Gesture that Smartphones Can Appreciate

Can't get to the phone? Try waving at it. A device that enables a smartphone's camera to recognize gestures – without gobbling up precious battery life – looks set to transform the way we make calls.

Microsoft's Kinect and the soon-to-be-released Leap Motion have thrust 3D gesture-recognition technology into the mainstream. Touchless phones, however, are still a rarity. Korean company Pantech released a smartphone in 2011 that could use its camera to recognize simple gestures. But across the industry the capability has yet to catch on: of the 1.6 billion mobile devices shipped in 2012, just 27 million (about 0.2 per cent) were equipped with gesture-sensing technology, according to ABI Research, a market research firm based in New York.

One reason may be that existing techniques infer gestures based on 2D images captured by a phone's camera. This is problematic because visually cluttered backgrounds can confuse the software, as can low-light settings. Kinect and Leap Motion illuminate an area with either an infrared laser or intense infrared light to capture depth information about a scene, but this guzzles too much power to be useful on a mobile device.

Now Andrea Colaço at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab in Cambridge and colleagues have developed a system called 3dim that augments standard smartphone cameras with a low-powered infrared light source. 3dim's software then looks for mathematical structures in the 2D image data in order to simplify the scene. Differences in the time that the infrared light takes to bounce off objects and return to the camera are used to gauge how far away those objects are.

Colaço claims this approach allows 3dim to function in difficult environments while tracking 10 fingers to within a millimetre in space. She says her prototype only demands a few milliwatts of additional power from the phone – about one-seventh of the amount used by a standard smartphone camera.

Colaço presented 3dim at the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship competition on 15 May. It could be included in the next generation of smartphones, she says, and adapted to work with wearable devices such as Google Glass.

Tobias Höllerer at the University of California, Santa Barbara, sees more promise for 3dim as a Google Glass system because he thinks it's awkward to make gestures while you're holding a phone. "Maybe the phone is not the device that will see this through. Maybe it will be glasses," he says.

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Posted by:

Okky Eldiana Muliaputri

125150200111092

10 Countries with World's Fastest Internet

Connectivity has so far turned from ‘wired’ to ‘wireless.’ In both the case, the last thing you wish to see would be a slow loading internet page.  Be it uploading a picture or having a video conference, everyone loves a lightning fast Internet connection. However, when most of the countries including India suffer from slow Internet connection, certain countries enjoy browsing at speeds as high as 1 Gbps, even at its outskirts.

Have a look at the top 10 countries with superfast internet, compiled by Bloomberg on the basis of the quarterly report prepared by Akamai technologies.

#10 Singapore (30.7 Mbps)

Singapore, known to be the ‘tech hub’ has cracked to take the 10th spot with an average of 30.7 megabits per second that is nearly double the global average of 15.9 megabits per second.

 # 9 Israel (30.9 Mbps)

The recent developments of broadband capabilities have made the country reach 9th in the world. The internet is provided through phone and cable infrastructure and has an average speed of 30.9 megabits per second.

#8 Bulgaria (32.1 Mbps)

The country is known to attract the global companies and investors because of its low taxes and cheap labour. Besides, it is also known for its high speed Internet where it reached an average of 32.1 megabits per second. Local Area Network (LAN) is the most common type of Internet access with over 60% of the consumers accessing it.

#7 Switzerland (32.4 Mbps)

Known to be the major hub of finance industry, Switzerland crossed at 32.4 megabits per second on average. The country has one of the highest Internet and broadband penetration rates in Europe.

#6 Belgium (32.7 Mbps)

The Internet connections in Belgium crossed an average of 32.7 megabits per second. Majority of the citizens have bandwidth caps to limit the amount of data users and these are between 5GB/month up to 500GB/month.

3-D Printing Will Change The World

To anyone who hasn’t seen it demonstrated, 3-D printing sounds futuristic—like the meals that materialized in the Jetsons’ oven at the touch of a keypad. But the technology is quite straightforward: It is a small evolutionary step from spraying toner on paper to putting down layers of something more substantial (such as plastic resin) until the layers add up to an object. And yet, by enabling a machine to produce objects of any shape, on the spot and as needed, 3-D printing really is ushering in a new era.

 

As applications of the technology expand and prices drop, the first big implication is that more goods will be manufactured at or close to their point of purchase or consumption. This might even mean household-level production of some things. (You’ll pay for raw materials and the IP—the software files for any designs you can’t find free on the web.) Short of that, many goods that have relied on the scale efficiencies of large, centralized plants will be produced locally. Even if the per-unit production cost is higher, it will be more than offset by the elimination of shipping and of buffer inventories. Whereas cars today are made by just a few hundred factories around the world, they might one day be made in every metropolitan area. Parts could be made at dealerships and repair shops, and assembly plants could eliminate the need for supply chain management by making components as needed.

 

Another implication is that goods will be infinitely more customized, because altering them won’t require retooling, only tweaking the instructions in the software. Creativity in meeting individuals’ needs will come to the fore, just as quality control did in the age of rolling out sameness.

 

These first-order implications will cause businesses all along the supply, manufacturing, and retailing chains to rethink their strategies and operations. And a second-order implication will have even greater impact. As 3-D printing takes hold, the factors that have made China the workshop of the world will lose much of their force.

 

China has grabbed outsourced-manufacturing contracts from every mature economy by pushing the mass-manufacturing model to its limit. It not only aggregates enough demand to create unprecedented efficiencies of scale but also minimizes a key cost: labor. Chinese government interventions have been pro-producer at every turn, favoring the growth of the country’s manufacturers over the purchasing power and living standards of its consumers.

 
 

Under a model of widely distributed, highly flexible, small-scale manufacturing, these daunting advantages become liabilities. No workforce can be paid little enough to make up for the cost of shipping across oceans. And few managers raised in a pro-producer climate have the consumer instincts to compete on customization.

 

It seems that the United States and other Western countries, almost in spite of themselves, will pull off the old judo technique of exploiting a competitor’s lack of balance and making its own massive weight instrumental in its fall.

 

China won’t be a loser in the new era; like every nation, it will have a domestic market to serve on a local basis, and its domestic market is huge. And not all products lend themselves to 3-D printing. But China will have to give up on being the mass-manufacturing powerhouse of the world. The strategy that has given it such political heft won’t serve it in the future.

 

The great transfer of wealth and jobs to the East over the past two decades may have seemed a decisive tipping point. But this new technology will change again how the world leans.

 

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Posted by:

Okky Eldiana Muliaputri

125150200111092

Samsung Smart TVs in it's Content

TVs aren’t any good if they don’t have anything screening on them, and Samsung’s got that message loud and clear. There’s two big draw-cards for the 2013 range of Samsung TVs the first is a revamped and revitalised Smart Hub interface that’s smart enough to know what you want to watch, and the second is a content deal that should be a big value-add for sports fans.

The new Smart Hub layout, in the My Apps screen.

The new Smart Hub looks very similar to the grid-style layout of the apps on Apple’s iOS, or the app draw on Google’s Android smartphone operating system. It’s no-nonsense: there’s a long line of recommended apps up top, and a larger grid of all the apps you’ve already installed. Navigation seems faster and smoother than in previous years likely an advantage of the new TVs’ superior processing power.

 The On TV screen of Smart Hub, which recommends you shows that S-Recommendation has picked out.

Most users generally use their TVs mostly for watching free-to-air digital TV, and Samsung is banking on this for its S-Recommendation feature. What S-Recommendation does is keep track of what you’ve watched, and of any content questions you might have asked, and pick out shows that it thinks you might be interested in. It learns your preferences each time you watch TV, so it’ll get more refined with time. It can also be configured for individual users, tying in with face recognition where it’s available. It’ll work with your free-to-air digital TV from when Samsung’s new TVs hit the shelves, and should support the in-built Foxtel app by the end of the year.

Samsung made the bold claim that its new TVs let Australian viewers access 90 per cent of the entire world’s televised sport. A lot of that comes from the comprehensive coverage of ESPN3 on the included Foxtel app, which requires a subscription, and most of the other content is through a service called LiveSport TV. It’ll cost you around $60 per month, but it’s got a whole mess of sports included from hockey to rugby.

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by Rembulan Suci Fii Jannatin [125150200111086]

Samsung S Health App, S Band, Heart Rate Monitor and Body Scale

Samsung is releasing a new line of electronic fitness devices to help you keep track of your exercises, weight, and weight loss goals. These new accessories do not have to be paired with the Samsung Galaxy S4, but they are being released at the same time the Galaxy S4 is being released, and will work with the new app by Samsung, the S Health app. This app will ship on the Galaxy S4, and since it will pair and work seamlessly with the following accessories, they should be a good companion for the phone.

S Health App

This app is supposed to ship on the Galaxy S4 phone, and will possibly be a downloadable app for the current Galaxy S3 phone. It will communicate through Bluetooth to the S Band, Heart Rate Monitor, and scale. Since it is Bluetooth, it may also pair and work with other monitors on the market like the Nike Plus system.

S Band

The S Band should work with the Galaxy S4 in a similar fashion to the way the Fitbit works, or the Nike Plus system. It will keep track of the distance you’ve traveled, calories you’ve burned, and give you overall reports on your daily, weekly, and monthly activity. It is supposed to ship around the end of April 2013, and is estimated to cost around $100.

Samsung Heart Rate Monitor

If you want more details on your workouts, then Samsung is releasing a Heart Rate Monitor that you wear as an arm band. It is expected to ship the end of April 2013 for around $70, and should track your heart rate during workouts to make sure you hit ideal levels for cardio, muscle building, and can track your performance over time.

Samsung Bluetooth Scale

Samsung is also releasing a Bluetooth scale to measure your body weight, and presumably your body fat percentage. If you are able to sync this with your phone, you can tell it your age, gender, height, and it will calculate your weight and let you know your body mass index, or BMI, track weight loss, let you know your body fat percentage, and presumably use social media to allow you to brag about weight loss, or get motivation from others. It’s expected to also be available the end of April for around $100.

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by Rembulan Suci Fii Jannatin [125150200111086]