With an opening ceremony celebrating social media and a guest appearance by the father of the world wide web, you would think the games are pretty Twitter-friendly. Well, not so much, as the hordes of London have been told to keep non-urgent texts and tweets to themselves to avoid disrupting TV coverage for those who weren’t lucky enough to score beach volleyball tickets. The recommendation comes after broadcasters bumbled through the men’s cycling road race due to a lack of available data from the cyclists’ GPS. The information bottleneck appears to be related to one specific network and sharing the data burden has been discussed, although probably not via Twitter. The IOC knows that telling the masses not to log on likely won’t have any impact — so, what’s next for the data haters.
Google’s 3D City View is now available on iOS. The Google Earth update adds three-dimensional imagery to major locations including Washington D.C, San Francisco and Boston. It’s arriving alongside Tour Guide; select a notable attraction to go straight to it, with accompanying trivia you can bore your friends with later. Sadly 3D maps requires the processing hardware of the iPhone 4S, iPad 2 or the third-generation iPad, but other iOS (4.2 or higher) device users can still get access to Tour Guide. Unsurprisingly, the update’s available via the App Store — but you shouldn’t need a map to find your way there.
Today at the Qualcomm mobile benchmarking workshop in San Francisco, Jon Peddie of Jon Peddie Research suggested that using augmented reality (AR) to test the performance of mobile devices could be “the mother of all tests.” By stressing all processors and sensors on modern smartphones and tablets — including CPU, GPU, DSP, ISP (image processor), GPS, gyro, compass, accelerometer, barometer, mic and camera — the benchmark would represent the worst case scenario in term of computing load. While AR adoption is still in its infancy amongst consumers — technology such as Project Glass still faces serious challenges — Qualcomm’s been very active in the field over the years and even provides and SDK for developers. Could this be a hint of what’s coming from the company in terms of benchmarking beyond Neocore and Vellamo? Let us know what you think in the comments.
This week ObjectVideo is one of several multi-million-dollar contract winners with IARPA, the Intelligence Advanced Research Project Activity, for investigation into a technology that will geolocate any image on a massive map of the planet. This technology will “geolocate an outdoor image or video from anywhere on the land surface of the world via the use of publicly-available information.” This geolocation task will have users able to utilize open-source knowledge to locate any photo or video they’ve got on hand with precision – a scary yet exciting concept indeed!
The folks at ObjectVideo, Inc., are one of several to receive rewards for research, their cash sum equaling out to be $15.6 million. This contract will also include the following bits and pieces – read em and weep!
“The Finder Program aims to build on existing research systems to develop technology that augments the analyst’s abilities to address the geolocation task. Technical innovations of the system will include the integration of analysts’ abilities and automated geolocation technologies to solve geolocation problems; the fusion of diverse, publicly-available, but often imperfect data sources; and expansion of current automated geolocation technologies to work more efficiently and accurately over all terrains and large search areas.
If successful, Finder system will deliver a rigorously-tested technology solution for image and video geolocation tasks in any outdoor terrestrial location.”
So no worries on those mirror-pics you took of your body appearing in any location searching public archives. If you’re shooting embarrassing photos out at the public park, on the other hand – think twice. Stay tuned as technology in locating you from the objects in your video and photos advances very, very rapidly.
BONUS: It won’t be exactly like Blade Runner, but it won’t be completely different from Blade Runner either – have a peek at what’s up:
As if George Lucas wasn’t already milking his money-printing franchise for all it’s worth, comes this GPS gem out of Japan. To the (presumed) delight of fanboys everywhere, navigation maker Dinos has inked a licensing deal with Lucasfilm that conjures up an all-out, Star Wars-themed car nav system. From the orchestral theme music at startup to the voice guidance performed by the original Japanese VO actors (Darth Vader and C-3P0 only), the 5-inch LCD mount is pretty much the memorabilia stuff of a grown-up, scifi geek’s wet dream. There’s even a mode selection option to let users pledge their allegiance to either the “Empire” or the “Rebels,” in addition to 20 different custom vehicle indicator icons. Sounds fluffy enough, but the unit also does double duty as a OneSeg TV tuner and can even be used as a standalone set. It’s on sale now for 39,800Yen (US$507), but unless you’re living in the Land of the Rising Sun, this import’s just kitsch for kitsch’s sake.
Nokia gave us a hint of Nokia Drive 3.0’s commuter-friendly additions all the way back at Mobile World Congress in February. It’s been quite the wait, but the update is at last lurking in the Windows Phone Marketplace. Although developed at the same time as Google Now, the Drive update will feel like a small slice of Android 4.1 for Lumia owners through its predictive routing: it can learn when you leave for work and how driving habits will affect the trip, giving a heads-up about traffic jams before you turn the ignition. Windows Phone reasserts itself through the option of pinning favorite destinations as tiles on the home screen, and an automatic switch between day and night modes is just as new. Drive’s My Commute feature will initially work only in the US, but it should be available within the next day or two for any Lumia owner — so those being denied Windows Phone 8 still won’t have any justification for being late to the office.
The San Francisco Bay Area’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission wants to stick a GPS module on every resident’s car, track the total miles driven—and then tax the accordingly. Mass transit and carpooling are fine ideas, but this doesn’t seem like such a great thing. More »
Did you think Microsoft was done with Bing Maps updates after it threw a whopping 165TB of satellite imagery at virtual explorers? You’ve got another thing coming. The mapping crew in Redmond has thrown another 215TB of data over the fence, this time targeting its Bird’s Eye views. Most of the attention is on Australia, Europe, New Zealand and Tokyo, although Microsoft has seen fit to sharpen up some of its US visuals in the process. All told, there’s over 88,800 square miles covered by the new and updated aerial shots — enough to make sure that we’ll never have trouble finding Cinderella Castle at Tokyo Disneyland.
You may have noticed Google’s forecast feature on your HTML5-capable smartphone browser — simply typing “weather” into the search field brings up a basic real-time temperature tool, complete with hourly and five-day forecasts for your current location. That feature has been around in one form or another since the beginning of last year, but as of this week, it’s made its way to tablets, too. Web weather is entirely browser based, and you can bring it up in just the same way as on a smartphone — confirm that your GPS is enabled, then head to Google.com and type “weather” — you’ll be rewarded with a 10-day forecast, complete with temp, precipitation, humidity and wind speed readouts. The tool is interactive, so while you may only be able to view a few days of weather at once, you can simply slide along the timeline to see more. The same applies to the hourly forecast as well. There’s nothing to download or subscribe to for this one, and it’s available right now at Google.com.
Enabling persistent location in a third-party mobile app isn’t always easy — it usually requires either cautious uses of updates, like iOS 5’s geofencing, or an acceptance that there will inevitably be a knock to the battery life while it’s running. Skyhook doesn’t want there to be any compromise, at least on Android: an update to its developer kit has rolled in an Always-On location option that theoretically represents the best of both worlds. Third-party app writers can opt for position refreshes as quick as 30 seconds apart, if that birthday gift reminder needs just that many updates, but will supposedly face “little to no noticeable impact” on how quickly users’ smartphones sip energy. We like the idea of guilt-free GPS, and there’s even an airplane tracking mode for when you just have to check into Foursquare from 30,000 feet in the air. Developers can start working on the option today; until implementations reach the wild, everyone else will have to make do with a clip of the airplane tracking feature after the break.
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