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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Okky Eldiana Muliaputri

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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

Cyber Criminals Target Mobile Users

Cyber criminals target mobile users, social media

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Mobile devices ... increasingly targeted by cyber criminals. Photo: Reuters

Australia's top cyber cops are warning that social networking sites such as Facebook are increasingly being targeted by cyber criminals as a way to steal internet users' money.

The growing commercialisation of social media through links to online trading such ''buy, swap and sell'' sites means cyber crooks now have a strong motivation to hack people's account details, police say.

“[Smartphones] can be compromised as easily as your computer can be compromised.”

Scott Mellis, Federal Agent

In an interview with Fairfax Media, the Australian Federal Police's manager of cyber crime operations, Commander Glen McEwen and Melbourne team leader Federal Agent Scott Mellis outlined a range of new threats facing web users.

These included vicious ''form-grabbing malware'' that can steal large amounts of personal data, as well as complacency about the security of mobile devices, which most people do not protect with anti-virus software, even while using their phones to do banking.