Hasta La Gadget!

The Dell Latitude 2100 is a computer designed for use in a classroom. Inside, the device is crammed with the guts of a standard netbook: Atom processor, 1GB of RAM, Windows XP. But on the outside it’s got a rubberized chassis designed to deflect filthy fingers, a keypad that kills bacteria, and a light that tattles when you’re not supposed to be online. (Don’t worry, we figured a hack aorund that.)

But are we, bitter seasoned journalists qualified to rate something clearly meant for kids? As much as we enjoy dressing up like Power Rangers and playing hooky from work there’s a dimension only someone born during the Clinton administration can provide for a product like the 2100. That’s why we drafted young Andrew Walker, a frequent Gadget Lab reader and 11-year old boy to help us with the above video.

Of course you can always check the full review right here.

(Camera work and editing by Michael Lennon, produced by Annaliza Savage)

Remember the winking, nodding magical collectible cards of famous witches and wizards from Harry Potter? French company Total Immersion has something similar for Muggles: The company helped create baseball cards where 3-D avatars of players emerged on the desktop to pitch and bat with real-world users, and is also now working with Mattel to create a new line of action figures based on the upcoming sci-fi-flick Avatar.

Digital magic known as augmented reality made it possible. “Augmented reality is a composite experience–a video stream merged with a synthetic component and manipulated in real time,” says Greg Davis, general manager at Total Immersion. “We are taking video and superimposing a digital layer over it.”

Total Immersion is one of the most successful augmented reality providers currently. Here’s a quick look at how the company’s augmented reality technology for the desktop works. Take the baseball cards. Users have to first log on to a URL and navigate to the 3-D section of the website, where they enter an interactive code found on their baseball card to activate the software. Then, they can hold the card under a webcam and Total Immersion’s software goes to work. It identifies a target on the baseball card, then overlays a virtual baseball player on the video onscreen. Users can then rotate the baseball player and make it perform a select few actions.

Now for a peek under the hood. The first step is to capture video from the webcam. When users click on a URL, this streaming video appears on a display, which can either be a desktop, cell phone screen or a projector-based display. From a user perspective, the video capture is similar to watching yourself while using Skype, explains Davis.

Total Immersion’s augmented reality software then steps in. The software has three components–recognition, tracking and rendering. In the video stream, Total Immersion’s software hunts for a ‘target,’ which is a single user or a group of users. It then tracks the target and imposes a 3-D overlay by adding a virtual object, before rendering it back on the screen in real time. There are limits: the software can only track a few targets at a time and it has restrictions on range.

For users, this means they see a composite back on the screen– them playing with a baseball player avatar or having a virtual object on their faces. “What you are seeing in the reflected video is you and something that is not–effectively augmenting reality” says Davis.

Total Immersion offers variations of this technology for cellphones and dedicated camera set ups that can be projected on to a custom screen such as large outdoor displays.

London-based designer Lee Washington has a solution to the problem of earbud cords getting tangled up: He’s made it so they can zip together, like the opposing sides of a zip-lock baggie.

It’s a clever and elegant solution — though it looks like the tradeoff is that it makes one of the two cords a bit stiffer and less flexible than before.

Of course, his solution is moot if you know the proper way to wrap headphone cords so they don’t get tangled.

Lee Washington has a bunch of other business ideas, too, such as paperclips shaped like little men. Cute! No word on if or when his zip-together headphones will be commercially available.

Tangle-proof headphones [YouTube, via Lee Washington]

Our coverage of Windows 7’s pros and cons sparked a storm of commentary, much of it predictably angry and partisan. But a few comments stood out.

One, posted on our first look at Windows 7, is from dereleased, who rebutted other commenters by citing a source on Microsoft customer satisfaction (even including a URL), presenting a thoughtful argument and adding a new wrinkle to the conversation:

OS X is built to run on homegrown hardware that they know inside and out and can always predict.

Linux (and variants) is Open Source, and therefore being maintained at lightning speed by a dedicated community of people who will make it work on anything, anywhere if they can, with the polish being added later. …

Windows, however, is in a fairly unique situation to the other two: it is designed to run on any hodge-podge of software you can throw together. Does it accomplish this goal? Arguably, yes. I know, it must suck when your XYZ brand component doesn’t work as perfectly as you want, but when you think about the absolutely _staggering_ number of different parts you can plug into that beast (tens of processors, hundreds of video cards, motherboards, etc, etc) and still have it run, it’s actually a bit impressive.

Yes, you can include URLs in Gadget Lab comments, and we especially like it when those URLs point to a source, not just some spam blog.

Unrelated to the Windows 7 controversy, two Gadget Lab stories this week drew attention to the limitations of modern computer architecture. Commenters on each of these stories added erudite, informed opinions that, perhaps not coincidentally, drew attention to the same problem: The limitations of the bus that connects a CPU with the rest of the computer, including its main memory.

On “Hardware Hackers Create a Modular Motherboard,” commenter jneutron5 made some valid points about challenges of parallel programming and current Intel architecture.

Parallelism in coding is hard, at times unintuitive, that’s true. But what these guys are doing is not only admirable, it’s way overdue. The fact is, unfortunately most of the best and brightest engineering colleagues of mine, even those that come from the top universities, know nothing about what it takes to code for parallel architectures.

From “DNA May Help Build the Next Generation of Chips,” a commenter called sixwings had this to say:

However, there is a monster that threatens to rain on IBM’s beautiful  parade. It’s called memory bandwidth. It is a monster that gets meaner  and nastier every time you add another core to a processor. The reason is that all the cores must use a single data bus and a single address bus to access a single piece of data at a time and this creates a paralyzing bottleneck.

…

We must come up with a completely different type of computer, one that solves the bandwidth problem by embedding huge numbers of elementary processors directly into the memory substrate.

Sixwings and jneutron5 — You guys should put your heads together. I think you’re on the same track!

Finally, on our story about what women want in gadgets, Tooloohoohoo had an interesting, if somewhat rambling, response:

“Fashionable” is certainly more important for women, but fashionable actually has little to do with appearance. It means that something is “in fashion,” that a culture which the consumer belongs to has begun to esteem the product, and the consumer wants to increase his or or her standing in that culture by possessing the product while it is still on the rise. Right now male culture esteems these things more than female culture.

All of these comments, among many others, were worthy and useful contributions to Gadget Lab this week. But we’re awarding the prize — a Leatherman Freestyle CX donated by the Leatherman company — to dereleased. Thanks for citing your sources.

Thanks to everyone who posted comments on Gadget Lab this week and please keep them coming! We’re all out of prizes for now, but with luck we’ll be able to bring them back in the near future.

The Screw Key is an old concept brought up to date. County Comm, supplier of tech toys to the law-enforcement market, has put back into production something your grandfather may have used: a pair of small screwdrivers which hook onto a key-fob. The flat-blade and Phillips-head drivers have a small handle for turning between finger and thumb, and they’re fashioned from hardened steel, so they should last a little longer than the junk you buy from the dime store.

That’s not to say they’re expensive. The keys cost just $5 a set, and look to be very handy indeed.

Product page [County Comm]