Yesterday we showed you a clip of Emily, a product of Image Metrics facial mapping and animation. She looked very lifelike, but you could spot her flaws if you were looking for them. Then commenter totoro pointed out this other example clip (that uses the same techniques behind Emily) that's, to my eyes, a generation beyond Emily. In fact, it's...basically perfect...making it hard to believe that the model is not a real human. Truly, at least in this one particular circumstance/pose, the uncanny valley seems to have been crossed. Here's the clip:

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Wireless power for charging gadgets has been among the more vapourous of developments we've been hearing promises of for years. While there are a few working instances of the tech on the market, its large-scale adoption still feels miles away. So the appropriate scepticism should be applied to this NY Times report claiming Intel will announce a major wireless power breakthrough today at the Intel Developers Forum, but the details do seem enticing this time around for one of the holy grails of the CE world soon becoming a bit more feasible. UPDATED: Pics of Intel's IDF demo from today have been added.

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Microsoft is going to start a new US$300 million advertising blitz to try to regain some of the street credibility they have been losing over all these years. The campaign is built around the idea that "Windows breaks down barriers that prevent people and ideas from connecting." Sounds like corporate PR-puffing, but there's a twist: it will star Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld.

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One day, robots will whiz by us one one wheel at 1000kph while solving absurd equations that would take us lifetimes to calculate. But that day has not yet come. So when a robot with coordination no better than a toddler starts trash-talking its humanoid accomplice, you know we're in for a painful and degrading future. Here's the clip:

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The Xbox 360 price cut rumours we've been hearing for September look to be gathering even more steam, as this RadioShack ad shows drops to US$399 for the Elite system and US$199 for the Arcade. That's down US$50 on the Elite and US$80 on Arcade, making your choices a nice smooth progression of Benjamins--US$199/US$299/US$399. The drops are rumoured to hit early next month. UPDATE: We've also just heard from the folks at setteb.it, who have news of an official 60GB upgrade to the 20 GB Xbox 360 system at the same price, €270 in Italy. [Joystiq]

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For those of you looking for your first taste of a female robot that will do your bidding, the US$99 WowWee Femisapien is on sale now at WowWee's site and major retailers like Target and Amazon. What's super cool about this robot is that you can program its movements, essentially, with a touch of a button and dragging its limbs around rag doll style. It also sorta has boobies. [WowWee via RobotsRule]

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Over at BoyGeniusReports is this leaked shot of what's allegedly the CDMA version of HTC's fabby Touch Diamond mobile phone. And oh boy, oh boy... that's one phone that's not been on a diet: compared to the GSM version sitting on top of it it's one big ugly fat fellow. Apparently it's actually "more comfortable to hold," but you've got to wonder about the weight of the gizmo, and the tightness of your pockets. [Howardforums via BGR]

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Fire extinguishers are damn handy, but hard to get excited about—unless they're cool flying ones—but these flower extinguishers from Japan should be weird enough to pique your interest. They're magnetic, so you just whack them on a convenient surface, like the front of your fridge. And if you're unlucky enough to get an oil fire on your cooking range, then you simply grab the flowers and fling them into the fire. You're probably thinking "Fighting fire with flowers? WTF?" right now. The flowers work by melting to create a film over the surface of the burning oil, cutting off its air supply and extinguishing the fire. See the video of them in action if you don't believe it.

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Olympus has just augmented the Mju range of point-and-shoot digital cams with the new 1060 model. It seems no slouch for a small pocket camera: It's a 10-megapixel shooter, with a 7x optical zoom and "Dual Image Stabilisation" to reduce blur. Plus it's got an new intelligent mode that auto-detects the five most commonly used "scenes" and tweaks the exposure settings for you.

UPDATE: Olympus has just informed me that the mju 1060 will only be available in black in Australia, which isn't such a bad thing - it looks much better than the boring old silver model.

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This custom case mod made for Bit-Tech is just eye-grabbingly bizarre... from the outside alone. Built by a guy called Craig, Bloo Balls was over a year in the making, which included and a whole lot of careful design, redesign and fabrication. There's a mass of careful plexiglass-carving in there, including a hand-made, custom-crafted liquid cooling system for both P4 processor and northbridge. Plumbing and CPUs don't often mix, which is why the build included one fried motherboard. Check out the gallery: it's amazing, inside and out. So amazing, it almost warrants its own genre name... we're just wondering what to call it.

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At the start of last month we mentioned that Sony Ericsson's TM506 would be coming to T-Mobile as the first HSDPA handset, and now it's official. Out early September at "select T-Mobile retail stores and online." Price still to be announced. [SonyEricsson]

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If you want to upload to the latest 2.0.2 version of the iPhone operating system, and you have a PC, check out the new QuickPwn for Windows, which now supports it. Yippee Kai Yay and all that. Mac users, hold on because they are working on the Mac version too. Until then, you can always use Pwnage. [iPhone Dev]

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Tomtom has just come up with a suite of GPS systems for the "mobile workforce" dubbed the Pro series. The first units are the Pro 4000 and Pro 8000, and while the hardware is essentially unchanged from non-Pro models, there are a few tweaks. Firstly the software has a "menu lock" option, that's supposed to lower distractions and improve driving safety, the maps come with a free update that's to be used within a year, and there's a PIN lock to protect your data. Secondly the support package comes with a two-year extended warranty and a dedicated customer service line. The 8000 also has advanced IQ navigation, which plans routes using actual average drive times, and voice address-input and Bluetooth handsfree calling. The 4000 is out for US$330 and the 8000 for US$460. [Navigadget]

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The KDDI AU Design Project bunch over in Japan have stumped up with this latest concept phone for music mobile phones of the future. And it blends two things we like a Giz: funky mobile phone tech and Transformers. In fact Box To Play is less "robot in disguise," and more "hi-fi in disguise" because when it's a phone, it's a normal phone—keypad, camera and such—but when it transforms it's its own speaker system with a graphical visualiser around its faces. Neat, and exactly the sort of innovative design I'd like to see in future phones. Check out the movie of the concept in action at the KDDI link. [KDDI AU]

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As its name implies, the Logitech Speed Force Wireless is a force feedback racing wheel for the Wii with a 10m wireless range. It is the first racing wheel accessory for the Wii that isn't a shell accessory for the Wiimote. The 10" wheel rotates 200 degrees and has analogue gas and brake controls. Need For Speed Undercover will be the first game to take advantage of the force feedback capability, but I'm more concerned about whether or not this thing will work with Mario Kart Wii. It will hit stores in November for US$100. [Logitech]

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Facebook has posted a huge preview of the next version of its iPhone app. Due in September, Facebook for iPhone 2.0 will look and feel a lot more like the real Facebook. The News Feed will be exactly the same and profiles will use tabs and the combined Wall/Mini-Feed from the site's latest redesign. Perhaps more importantly, the functionality will be much closer.

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This phone, inspired by the multiple layers of wooden sandwich in plywood, is of multiple slider design. Inside, and separated by tabs, are a printer, projector, gamepad and sliding downward, a dialpad. It's as cool as it is impossible to build, and so KDDI labs should feel proud for making an imaginary device with so much character. [KDDI via Cscout]

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When I was sitting for my final English school exams, I pretty much had to memorise half a Shakespeare play, excerpts from half a dozen books and have a thorough understanding of half a dozen more. These days, the kids get to use their iPods and mobile phones to look up information and phone friends, at least at exclusive Sydney girls school PLC Croydon. According to the SMH yesterday, the school is trialling a system of examinations that allow girls to "access information from the internet, their mobile phones and podcasts played on mp3s".

To stop the dreaded copy and paste education, students are required to cite all their sources accurately (just like how you have to at uni). The girls can also telephone friends or relatives to get an insight or different angle into their exam question.

But I'm not bitter. I actually think that it's a great idea. Because outside of those six years at High School, there's no point in your life that you actually need to remember large sections of Shakespearean dialogue. Obviously this tactic wouldn't work for all subjects, but for creative subjects that require composed essay submissions, why not educate the kids earlier how to use other people's work as a source of inspiration.

The SMH believes that this concept could revolutionise examinations at HSC level within a few years. So long as there's the proper checks for plagiarism in place, this is a real step in the right direction for integrating technology into education.

[SMH]

While Comcast's new network management scheme--to slow down heavy bandwidth users' entire connection--started back in June, we're just getting some of the grislier details. People hitting their pipe hard--whether it's watching a boatload of streaming video or FTP or... Read More »

A man in Utah shot himself in the chest with a hunting rifle and died while his ex-girlfriend watched over a webcamera. Watching a loved one hurt themselves has to be terrible, but watching over the internet, helpless to stop it, has to be a lot worse. Terrible. [KSL]

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By surrounding its thin (an hopefully sturdy) steel legs with movable blocks, the somewhat cleverly named UnsTable creates the illusion that it's on the verge of collapsing. The novelty would probably wear off pretty quickly, and the table doesn't have a great deal of mileage as a prank device. I mean, you've got to lure someone to your weird yellow desk, sit them down and have them scatter important, delicate items across its surface, just so you can sort of kick one of the legs to the side and make them think, for just a second, that their stuff would be broken. In any case, it's an attractive table. Check out the animation below to see the the UnsTable in "normal" and "oh no!" modes. [Core77]

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iPhone Copy and Paste Between Applications Is Here, But Not from Apple
Well, it's a start...

Emily Isn't Real, But Would You Have Guessed?
Wow. Virtual sex is starting to look a little bit more appealing, wouldn't you think?

Motorola Insider Blame Game: Engineers Shoved Designers Aside
The only way to really settle this is a fight to the death.

Sony Makes PSP-3000 Official
And yet still no second analogue controller -- I can't wait forever, Sony!

BlackBerry Bold Plagued by Same 3G Problems as iPhone
Any local Bold users experiencing these problems?

Following up on rumorage that pre-sales for the HTC Dream/G1 would start Sept. 17, TmoWorld says they've got the full skinny on T-Mobile's Android debut party: Supposedly, pre-orders will be online only for eligible post-paid customers--lasting through Oct.3--who will get the phone on Oct. 13, the public launch day. TmoWorld says the subsidised price will be US$199 w/ a two-year contract (no one-year option).

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Enticed by those tricky ads, Alabama resident Jessica Smith rushed out to get one faster than the iPhone 3G's Google Maps could tell her where to go. After a month of it being slower than she expected, only able to touch 3G 25 percent of the time and an "inordinate amount of dropped calls," Ars says that yesterday she slapped Apple with a class-action lawsuit over the "defective iPhone 3G."

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Wired has a great feature on Richard Garriott, the father of MMORPG OG Ultima and the latest millionaire to get blasted up to the ISS as a paying tourist. More specifically, the gruelling 8 months of training Garriott must first endure at Zvyozdny Gorodok, (Star City), a.k.a. Yuri's house, a.k.a. where space flight was born. All tourists on the ISS must be capable of performing mission-critical duties in the case of an emergency, and Wired followed Garriott through the historic site every step of the way, grabbing fantastic photos of this incredibly historic facility in the process.

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Wii Music, Nintendo's "answer" to the music and rhythm games, is considered by many (including us) as one of the worst things Nintendo has ever put out. Good thing Sarcastic Gamer of Wii Fit and Microsoft Surface parody fame is on the job. Even though the general tech audience has resigned themselves to the fact that the public will buy any piece of crap with the Wii label on it, we're still holding out a sliver of hope that even idiots won't want to flail around while a guitar + xylophone + trumpet version of Yankee Doodle blares from their TV set. [Sarcastic Gamer]

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Ars has the first solution we've heard for the app-crashing problem bad enough Steve himself said Apple was working on it. Tests by Jaime Hosticka, who used to work for Apple, show that downgrading to iTunes 7.7 fixes the crashies for some people. He also got a more detailed email response from Steve Jobs--six whole sentences--about the issue.

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