Future Tech on Technabob...
Moving Pictures: Motionportrait Technology Can Make a Moving Cg Face From a Single Picture
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Japan-based MotionPortrait Inc. has developed a way of making a three-dimensional image of a person’s face based only on a single headshot. What’s really impressive about MotionPortrait technology is that the CG face moves and can make all sorts of expressions in a fairly realistic manner. And remember, that’s just… |
June 3rd, 2009
Camspace Turns Any Object Into a Controller
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Almost a week ago, Kotaku’s Brian Crecente wrote an article regarding the re-emergence of video game peripherals, spurred on by the success of Guitar Hero, Rock Band…, and of course the Wii. In the article, Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst Michael Pachter was quoted as saying, “I think the |
May 25th, 2009
Transducer Network of Silence: Mit Engineers Working on Sound Masking Tech
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MIT engineers Joe Paradiso and Yasuhiro Ono want to patent what they’re calling “Distributed Acoustic Conversation Shielding”. Yup, it’s like Get Smart’s… Cone of Silence, except that it actually works. I hope. Paradiso and Ono’s acoustic shielding makes use of a network of transducers – speakers and sensors – that |
May 20th, 2009
Spotlight Gps Pet Locator Will Make Lost Pet Posters Obsolete
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Positioning Animals Worldwide, Inc. (PAW) and the American Kennel Club will soon be offering a high-tech way of keeping track of your pet dogs. The service is called SpotLight, and it combines Assisted GPS technology along with round-the-clock service to ensure that pet owners can track – and recover –… |
May 17th, 2009
Somniloquy: the Future Will be Filled With Environment-Friendly Pirates
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People leave their computers on for a long time for various valid reasons: when backing up, scanning malware, reformatting and restoring because the malware couldn’t be removed, installing SP3 for the third time, downloading a large file via torrent, and being infected again. And that’s the digital circle of life.… |
April 29th, 2009
Web-Slinging Here We Come: Scientists Add Metals to Make Super-Strong Spider Silk
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Yet another proof that geeks are indeed cool: A bunch of scientists – whose professional motto is “Why not?” – decided to combine certain metals with the silk of the Araneus spider, and came up with “super-strength spider silk.” The experiment was actually inspired by a certain marine worm that… |
April 24th, 2009
Brown Energy: Buses in Oslo to be Fueled by Methane Fermented From Human Waste
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Did you know that a year’s worth of human excrement is equivalent to 2.1 gallons of diesel? Well it is. So says Ole Jakob Johansen, an officer at Oslo, Norway’s city hall. And Johansen isn’t just spouting random, disgusting trivia: in 2010 Norway’s capital will start rolling out buses fueled… |
April 17th, 2009
Scarpar: the Anywhere Board
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The people behind Scarpar wanted to “extend the snowboard season” which they say is quite brief in Australia. Some say that the skateboard was made so that surfers could still surf even if waves were flat. Will Scarpar be the next step in boarding? The Scarpar runs on two tracks… |
April 15th, 2009
Soundshelf Design Concept: Not for Libraries
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Polish designers Witek Stefaniak and Anielka Zdanowicz observed that conventional speakers rarely fit in with our living spaces because of their appearance, so they end up being “put away in the corner of the room or hidden in the wall”. I’ve made the same observation. Anyone blessed with eyesight has… |
February 19th, 2009
