Thursday, May 16, 2013

PrimeSense demonstrates Capri 3D sensor on Nexus 10 (hands-on)

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/15/primesense-demonstrates-capri-3d-sensor/

PrimeSense ready to demo Capri 3D sensor at IO

Take the 3D sensor inside the Microsoft Kinect, shrink it down to a tenth of its original size and add a bunch of mobile capabilities, and you have yourself PrimeSense's latest conquest, better known as Capri. The company, which is the brains behind the Kinect, has been openly working on bringing a tiny-yet-advanced 3D experience to tablets, televisions and smartphones for quite some time now. And it's proud enough of its progress so far that it's willing to give some real-life demonstrations to developers attending Google I/O. You may not see Capri embedded on the PCB of your portable gadget anytime soon -- at least, not until PrimeSense winds up wooing the pants off a lucky OEM or two -- so in the meantime, the company has connected the sensor board to the Nexus 10 via micro-USB.

Unlike the Kinect, however, PrimeSense doesn't think gestures will play a significant role in how we use Capri to interact with our gadgets. Rather, it seems to be more focused on 3D-based use case scenarios, many of which haven't even been thought up yet. As you'll see in the video below, we were shown an AR game that takes the environment around you -- walls, furniture and other elements -- and uses them as restrictions, just as much as they would be in real life. In another app, Capri snapped a three-dimension shot of an object on the table in front of us, captured its measurements and let us export that image to another device or even a 3D printer. In many respects, PrimeSense appears to be taking the same strategy Google does with Glass: get developers excited about the tech in the hopes they'll come up with clever uses for it. And while the company isn't ready to put Capri in their hands yet, the SDK is up for grabs, and I/O is no doubt an ideal place to build excitement for it. If you're looking for more info, we have a gallery, video and press release below, and you'll find the SDK at the More Coverage link.

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OLPC working on XO laptop telescope and microscope peripherals (hands-on)

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/15/olpc-telescope-microscope/

OLPC working on XO laptop telescope and microscope peripherals handson

So much of what children are taught in the sciences amounts to abstractions. It's a shame, really -- concepts of the universe are so much easier to extrapolate when we can see them for ourselves. OLPC's looking to give the classrooms it serves more access to the very big and very small with two new attachments that we had the opportunity to check out on a recent visit to the company's Miami office. First off is a telescope that secures to the side of its XO-4 laptop with a vice grip, utilizing the device's built-in camera. There's also a microscope that sits atop a swiveling base and plugs directly into one of the laptop's USB ports. Both peripherals run on Fedora-based software designed by the company.

OLPC will be bringing these out as soon as it can get the price down through manufacturing. For the France-designed telescope, the company is aiming for $10, with a potentially lower price on the microscope. The idea is to get one of each in a classroom, rather than the one-to-one approach of its XO line.

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TCL announces MoVo UD 4K television with Google TV coming later this year

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/16/tcl-movo-ud-4k-tv-google-tv/

TCL announces MoVo UD 4K television with Google TV coming later this year

Google just announced it will be upgrading Google TV units to Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, and China's TCL has announced it will have the first 4K TV built on the platform. We got a look at TCL's custom-skinned MoVo Google TV platform and 4K TVs separately at CES (pictured above, and in the gallery) so it only makes sense they'll be combining the two. Part of TCL's MoVo customizations include a motion sensor to recognize each user and personalize offerings based on their habits. Called Personal Box Office (PBO) or "Lazy TV" searches the available content and makes a recommendation without the need for a remote or even voice command. The press release indicates it will be available "later this year" although whether that includes a US release like Seiki's 50-inch Ultra HD set remains to be seen. According to the company it's being demonstrated at Google I/O this week, we'll see if we can get some hands-on time tomorrow.

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Field Trip for Android gets updated with over 80 countries, auto-translation

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/16/field-trip-android-update/

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Niantic Labs' Field Trip is a location-discovery app that runs in the background during your aimless wanderings, piping up when you stumble across something notable. Unfortunately, for software designed to help you travel, it'd only made the one journey itself -- to the UK, and no further. Fortunately, the Google-owned company has sent the Android version of the app truly global, helping you find attractions in over 80 countries. Niantic Labs has also jammed in 30 languages and auto-translation, so if you find a restaurant review in an unfamiliar tongue, you won't have to resort to negotiating with the locals.

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Source: Google Play

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Google opens its Cloud Platform Compute Engine to all comers, updates App Engine

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/05/16/google-cloud-platform-compute-engine/

Google opens its Cloud Platform to all comers

During Google's I/O developer's conference keynote, it actually slipped in quite a bit of, yes, developer news amongst all the noisy consumer launches. One biggie was the announcement that any and all companies looking for computing horsepower can jump on board its formerly-limited Google Compute Engine, part of the Google Cloud Platform. In order to compete with the kingpin of that space, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and its Elastic Compute Cloud, Google has bolstered its platform with new features, including shared-core instances for low-intensity chores, advanced routing, large persistent disks up to 10TB in volume size and sub-hour billing to keep costs down. It also updated its App Engine hosting service with PHP runtime, calling it "the most requested feature," and launched Google Cloud Datastore to go up against AWS' cloud storage services. All that will surely help Mountain View gain a bigger slice of the multi-billion dollar cloud infrastructure market, and should open up more space for all those apps.

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Via: Techcrunch

Source: Google Cloud Platform Blog

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