that the developers who will have access to the (currently free) toolkit can produce motion games we’d be sincerely interested in playing.

Michael Gorman contributed to this report.

Filed under: Gaming, Software

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Source: Extreme Reality

Bluetooth accessories that let you keep tabs of your stuff aren’t exactly new, but few are as charming and well-designed as hippih’s hipKey, at least from our initial impressions. Created and designed in Denmark, the tiny crescent-shaped device made its US debut at CES 2013 after a couple of very successful months abroad — it apparently sold out just five days after it was available through Apple Online Europe. It connects to any iOS device with Bluetooth 4.0, where you can either use the hipKey to keep track of your iPhone or iPad or use a handy iOS app to keep track of the device itself. Just hook it up to your precious belongings and you’ll know where they are via vibrations or an alarm. You can also use “Child Mode” to record what a child was wearing in case you lose him/her in a crowd. Additionally, there’s a patent-pending Safe Zone feature that lets you create alarm-free locations so you don’t accidentally set it off when at home or the office.

We had chance to try the hipKey out in person, and were impressed by its small and discreet size. Made out of anodized aluminium, it’s incredibly pocket-friendly and only has a couple of buttons so the controls are easy to comprehend. The alarm goes as loud as 90db and the vibrations seems pretty easy to detect. We only had a second or two to try the app out, but that appeared quite intuitive as well. It’s difficult to say whether this will be that useful in real life, but we’ll need to test it out for an extended period to find that out. According to a hippih spokesperson, the hipKey will be available from the Apple store in the US starting January 15th for $90 each.

Continue reading hippih’s Bluetooth-powered hipKey keeps your iPhone close, your precious things closer (hands-on)

Filed under: Cellphones

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Source: hippih

We normally don’t bother to write about iPhone cases here at Engadget, but this one seemed pretty neat. Snappgrip is a case that turns your iPhone into a point-and-shoot camera — partly for kitsch’s sake, but mostly to make one-handed shots easier to pull off. The design is simple: it’s just a plastic shell with a shutter button, a dial for controlling shutter speed and a hand grip — the sort you’d normally find on a compact camera.

To use it, you’ll need to download the free iPhone or Android app. Interestingly, though, the company is releasing its SDK to developers, so in theory you’ll one day be able to use this case with other camera apps. Another quid pro quo: the case only fits the iPhone 4, iPhone 5 and Galaxy S III for now, though the company is considering ways to make the case universally compatible. Snappgrip is priced at $99, but it’s not shipping just yet (the Kickstarter campaign, linked below, is still going strong). For now, we’ve got a quickie hands-on video waiting just past the break.

Continue reading Hands-on with Snappgrip, a case that turns your phone into a point-and-shoot

Filed under: Cellphones, Cameras, Peripherals, Mobile

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Source: Snappgrip (Kickstarter)

Here’s a cool little surprise from the Pepcom floor: the Zagg Origin is a two-in-one speaker system. The smaller of the two fits in the palm of your hand, communicating with your tablet or smartphone via Bluetooth. It’s got some physical buttons on top and an auxiliary port, power button and mini-USB slot on its rear. It also vibrates like crazy when it plays. Drop into the larger dock desktop speaker and the music starts playing through that via the aforementioned vibes. Pretty cool, really. It’s gonna run you around $250 when it launches in roughly seven weeks. Watch video of the origin in action after the break.

Continue reading Zagg Origin is two speakers in one (video)

Filed under: Home Entertainment, Peripherals

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RCA’s new Mobile TV Tablet appeared in the flesh here at Pepcom at CES 2013. The 8-inch tablet’s a little weighty, but packs a combination DTV and Dyle TV tuner — an industry first — so we’ll forgive it a little. There’s an 8-inch IPS touchscreen, which, while suitably bright, was coated in fingerprints. It’s not the prettiest tablet we’ve seen but it’s something you’ll have to forgive for all that wireless functionality paired with Android 4.0. There’s also 8GB of built-in storage with microSD expansion and while those TV functions work without data, in the thick signal mess of tonight’s event we couldn’t get the Dyle app running. Take our word for it, it did work prior to filming our hands-on and we were able to watch live TV and hop around channels with ease. The device will arrive in stores this April, priced at $299.

Continue reading Hands-on with the Dyle-, DTV-capable RCA Mobile TV tablet (video)

Filed under: Tablets

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