vizualz

FirstView’s $95 Android / Windows CE PC607V tips a craptablet iceberg at CeBIT: “

Doesn’t look too bad for a $95 Android tablet, huh? Well, there’s plenty more where that came from. Scattered along the main halls of CeBIT are dozens of Chinese and Taiwanese consumer electronics resellers looking to sell products to new customers, and this year they sure loaded up the suitcases with cheap Android / Windows CE tablets. For the most part all these tablets (or small smartbooks) have ARM 9 or 11 processors and 5 to 7-inch resistive touch displays. While some like the FirstView PC607V tablet (pictured above) have attractive skins on top of Windows CE, others from companies like Forsa and Huawei have gone with stock versions of Android. In truth, all of the ones we played with felt chintzy, but it was easier to lower our standards when we learned they wouldn’t draw more than $150 from our wallets. We’ve got a hands-on video with FirstView’s Android tablet after the break, but if that doesn’t fill your cheap tablet needs hit the more coverage links for videos by some serious Android / ARM tablet lovers.

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(Via Engadget.)

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1Gbps Streaming Achieved With Infrared Light [Research]: “

A Penn State graduate student and professor have built a system that transmits wireless data at 1 Gbps over infrared light. And they think it can go even faster.

Just last month, we saw Siemens get to 500Mbps streaming using white LEDs, but this infrared solution works at twice that speed:

Their setup sent data across a room by modulating a beam of infrared light that was focused on the ceiling and picking up the reflections using a specially modified photodetector. The pair says that their measurements show the system could support data rates ‘well beyond’ the one gigabit per second they are currently claiming.

While there are some hurdles to overcome before optical wireless networks become commonplace, the professor who guided the project believes that if the technology continues to develop at its current pace, we could see a practical application within three years. [PSU via Technology Review]

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(Via Gizmodo.)

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The RFID Record Player Is a Real World Cover Flow [DIY]: “

Inside the fake player he placed an RFID reader, which gets the information from the RFID-tagged record. Once it detects it—and the user moves the tonearm into position—the record player starts reproducing a playlists. Matt wanted to be able to touch the songs, like people used to do back in the day, when people wore funny shirts and pants and watched Three Is Company in analog TV. If you want all the inconvenience of physical records combined all the inconveniences of cold digital music, you absolutely need this. I know I do. [Real Tomato]

(Via Gizmodo.)

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Yves-Behar-designed $75 One Laptop Per Child tablet: Too good to be true?: “

Yves Behar/fuseproject’s update to the One Laptop Per Child machine, the stunning XO-3, is a touchscreen tablet device slated for 2012 release with a surprising (and at this point, presumably theoretical) $75 price point. Says fuseproject Program Manager Melissa Guthrie,

While the distribution of OLPC XO continues, today we and OLPC are presenting the XO-3. Our new design features an all plastic tablet screen which is semi-flexible and extremely durable (compared to current glass screens which crack upon impact), and just like the original XO, the display can be optimized in both transmissive and reflective modes for indoor and outdoor lighting conditions.

The XO-3 supports many use scenarios to fulfill kids’ learning needs: from horizontal book mode to portrait reading mode, to multi-touch, so many hands can play and learn together on the same screen, to a full-touch keyboard and a back facing camera.

Hit the jump for more shots.

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(Via core77.com’s design blog.)

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New dual-screen laptop will be supremely irritating to fellow passengers: “

It’s only 11 inches wide when closed, but the new Kohjinsha DZ laptop unfurls two 10.1-inch screens side by side, giving you an absurd amount of screen real estate.

The sub-$1,000 device is the first mass-market dual-screen laptop, and while it has obvious applications for spreadsheet crunchers and creative types, the real utility of this machine is that you’ll be able to intrusively annoy your airplane seatmate in a way that you simply can’t with a conventional one-screen laptop.

via gizmag

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(Via core77.com’s design blog.)

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Augmented Projection: “Magic Projection” Creates Elegant Moving Screens: “

Where better in the world to introduce elegant moving screens than a country that made narrative on flat surfaces come alive, from painted screens to manga?

Magician, visualist, and technologist Marco Tempest sends this brilliant video documentation of the work he’s been doing with what he calls ‘Magic Projection.’ The technique is simple – and extraordinarily effective. Infrared tracking points in the screen, coupled with extremely efficient vision analysis software on the computer, produce a perfectly-scaled image. Beyond that, everything is Marco’s own ingenuity. (One reason I think we all have a lot to learn from Marco is that his sense of how to do things as a magician is different from how a lot of us with arts backgrounds approach developing our techniques.)

This is, of course, markedly different from manual projection mapping, which requires that you scale your image by hand to whatever surface you’re using.

The tools are all free and open source. Our friend Zach Lieberman, a fantastically-skilled coder and originator of OpenFrameworks, worked to develop the project with OF, Intel’s free vision library OpenCV, free hardware platform Arduino, and Sony PS 3 Eye drivers MacCam. (OpenFrameworks, for those of you just joining us, is the Processing-inspired, artist-friendly C++ coding platform.)

Description from Marco:

Here is my ‘Magic Projection’ system out on the streets in Tokyo. ‘Magic Projection’ is my new Augmented Reality Projection Tracking system created for use in my magic stage performances. Have a look and let me know what you think.

The system works by tracking embedded infrared LED tracking markers in lightweight screens with a modified PS3 EyeToy camera and then fits projected video images onto moving screens at 120 fps.

In addition it features a virtual spotlight to light the performer while holding the screen without spilling light onto the projection surface, real-time 2D particle physics, an electronic whiteboard and a 3D function that rotates 3D objects in real time in relationship to the screen angle relative to the projector.

And yes, I was a bit lazy and didn’t link to Johnny Lee’s work, which inspired this (and is credited accordingly):

Foldable Displays (tracked with the Wiimote)

The Wiimote also works effectively; Marco is instead using the PS3 Eye, which will also work as a camera feed if that’s important. Lee’s creation plays with the idea of folding, but as you can see, the idea is familiar. (Thanks, John Holdun!)