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Okay, so this new moving-photo tech doesn't have the photo subjects actually dancing about within the frame, but it does allow for objects to have moving/reactive shadows and highlights and it's zero-powered like an old-fashioned picture.
The term "word's first" gets thrown around a lot with gadget releases, but with kooky creative phone maker KDDI behind the project, I'm a lot less skeptical about the claim that they have developed the first 3D mobile phone screen. You can't get the full effect from the images here, but it appears that this prototype 3.1-inch 480 x 800 WVGA LCD utilises the "parallax barrier method" that divides images or video separately for the right and left eye. Naturally, no timetable for a release has been revealed. [IT Media via Mobile Mentalism]
The 2008 International Science and Engineering Visualisation Challenge has just concluded with some pretty astonishing imagery in the winning slots. This picture, dubbed "Glass Forest," is a scanning electron micrograph of diatoms (weird unicellular algae) clinging to a marine worm, and won the photography category: to my eyes it looks half like a palm tree and half like a Star Trek effect. The illustration category winner is even more amazing.
Hitachi became the latest company to enter the online search arena, unveiling a "similar image search" engine called GazoPa at TechCrunch50. Unlike regular image search services, GazoPa relies on characteristics such as similar colours and shapes rather than traditional metadata. We're not sure why Hitachi, better known as a hardware company, would dabble in something like image searching, but GazoPa seems like an interesting concept if it works as well as it does in the video.
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:
Yesterday's images of the almost-finished Burj Dubai blew our minds with its scale and grandiosity. Today, reader David Hobcote zooms out his Canon 1Ds Mark III on board a Bell heli to show us the current state of some of Dubai's new landmarks, including the stunning New Atlantis Hotel and the first house constructed on one of The World's artificial islands. Yes, it looks like a new Sim City running in a PlayStation 3.
Before Gizmodo, I worked in the bowels of the broadcast industry for a number of years. I was either shooting video or cutting video every day, all day. And while Final Cut Pro and Adobe After Effects were both tools I used with some proficiency on a daily basis, I've never seen a post production demo as incredible as this clip from the University of Washington.
3-D images? Peshaw. Those are so 2007. What humanity needs now is what MIT researchers hope to provide very soon: super realistic "passive 6-D reflectance field displays" that not only look great, but also respond to stimuli, like lighting conditions. And, not only will these uber images do all that and a bag of chips, they'll be able to change over time as lighting conditions change, with "no electronics or active control" from we mere humans. Oh, and the displays will respond the changes in viewpoint, meaning these visual wonders will have a creepy degree of interactivity to them too (read: legitimate holograms).
I happen to love the automated check out lines at the supermarket, but I hate the five or six seconds of my day that are wasted there when I have to manually input the name of the produce I'm weighing on the scale. Lucky for me, and for other lazy people who absolutely have to have those five seconds back, there's a new development in automated check out scales that could revolutionise the supermarket industry. Here's a hint: It's like facial recognition, but for fruit!
Some more images have popped up at Hiptop3 of the forthcoming Sidekick Gekko aka 2008 from T-Mobile, and they're the best we've seen to date. This is a slender looking hiptop which will launch with a multitude of skins, making it the most customisable Sidekick to date. And really, with a feature like that, you'd think the code name would be "chameleon", but what do we know? [Hiptop3]
