Netizen

Tuesday, October 07, 2014

RoomAlive

English: The Xbox console with the S controller, made by Microsoft. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I can see this having major educational uses. But it still feels version 1.0 with a long way to go. This will make new kinds of games possible. This will also get used by the porn industry. This could be used to create exotic backgrounds for parties you might want to throw.

Microsoft’s ‘RoomAlive’ transforms any room into a giant Xbox game

Relive’s video projectors and Kinect combination is far too costly and large for living rooms right now, but Microsoft is imagining a future where this technology will be smaller and low-cost...... "There’s still lots to explore with RoomAlive as a gaming platform," explain’s a Microsoft Research spokesperson. "We envision a future where games can use physical objects as part of the game."

RoomAlive: Magical Experiences Enabled by Scalable, Adaptive Projector Camera Units

Users can touch, shoot, stomp, dodge and steer projected content that seamlessly co-exists with their existing physical environment. ..... focuses on interaction, and the new kinds of games that we can create with interactive projection mapping. RoomAlive looks farther into the future of projection mapping, and asks what new experiences will we have in the next few years? ...... The projector is used for display and the Kinect is used for tracking. Normally video projectors are used to display PowerPoint presentations on flat screens. RoomAlive uses cheap commodity video projectors to animate every square inch of your living room, this technique is known as projection mapping.

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Microsoft's RoomAlive turns your walls into a life-sized interactive Xbox game

Monday, October 06, 2014

Universal Bill Of Rights For Netizens

A netizen being defined as any human being with internet access. It is past due time to put together a universal bill of rights for netizens. There are too many privacy and security issues. Technology is not enough of a solution. There has to be a political statement.

My Klout Score

I just got an email from Klout that says my Klout score went up. Is 50 good? I signed up for Klout like I signed up for LinkedIn. I signed up because it showed up in the news. I signed up and forgot about it. I have rediscovered LinkedIn in the recent years. But Klout I have not dusted off yet.

I guess I am in the top 20% with a score of 50. But that's not good, is it? Top 5% would be nice.

Friday, October 03, 2014

Food And Cooking Are Fair Game For Innovation

Fun With Food

the “scientific identification and exploration of deliciousness.” ...... Insects are, of course, the miracle protein of the future: no one asking how we will feed the world can avoid talking about them. ...... grasshoppers, beetles, bees, crickets, and other insects that have served as food. ...... “Bee larvae could be the caviar of insects” and “Exoskeletons can be useful for crunch—for instance, in a roasted grasshopper.” ..... The team at the lab happily spends days developing granola with bee larvae and honey on oats and various seeds. Bee larvae, Evans notes enthusiastically, are half protein and 20 percent mono- and polyunsaturated fat (the good kind), with “loads of vitamins and minerals.” And insects might be genetically modified to be even higher in protein and what are thought to be beneficial lipids. ..... The immediate agricultural future of insects is in animal feed: such a diet is certainly better suited for chickens, who peck at insects, than the fish meal they’re given now. ...... the team wields a “spice rack of microbes” to ferment every kind of grain and fruit. The results appear in the grasshopper garum, that surrogate chocolate cake, and the food-friendly beers that, along with insects, are the main funded project at the lab. ...... Redzepi principles: going into a field, kicking an anthill, using pieces of bread to absorb the formic acid ants emit, and using that to add lemony notes to a stew—a trick they learned from a longtime forager. ..... the oak moss and peach base of one of the 20th century’s most enduring fragrances, Mitsuoko, and sprayed nebulized spruce tincture over a granita of peach juice, crystallized peach skins, and sheep’s-milk frozen yogurt, accompanied by crispy oak moss, to make what he calls a “magical, ethereal dessert.” ...... Much of this is play, blending science and cooking techniques with anthropology, sociology, and cultural history. ..... the new generations of chefs .... Whatever equipment fads come and go, chefs will always be in search of new flavors based on nature. ...... a national chapter of Slow Food ..... One late afternoon, following a day of checking on Aspergillae and the mummified deer leg, he was hand-chopping sheep’s heart, lung, stomach, liver, kidney, tongue, and suet and blending the result with oats, foraged herbs, and a good dousing of whiskey before stuffing it all into the heavy, enormous rumen, which had to be lifted into a pot—an all-hands-on-deck process that left everyone smelling strongly of sheep offal.

Smartphone Lenses That Move Sideways

Deutsch: Prinzip eines Zoom-Objektivs, stark vereinfacht. Die einzelne Linse ganz links stellt das Grundobjektiv dar. Die drei weiteren Linsen bilden gemeinsam ein afokales System. Selbst erstellt mit POVRAY 3.5 unter Verwendung freier Skripte und der frei verfügbaren Version von LINOS Photonics WinLens 4.3, Quellcode beim Uploader wegen eines Festplattenchrashs leider nicht mehr in einer funktionierenden Version vorhanden. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I probably use my phone as a camera more than anything else. Therefore I am all ears when something like this shows up in the news. I am not too hungry for more megapixels. But the lack of meaningful optical zoom has been a major problem from day one. It has been in the "God, give me the wisdom to accept things I can not change" category.

Lenses That Move Sideways Could Improve Smartphone Snaps

To pack a camera-quality optical zoom into a smartphone ...... For now, the DyanOptics lens prototypes can magnify objects up to three times larger than they really are. Chan says the company expects to magnify objects up to five or six times ..... Chan is already thinking beyond the smartphone. She believes the technology could find a home in the cameras strapped to drones or robots. ..... there are cameras everywhere