philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Microsoft’s “3-D Audio” Gives Virtual Objects a Voice

[Philip Lelyveld comment: this combines two old (40 years?) technologies to create a new experience.]

Tashev says he is now working to improve the capture system and make it smooth and speedy enough to be something a person with a Kinect camera might be able to do at home.

Mark Billinghurst, a professor and leader of the Human Interface Lab at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, says that the approach developed by Microsoft could have a broad impact if the scanning process can be made practical enough. And being able to deploy 3-D audio tricks on voices, notifications, and sounds in games on smartphone headsets or devices like Google Glass could make them easier to interact with, he says.

See the full story here: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/527826/microsofts-3-d-audio-gives-virtual-objects-a-voice/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20140605

Data Mining Reveals the Factors Driving the Price of Bitcoins

Kristoufek says that while speculation has played an important role in the rise of Bitcoin, the data clearly indicates that more conventional factors have been important too. These include the use of bitcoins in trade, the supply of the currency and its price level, whether seemingly over or undervalued.

At the same time, the rise in the price of bitcoins has generated significant interest in the process of bitcoin mining itself. This has persuaded people to invest their own computing power in mining bitcoins for profit. That too has had an effect on the price, says Kristoufek.

Interestingly, this effect has become less pronounced more recently because of the specialized and expensive computing hardware that has become necessary to compete in the mining market.

And finally, Kristoufek says there is good evidence that the price of bitcoins has been driven by speculation, both in the long run and in short term rises and falls. “During the episodes of explosive prices, the [speculative] interest drives the prices further up, and during rapid declines, it pushes them further down,” he says.

His analysis also found no evidence that investors use Bitcoin as a safe haven like gold.

See the full story here: http://www.technologyreview.com/view/527906/data-mining-reveals-the-factors-driving-the-price-of-bitcoins/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20140605

Surviving Technology Extinction

There are a couple of indicators of true openness:

• Interoperability: Can the solution be run with any standards-based technology (e.g., browser, app server, etc.)? If you want to move hosting from, say, AWS to Rackspace, what does this entail?
• Active contributors: Look for companies that have committed some significant portion of their technology to the open-source community. This means more than just lobbing code into SourceForge. The real sign is a community of active contributors. For example, how many people have made contributions (features, bug fixes, etc.) to the company’s technology on collaborative development sites like GitHub?

Vendors for whom openness is a part of the DNA offer customers more than just lowered risk of lock-in. There is also the ubiquity of skilled resources, as well as the likelihood of a broader ecosystem. Openness and ecosystems go hand in hand.

See the full story here: http://recode.net/2014/06/04/surviving-technology-extinction/

A Cleaner, Cheaper Way to Make Metals

While Infinium’s approach can be used to produce other metals, including magnesium and aluminum, the company is starting with rare earths because they fetch much higher prices. Its first customer is the U.S. government, which needs rare earth metals for its stockpile of strategically valuable materials. Rare earth ore is mined in just a few places in the world, and high costs and environmental challenges have prevented companies from processing rare earth ore to make metals domestically.

The key advance for Infinium was developing alternative molten salts that don’t react with the zirconium oxide, so that it can last long enough to be practical.

Finding an alternative to carbon has long been the “dream” of the metals industry, says Donald Sadoway, a professor of materials science at MIT who is not involved with the company. “I believe [Infinium’s] technology is sound. It’s real,” he says. Whether the company succeeds “is all about the economics,” he says. “No one cares about the flow chart for the process. You care about the prices. If it produces a good metal at a lower cost, people will be interested.”

Read the full story here: http://www.technologyreview.com/news/527526/a-cleaner-cheaper-way-to-make-metals/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20140604

New Technologies to Help Seniors Age in Place

Some researchers are studying how to adapt radar technology, which has been used for years to catch highway speeders and in weather forecasting, to applications for assisted living. Others are testing the 3-D sensors used in gaming systems like the Xbox to develop nonintrusive alert systems.

The goal with the elderly is to detect a fall without disturbing them unless they have just fallen. "The whole idea is you cannot have visual access to inside," says Moeness Amin, director of the Center for Advanced Communications at Villanova University.

Read the full story here: http://online.wsj.com/articles/new-technologies-to-help-seniors-age-in-place-1401749932

New Chip to Bring Holograms to Smartphones

One chipset, small enough to fit into a smartphone, is capable of projecting video on a surface with a 48-inch diagonal. A patchwork of chips, laid together, can form far larger and more complex images. The first iteration of the chip, which is scheduled to begin shipping next year, will only project 2-D videos, but the next version, expected to follow soon after will feature holographic capability, according to Ostendo's chief executive and founder, Hussein S. El-Ghoroury.

During a recent test reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, Ostendo showed a working prototype: a set of six chips laid together that beamed a 3-D image of green dice spinning in the air. The image and motion appeared consistent, irrespective of the position of the viewer.

According to Ramesh Raskar, an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is working on 3-D displays for MIT's Media Lab, Ostendo's advantage and the key to its 3-D capability is its resolution. The Retina display on Apple Inc.'siPhone, for example, has about 300 dots per inch, Ostendo's chips are at about 5,000 dots per inch.

Ostendo, which says it has several opportunities with major handset manufacturers, expects the first 2-D projector unit to be in the hands of consumers before the summer of 2015. With a lens attached, it will be less than 0.5 cubic centimeters, roughly the size of the camera in the iPhone. It also expects to begin manufacturing the second version of the chip, with 3-D capability, in the second half of 2015. The cost to the consumer should be about $30 a chip, Ostendo estimates.

See the full story here: http://online.wsj.com/articles/new-chip-to-bring-holograms-to-smartphones-1401752938#printMode

Watch the video of the hologram here: http://stream.wsj.com/story/world-stream/SS-2-44156/SS-2-546759/?mod=wsj_streaming_world-stream

ESPN Opens New Digital Center

“The group working on DC-2 was given a simple assignment,” said Jodi Markley, senior vice president of operations for ESPN. “Design and build technology that hadn’t been built yet, create studio environments with unlimited capabilities for content creation, make it a very comfortable place for our employees to work, and make it green. This facility far exceeds that original assignment. In fact, DC-2 is the most technically sophisticated media facility in the United States.”

Much of the planning and new technology that went into DC-2 was based on close consultation with the network’s employees and ESPN President John Skipper highlighted the work of Chuck Pagano, the network’s CTO, who played a key role in designing the new facility. Pagano, who started with ESPN before it even began broadcasting in 1979, will be retiring in June.

See the full story here: http://www.c2meworld.com/creation/espn-opens-new-digital-center/

The FCC may consider a stricter definition of broadband in the Netflix age

The FCC soon intends to solicit public comments on whether broadband should be redefined as 10 Mbps and up, or even as high as 25 Mbps and up, according to an agency official who asked not to be named because the draft request was not yet public. The new threshold would likely increase the number of people in the United States that statistically lack broadband, which in 2012 amounted to 6 percent of the population.

See the full post here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/05/30/the-fcc-may-consider-a-stricter-definition-of-broadband-in-the-netflix-age/

Samsung is working with Oculus on a media-focused VR headset

Samsung wants to be first to market with a virtual reality headset, but it doesn't want to invest the time and money that Oculus and Sony are. Oculus VR wants to create a high-quality virtual reality headset specifically for gaming, and it doesn't want to rush one out. And thus, a convenient partnership is born between the two companies: Samsung makes the OLED screens that Oculus needs for its final product; Oculus makes the software that Samsung needs for its upcoming headset.

We're told by sources close to both companies that Samsung's using an early form ofOculus' mobile SDK -- an exclusive use as part of the deal -- developed in part by John Carmack. We were also told that the OLED screens that Oculus is getting as part of the deal are of higher resolution than 1080p, and that the screens will also be used in at least some of Samsung's next flagship phones. And this is where things get weird.

Rather than having its own screen, Samsung's VR headset uses your phone directly. It plugs in using an existing port on your phone (think: micro-USB) and becomes the screen. The headset itself has built-in sensors -- an accelerometer at the very least -- so any motion-tracking functionality is offloaded from your phone's processor.

Wait! Before you write it off forever as "one of those headsets that straps your phone to your face," we're told there are some pretty great benefits to using a mobile device. For one, the rear-facing camera allows for video passthrough. That's to say, "You can see through the phone using the rear camera, which shows a video feed of the outside world to your eyes." Pretty intense sounding, but a smart addition for making long-term use more realistic. While the latency is too great to make augmented reality applications possible, it's a convenient way to pause whatever you're doing and, say, have a sip of a tasty beverage.

Finally, expect Samsung to tout this device as a media player as well.

Oculus VR and Samsung declined to comment for this story.

See the full story here: http://www.engadget.com/2014/05/30/samsung-oculus-partnership/

The past, present, and future of in-car infotainment

Speech recognition for vehicles has been in development for a while now, with companies like IBM andMicrosoft, and more recently Apple and Google, helping out. Apple's Siri in particular is popular, although Audi seems to be forging a closer relationship with Google. And increasingly, cars are being designed with their own integrated connectivity rather than relying on a customer's device. Chrysler announced in-car EVDO hotspots back in 2008. And both Audi and Chevrolet have introduced mobile data to company products, each appearing to buck industry trends of debuting these sorts of features in range-topping supersedans.

As autonomous cars become more of an everyday reality, it’s probable that we’ll see drivers being able to enjoy more visually dependent entertainment, but even that can only happen with adequate safeguards to prevent someone from binge-watching Breaking Bad right into a pileup. And speaking of driver line-of-sight, expect to see developments in heads-up displays (HUDs), too. Right now, some Chevrolets and BMWs have HUDs, but they’re small and only display salient information like speed. Google believes that Glass can display text to people driving without it being distracting, and if they’re right, presumably that can be adapted for a more panoramic view out of a windscreen. As you'd expect, this may require some rigorous study before lawmakers can be persuaded it’s safe to unleash such an experience on our roads.

See the full story here: http://arstechnica.com/cars/2014/06/the-past-present-and-future-of-in-car-infotainment/2/