I am very excited about the forthcoming Windows 8 and I have been playing around with it since the Developer Preview was released.
We have a big touchscreen in the office here so it is perfect for the Metro UI, but I have to say that the mouse interaction on a laptop without a touchscreen is very average.
Along came Tobii and at first you think it is just another gimmick, but everybody on the net who has actually tried it is blown away by it.
Tobii comes with an eye control device, a rectangular glass obilisk that is attached to the hinge of the laptop. It requires a personal calibration and off you go. It also controls all the swipe gestures available in Windows 8.
By now we all experienced kinect one way or another and I personally really enjoy my kinect at home.
Kinect has been talked and hacked a lot and most people can see much more in it than just a game controller.
Looks like MS Research is thinking the same thing and in the video below they are showing off some cool things, like head tracking, glasses free 3D, gesture based interfaces and more.
As we all know from past experiences, these may or may not happen, but right now they are pretty cool.
Amnesia Razorfish today announced the launch of Amnesia Connect – a software breakthrough, which allows instant and seamless sharing and transfer of any content such as photos, music or embedded apps between multiple handheld devices using a Microsoft Surface table using a single gesture.
Amnesia Razorfish Connect has been developed entirely in-house at Amnesia Razorfish by the creative and emerging technology teams.
Following months of research and development, Amnesia Razorfish has replaced the typical ‘send and receive’ interface with a more natural ‘gesture-based’ interface. A smartphone owner can now move their content freely between two devices by simply dragging content off their phone onto a Microsoft Surface Table and back onto another device instantly.
Amnesia Razorfish Founder and Executive Creative Director Iain McDonald said: “The previous barriers which stood in the way of getting content on or off your phone have been completely removed with this software.
“In the past device integration like this has been mainly confined to Hollywood movies or smoke and mirror demos, so we set ourselves the challenge of making it real.
“It took a while to crack, but the result speaks for itself – all the buttons are gone and sharing content is now completely instinctive. In a world where smartphones are becoming omnipresent, this kind of software opens another world of ideas for brands.”
The smartphone user can transfer new free or commercial content from the table by dragging it directly to their phone with a single swipe – then before full transfer takes place, a preview instantly visible as a live motion tracked ‘lens preview’ through the phone display – similar to an X-ray through to the table.
For example, in less than a few seconds a photo can be taken on one device and dragged effortlessly onto the Surface table and then directly onto another device running on Amnesia Connect software.
“The new software promises a range of new possibilities for the retail and hospitality industries in particular. In the near future we envisage a Smartphone user being to complete commercial transactions for both physical and digital content,” McDonald said.
The Amnesia Connect software works with all Apple IOS devices and is being further developed to work seamlessly with Android, Windows Phone and BlackBerry Smartphones.
Amnesia Razorfish Connect utilises a range of technologies including Wi-Fi, proximity detection, unique ID and phone accelerometer, depending on the type of phone and location.
For in-store transactions, NFC (Near-Field-Communications) has been proposed as one of several possibilities for payment transactions, although a pre-authenticated user account with credit card details could also be used.
Amnesia Connect has also been developed to work with the new Microsoft Surface 2.0 table, that was announced at the 2011 International Consumer Electronics Show.
Amnesia Razorfish Managing Director Michael Buckley said that Amnesia Connect is available immediately for the agency’s clients to utilise in projects and added existing clients that had seen the application were ‘very excited’.
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As usual everybody seems to be waiting to announce their new products at CES and this year hasn’t been any different.
And again we are overwhelmed with information from everyone and blinded by all the new shiny products. I will have to get a 2nd job to be able to afford all the new gadgets I want now.
So below is a list of my favourites from the CES this year that I found on different blogs around the internets (maybe one day I will be able to go there in person)
So here I will be showing you tablets, 3D stuff, Microsoft hardware and some other cool stuff I came across
I have to start this post with a whinge, I pre-ordered Xbox Kinect from JBHifi. When I pre-order something I do expect it to get to me on the day it gets released or at least the day after. We finally got our Kinect here at the office after it was already released for over a week. I could have just walked down the street and picked on up.
but that is not what I want to talk about here. It is all setup in our reception area and we already had a lot of people trying it out and loving it.
There are some very smart people out there and it only took 3 hours before the Kinect was hacked and an open source driver was created so you can use it on your PC, a little later on your Linux box and then on your Mac.
and what are people doing with it? They are creating some awesome things. Here is a small collection of the things I came across:
Best interactive Puppet
Have your own lightsaber
Capture yourself in 3D
same guy in 3D with a little awesome surprise at 0:53 – watch it it’s worth it
The issue: traversing a busy urban street in a 360-degree photographic bubble can be disorienting, especially when searching for a specific address or business
The solution: Microsoft Street Slide, developed by MS Research. Zoom out of your panoramic bubble and the street is presented as a dynamic, multi-perspective "strip" giving you an instant visual summary of the surroundings.
Supposedly Microsoft is already working on taking Street Slide mobile with an iPhone port, and probably a version for the upcoming Windows Phone 7 series.
Unfortunately, don’t expect this to be released anytime soon as the team has only processed about 2400 panoramas so far covering just 4 kilometers of streets.
Swiss company Atracsys sold its tech knowhow to Sony and the company is today informing the world that its atracTable is ready for mass production and commercialization this June.
The system is a dual camera-based system that tracks and analyzes body movements in three dimensions, in real-time. Initially designed for use with a computer in a sterile operating theater, the interface not only notices subtle changes in the position of your body, arm, hand, or finger position, but it’s also determine rough age, sex, or facial expression of the user.
of course nobody knows a price yet, but they promise a high-contrast, Full HD screen, which is already better than the surface table from MS.
It will be able to communicate with your mobile devices or respond to motion input, which is picked up by a pair of Sony camcorders.
Microsoft today launched its new series of touchscreen mobile smartphones called Kin.
There is a 4GB and an 8GB version with 5 and 8 Megapixel cameras with flash, capable of HD video and both models focus heavily on all your social networks, e.g. Twitter and facebook.
It seems that these phones are targeted at 18 to 35 year olds.
check out the video here
not the phone I am going to go for, but impressive to see how MS is putting all its eggs into social networking.
Amnesia Razorfish is a digital marketing agency headquartered in Sydney, Australia. It is the Australian arm of Razorfish, one of the largest digital agencies in the world.
We live and breathe digital and provide a range of services from strategy, media, creative, tech, social media, analytics and more.
