- “Now, this is really hot. There are well over 100 new features, but I’m going to cover 8 new features of the iPhone 4. The first: an all new design.”
- “Now, stop me if you’ve already seen this.” Huge laughter and cheering.
Oh Jobos, you are a funny guy! =]
Steve Jobs officially unveiled the iPhone 4, and the tech world couldn't be more excited to see all it's previously unrevealed secrets. I can only imagine the amount drool that was leaking on to the conference room floor, but I do know, I personally made a mess on my keyboard. O.o
This new iPhone was tailor made to kick off the AR revolution, once this thing hit the market augmented reality will become mainstream soon after. Here's a list of all the amazing wonderful, and deliciously augmented feature the new iPhone has.
“It is just 9.3mm thick, that is 24% thinner than the iPhone 3GS. A quarter thinner in something you didn’t think could get any thinner! In fact, it is the thinnest smartphone on the planet.”
“We have a front-facing camera, microSIM, camera + LED flash, headset, and a second mic for noise cancellation."
“It’s got integrated antennas right in the structure of the phone — it’s never been done before and it’s really cool engineering. Stainless steel for strength. Glass on the front AND back. Integrated antennas, and extraordinary build quality.”
“Second: this is a biggie. Something we call the retina display. In any display, there are pixels — here’s four of them. We start off by dramatically increasing the pixel density, 4x in the same amount of space. People haven’t even dreamt of a display like this. It turns out there’s a limit around 300px per inch that the human eye can’t differentiate between the pixels — text looks like you’ve seen it in a fine printed book, unlike you’ve ever seen on an electronic display before. It’s extraordinary.”
“Third: the iPhone 4 is powered by the A4. It’s designed by our own team, and it’s wonderful to have on the iPhone.”
“Now, because we’ve made the battery bigger and the A4 is so good with power management, we’ve improved the battery life! 7 hours 3G tlak, 6 hours 3G browsing, 10 hours WiFi browsing, 10 hours music, 40 hours of music, and 300 hours of standby.”
“We’ve got another cool piece of hardware: we’re adding a three-axis gyroscope.The gyro joins the four other sensors… these phones are getting more and more intelligent about the world around them. So that’s four. Number five. This is a great one. A whole new camera system built into iPhone 4.”
“Megapixels are nice, but what cellphone cameras are really about is capturing photons and low-light photography. So we’ve gone from a 3 to a 5 megapixel sensor with a backside illuminated sensor. It’s a way of getting more light to the sensor… also, when most people increase the megapixels, they make the pixel sensors smaller. We’ve kept them the same size so they capture more photons. We’ve got a 5x digital zome, tap to focus, and LED flash. But that’s not all: the camera records HD video. We’ve written an application ourselves. iMovie for iPhone!”
Showing edits, transitions, bringing in music from iTunes. Geolocation information can be imported to titles. This is all looking pretty amazing. There’s nothing out today that is remotely comparable to this in terms of mobile video editing. Showing final HD video that was recorded, edited, and rendered on the phone. Pretty unreal.
When Apple announced iOS 4.0 earlier this year, some additions to the SDK (software development kit) caught the attention of augmented reality (AR) developers - specifically, open access to the phone's camera APIs. But with the introduction of the new hardware in the iPhone 4 made this past Monday, the possibilities for AR on the popular smartphone have skyrocketed. Today I had the opportunity to chat about the device's impact on AR with Stefan Misslinger, lead iPhone developer for metaio, one of the leading AR companies and makers of the mobile AR browser junaio... Check here to read more.
Layar's Layar3D will overlay virtual 3D objects in the real world, and the potential uses for this technology go far beyond the example of Augmented Pac-Man in the video above, and it will eventually move from the display screen of your Android phone into actual spaces around us.
The 3D is created with OpenGL, while the positioning is calculated with the accelerometer, the GPS and the compass of the phone. The application will support live downloading and rendering of 3D objects. These objects will be active, in the sense that you’ll be able to assign actions such as “open link” or “play music” to them.
Unfortunately, the new version of Layar3D is aimed at developers only, with a planned public launch in November. No iPhone version yet.
This is a short film that was directed by the French animation collective H5, François Alaux, Hervé de Crécy + Ludovic Houplain. It was presented at the Cannes Film Festival 2009. It opened the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and won a 2010 academy award under the category of animated short.
In this film there are two pieces of licensed music, in the beginning and in the end. All the other music and sound design are original. The opening track (Dean Martin "Good Morning Life") and closing track (The Ink Spots "I don't want to send the world on fire") songs are licensed pre-existing tracks. All original music and sound design is by, human (www.humanworldwide.com)
In light of recent events involving major oil corporations, who will not be mentioned, I thought this short film deserved a wide viewing. It's depiction of corporate brand-identity's blatant over saturation on society is brilliantly illustrated in this Tarantino-esque graphic short. Enjoy!
We have entered new era in biology, scientists for the first time have created a synthetic cell, completely controlled by man-made genetic instructions from a computer model, researchers at the private J. Craig Venter Institute announced this month. "We call it the first synthetic cell," said genomics pioneer Craig Venter, who oversaw the project. "These are very much real cells."
Created at a cost of $40 million, this experimental one-cell organism, which can reproduce, opens the way to the manipulation of life on a previously unattainable scale, several researchers and ethics experts said. Scientists have been altering DNA piecemeal for a generation, producing a menagerie of genetically engineered plants and animals. But the ability to craft an entire organism offers a new power over life, they said.
Presented by LogicGodTV, this is a demonstration of a neural network imitator script. Impulses change which synapses become stronger and weaker, effectively making the system "learn". Complex loops can be created and snuffed out, creating an interesting simulation. GoogleTechTalks has a full hour of discussion about neural networks and how to produce useful learning machines and artificial intelligence. The Next Generation of Neural Networks.
NASA will launch the first human-like robot to space later this year to become a permanent resident of the International Space Station. Robonaut 2, or R2, was developed jointly by NASA and General Motors under a cooperative agreement to develop a robotic assistant that can work alongside humans, whether they are astronauts in space or workers at GM manufacturing plants on Earth.
The 300-pound R2 consists of a head and a torso with two arms and two hands. R2 will launch on space shuttle Discovery as part of the STS-133 mission planned for September. Once aboard the station, engineers will monitor how the robot operates in weightlessness. R2 will be confined to operations in the station's Destiny laboratory. However, future enhancements and modifications may allow it to move more freely around the station's interior or outside the complex.
The Future Is Now: Still Partying Like It's 1999? 25 years ago, humanity was introduced to the information age, and most of society had no idea what was about to completely dominate their lives. In fact, people were stuck on fantsitcal ideas of what the future would be like. Hollywood fostered notions of "magic" and impossible feats from super human begins, and media has been passively grooming society to believe that real life is not like what you see on television or a movie screen. The book 1984 was turned into a feature film, and Apple challenged it's core idea with the introduction of the Macintosh. Apple's Super Bowl commercial suggested that computers would break society free from big brothers electric eye and give the power to the people. Society never really believed real life would have telescreens, big brother, terminators, HAL computers, cloning, splicing, and finding the "God Particle", those ideas were only limited to fantasy... That is until now!
While most of society has been operating as if the pause button was hit on Sept. 10, 2001, consuming as we did 25 years ago with just some minor tweaks, the tech and science sectors have been moving at light speed to bring the future to the masses...and it's a future that's yet to be determined. Right now we are at the cross roads of our creations, in one direction it's salvation and the other it's the matrix. Most of us are still asleep and dreaming of 1999... Clinton was in office, most of the country was rich, the internet was becoming a passing fad and global warming was just a myth... Right now is the time for society to wake up and see, open their eyes to the future, it's happening right now.
The Future Is Now: 
