Hasta La Gadget!

Life in Dubai, Abu Dhabi or any of the other United Arab Emirates can be very good indeed but the fun can come to a screeching halt should you bounce a check or miss a credit card payment. Non-payment of debt – any debt, any amount – is a criminal offense in the UAE and rather than face the music an astonishing number of Ferrari, Lamborghini, Porsche and other high-end car owners park their pricy rides at the airport and hop on an outbound jet, never to return.

We’ve seen a couple of prototypes that enable or at least emulate touch-sensitivity on everyday objects. But as wearable technology continues to flourish, we’re going to need a simple and portable solution. Augmented reality company Metaio thinks they may have an answer with Thermal Touch, a technology that emulates touch-sensitivity using “the heat signature left by a person’s finger when touching a surface.”

Right now the hardware needed to pull off the feat is quite bulky. In the demo video below, Metaio used a tablet, a standard camera and a rather large infrared camera. The company hopes that in the future, all of the necessary hardware can be included in a wearable device similar to Google Glass, like so:

Here’s the demo video:

Sorry zombies, I guess you’ll be stuck with voice commands. Good luck with that.

[Metaio via TechCrunch]

An international group of inter-disciplinary scientists in oncology,
plasmonics, nano-fabrication, microfluids, and surface chemistry have
developed a detection device that can identify cancer in the blood long
before any detection device available now. Though many years and many
scientists have contributed to its development, the cancer detector and
tracker is deceptively simple-looking and fits on a chip that’s only a few square
centimeters in size.

When the first Lytro camera was announced, it looked pretty cute, but it was impractical because of its limited options. It was basically just a plaything. Now, however, Lytro wants to change this with the release of a camera designed for professional and prosumer shooters.

The Lytro Illum captures photos as an interactive window, instead of just a static cross-section of reality. It comes with a 40-”megaray” light field sensor, almost four times the resolution of the original Lytro. Below is a sample of some interactive images shot with the camera. Be sure to click around to see how the refocusing feature works:

The new camera has also got a 30-250mm 8x optical zoom lens, a constant f/2.0 aperture, and a high-speed shutter, which is capable of freezing motion under a variety of different circumstances. Sounds intriguing.

After capture, you can adjust aspects of images that are usually fixed, like focus, tilt, perspective shift, and depth of field. The Illum will be launched this July for $1,599(USD), and you can pre-order one now over on the Lytro website at an introductory price of $1,499, with just $250 down.

The guys at VentureBeat spent some time with Lytro CEO Dr. Ren Ng to get a demonstration of the Lytro Illum, and shared this video of the interview:

[via FStoppers]

Owners of first-generation Apple TV set top boxes (sold from 2007 through 2010) have been reporting issues that are keeping them from connecting to iTunes. The issue is said to be affecting users of the original Apple TV around the world. Without being able to connect to iTunes, users can’t buy content and may not have access to all their content.

Users are reporting that none of the normal troubleshooting procedures are fixing the connectivity issue. Neither rebooting nor restoring the set-top box seem to resolve the issue.

In addition, users of the iPhone on iOS6 or older recently found that they no longer had access to FaceTime. Some believe that the two issues are related and some sort of change at Apple has made the errors rear their heads. Some rumors suggest updates to protect Apple servers from Heartbleed led to these problems. Apple had a fast fix for the FaceTime issue with people needing to update their operating system. No such quick fix for the Apple TV has surfaced so far.

Apple hasn’t confirmed the issue officially, and as of this report, the problem appears to be unresolved.

[via MacRumors]