Hasta La Gadget!

You have a lot of documents you’ve acquired over the years, hundreds or thousands in some semblance of order thanks to folders and whatnot. Now, imagine taking the output from hundreds or thousands of others, all with their own ideas about organization, and finding only those pages relevant to a certain topic. That’s what legal aides have to do in cases where a major corporation is being investigated, and we’re thinking that’s a major target market for Xerox‘s Smart Document Review. It’s a prototype touchscreen table that enables users to collaboratively filter documents, starting by indexing a giant pool and then allowing for the creation of “magnets” that contain keywords or other heuristics and dynamically pull out matches, all happening courtesy of animations that look only slightly less sophisticated than those seen in Hackers. Search results can then be dumped to a thumb drive. The prototype table dates back to earlier this year, but Xerox is now making them available as part of a pilot program exclusively for trendy law offices with unisex bathrooms.

[Thanks, Pradeep]

Continue reading Xerox shows off Smart Document Review table, a Surface that sifts through billions of docs (video)

Xerox shows off Smart Document Review table, a Surface that sifts through billions of docs (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 20 Dec 2010 10:24:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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UC Davis’s Oliver Kreylos has been responsible for two of our most impressive Kinect hacks yet. He was one of the first to get proper 3D video out of the thing, following that up by pairing up two of the cameras, one to fill in the gaps of the other. You might have thought he was just playing around but no — oh no. There was a method to the madness and his ulterior motive has been revealed: 3D telepresence. This is what he’s been working on all along and he has an early version operational, using the output from two Kinects in a remote office to beam a 3D representation of another person to his display, which he can navigate around (and through) using a Wiimote. Meanwhile, the viewer can see the position of Oliver in real-time, a virtual camera floating around and enabling them to maintain eye contact despite her not actually looking at either physical camera. That demonstration is embedded after the break along with a somewhat fanciful follow-up in which Kreylos engages in a rather… protracted lightsaber battle against the forces of evil.

Continue reading Two Kinects join forces to make 3D telepresence, enable virtual light saber battles (video)

Two Kinects join forces to make 3D telepresence, enable virtual light saber battles (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 20 Dec 2010 10:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Tonight will mark the first opportunity in two years for star gazers to catch a glimpse of a total lunar eclipse. Weather permitting, the eclipse should be visible for upwards of 1.5 billion people–those in North and South America and parts of Europe, Asia, Hawaii, and New Zealand will get a chance to glimpse the cosmic event.

The shadow of the eclipse will fall on the moon at around 1:33 AM EST tonight/tomorrow morning. Prime viewing will occur between 2:41 and 3:53 AM EST. By 5:01 AM, the eclipse will be gone. The mid-totality moment will occur at 8:17 UT/3:17 a.m. EST/12:17 a.m. PST.

Unlike the tricky pinhole viewing of solar eclipses, you’ll actually be able to look at this one–heck, bring a pair of binoculars or a telescope, if they’re handy. Another total lunar eclipse won’t be visible in the US until April 2014.

For more information on the Eclipse’s stages, check out Space.com. 

A nation-wide pornography block? That’s what one UK politician is gunning for. Ed Vaizey, conservative parliament member and communications minister, is looking to block access to legal pornography, making access to the stuff an opt-in–rather than opt-out–model.

Those interested in looking at adult content will have to contact their Internet providers. Doing so will add them to a “porn surfing whitelist”–a lot more work than the average Internet surfer is currently used to undergoing in order to see naked people.

The move is being pushed as an attempt to block children from seeing adult content. According to a recent study, one in three kids in the UK under the age of ten has seen pornography on the Internet (which, for those of you non-techy folks out there, means that one in three kids in the UK under the age of ten has seen the Internet).

How possible is such a country-wide block? Not very, according to pretty much every ISP in the country. Here’s an example, quoted by the BBC, “Unfortunately, It’s technically not possible to completely block this stuff.

And here’s something from the Internet Watch Foundation, “You end up with a system that’s either hugely expensive and a losing battle because there are millions of these sites or it’s just not effective. The cost of putting these systems in place outweigh the benefits, to my mind.”

Is Apple looking to take it to Google and its uppity Maps app? That certainly looks to be the case, with AppleInsider noticing that the company has four new job listings which specify “Computational Geometry or Graph Theory” and “experience developing navigation software” as “valuable knowledge.” The obvious implications here are that Apple’s looking to craft first-party, full-fledged, turn-by-turn navigation and bring it to its GPS-equipped devices, but maybe the company’s previous new hires simply got lost a lot and this is just an attempt to nip that problem in the bud. Either way, the software job market just improved by four. Giddy up, coders.

[Image credit: Nurimb]

Apple looking to hire iOS navigation engineers, first test is to find way around One Infinite Loop originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 20 Dec 2010 09:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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