Epson’s 3D display glasses, the Moverio BT-100 have been floating around as a development platform for a couple years, and APX Labs is the latest to hack the headset. APX Labs is a software firm best known for creating Terminator Vision augmented reality tech for the US military, and it decided to use the BT-100 as a vehicle to develop and showcase a smart glasses platform it’s built to work for both business and consumer applications. In order to get the functionality it needed, APX grafted a 5 megapixel camera, mic and a full suite of motion sensors to provide nine-axis head tracking onto a Moverio headset.
Gallery: Epson Moverio BT-100 APX Labs smart glasses mod
All that gear is shoved into a 3D-printed module and attached to the BT-100 to turn it into a pair of smart glasses. In addition to the cameras and sensors, APX also hacked an Epson daughter board onto the Moverio’s controller to allow an HDMI video feed from a smartphone to be shown on the displays. This result? A system that understands where you are, what you’re seeing and hearing and a UI that allows users to glean information from the world around them using voice commands and head gestures. That should sound familiar to fans of Google Glass, but by using Epson’s binocular displays, these smart glasses can convey depth in a way Mountain View’s monocle cannot. (Not to mention that Glass doesn’t even do AR apps… yet). The hardware we got to see was a crude prototype built for demo purposes only, but the software platform shows promise and Epson’s got a version two Moverio headset in the works — so perhaps you can see a bit of the future of smart glasses in the video after the break.
Filed under: Displays, Wearables
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One of the hacks at Disrupt NY’s Hackathon this year employed hardware startup Leap Motion’s new 3D gesture controller, which unfortunately just ran into a delay. Leap Motion’s issues aside, this project, the combined effort of Chao Huang, Cedrich Pinson and Jorge Martinez, brings a Facebook Home-style experience to the desktop.
With “Leap in Time,” Leap Motion is used to navigate through a Facebook timeline via hand gestures that are intended to be as natural and intuitive as possible. You swipe left and right to go through photos and posts, and there’s inertia built-in to make it feel even more immersive. Then there’s a motion to pause and focus on a particular piece of content, with a palm outward gesture, and you can simply make a thumbs up to like a post.
Working with the Leap Motion was fairly simple, the team said, but does seem to experience difficulty with some environment issues like changing lighting conditions. It’s also crucial to maker sure that the Leap Motion app you’re building is cued to pay attention to certain things at certain times and to ignore specific motions in different settings. You have to cue the app to not pay attention to sideways hand waving when you want it to be able to recognize the thumbs up, for instance.
The hack was surprisingly smooth given that it was built in fewer than 24 hours, and Huang said there’s plenty more they could do given more time, but they wanted to focus on what they considered the core Facebook experience. The project is also reminiscent of a recent concept design making the rounds of a Facebook Home app for Windows 8.
Leap in Time is a simple enough implementation of Leap Motion, but it does act as a pretty solid example of how gesture control might actually work well for navigating apps and software that we use every day. I know that Leap Motion is eager to get as much software as possible into Airspace, the app store for the controller, but this team said they weren’t sure whether they’d actually pursue this any further.
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Faceshift is a new motion capture utility that does an impressive job of replicating facial movements with barely any noticeable delay. The technology relies on Microsoft’s ever-capable Kinect camera to pull in the 3D data it needs to mirror your expressions, though Faceshift’s creators have done an admirable job refining the device’s face recognition capabilities. Seeing even the most slight movements replicated by an on-screen avatar brings to mind the top-notch motion capture we’ve seen in the video game industry in recent years, led most notably by LA Noire.
And gaming is an area where Faceshift could present new opportunities to developers. An SDK targeted at animators and game creators has been released, though it wouldn’t…
2012 © Robotics and Sensor Networks Group, The University of Calgary. Visit us @ www.ucalgary.ca/sensenet
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This week, I tested Haiku Deck, a free app from Seattle-based Giant Thinkwell Inc. that has the potential to shake up the way presentations are made and shared. It works on Apple’s iPad, a device most people wouldn’t instinctively reach for when creating a presentation. Haiku Deck is named after the three-line, 17-syllable, Japanese poem, and like a haiku, it intends to create something beautiful and enjoyable while staying simple. The app can make all sorts of slide shows, from committee presentations to wedding photos.
Though the app is limited to iPads now, by the end of this year, Giant Thinkwell will introduce a Haiku Deck app for tablets running Google’s Android operating system. And this isn’t the first app to introduce presentation-making on the iPad; Apple’s Keynote app, for example, does this, but costs $ 10 and is much more complex than Haiku Deck.
Simplicity rules in this app. Each slide in a Haiku Deck can have no more than two lines of text, though these lines can be arranged in various layouts. Each slide contains a single full-bleed photo associated with its text. The app offers image suggestions that might best represent keywords in the slide. Images are pulled from over 35 million photos in the legally shareable content site, Creative Commons, using a Haiku Deck algorithm. If you prefer, photos can be pulled in from your iPad, or from networks like Facebook, Instagram, Flickr and Picasa.
Photos are automatically suggested according to keywords in Haiku Deck slide shows.
Themes are applied to slide shows in one step, simultaneously changing all slides’ font styles and sizes. Themes are limited to five free ones that come with the app and 11 Premium themes that are available for $ 1.99 apiece. In 20 minutes, I created a slide show about Haiku Deck using the free Cinematic theme.
I had a blast using Haiku Deck and often did so while watching TV with my iPad on my lap. I made a few decks and I was surprised by how simple they were to put together. Friends who saw them thought I took much more time to make them, considering how professional they looked, and were surprised to hear I made them using just an iPad. I shared my work with others using a link people could click on to play the slide show with any Internet-connected device. I played them on Macs, Windows PCs, iPads, iPhones, Android phones and BlackBerrys.
After creating a slide show about getting people involved in a committee that I lead, I compared it with a slide show I made using photos from a Labor Day weekend trip I took to Charlottesville, Va. Haiku Deck was really useful in the committee presentation, where I had no photos of my own to draw from. With that presentation, it prompted me to pull more abstract, clever images to illustrate my points, like a photo of an acrobat for a slide that said, “Participate in events” and an image of people diving into a lake for a slide that said, “How can you dive in?”
But even when I used Haiku Deck to make a deck of my trip to Charlottesville, the app’s smart suggestions of photos that might go with keywords in my slides were entertaining to look at and I used several photos from Creative Commons to supplement images I didn’t have. For example, one night we wandered the University of Virginia campus, but I didn’t take any photos that came out well in the dark. Haiku Deck suggested a huge list of images related to the keyword “UVA,” and I typed “night” into the search box to get more specific images. After a while, I did this often to find the right photo.
From the iPad app, I could email decks, share them on Facebook or Twitter or export them as PowerPoint presentations. After looking at a Haiku Deck on the Web, people can download it as a PDF; this feature will eventually also be available on the iPad app. And with a Haiku Deck account, I could make my slide show public, private or restricted, meaning only people who got the URL could see it.
There are downsides to Haiku Deck and Giant Thinkwell is working on fixing some of them. These include adding the ability to play music with slides and extra layout and text options. It will soon add the ability to make two versions of the same slide shows using different themes. The company also plans to add presenter notes.
I also noticed that in Edit mode, where the slides appear in a small tray at the bottom of the screen for easy rearrangement, I couldn’t see the text on slides, which got confusing as I rearranged similar images from my trip to Charlottesville. The company said this was a design choice to keep the interface uncluttered.
If you want to make a presentation that’s enjoyable to look at and complemented with images you might not have, Haiku Deck is a smart app that makes beautiful slide shows in no time and makes your iPad a more productive tool.
Email katie.boehret@wsj.com.
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Take one look at the upcoming 3D stop motion film ParaNorman and it’s easy to see that moviegoers are in for some stunning visuals come August 17th. Once you realize the contribution of 3D printing to the film’s creation, however, you’re likely to appreciate the movie on an entirely new level. In order to portray a wide array of emotions on the faces of the film’s 62 characters, animation studio LAIKA tapped 3D Systems and their ZPrinter 650 to generate over 31,000 individual facial parts for inclusion in the production — talk about working overtime. According to Brian McLean of LAIKA, “By using a color 3D printer we were not only able to push facial performance to new levels, but we were also able to achieve a level of detail and subtlety in characters’ faces that a few short years ago would have seemed impossible.” If you’ve yet to catch a preview of ParaNorman, just hop the break to see some of the printed handiwork.
Filed under: Misc. Gadgets, Home Entertainment, Meta
Stop motion animated film ParaNorman taps 3D printers to create 31,000 unique facial features originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 08 Aug 2012 23:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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This is a Mario themed stop-motion animation made from 7,000 Post-It’s and a ton of free time that could have been used doing anything else. If it were me? Sleeping. Probably in a running shower. “That’s dangerous.” THAT’S HOW I LIVE MY LIFE. But seriously: please don’t tell my mom, she worries about me enough.
Hit the jump for the video.
This is a Mario themed stop-motion animation made from 7,000 Post-It’s and a ton of free time that could have been used doing anything else. If it were me? Sleeping. Probably in a running shower. “That’s dangerous.” THAT’S HOW I LIVE MY LIFE. But seriously: please don’t tell my mom, she worries about me enough.
Hit the jump for the video.
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