Posts tagged tech
The New XBox can Detect Your Heartbeat
So says Ars. Here’s the applications I’m anticipating:
- Detection of feelings for an in-game character by measuring heart rate when they appear on screen.
- Dialing 911 for heart attacks that occur on the couch.
- Meditation training.
Any others?
Before Kepler We Knew Only a Handful of Planets
RIP Kepler, the exoplanet finding telescope satellite:
Very few experiments have changed the way we perceive our Universe, but the Kepler exoplanet survey telescope is one such example. Simply by monitoring a single patch of the sky continuously, it provided a new understanding of how many planets exist in the galaxy. Since its launch in 2009, Kepler identified 115 exoplanets with over 2,700 other potential planet candidates—including a number that are comparable in size to Earth or orbiting within the habitable zone where liquid water might exist.
However, Kepler is an orbiting telescope, unreachable by spacecraft for repairs. Today, NASA announced that a reaction wheel—required to keep the telescope pointed steadily in one direction—ceased functioning. This is the second reaction wheel failure, meaning Kepler can’t continue to monitor the same stars and their exoplanets it has watched since 2009.
(Via Ars)
One-third of All Smartphone Sales were Prepaid in Q1
CNET:
“For consumers looking at prepaid phones today, value does not equate with finding phones that are cheap or obsolete,” NPD Vice President Stephen Baker said in a statement. “In fact, the Galaxy S2 and the iPhone 4S, two of the top five prepaid smartphone models in 2013, were among the top-selling phones overall just one year earlier.”
Something I created the other day: The Photography Industry Landscape
Taylor structures the entropy of the photo industry much better than myself.
How many of these boxes will roll up into the camera?
Above are the before and after shots of a fire near Camarillo, CA which started May 2nd and burned more than 24,000 acres.
The images above are falsely colored, to reflect the multiple spectrums of information being captured:
The Landsat Data Continuity Mission (LDCM), the newest Landsat satellite, passed over the Springs Fire on May 4, 2013. In the false-color images above from LDCM’s Operational Land Imager (OLI), unburned vegetation appears dark green. Burned areas are red, and the most severely burned areas are generally the darkest. Actively growing farmland is light green; plowed fields are brown. Buildings and roads are gray. Note that the image is rotated so that north is to the right.
Can’t wait for such augmented vision technologies to trickle down into consumer cameras and smartphones. (Via NASA)
Why the Camera Market is the Most Exciting Market to Watch Today
When you plonk on the viewfinder and a zoom lens, petite mirror less cameras approach SLR sizes. Can someone explain why one would buy this for $1450 rather than picking up a low end Canon or Nikon DLSR, with a significantly larger sensor and selection of lenses? And if you remove the viewfinder and drop in a fixed focus lens to keep the size down, why not an truly pocketable Sony RX100 for $600?
Many remark that mirrorless feels like the future; it’s a nascent category that doesn’t fit cleanly between increasingly capable point and shoots and comically capable cheap DSLRs. But it’s not truly disruptive. Rather than rendering an entire product category obsolete it sits more like a wedge between point and shoots and DSLRs attempting to squeeze out either. It’s not an iPad. It’s not an iPhone. At some point it will mature, and some of the bets the line is assuming are smart: at some point we won’t have mechanical mirrors flipping up and down in cameras and sensors will be large, cheap, and sensitive enough to put large performance in smaller bodies.
But while I agree with these bets, I don’t think mirrorless is going to win. In the last few months point and shoot cameras have been presenting an alternate future. The Sony RX100 puts an one inch sensor in a actually pocket size body and retails for about $600. The Ricoh GR sports an DSLR equivalent sensor in an even smaller frame (albeit with a fixed lens) for $800. In two to three years these capabilities will trickle below the $500 line and start ending up in casual shooters’ hands (the one’s not satisfied by smartphones, which will not be a majority).
Between smartphones which challenge point and shoots, point and shoots which challenge DSLRs, and mirrorless cameras challenging everyone in the room, the camera space is my new favorite consumer tech sector to watch. It resembles the pre-iPhone smartphone/featurephone market. The boundaries are unclear and the underlying technology is barely being used to it’s consumer potential. The interfaces are ugly, the exterior design is just starting to be considered, and ubiquitous connectivity is starting to become a given. The market is ripe for disruption and there’s no shortage of entrants.
(Photo via Digital Photography Review)
“ Adobe says it plans to focus all of its software development efforts on its Creative Cloud product from here on out. The Creative Suite (CS) is being rebranded to Creative Cloud (CC) as part of this shift. In other words, the Creative Suite line is coming to an end, and Creative Suite 6 will be the last in the series. Gone are the days in which you purchase a boxed copy of Adobe software.”
Quite a big change: Boxed Software → Owned Software → Subscription Software.
And $20 a month is a great price point.
My Gadgets by eBay is a really smart idea: GDGT with pricing. (by ebay)
Instagram is adding photo tagging, beginning it’s alignment with Facebook and diverting from the app’s straightforward, subtle nature.
