Tech
Gesture Cube
“From pen and paper to typewriters we traveled onward to keyboards and input devices, and now further onward to touchscreens. But what’s after the touchscreen? What new interface will Apple or its challengers be generating buzz about in five or ten years?
This “Gesture Cube” interface concept could be it. Check out the video, even though it moves a bit slow for my tastes–I’d say you can skip the first 1:05 to get right to the cool stuff.
I can’t wait to see hardened pros using this thing as fast as a pro typist; it’ll look like they’re doing kung fu.
In any case, here’s the nitty-gritty:
Just wave your hand to access music, web, your family and friends. You don´t even need to touch the surface. Gesture Cube uses 3D spatial movement tracking to detect your hand´s approach and movements. It´s a magical experience. Using natural gestures to control our electronics helps to draw them closer to human behaviour, making things easier and more fun. The result is an intuitive product concept with unlimited possibilities.
LUNAR Europe designed Gesture Cube as a three-dimensional object without a clear front to allow a wider range of gestures for its interface, to show different levels of an application or to conveniently multitask between various applications. The Gesture Cube´s design is simple yet so beautiful it also acts as a sculptural icon in your living space.
Gesture Cube is a joint development by three partnering companies:
Product Design by LUNAR Europe, User Interface Design by ZINOSIGN and Technology by IDENT Technology AG.” Core 77.
Aaxa L1, a laser-driven LCoS pico projector
AAXA has announced their latest pico-projector, the L1 laser pico projector. This is a laser-driven LCoS projector (20 lumens, 800×600, up to 50″ images) with a built-in media player. It’s tiny: 4.2″ x 2.1″ x 0.8″ and weighs just 170 grams (including the battery). It uses lasers, so it’s focus-free and can project on curved surfaces. It has 160MB of internal memory, but can access USB disks, and a 2GB one is included. It supports movie, photo and audio files. It also supports office documents. AAXA say that the battery life is 90 minutes.
Apple iPad : the uncomputer for the masses
Very smart article from Techcrunch :
Apple has grandiosely claimed that the iPad is creating an entirely new product category, and I think they’re right.
Many people are comparing the iPad launch to the iPhone or the iPod – dismissed by tech critics, who were ultimately proven wrong by mass adoption of the devices. There is something to this comparison, but it’s not quite fair. Both the iPod and the iPhone attacked existing product categories and made them so much better that they wiped the floor with their competition. The iPad is attempting to create a new market. A great many of the people who bought an iPod had other MP3 players beforehand. I’d wager most of the people who end up buying an iPad have never owned a dedicated tablet computer, and never considered that it would be worth owning one.
A better comparison is with the Nintendo Wii. While Sony and Microsoft competed in the cut-throat market of consoles for gamers, the Wii also created a new product category: consoles for everyone else. It worked pretty well for them – it turns out that there’s a lot more non-gamers than gamers, and making a device that appeals to 95% of the population sells better than making one that appeals to only 5%.
And that’s exactly what Apple is doing: making a slick “uncomputer” that’s tailored to those people who don’t actually need a computer. Many gamers ended up buying Wiis too, and I’m sure many geeks will buy iPads, but the real money-maker will be those who don’t even have a Mac, and probably won’t ever have one because it’s too expensive and they don’t need it.
The price point is also just right for this market – $499 is around the range of a cheap laptop or an expensive netbook. The applications balance is right – focus on email and web, with a good helping of medias, games and various practical apps. The gorgeous look is of course going to appeal to everyone. Once it has a video camera (inevitable for the next iteration), it will do everything that normal people do with their laptops at home today.
The only question, in my my mind, is, what will these people do when their cheap old Dell finally clonks out? Right now, to use an iPad and iPhone effectively, it seems you still need some kind of base station. So when the old Dell gives up the ghost, will people buy another one? Pony up for an expensive Mac? Or simply decide that the iPad is good enough and they don’t want another laptop?
Apple’s Ipad presentation…
I’m sorry for you guys if you don’t like technical stuff, but it’s pretty hard at the moment not to mention the release of the new Ipad by Apple. Like all the time Steve Jobs did his big show about his best product ever…blahblahblah….let’s see when it will be available.
USB 3: Fast & ready
With USB 3.0, you will spend less time in waiting, and more in creating. The beauty of USB 3.0 is its backward compatibility with USB 2.0; you need a new cable and new host adapter (or, one of the Asus or Gigabyte motherboards that supports USB 3.0) to achieve USB 3.0, but you can still use the device on a USB 2.0 port and achieve typical USB 2.0 performance. In reducing some overhead requirements of USB (now, the interface only transmits data to the link and device that need it, so devices can go into low power state when not needed), the new incarnation now uses one-third the power of USB 2.0.
The theoretical throughput improvement offered by USB 3.0 is dramatic — a theoretical 10X jump over existing USB 2.0 hardware. USB 2.0 maxed out at a theoretical 480Mbps, while USB 3.0 can theoretically handle up to 5Gbps. Mind you, applications like storage will still be limited by the type of drive inside; so, for example, you can expect better performance from RAIDed hard drives or fast solid-state drives (SSDs) than from, say, a standalone single drive connected to the computer via USB 3.0.
The real-world examples are fairly convincing — and underscore USB 3.0’s advantage for high-def video, music, and digital imaging applications. Our early test results are encouraging as well: We tested Western Digital’s My Book 3.0, the first USB 3.0-certified external hard drive.
full article on PCWorld