This week NVIDIA is once again blurring the lines between desktop and mobile graphics with a note on the introduction of Kepler technology into their next-generation mobile processor. NVIDIA suggests that, “from a graphics perspective, this is as big a milestone for mobile as the first GPU, GeForce 256, was for the PC when it was introduced 14 years ago.” This is the first set of details we’re getting on Project Logan, the next processor architecture in the Tegra chipset family.
You’ll remember the comic book character collection of code-names for the processors that’ve become the Tegra 3 and Tegra 4 – and what we must assume will be the Tegra 5 as well. Here with what’s still called Project Logan, NVIDIA makes clear their intent to bring graphics processing abilities until now reserved for desktop machines to the mobile realm; for tablets, smartphones, and everything in between.
In addition to deploying Kepler’s efficient processing powers to the Logan mobile SoC, NVIDIA intents on bringing the excellence in a form that the company will be able to license to others. This licensing was outlined earlier this year amid the latest Kepler integrations into GPUs such as the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760.
NVIDIA suggests that the technology deployed with mobile Kepler is able to use one-third the power of “GPUs in leading tablets, such as the retinal iPad”, while it performs identical renderings. They also note that this efficiency is achieved with mobile Kepler without compromising graphics capabilities, working with OpenGL ES 3.0, OpenGL 4.4, and everything else in the OpenGL universe.
Though we’re expecting this architecture to hit Google’s Android – as NVIDIA has been hitting for the past several years – they do mention that the technology also supports DirectX, the latest graphics API from Microsoft. Think Windows RT and Windows 8 – NVIDIA’s been there before.
Working with these current and next-generation APIs allow NVIDIA to bring on graphics unlike any seen in the mobile universe, developers taking hold of these environments with a variety of high-end rendering and simulation techniques. NVIDIA runs down three of the most powerful:
Tessellation – which creates geometry dynamically and efficiently on the GPU from high-level descriptions, sizing triangles optimally based on the user’s viewpoint. By comparison, fine detail in a traditional pre-generated approach is inefficient, requiring excess geometry to deal with all possible viewpoints.
Compute-based deferred rendering – which calculates the effect of all lights in the scene in a single deferred rendering pass. This OpenGL 4 capability greatly improves deferred rendering efficiency and scalability compared to current OpenGL ES based implementations, which require an extra pass for each light source in the scene. The scalability of the compute-based approach paves the way to even more advanced lighting models, such as using virtual points of lights to approximate global illumination effects.
Advanced anti-aliasing and post-processing – which deliver better image quality, particularly in areas of very sharp color contrast, by making multi-sampling more programmable and allowing applications to implement their own anti-aliasing filters. These also enable more efficient film-quality post-processing effects, such as motion blur and depth of field.
NVIDIA makes clear that a lovely collection of processing-heavy tasks will be able to be carried out with this next-generation solution including computer vision, augmented reality, computational imaging, and speech recognition. Showed off this week at Siggraph was a return of the digital head now known as “Ira”, aka Faceworks.
Stick around as we continue to jump deeper into the next big superhero-themed processor, one that’ll break barriers beyond what we’re only just seeing now with the NVIDIA Tegra 4 – living inside NVIDIA SHIELD and getting pumped up for benchmarks sooner than later!
Nokia’s Lumia 1020 PureView might not need an introduction, but it may need an explanation. Announced with no small amount of fanfare (and hyperbole from Nokia CEO Stephen Elop) the new Windows Phone borrows Nokia’s photography tricks from the notably-niche 808 PureView of 2012, refining it with Microsoft’s OS and a more streamlined form-factor to make an attempt at the mass-market. That mass-market will get the Lumia 1020 on AT&T from July 26, but the 41-megapixel marvel has already been on the SlashGear test bench, so read on for our full review.
Hardware
To call the Lumia 1020 the most legitimately exciting Windows Phone isn’t an exaggeration. Nokia’s big reveal really found its feet when the company showed off how the PureView phone could literally be used to spot a needle in a haystack, the impressive optical zoom promising a degree of flexibility without optical compromise that nothing else on the smartphone market today can rival.
It’s still not a small phone. The camera bulge is reduced from that of the 808 PureView, a circular swelling rather than that Symbian handset’s generally bloated chassis, but it’s noticeable in the hand and in the pocket. There are some things – like a big CMOS and the six-part optics to go with it – that simply can’t be slimmed down entirely. The white of our review unit is a whole lot more discrete than the yellow version Nokia focused on during the unveil, and the familiar Lumia polycarbonate feels sturdy but not too heavy. We might have preferred the more grown-up styling of the Lumia 925, but the 1020 doesn’t embarrass itself.
Face on, and the Lumia 1020 looks like the Lumia 920 before it. Inside, things are much in keeping with that existing handset too. You get a 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Plus MSM8960 processor paired with 2GB of RAM and 32GB of internal storage, along with a 4.5-inch 720p Super AMOLED touchscreen that has both impressive viewing angles and good outdoor visibility thanks to Nokia’s ClearBlack Display technology. It’s also one of the company’s Super Sensitive panels, promising to remain usable even if you’re wearing gloves.
LTE is supported on the AT&T review model we’ve been testing, along with HSPA+ and GSM/EDGE. You also get WiFi a/b/g/n, Bluetooth, and GPS, plus a 2-megapixel front-facing camera with a wide-angle lens above the display. Physical controls include the dedicated camera key that Microsoft mandates – here with two levels to lock the focus – along with a volume rocker and power/lock key. Ports include microUSB and a 3.5mm headphone jack.
Software
Windows Phone 8 is a known quotient by now, already having taken the third spot in the smartphone charts, albeit still trailing Android and iOS considerably. The promise is better integration for those using Windows 8 on their desktop, notebook, or tablet, and Xbox for their gaming, though right now the actual extent of that symbiosis is relatively shallow.
Instead, you’re left with a mobile platform that is cleanly designed, highly approachable for new users, and – if you spend some time experimenting with the resizable Live Tiles of the homescreen – surprisingly flexible, though which continues to lag behind in app availability. The Windows Phone Market is getting bigger all the time, but developers still generally look to Google and Apple first, and that means that, while Microsoft’s platform is gaining in big-name titles, it’s usually with a delay from their appearance elsewhere.
Nokia has been doing its best to fill in the gaps, particularly with its location-based services provisions, and the HERE suite is surprisingly capable. There’s offline navigation, complete with turn-by-turn voice prompts, along with an augmented reality-style search system for points of interest which overlays venue information on top of a real-time view from the 1020′s camera. Like Google Maps, you can see public transportation options, too; Nokia allows you to pin common journeys to the homescreen, the Live Tiles of which show the next departure time.
Our long-standing feelings about Windows Phone still stand, however. It’s approachable but still feels immature, not helped by patchy third-party support. The situation is getting better, but it takes something stand-out to make the OS more appealing; thankfully that’s just what the 1020 PureView offers, in the shape of its camera.
Camera
Until you dive into the new Pro Camera app, it’s business as usual. It’s the new camera interface that we’re most impressed by, replacing Microsoft’s mediocre default with something that does a far better job of blending point-and-shoot simplicity with the sort of advanced features photography enthusiasts tempted by the PureView system might want to see.
Nokia overlays the key settings – white balance, ISO (100-3200), exposure, shutter speed, and more – in an array of concentric rings. It’s a system we’ve seen Samsung use on the Galaxy Camera, but where Nokia has diverged is in making each ring transparent, so that you can still frame the shot. Even better, the preview changes in real-time as you adjust each setting, making it abundantly clear how you’re affecting the end-result.
The outcome is an immediacy and clarity of settings that other smartphone cameras can’t compete with: rather than jumping between the settings page and the preview screen, in a trial-and-error manner, you see exactly what will happen with the changes you’re making. Nokia has said the Pro Camera app will appear on its other PureView-branded phones, and it undoubtedly won’t be long before it’s cloned for rival devices, but we can’t bring ourselves to be too upset about that since it’s a system we already wish was ubiquitous.
Although 41-megapixels is the headline number, Nokia actually aims for roughly 5-megapixel shots. By doing so – and keeping file size down, important since the Lumia 1020;s 32GB of internal storage is non-expandable – the Windows Phone can offer a lossless digital zoom, up to 3x in fact. Sliding a finger up and down the display zooms in and out.
However, it’s also possible to do post-photography lossless zooming, as the Lumia 1020 can actually capture both a 34-megapixel and 5-megapixel pair of originals simultaneously. It’s not a perfect metaphor, but in effect the higher-resolution image is the negative, and the lower-res the final print: by working with the “negative” the Lumia can offer the same lossless editing later on, cropping out a different 5-megapixel chunk however you please.
It’s a potential game-changer. Nokia calls this sort of post-shot editing “computational photography” but for most users it’s going to feel more like magic. You can effectively forget about initial framing and instead just snap the scene, and then come back to the image later and pull out the particularly interesting parts at your leisure. The Pro Camera app also supports basic editing tools, including straightening the frame if your aim is lax or the part you subsequently decide is most interesting isn’t at the same orientation as the overall picture.
It actually takes a little time to get out of the habit of laboriously setting up the framing before you fire off a shot. Until now, the most flexibility you’ve had working with digital images has been either tweaking the settings on a RAW file, or perhaps jumping around focus points with a Lytro. Neither can be the most intuitive experience, however, unlike how smoothly Pro Camera works on the Lumia 1020.
Click each image to compare full size versus zoom or cropped
Things aren’t quite perfect, though. It’s not so much the PureView system as the horsepower Nokia brings to run it all: Microsoft’s limitations around hardware means that the Lumia 1020 effectively has an 18 month old processor to power things. The Snapdragon S4 was new in early 2012, but is certainly showing its age now, and while it’s sufficient for keeping the homescreen Live Tiles running smoothly, Pro Camera is asking a lot more from it.
Even with 2GB of RAM, PureView experiences delays. It’s most obvious when you’re saving images, impacting shot-to-shot time. Whereas with rival phones you can keep hitting the shutter button and fire off frame after frame (admittedly at lower resolution), on the Lumia 1020 there’s a roughly 3.5s pause when the handset saves both the 34-megapixel and 5-megapixel pair. During that time, you can’t do anything with the phone, not even start playing with the settings for your next image.
Unfortunately, the lag is even noticeable when you’re shooting in 5-megapixel mode only, though there it’s reduced to around 3s. It stands at complete odds with Nokia’s own Lumia 925 (which also bears PureView branding, though “makes do” with an 8.1-megapixel sensor and optical image stabilization, and lacks the lossless zooming feature) where back-to-back shots are practically instantaneous.
So, the liberation from having to frame images is undermined, somewhat, by the knowledge that if you snap a photo at the wrong time, you’ll have to wait a short while before you can make a second attempt. Three and a half seconds might not sound like much, but if you’re spending it watching your subject do entertaining or interesting things that you simply can’t capture, it starts to get very noticeable.
Click each image to compare full size versus zoom or cropped
It’s tough to see the lag, as frustrating as it is, as a deal-breaker when you see the quality of the images the Lumia 1020 produces, though. The post-shot reframing would be pointless if the overall pictures coming out of the camera weren’t high-quality, but they look fantastic. It’s worth remembering that, if you don’t use the zoom to get in close, you get to take advantage of what Nokia calls “oversampling”: data from multiple clustered pixels in the high-res original is combined to get a more accurate final pixel in the 5-megapixel shot. The more clustered pixels the Lumia 1020 has to work with (i.e. the less zooming you’ve done), the better the final shot.
The takeaway, then, is that not all PureView images are created equal. Used with no zooming whatsoever, and in standard 5-megapixel mode, and you get the most oversampling benefit; at maximum zoom, or when you’re working with maximum resolution images, you get no oversampling at all.
As for video, there’s a persistent frustration at not being able to shoot stills while simultaneously recording video, but otherwise the 1020 PureView is capable of some solid 1080p recording. Audio quality is particularly notable, and the noise cancellation is effective.
Phone and Battery
Nokia outfits the Lumia 1020 with a 2,000 mAh battery, though that can be expanded using the optional camera grip which integrates an external power-pack, but which wasn’t available for our review. Alone, longevity depends greatly on what you’re asking the Nokia to do. With push-email turned on, and a typical mixture of calls, messaging, browsing, navigation, some photography, and multimedia playback, the Lumia 1020 lasted a regular day.
Lean on the camera, however, particular the Xenon flash, and you’ll find the power is crunched through more rapidly. Nokia’s “computational” approach to photography takes its toll on the processor, and that has an impact on how long the phone will last. With heavy use of the PureView-related features, we needed a top-up on the battery by late afternoon.
As for calls, we had no problems on AT&T’s voice network, with no dropped calls and good background noise cancellation from the Lumia 1020′s dual microphones.
Wrap-Up
It’s clear that the Lumia 1020 isn’t for everyone. The size of the phone, although considerably improved over the 808, is still more of a pocket-filler than the flagships running iOS and Android, and while the PureView system itself is impressive, not everybody needs the flexibility that it offers.
Yet it’s a legitimate halo product for Nokia, and a fitting device to bear the PureView brand. Where the Lumia 92x series spurred arguments over whether they were “true” PureView, given their more mainstream sensor sizes, the Lumia 1020 has no such crisis of identity. Fire off a frame at the right time, and the phone is capable of simply superlative shots, easily embarrassing just about every other smartphone camera out there on the market today, not to mention many point-and-shoot compacts.
Our reservations are down to the core hardware – and here we blame Microsoft, not so much Nokia – however, and the processing delay introduced as PureView’s computational demands bump against Windows Phone’s chip limits. The lag between shots is the big fly in the Lumia’s ointment, and there’s a sense that Nokia’s rush to get PureView and Windows Phone working together wasn’t quite matched with Microsoft’s own urgency to green-light newer, more capable processors.
It’s that, more than anything, that keeps the Nokia Lumia 1020 in its niche position. Stomach the intermittent pauses and the PureView camera system is incredible, but everyday users convinced by Windows Phone might find the Lumia 925 offers a better balance of optics, usability, and design. Nonetheless, when PureView delivers, it’s hard not to be charmed by Nokia’s photography obsession.
This week during the Apple earnings call that also saw Apple report a record quarter for iPhone sales, CEO Tim Cook suggested that the higher end of the smartphone market has not reached it’s peak. This was in response to a question about the iPhone and how possible it was that the “high end” was “reaching saturation”. This was in spite of, as the user asking the question made clear, the increase in iPhone sales this quarter.
It’s not as if the iPhone is hurting for sales – even with the iPhone 5 being the newest model on the market and rumors of a next-generation device already saturating the airwaves. Instead, Apple’s attitude during the Q and A section of the earnings call this week remained wholly positive.
“From a growth point of view for Apple, our key catalyst will always be new products and new services. In addition we have opportunities in distribution, carrier partnerships, the online store, and the indirect channel.” – Tim Cook
Cook added that he saw the iPhone’s market as healthy – not a place where too many devices on the market means no one will want a new machine.
“I don’t subscribe to the common view that the higher end of the smartphone market has hit its peak.” – Tim Cook
Does this mean no iPhone budget model? While no one asked such a question directly, Tim Cook’s representation of Apple as a company whose one goal is to make great products remained solid.
“We think if we focus on great products and do it well, the financial performance will also come. We don’t see those things as being mutually exclusive.
…
The most important thing is that the customers love the products – if you don’t start at that level, you end up creating things that people don’t want.” – Tim Cook
What do you think? Do you think it’s time the smartphone market started seeing innovation in ways we’ve not yet thought of? Consider the Nokia Lumia 1020 and it’s massive 41-megapixel camera setup. Is that enough?
Or does Apple – in this case – need to create a smartphone that’s got something we’ve not even considered?
We knew it would be coming anytime soon, but Nokia has officially unveiled the Lumia 625 smartphone that’s meant for the frugal folks in the world. It’s certainly no Lumia 1020, but it’s one of the cheapest Windows Phone 8 options that still manages to pack a big screen, as well as 4G LTE capabilities.
The display measures in at an impressive 4.7 inches, but with a rather disappointing WVGA 800×480 resolution. It won’t exactly make the pixel-density snobs happy, but we’re guessing those looking for a cheap phone will find the screen satisfactory. Under the hood, there’s a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 dual-core processor clocked at 1.2GHz with 512MB RAM and 8GB of internal storage.
The phone comes with a 5-megapixel rear camera that can shoot 1080p video, and there’s also a front-facing VGA snapper for those inevitable duck-face selfies. Rounding the phone out is a 2000 mAh battery, and the front display is covered in a layer of Corning’s Gorilla Glass 2 to prevent scratches and the like.
The big feature here, though, is the 4G LTE on board, which makes it one of the cheapest handsets out there that sports the faster data speeds, making it the perfect option for those folks not necessarily looking for the fastest phone in terms of processing power, but needing the fastest data speeds while out on the open road.
The Lumia 625 will be headed to European and UK mobile carriers in early September, including EE, Vodafone, O2, Phones4U, and Carphone Warehouse. As for price, be prepared to only hand over £200 (€220 in Europe). You’ll have your pick at black, white, orange, green, or yellow. No word on whether or not the device will make its way over to the States, but we wouldn’t be surprised if it eventually did.
This week at the annual computer graphics conference known as Siggraph, NVIDIA has let loose information on their next-generation NVIDIA QUADRO K6000. This is NVIDIA QUADRO release is the new most powerful graphics card on the market – so says NVIDIA, bringing the world’s largest graphics memory with 12GB onboard. This isn’t the sort of processing power you’ll be using for anything less than the most power-hungry tasks on the planet.
Faced with managing extremely large data sets and time constraints, NVIDIA is aiming to satisfy the most current demands of product creators everywhere from graphics-intensive big-screen films to car manufacturing. Showing examples in both Layout and Animation & Simulation, NVIDIA has made it clear: the memory capacity involved in the K6000 allows previews of scenes with a much more final vision than has ever been offered before.
“It’s going to allow artists to preview their scenes much earlier in the pipeline. In this case, with the K6000, it’s all interactive.” – NVIDIA
“The added memory and other features allow our artists to see much more of the final scene in a real-time, interactive form, and allow many more artistic iterations.” – Guido Quaroni, Supervising Technical Director at Pixar Animation Studios
In car manufacturing, NVIDIA aims to push reality-based design processes to a new generation as well – time restraints and massive amounts of data are needed here as well. Especially when full-on reality-based previews of vehicle renders are needed to avoid costly mistakes once the manufacturing process begins.
“I am now able to load nearly complete vehicle models into RTT Deltagen and have stunning photorealism almost instantly. Instead of spending significant time simplifying the models to fit into previous hardware, we can now spend more time reviewing and iterating designs up front which helps avoid costly changes to tooling.” – Dennis Malone, associate engineer, Nissan North America
The third of three places where NVIDIA aims to take command is with massive geological datasets. In the ecology survey universe, like the automotive world, users need to know what’s under the ground before they get there – the rendering of these possibilities is one of the most intense at this point in our collective history.
“Compared to the Quadro K5000, the Quadro K6000 tripled the performance when running jobs on Terraspark’s InsightEarth application. With jobs running in mere minutes, we can run more simulations and get better insight into where to drill. In this business, drilling in the wrong place is a multi-million dollar mistake, and the Quadro K6000 gives us the edge to make better decisions.” – Klaas Koster, manager, seismic interpretation, Apache Corporation
Sizemic exploration is what we’re looking at here. Faster simulation means faster imaging and faster analysis in the end.
The NVIDIA QUADRO K6000 will be available this Fall worldwide from both leading OEMs and resellers. If you’re aiming to bring on a massive display wall for broadcast-type applications or digital signage, you’ll be glad to see 2 DisplayPort 2.1 ports and 2 DVI ports on its back that can be run simultaneously.
• 12GB ultra-fast GDDR5 graphics memory lets designers and animators model and render characters and scenes at unprecedented scale, complexity and richness • 2,880 streaming multiprocessor (SMX) cores deliver faster visualization and compute horsepower than previous-generation products • Supports four simultaneous displays and up to 4k resolution with DisplayPort 1.2 • Ultra-low latency video I/O and support for large-scale visualizations
When pressed on how this product would continue to roll beside the gaming-aimed card family GeForce – specifically with cards such as the GTX TITAN, NVIDIA made it clear: these are two separate families, but they can co-exist as a friendly bunch.
“The Quadro family is targeted at professionals – while you can certainly play games, the real value is for professionals on a variety of verticals. For that Geophysicist that like to play Assassin’s Creed, could he have a good time doing that? Absolutely.” – NVIDIA
This unit will be available in, as NVIDIA says, an “October timeframe” from groups like Dell, HP, and Lenovo and with systems integrators like BOXX Technologies and Supermicro.
In what’s fairly clear to be the spirit of such developer events as Apple’s WWDC and Google I/O, Samsung has this week announced the creation of their own Developers Conference. Starting October 27th and lasting two days, ending on the 29th, this event takes place right in the heart of San Francisco, aiming to bring in both developers and industry leaders to a software-centric series of events living in the Samsung universe.
At the moment, Samsung has only suggested that registration and full details for the event will be going live later this summer. Here in the early summer of 2013, Samsung’s full plans for their own attempt at joining the likes of Microsoft’s BUILD – aka their own yearly developer-centered conference – stay simple.
“Engage with industry leaders. Collaborate with fellow developers. Learn about new Samsung tools and SDKs. Create what’s next.” – Samsung Dev Con
Over at SamsungDevCon’s initial web presence, the company brings a similarly scant set of details. It is known at this early stage that this event will include more than just mobile products. It’s not just going to be about Samsung smartphones and tablets. This will be, according to Samsung, a “major, Samsung-side, cross-product (multi-screen) developer event.”
Sound like a good time to you? Have a peek at our Google I/O tag portal for one direction this multi-day event series might take, and our WWDC tag portal for another.
Leap Motion isn’t convinced that a touchscreen is enough: instead, it wants you to start waving. While gesturing wildly at your electronics may bring to mind Jean Michel Jarre or trying to play a theramin, the Leap Motion controller is a whole new ball-game. Little larger than a packet of gum, the USB peripheral sits in front of your keyboard and tracks everything that moves in the space around it, with the theory being that reaching out and grabbing a virtual interface is a whole lot more natural than pushing a mouse around or even swiping at a touchscreen. Is the reality so clean-cut? Read on for the full SlashGear review.
Hardware and Setup
Considering the amount of cleverness going on inside, the Leap Motion controller itself is relatively nondescript. Measuring 3 x 1.2 x 0.5 inches, the silver and black box is designed to sit in front of your keyboard, in-between where your wrists would normally be. A USB connection feeds out the left side, though if you’re prone to poor ergonomics while typing, you might find it gets in the way of your left wrist. Alternatively, you can put it above the keyboard (assuming you’re on a desktop machine) though you’ll have to reach a little further forward to work within the “sweet spot” of tracking.
That area is actually around 8 cubic feet, though it’s shaped more like a dome with the Leap Motion at its base than a cube. It extends roughly a foot off the desk, and around a foot and a half across, and is capable of tracking not only your hands, but each individual finger and in fact the movement of each joint.
So far, we’re talking about a pretty advanced Kinect, but where Leap Motion’s system differs from the camera-based system Microsoft’s Xbox 360 uses is in the accuracy. The controller may be tiny, but it can still track each finger’s movement to up to 1/100th of a millimeter, with a refresh rate of 290fps. That’s sufficient, the company promises, to track handwriting or sketching if you hold a pen or pencil above the controller, grabbing even the tiniest of flicks and flourishes.
Setup is straightforward. The box itself plugs into your computer – either a Windows 7 or 8 PC, or a Mac running OS X 10.7 Lion or above – with one of the two included USB cables, with Leap Motion bundling a 60-inch cord for those trying to reach a tower case under the desk, and a shorter 24-inch cord for those with a closer laptop.
The light on the front of the controller goes green, and then it’s a case of visiting Leap Motion’s online account page to download the driver software. There’s also a straightforward “Getting Started” video which walks through some of the possibilities, and then – when everything has installed – creating an account for Airspace, Leap Motion’s app download store.
Apps at that store are downloaded through the Airspace Home launcher, and there’ll be free and paid options to choose between. Prices for the paid apps range from $0.99 through to $99.99 (that getting you AeroMIDI, which does actually turn the Leap Motion controller into a Jean Michel Jarre-style MIDI motion controller that works with soft or hard synths), though $4.99 to $9.99 is more common. Not everything is available for both PC and Mac, and right now in total there are around 72 titles to choose from.
Software & Apps
The first app most people will try is probably Touchless, available in versions for both platforms, and which effectively turns your hand into a mouse. Moving your hand in the space above the controller moves the mouse on-screen; stabbing a finger forward is a click, while swiping with multiple fingers extended works for scrolling. You can also pinch-zoom, again in mid-air, and there are different levels of precision to choose between – depending on how adept you are – which prioritize either precision, speed, or a combination of both.
It does take a little getting used to, but not much, and soon we were swiping, snatching at icons, flicking webpages around, and generally treating our Mac like it was a prop from Minority Report. We had best results when navigating through the browser, music playlists, or image galleries; it works in more precision-oriented apps like Photoshop, but it’ll take a little longer for our muscle-memory to retrain from a more traditional mouse or trackpad for those purposes.
The rest of the apps range from music players, through simple utilities like a movement-tracking biometric security lock, through art programs, to games, which dominate the Airspace store. There are also some science titles, including dissecting a virtual frog with your fingers. Integration with Google Earth and Nokia’s HERE Maps has also been included, so you can gesture through landscapes for instance.
It’s the sort of thing that works better when shown on video than in text, so we’ve picked out some of the highlights in each category to show you exactly what sort of movements are involved.
Better than a Touchscreen?
Used to be, a keyboard and mouse was enough. Now touch is the big new theme in computing, even though not every company agrees that it makes as much sense on the desktop as it does on, say, a tablet or smartphone. Apple is a notorious hold-out, but even with various PC manufacturers putting touchscreens on Windows 8 machines, there’s still plenty of models sold without.
In many ways, reaching out and stroking your computer’s display really isn’t ergonomic. There are often times when the minimal hand-movement of flicking between keyboard and mouse/trackpad is far more efficient. Scrolling through webpages and articles, meanwhile, is a more natural home for touch, but again the usability of holding a hand out to do the navigating is questionable.
Leap Motion’s system won’t quite address that – you’re still holding out your hand for extended periods, even if it’s not to reach all the way to the display – but with a broader area of activity than two-dimensional touch it feels less of a chore over extended periods. Again, even with Touchless we found some apps were more Leap Motion-friendly than others, but the ergonomics of flicking a hand over your work-area in general are far more flexible.
Wrap-Up
How useful Leap Motion’s controller is depends on whether you try to use it as a mouse-replacement or as an addition to your desktop. We’d argue that, in this early iteration at least, the latter makes more sense: there were times we quickly went back to using our existing peripherals, but equally there were moments when casually gesturing through the browser or Google Earth felt far more natural using our hands.
At $79, the Leap Motion controller is roughly the same price as a high-end peripheral like a gaming mouse. That seems on the reasonable side to us, assuming developer interest continues and we see not only more titles in the Airspace store, but more standalone apps and games integrate with the high-precision tracking. Eventually, we can envisage a time when Leap Motion’s technology is simply built into your laptop or keyboard; until then, eighty bucks is a low-cost way of bringing some sci-fi magic to your desktop.
In addition to announcing the Moto X’s official unveil date, this week the folks at Motorola Mobility have had a bit of a spill. This spill – if you could call it that – consists of details surrounding their next generation of smart devices, particularly sitting in the “wearables” realm. Could it be time to see what was most recently hoped for in the Motorola MOTOACTV rebooted here in 2013 to mix it up well with the company’s newest fully fashionable hero smartphone release?
This spill comes in the form of a list of hires, job postings made by the company that are looking to help with the expansion of “a new world-class wearables design group within Motorola.” If that’s not a good indicator for a possible big-time expansion of the sector we’ve not yet heard of, we’d like to hear what is.
“Create beautiful, Functional and Desirable objects.”
What you’ll see in the job listing – if it’s still up by the time you see this article – is a suggestion that Motorola’s search requires, first and foremost, a person that will “provide strategic leadership, champion innovation and institute best practices to create a new world-class wearable’s design group within Motorola.”
“Specifically, the Industrial Design Team collaborates closely with our internal work partners to create compelling, usable and innovative products that define our brand with over a million consumers worldwide. The wearables design team will lead the establishment of our brand in the massive competitive and growing space of wearable connected products.”
So what’s this all got to do with Moto X?
Have a peek at the Moto X reveal event invite and observe the design language:
Can you spot the smartphones?
You’ll find the white version and the black version of Moto X in the hands of these hipsters, and you’ll find at least one accessory – in addition to the phone – on each of these young, cool fashionistas. Even the fellow (we’ll assume it’s a fellow) to the left is wearing a tank-top – certainly not something you wear to the office.
Add to this original Moto X advertisement released on the 3rd of July. Both humans – we’ll assume they’re humans, anyway – are wearing straight black as they jump into the sparkling greatness that is the future, straight above them the brand new Motorola logo complete with rainbow ring.
Click image for full-sized JPG file.
A posting to Motorola’s Google+ page shared on the 11th of July dropped this image tied to the note: “3D printers, Velcro vans, and really smart people. +MAKEwithMOTO, we like your style.” Of course MAKEwithMOTO has been around for a while longer than this tip, it’s not hard to imagine the initiative crossing paths with Moto X quite easily in the very near future. How about for those back smartphone casings, fully customizable the lot of them?
This equation is adding up quick: soon after the Moto X is launched and Motorola’s new aim – the user – becomes more important than making the device destroy all other devices with specifications alone, the company will set its sights on attaching itself to another appendage.
While it’s not immediately clear how Motorola, a Google company, will aim to release any sort of wearable device with Google aiming to release the ideal unit – Glass – this notoriously resilient company will make another move that’s unique.
Will it be another smartwatch? Something to keep track of your steps when you head out for your daily run – or lack thereof? Hardly.
Motorola will be getting a bit more under your skin than that.
This afternoon invites have been sent out from Motorola for an event with no secret to is content: Moto X. This event will be taking place on August 1st and – believe it or not – it has no set timeframe. Instead it would appear that this pre-event registration has the press making certain they’re set for the day well before the public press event is announced.
This device has been chattered about for months, and over the past several weeks – then days, we’ve been seeing an exponential number of details centering around a public showing by none other than Google’s own Eric Schmidt not one week ago.
This device is set to work with Google’s next-generation Android software and will be bringing on its own unique set of sensors, customizability, and camera abilities as well. You’ll find this smartphone delivered in black, white, and a variety of colors in-between – it’ll all be up to the user in the end. You’ll want to have a peek at SlashGear’s own Moto X and the details you need for an ideal launch as well as the exploratory article Moto X and the colorful customization of Motorola, a Google company.
“Come experience the new Motorola. No Stage. No Crowds.”
Have a peek at our Moto X tag portal for more information on this smartphone as we edge closer to the big day, and make sure you stick around for the July 24th Google event as well. It’s there that we’ll likely see Android 4.3, complete with the red carpet rolled out for Motorola soon thereafter.
It was just a few months ago that the folks working with Jeff Bezos and Bezos Expeditions headed to the depths of the sea to bring up a new collection of NASA history. This week it’s made clear – and confirmed – what they actually found: these F-1 engines belonged to none other than NASA’s mission Apollo 11. If there’s one tribute to the greatness of that moon exploration mission that we’re guessing Neil Armstrong wouldn’t have expected, this would be it.
The 20th of July will be the 44th anniversary of the original moon landing, and here in a mission that brought us down in the other direction to the ocean’s floor, the recovery of a big batch of hardware components brings the whole missing into clear view once more. The parts recovered here have become a whole heck of a lot more important than they were without identification here in the summer of 2013.
What’s been found – amongst other identifying markings, of course – is a simple 2044 stenciled in black paint on the side of one of the thrust chambers of these F-1 engines. This discovery was part of an in-depth exploration of the hardware’s markings and identifying bits and pieces, leading to the understanding that these units are connected to history as follows:
Rocketdyne serial number 2044 discovered stenciled in black paint 2044 correlates with NASA serial number 6044 Serial number 6044 F-1 Engine #5 belongs to Apollo 11
The connections are unmistakable – but wouldn’t just be left to a simple paint marking to hold solid. Upon deeper digging, corrosion removal delivered another clear “Unit No 2044″ stamped into the surface of the metal.
This post-sea in-depth exploration was and is continuing to be done by the conservation team at Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center in Hutchinson, Kansas. The announcement on this confirmation – stamps and all – was made here on the 19th of July, 2013.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
