This looks like some 3D rendering of a fantastic alien matter that can't possibly exist on Earth. But, being the amazing planet we live in, it is actually a real thing: "A bismuth crystal illustrating the many iridescent refraction hues of its oxide surface." We live in a wonderful world, people.
Source: http://gizmodo.com/these-fish-look-like-theyre-casting-spells-1628491822
When you think about mechanisms that animals use to avoid becoming dinner, clever adaptations like poisons or pointy spikes come to mind. But the Ostracod, a type of zooplankton, uses something a little more magical.
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2014/08/30/dell-curved-monitor-u3415w/
What good is having an ultra-powerful PC if you're still connecting it to a dusty old monitor? We reckon doing so would be pretty silly. Good thing that alongside the new Alienware Area 51, Dell's pulled the curtain back on its 34-inch Ultrasharp U3415W display then. It boasts a wider-than-widescreen 21:9 aspect ratio that's paired with 3,440 x 1,440 lines of resolution (just under 4K's 3,840 x 2,160) and a curved screen. Dell says that the monitor's wide field of view mated with its curves will give gamers a leg up on the competition because, compared to flat monitors, less eye movement is needed to take advantage of the player's peripheral vision. Intrigued to test that claim? You can do so come this December. We're hoping that regardless of size, though, a curved screen doesn't necessarily equate to an expensive screen -- Dell hasn't announced pricing for these displays just yet.
Filed under: Desktops, Gaming, Home Entertainment, HD, Dell
The biggest names in technology — Apple, Samsung, and Google, among others — will unveil their next-generation smartphones starting in September. So before the new smartphone season officially begins, we thought it’d be interesting to take a look at the current landscape and see where it’s moving.
Based on company data charted for us by Business Insider Intelligence, Samsung is the current market leader in terms of smartphone shipments, thanks to the growth of Android, while Apple’s market share has started to shrink, giving away some of its lead to emerging low-end smartphones from LG, Huawei, and Xiaomi, in particular. Still, as the competition heats up thanks to the newest cheap handsets coming out of China, Samsung and Apple maintain strong positioning as they head into the fall quarter and ever-important holiday season.
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Built into the app is a feature called Cinema, which acts as a gyroscope that continuously crops the external frame around an anchored a central image. The edges of the fixed white frame never cross the warped, shaky frame, meaning when the images are collated together, all of the effects of camera shake are removed:
Instagram yesterday outlined how this neat algorithm works. The gyroscopic samples and frames are first fed into a stabilizer to generate a new set of camera orientations as an output. Each input frame is changed by the IGTrackStabilizer until it is in the right camera orientation.
Cinema also has an adaptive zoom feature, which picks the zoom of the camera based on how shaky the recorded video is. If there is a small amount of shake, the camera will zoom in more - as not much room is needed to counteract the shake. If there is a lot of shake, the camera will zoom in less, as a lot of space will be needed to make sure the shake doesn't mar the picture in the central frame.
The end product is smooth video playback, regardless of whether you are able to hold a camera steady or not.
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2014/08/27/samsung-gear-s-3g/
Samsung is taking the wraps off of yet another new smartwatch, but the Gear S (not Solo) has a twist: there's a 3G modem inside. While it may not be especially fast, that means that even when outside the range of a Bluetooth-connected phone or WiFi, it can still send and receive messages or make calls. It has a 2-inch AMOLED screen plus a dual-core 1GHz CPU inside along with GPS, heart rate and motion sensors, all powered by a 300mAh battery Samsung says can last up to two days. It runs Tizen instead of Android Wear, with pedestrian navigation available from from Nokia's HERE and support for Facebook. In the run up to IFA next week Samsung is also bringing the Gear Circle headset (yes, we also figured they'd save that name for a round watch) that pairs with a phone over Bluetooth, letting users hear notifications, use voice commands or listen to music through the earbuds.
Both devices will go on sale in October, although there's no word on a price for either. The Gear S is outfitted for all kinds of fitness tracking, either through Samsung's S Health or Nike+ Running, it's IP67 dust and water resistant, packs 4GB of storage and 512MB RAM. The Gear Circle has a magnetic clasp so it fits around your neck while not in use, a touch sensor and battery with up to 11 hours of talk time. So will either of these wearables break into our gear bag or wardrobe? We'll have a better idea next week after getting our wrists/necks on them during the IFA 2014 show in Berlin.
Filed under: Wearables, Mobile, Samsung
Source: Samsung
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2014/08/28/false-report-brings-swat-raid-on-gamer/
A Littleton, Colorado man named Jordan Mahewson was raided by a heavily armed SWAT team thanks to a false shooting and hostage report, and all the chaos was captured on a Twitch game stream (see below). During a Counter-Strike session, Jordan "Kootra" Mathewson -- a founder of The Creatures -- suddenly noticed things around him were amiss. "Uh oh. This isn't good. They're clearing rooms. What in the world, I think we're getting swatted," he says in the video. Luckily, Mathewson stayed calm throughout the ordeal and was released a short time later.
On top of invading his offices, police locked down several schools and businesses in the Littleton, Colorado area. Suffice to say, the situation was extremely dangerous, and the police chief said "we have real guns and real bullets, and there's potential there for some tragedy."
Sadly, Mathewson's ordeal isn't an isolated one: "swatting" is the act of calling in false reports to draw real SWAT teams to a target's house, and is often inflicted on rival gamers. As Vice News pointed out recently, the phenomenon is fairly new and can easily result in deaths, especially when malicious calls involve shots fired. There's no word yet on who perpetrated the hoax (despite one claim) but police said they'll prosecute whoever it was "to the fullest extent of the law."
A similar event occurred recently to Sony Online Entertainment head John Smedley. A flight he was on was diverted after a group known as "Lizard Squad" sent a Twitter message to American Airlines warning of (false) explosives on board. Like the "swatting" action above, real people were put in real danger because of these malicious pranks.
Filed under: Gaming
Via: Sky TV
Source: The Creatures (YouTube)
Source: http://gizmodo.com/the-bublcam-live-360-degree-video-with-no-blind-spots-1627041553
At first glance, the bublcam looks kind of like a Poké Ball, but it's actually an impressive HD camera capable of taking completely 360-degree panoramas, live. The spherical little wonder isn't just a fantasy; it works pretty damn well.
Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/why-apple-is-making-a-big-ipad-2014-8
For months, there have been rumblings throughout Apple's supply chain that the company is working on a new iPad with a larger screen. On Tuesday, those mushy rumors got a bit more credible when Bloomberg reported that Apple plans to launch a larger iPad with a 12.9-inch screen in early 2015.
For reference, the iPad Air has a 9.7-inch screen and the iPad Mini has a 7.85-inch screen. The top model of the MacBook Air has a 13-inch screen. So this new iPad will be a massive tablet, and something you likely wouldn't want to lug around everywhere you go like you can with a smartphone or the superthin iPad Air.
Others have tried making supersize tablets before. Toshiba's Android-powered Excite tablet, which came out in 2012, had a 13-inch screen. It was simply too big:
So, why would Apple want to create a giant iPad?
Let's do some sleuthing.
iPad sales are in decline. In the second quarter of this year, iPad unit sales were down 9% on a year-over-year basis, a trend that Apple seems to be having trouble turning around. This chart from Business Insider Intelligence sums it up pretty well:
There are several theories for why this is happening. Some people think the iPad upgrade cycle isn't as frequent as it is for iPhones. Whereas you may typically upgrade to a new iPhone every other year when your carrier contract is over, some think consumers are keeping iPads for three or four years before upgrading.
Another popular t! heory is that many people are realizing they don't even need an iPad in the first place, considering the MacBook/iPhone combination is more than adequate to get it all done. The MacBook is for productivity at your desk, while the iPhone helps you on the go with some fun apps, games, and social networks thrown in. The iPad is just a big iPhone, the theory goes, and therefore doesn't really justify the extra $400 or more you'd have to pay to use it.
It's the second theory that sounds like the most plausible culprit for the iPad's slump, and it's part of the reason why we've seen so many attempts recently at hybrid devices that try to merge the tablet with a laptop.
Microsoft's Surface Pro 3 is the best example of that. Since the device was first introduced, Microsoft has marketed the Surface Pro 3 as "the tablet that can replace your laptop." Snap in the special keyboard cover, and you have a full-featured PC. Snap it out, and you have a regular tablet for kicking back and having fun.
That's the promise, at least. But as just about every review of the Surface Pro 3 has said, the device fails to live up to that promise. The problem with the Surface is that it requires you to flip between two radically different interfaces: a traditional desktop mode, and a touch-enabled "modern" interface. It's clunky and confusing. Yes, the Surface Pro 3 inches us closer to that dreamy device that can do it all, but we're not there yet.
But that could be what Apple has in store for the 12.9-inch iPad. (Let's just call it the iPad Pro moving forward.) Think of it as a laptop that reimagines what laptops should be able to do. A "hybrid" like the Windows 8 devices out there wouldn't be the best description because Apple would likely never load two different inte! rfaces o nto one device.
What's more likely is that Apple implements a multitasking feature into its mobile operating system, iOS. In fact, we already know iOS 8, the next version of iOS, will allow such multitasking on the iPad. According to 9to5Mac's Mark Gurman, Apple will update iOS 8 a few months after its fall launch to allow split-screen multitasking. Others have found hidden code in iOS that shows Apple is experimenting with split-screen apps.
It's very similar to the way Windows 8 lets you run two touchscreen apps side by side. It could look something like this:
Throw in a clever keyboard cover, and you may be onto something.
Then there's the whole productivity problem. The common theme around iPads is that they're only good for the fun stuff like social networking and watching videos.
But the apps are getting better. Microsoft finally released Office for the iPad this spring, and it's really good. Apple has its own suite of office apps that come free with every iOS device. Google Docs on iOS now come as separate apps and are compatible with Microsoft Office files. Other startups like Quip are completely re-imagining what it means to get stuff done on a tablet.
Plus, more big companies will likely be snapping up iPads thanks to Apple's partnership with IBM. IBM will use its salesfo! rce to s ell iPads to its big enterprise customers and provide a lot of business apps with them.
Apple CEO Tim Cook himself recently told The Wall Street Journal that he's able to do 80% of his job on an iPad. In an interview with Re/code's Walt Mossberg on Tuesday, Cook called the disappointing iPad sales a "speed bump," implying that things will turn around.
With all the talk about Apple breaking into new categories (TV, smartwatches, and big-screen phones), it sounds like it's also gearing up to reinvent the tablet as a productivity tool. Apple could very well be working on the dream device we've been asking for, the best of a laptop and tablet in one.
SEE ALSO: The most exciting gadgets to look forward to in 2014
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When PC gaming juggernaut Valve announced its Steam Machines initiative in Fall 2013, it was unveiled as such:
"Entertainment is not a one-size-fits-all world. We want you to be able to choose the hardware that makes sense for you, so we are working with multiple partners to bring a variety of Steam gaming machines to market during 2014, all of them running SteamOS."
Not long after, at CES 2014, Valve revealed a full line of Steam Machines from 14 different companies. Chief among them was Alienware, Dell's gaming PC arm, which showed a teensy $550 box called the "Alpha." Alienware was a standout not just due to name recognition, but because the company proposed a launch window for its "game console". The Alpha won't ship with any of the promises of the Steam Machines initiative: no Steam OS and no Steam Controller. Valve's delayed both, but Alienware's pushing on nonetheless with a fall launch.
That's all to say one thing: While the Alpha is still a "Steam Machine" in size and horsepower, it isn't a Steam Machine. The Alienware Alpha is a weird gaming PC.
Alienware held an event last week in New York City to show off the Alpha. We were given time to play games on the system, sure, but the focus of the event was on the custom operating system that Alienware's built to get around the fact that Valve's initiative isn't ready.
According to Alienware, Valve president Gabe Newell sees the Alpha as the "ideal Steam Machine." It's hard to see how, at least at the moment: It runs Windows 8.1, it ships with an Xbox 360 wireless gamepad, and it requires a USB-based wireless dongle to make that gamepad function. Alpha is $550 -- $50 more than the most expensive new game console -- and it's lacking in the horsepower department. Which GPU is inside? A "custom" NVIDIA Maxwell GTX. How about processing? Handled by an Intel i3.
In so many words, the Alpha is roughly as powerful as the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, only it costs more and is nowhere near as accessible.
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2014/08/12/levitating-bluetooth-speaker/
We've seen levitating pens, levitating lamps, levitating loungers and even levitating fish -- now there's a Bluetooth speaker to add to the mix. OM Audio, maker of such respectable audio accessories as the Inearpeace earphones and Mantra speakers, has taken a bold leap into the world of novelty products with the OM/One. The compact sphere can be used with or without its magnetic base (which requires an AC adapter), and includes an integrated battery with up to 15 hours of continuous play. There's also a microphone on board, so you can use the OM/One as a speakerphone as well.
We had a chance to check out an early prototype, which you can see in action after the break. Sound quality was fine -- not fantastic, but on par with other compact Bluetooth speakers. You can improve the experience by adding a second OM/One, which pairs with the first to produce stereo audio. The levitating effect is interesting to look at, but it also reportedly helps produce better audio with a lower-power driver, since nearby objects won't absorb sound. You can pre-order it today in black, white or "disco ball" on OM's site for $179. OM reps expect to ship the first batch in December.
Filed under: Home Entertainment
Source: OM Audio
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2014/08/11/microsoft-research-project-turns-a-smartphone-camera-into-a-chea/
Microsoft's been awfully busy at this year's SIGGRAPH conference: <embers of the company's research division have already illustrated how they can interpret speech based on the vibrations of a potato chip bag and turn shaky camera footage into an experience that feels like flying. Look at the list of projects Microsofties have been working on long enough, though, and something of a theme appears: These folks are really into capturing motion, depth and object deformation with the help of some slightly specialized hardware.
Consider the work of researchers from Microsoft Research's Redmond and Cambridge outposts -- they figured out a way to turn a run-of-the-mill 2D camera like the one embedded in your phone or perched atop your monitor into an infrared camera usable for capturing depth data, sort of like a Kinect. The team made working depth sensors out of a tweaked Android smartphone and a Microsoft webcam, and both were able to track a user's hands and face with aplomb, making them awfully interesting (and relatively cheap) hacks for tinkerers who want to create and test gesture-centric projects without much hassle.
Yet another project saw a team of researchers develop their own RGB-depth camera out of off-the-shelf parts. Why? So they could figure out a way to meld it with software to capture 3D models of people and objects that deform, shift and shimmy in real-time. Imagine holding an inflatable ball in the palm of your hand -- it'd be a piece of cake for an RGBd camera to capture it and for modeling software to render it as a sphere. Now imagine squeezing that ball; imagine the bulges and depressions that take shape as your grip tightens. Between their camera and their software, these researchers have managed to create deformable models much faster than before; it might not be long before such objects wind up in your next frag session.
Filed under: Software, Microsoft
Source: Microsoft Research
Source: http://gizmodo.com/watch-how-open-source-openstreetmap-mapped-the-globe-in-1619401706
A decade ago, OpenStreetMaps launched as a free, open-source alternative to the other mapping tools you may encounter on the internet. Turns out that the collaborative experiment worked exceptionally well, and thanks to a new site, you can see for yourself how the Wikipedia of mapping has covered the whole planet.
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2014/08/11/lg-3500-oled-tv/
Now that plasma TVs are really on their way out, it's the perfect time for a true alternative to LCD, and LG is ready with its cheapest OLED TV yet. The 55EC9300 is the third generation of curved 1080p OLED TVs to roll out and with a price tag of $3,500, the price has dropped 75 percent since the first one debuted a year ago for $15,000. It's still pricey for its size, but you won't have to choose between tuition and a TV this time around. Inside is the webOS Smart TV platform we loved at CES, and of course, the new display technology that is supposed to bring better colors and deeper blacks than have ever been possible before.
The question now, is if the improved colors of OLED are a better option than the high-res 4K screens currently flooding shelves. If the rumors are right, we'll see a 65-inch 4K version soon that cuts out the compromises, but costs twice as much. You'll be able to get your own eyes on the screens soon -- pre-orders are available through Best Buy and Amazon, and Best Buy will sell the set starting on the 24th.Filed under: Displays, Home Entertainment, HD
Source: http://www.engadget.com/2014/08/11/ifa-2014-windows-phone-teaser/
You won't have to wait long if you're hoping for a new round of Windows Phones with powerful cameras. Microsoft has just sent out a save-the-date notice that asks the media if it's ready for "more face time" at a Berlin event on September 4th, just ahead of the IFA technology show. There's a Lumia 1020-style camera module not-so-subtly woven into the text, too. While there are no dead giveaways in the teaser, it's not hard to figure out the references. Our hunch is that "face time" is an allusion to "Superman" (aka the Lumia 730), the selfie-oriented Windows Phone that leaked just a few days ago. The module is slightly more cryptic, but it might be hinting at the aluminum-clad, 13-megapixel "Tesla" (Lumia 830) that reportedly surfaced last month. We're headed to IFA, so you should expect to hear much, much more about any new Lumias within a few weeks.
Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Microsoft, Nokia
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