Watson Wins
The victory of machine over man was celebrated with emotion by Watson’s creators in this moving summary of the games’ significance.
Exit Big Blue, Enter Watson
Next week, IBM’s Jeopardy playing computer will go head to head with the human Jeopardy champion to test the limits of natural language processing and open question answering.
Crystal balling from TechCrunch on what we can expect from 2011.
So here we are in a new decade, and the technologies that are now available to us continue to engage (and enthrall) in fascinating ways. The rise and collision of several trends—social, mobile, touch computing, geo, cloud—keep spitting out new products and technologies which keep propelling us forward
The Emotional Computer
When people talk to each other, we gauge much of how the other person feels by their facial expression and/or from how something is said. We pick up emotions from tone of voice and facial expressions that allow us to decide how best to continue our conversations – to empathize with sadness, share happiness, or react to anger or frustration. People even express themselves in this way when interacting with machines, but the devices don’t seem capable of reacting to how a person feels.
Team leader Professor Peter Robinson challenged his team from the Rainbow Graphics and Interaction Research Group to build a system that could “understand not just what I’m saying, but how I’m saying it.”
IBM’s Annual List of Five Innovations Set to Change Our Lives in the Next Five Years
What’s your verdict? Is this list spot on or way off?
360° Video
Using the same technology as Google’s Street View, video can be shot in 360 degrees.
How L.A. Noire Conquered The Uncanny Valley With A Tech Called MotionScan
The “uncanny valley” describes the perception gap between a human-like impression and an actual human. To cross the uncanny valley, a simulation must match the impossibly subtle nuances of detail in a real human beyond perception.
“We’re trying something new that’s never been done. We’re not just releasing a game – everybody looks at this who hasn’t seen it in person, even from the screenshots you look at it and go, ‘Oh, it’s GTA with Fedoras on’. But the reality is that it’s a whole new different concept, it’s a whole new way of looking at interactive entertainment. I think we’re starting to blur the lines between a television program and a video game.”
Futuristic Concept Camera Captures Entire Perspectives at Once
This camera doesn’t exist yet. But… it could. And… probably will. Very soon.
It’s always fun thinking about what photography will be like in the future, and the direction camera technology will go. What’s even cooler is seeing these ideas turned into concept drawings or videos. The Capture180 is a concept camera by Lucas Ainsworth that takes a 180° hemispheric photograph with each exposure in addition to the ordinary, framed photograph. When viewing the photographs with the camera, you can “knock” the camera into a viewing mode in which it acts as a small window into the giant scene that was captured.
Research company Juniper has drawn up a list of predictions for the mobile and wireless industry for 2011 and they portray humanity hurtling headlong towards a mobile-centric lifestyle. Juniper sees 2011 as a year where we’ll see increasing use of Augmented Reality, the first Cloud-Based Operating Systems, Mobile Banking becomes a must, the beginning of the demise of the credit card, the rise of Mobile Lottery Tickets, biometrics coming to mobile and Social Purchasing moving to a whole new level.
Download Juniper’s full report.
Here are Juniper’s top 10 wireless predictions:
- Surging Mobile Data Traffic
- Augmented Reality to Enhance Mobile Games and Retail
- Cloud-Based Operating Systems are Launched
- Mobile Banking will become a “must-have” when opening a new account
- Mobile Devices Begin to Replace Credit Cards
- Mobile Handsets Become Even More Sensitive
- Mobile Lottery Tickets Sales to Soar Fuelled by Deployments in US, Europe, and China
- Mobile-Specific Threats Lead to Demand for Mobile-Specific Security
- Buyouts take Social Purchasing to a New Level
- More Vendors Develop a “GreenHeart”
3D Video Capture with Kinect
Imagine the implications of this with a dozen cameras in a room.
If Oliver Kreylos’ Kinect 3D video capture work was amazing already, his hack to use two Kinects to eliminate shadows and fully capture reality in 3D space is just crazy.
In Oliver’s previous experiment, the 3D video capture was limited by Kinect’s single point of view. This point of view created shadows of nonexistent data, since Microsoft’s camera can’t see behind objects. To solve this problem, he added a second Kinect at a different angle to capture what the other Kinect couldn’t see. By combining both video signals and three-dimensional information, he was able to fully recreate three-dimensional reality, with no shadows.
The essential compendium of need-to-know statistics – global mobile subscribers, 3G, mobile Web, mobile advertising, mobile apps, consumer mobile behavior, SMS, m-commerce, m-banking, handset share and much more. Beware of media hype and mobile myth – put your mobile strategy on a sound footing with the latest research from credible independent experts.
By 2050, three of every four people on the planet will be living in crowded mega-cities, the UN says. That doesn’t leave much room for a backyard, let alone kitchen or laundry room.
So this year, organizers of the Electrolux Design Lab contest challenged young designers to come up with space-saving, space-age appliances that take advantage of new and emerging technologies.
From a virtual reality kitchen where your thoughts are transferred to food-prep robots to a combination closest/nano-tech water-free washing machine, the results are intriguing.
“We don’t want to replicate things that exist already,” said Tom Astin, a spokesman for the Stockholm-based appliance luxury appliance manufacturer. “But to have some basis in technology with an eye toward the future.”
Connected Devices of the Future
A great roundup of photos and videos demonstrating concepts for future screen technologies.
Embed has been disabled. Click through to see the videos.
Working with manufacturer Freescale Semiconductor, Zoticus design has put together a series of video clips describing future-foward scenarios of how intelligent devices with access to passively-collected data might communicate with each other.
| 1 note |#