It didn't take long, only a matter of hours, for Apple's new iPad to find it's way into a car.
A US car audio company, SoundMan have become the first to install the iPad into a car dashboard. As soon as the iPad was launched, the SoundMan team moved quickly to install it into a Toyota Tacoma Pick-Up truck.
I've been thinking of installing a media centre into my own car, but after watching this I'm having thoughts of simply installing an iPad.
There is a number of really cool Flash webcam effects emerging from different developers across the globe. I'm fascinated by this technology as it opens a greater potential for games and enhanced website interfaces.
This is a very short list of some of the coolest Flash webcam effects.
3D Glasses Enhanced Face Tracking
http://www.boffswana.com/news/wp-content/uploads/facetracking3D/main.html
This very cool flash effect tracks your face using the web cam, when you move your face you move the small room around. The effect is also enhanced if you are wearing 3D glasses.
Webcam Baseball Game
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7jm-AsY0lU&feature=related
This webcam game brings your Baseball collector cards to life with mini games.
3D Animated Paper Tracking Effect
http://ge.ecomagination.com/smartgrid/#/augmented_reality
This demo is a paper tracking and sound enhanced Flash effect. Move a printed document in front of the webcam and a 3D animation of Wind Power will appear in front of the document. Blowing will also increase the spinning speed of the fans.
3D Monster Paper Tracking Effect
One of the earliest demonstration of the paper tracking webcam effects.
Papervision - Augmented Reality (extended) from Boffswana on Vimeo.
The iPad is close to release with less than 1 month to go. So you might be asking, what applications are available with the iPad by default?
There are 13 applications available by default which have been optimised and enhanced specifically for the iPad. iBooks is a new application for the iPad but the following have been removed when compared to the iPhone:-
I understand why the Clock and Voice Memos iPad application may have been skipped as they would be very difficult to create an interface to suit the size of the iPad. Do you just create a bigger clock? No, of course not. I don't understand why they couldn't come up with the idea of a world map showing analogue clocks in different timezones, wouldn't that be efficient for the iPad.
Whilst people consider this to be a small utility, you wait until the calculator is not available whilst you have the iPad in your hands. We have been promised these missing iPad applications will be available on the iTunes store so hopefully this is true.
Will have to check with the staff down at my local Brisbane Apple Store.
I was on the hunt today for some ideas for data visualisation, I went through some of the usual ones such as Tag Clouds, Digg's Lab Visualisations, and more. There was one visualisation that stuck out from the rest called 'We Feel Fine.'
The site can give you a visualisation of people's feelings by sex, age, and location by using different coloured dots. You can customise the data you wish to view as well.
Once you have selected the sort of data you wish to view, you can then click on the different coloured dots to view a person's feelings. The application will then load either a quote or a picture and caption showing that person's feelings.
The application I assume is gathering everyone's feelings by Twitter updates, MySpace status updates and other social media sites that allow users to updates their status.
This dominant company is ahead of it's market because of three reasons, competitive pricing/marketing, support, and because they keep up with the latest trends of the communication. Dell are always looking at new ways to advertise or keep in touch with their potential customers by trendy communication methods.
The latest trend they're using is Twitter, a short message service that alerts you on what people and companies are doing. Dell has listed all their twitter accounts at http://www.dell.com/twitter for everyone to peruse.
Currently, only tech-savvy people use twitter (slowly growing out of this trend), but you will find that the majority of people who are ordering bulk lots of computers (5+) are the tech-savvy people. So to be able to target those users is definitely an asset to the point of view of Dell.
Group Managing Director for Telstra Enterprise and Government, David Thodey (Left) and Telstra Chief Technology Officer, Dr Hugh Bradlow projected as a hologram(Right).
Today, Telstra showed a presentation with one guy in Melbourne and another guy in Adelaide, both sharing the same stage by the use of holograms (as pictured above). This is very exciting to see this technology finally become live as it is the beginning of a new era in Technology, Business and Lifestyle.
It has the look and feel of being in the same room together. Dr Bradlow
How holograms can change the Internet is a never ending list, instead of meeting people one website pages, why not invite their hologram into your room? Brings new meaning to the term "chat room" when the rooms can be physical.
Attending meetings in 2 different countries, one hour apart will become seamless and part of everyday life. The system isn't commercially available yet, but as the speed of Internet increases it will only be a few more years until we start to see this technology.
For more information about the presentation, checkout Brisbane Times.
When Google introduced their Street View feature into Google Maps, I've always said it would be very cool to see a video for directions from one location to another. I've found this site where they've been able to achieve just that.
The web app is available on Google Code so if you wish to look at the code behind it, you can. To view the app in action, visit http://gmaps-samples.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/streetview/streetview_directions.html.
The first thing you're going to notice is that it's slow, even on the fast speed and also you may receive blurry images if you're like me (in Australia). However as you can 'tap' into the Google Maps via their API, you're able to view all their images and functionality in any means you wish to (without violating their terms and services of course).
A user has created a C++/OpenGL application to give you a game-like experience, where you're able to move back and forwards and move around via the mouse. View the You Tube movie below to see this application in action.
For those who want to make their own Google Maps Street View application, this link is a great starting point.
Finally YouTube have taken the approach to create personalised home pages, which is part of what YouTube is lacking to become a social network.
This gives you a better, centralized away in which to experience YouTube, putting all your recommendations, updates from across your subscriptions, and friend activity on one page. Mashable
Finally YouTube have taken the approach to create personalised home pages, which is part of what YouTube is lacking to become a social network.
This gives you a better, centralized away in which to experience YouTube, putting all your recommendations, updates from across your subscriptions, and friend activity on one page. Mashable
Before Photo
At Adobe Design Sessions today and gone through some of the new features of Photoshop, editing photos is soooo much easier, I feel lazy doing it. But this is a quick example.
After Photo
If you're wondering what has happened between the before and after photos, I've removed dimples, pimples on her face and cleaned her skin to get a smoother texture.
If you're bored with Google Earth, the excitement of looking at maps of the world has come and gone, then this might get your interest back for a few more minutes.
After installing Google Earth onto your computer, simply hit Ctrl+Alt+A (or Command+Option+A for Macs) to start the flight simulator. You get to choose 2 types of planes and I highly recommend you to read the instructions found here before starting.
Some more ideas have come into mind such as space exploration (fly from planet to planet and into Earth, Mars, Sun, Moons etc).
If you're bored with Google Earth, the excitement of looking at maps of the world has come and gone, then this might get your interest back for a few more minutes.
After installing Google Earth onto your computer, simply hit Ctrl+Alt+A (or Command+Option+A for Macs) to start the flight simulator. You get to choose 2 types of planes and I highly recommend you to read the instructions found here before starting.
Some more ideas have come into mind such as space exploration (fly from planet to planet and into Earth, Mars, Sun, Moons etc).
If you crop an image, you can loose some major parts of the image. If you resize an image, it might be too small to see what exactly it is showing. The video above shows a demonstration of some smart algorithms that can keep the major parts of your images in normal size and reposition the rest of the image to make it smaller. Excellent idea for the new era of Internet browsing with mobile devices.
I would particularly like to see this type of technology developed in Flash, Silverlight or AIR, people are already requesting anyone to make a plugin for Photoshop that has the same behaviours on Techcrunch (I Want This In Photoshop Immediately).
Recently there have been some issues with phone numbers that have changed when Google brought out GrandCentral. Although GrandCentral claim the issue would have occured regardless whether Google brought GrandCentral or not. The issue was caused by a lower carrier that has fallen out and affected 434 users. This has caused a fair bit of issues especially when these users brought the phone numbers on a 'phone number for life' deal... not quite what they got.
Regardless of that part of this post, why do we still have phone numbers? After reading a post about the GrandCentral issues it got me thinking about how it would be better if we had domain name like addresses instead of phone numbers, this way we can have DNS servers that would link you to the correct phone number (just like how web sites work).
It would be a lot easier for the end caller as well, if someone wanted to call me it is a lot easier to remember dallasfreeman.au or something similar as compared to (07) 1234 5678.
I've been meaning to post about Twitter Mosaic for quite some time now, very cool service for the community to get involved. There are two ways to get involved:-
1) With your Twitter Account (get one if you haven't got one) - add twitter_mosaic (or better known as follow twitter_mosaic).
2) Go to www.twittermosaic.com and upload your own picture to be turned into a twitter mosaic. Very likely that your picture won't be chosen.
What does Twitter Mosaic do?
It simply makes a mosaic out of twitter profile images with the pictures people upload to TwitterMosaic.
Full resolution image of end result.
Negative Mosaic of the world.
My Twitter profile image has also been used on the following mosaics, see if you can find them!
1) Soylent Green
2) Silence of the Lambs
3) Transformers
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