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

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

CES 2013: Samsung shows off new flexible display technology; Bill Clinton appears as guest

Samsung’s aiming to make smartphone tech a little less rigid with the introduction of new, flexible screens that can be used in smartphones and tablets to make them more resilient.

In the keynote presentation at the tConsumer Electronics Show, Samsung device head Stephen Woo and lab lead Brian Berkeley showed off bendable, rollable, foldable displays with several concept devices. The flexible screens, which Samsung has branded as Youm, are designed to have displays as rich and crisp as current smartphones, but with more options for form factors.

In one example, CNET noted, the screen bends around the edge of the device to display information on the side of it, similar to the information on the side of a book. More broadly, flexible screen technology could help improve the resilience of consumer technology devices and make them even more portable.

The company also showed off a number of hardware components and processors that will let its devices run faster and more powerfully, while also consuming less energy than current devices. The company’s presentation was light on details about when any of the tech would actually appear in consumer devices.

Samsung has been focused on shaking up the way that consumers look at their screens by playing with different form factors. The company also introduced an OLED television with a curved display, meant to give the set a more natural appearance.

Wednesday’s keynote also featured a few words from former president Bill Clinton, who has worked with the company’s charity efforts in the past. Clinton spoke about ways mobile technology can help address problems in the developing world.

Clinton also spoke briefly about the need for gun control in the United States as well as solutions for global climate and political problems, saying that technology can help break down barriers people construct to avoid “people who don’t agree with us,” Engadget reported. Deploying communication and processing technology — and making it available to more of the world — he said, can help bridge gaps.

by : Fitri Bibi Suryani  - 125150200111076

The 5 most beautiful gadgets of all time

          Gadgets aren't always the prettiest of things, which is why they're often relegated to the undersides of desks or the backs of TV cabinets. But that doesn't mean gadgets can't be gorgeous. These are the gadgets that wrap their electronic innards in beautiful bodies.

1. iPhone 4/4S 

The iPhone 4/4S is Apple's mobile masterpiece - a flawed one, certainly, as Antennagate demonstrated, but a masterpiece nonetheless. Jonathan Ive's redesign of the widely imitated original iPhone introduced new materials, new construction techniques and the brand new Retina display, and the overall result was a device that was as beautiful when it was switched off as when it was switched on.The iPhone 5 may be thinner and even more cleverly engineered, but to our eyes the 4/4S was the phone perfected.

2. Nest Thermostat

No, we haven't been eating suspiciously ripe cheese again: we genuinely think a heating controller is one of the most beautiful gadgets around - and not just because every other thermostat we've ever seen has been soundly beaten by the ugly stick.

Designed by Tony Fadell, the iPod designer The Economist brilliantly called "the Podfather", the Nest isn't just about the industrial design: its easy, effective and attractive software is a big part of its appeal too. We wish all home electronics were as pretty as this.

3.Sony AIBO

Pretty much anyone can design something lovely, but how about loveable? That's much tougher, but Sony's engineers managed it with AIBO (Artificial Intelligence Robot), the cute robots it made from 1999 to 2005.

Some AIBOs were more successful than others - we prefer the Simba-esque "lion cub" design of the ERS-210 to the trying-too-hard "sinister-looking puppy dog" ERS-311 - but at its best an AIBO was a gadget that you could genuinely fall in love with.

4. Bowers & Wilkins Nautilus speakers

Beautifully designed or over-designed? Our money's on the former: those jaggy bits aren't just for show, but to absorb and tune the sound from the aluminium tweeters.

B&W reckons that the Nautilus speakers are "the very pinnacle of technological innovation to which all others must aspire" and that it hass created "as near as possible, the perfect loudspeaker," and you can have a pair of your own for just £55,000 (around AU$80,228 / US$84,463). If your budget's a bit more modest, B&W's Zeppelin Air will set you back around £500 (around AU$729 / US$768).

5. Macbook Air

Can traditional computers get any prettier than the MacBook Air? Judging by the rest of the PC industry's response, the answer appears to be no: the Air is one of the most widely imitated laptops the tech industry has ever seen.

As our own Paul Lamkin put it in our review, the design "has become a classic, a blueprint for contemporary technology done correctly, and an inspiration for the ever-increasing Ultrabook brigade."

By : Muthiyana Cantya Puspita - 125150200111077