Another day, another Android tablet render. This one, the imaginatively titled WePad, is as ambitious as its name might suggest. (You know, because "we" is plural of "I"? Yeah, it's a stretch.) Dwarfing the iPad with its 11.6-inch (1366 x 768) display, a 1.66GHz Intel Atom N450 processor, GMA 3150 graphics, webcam, two USB ports, flash card reader, UMTS modem, and a mooted six hours of battery life, we could see ourselves picking one up -- provided the price point is decent. But that's just the beginning! The manufacturer, Neofonie, also has designs on a WePad app store and, if all goes according to plan, this thing'll sport genuine Google Android and the Android Market. The company also mentions something called the "WeMagazine publishing ecosystem," the basis of a turn-key operation for getting your own branded device out on the e-reader market, so if you're looking to get into the biz just hit the source link to begin your adventure. As for us, we'll wait to see a final product before we jump to any conclusions.

Neofonie announces WePad 11.6-inch Android slate originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 20 Mar 2010 21:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Beaucoup de musicos sont adeptes de chatroulette car ils y trouvent beaucoup d’auditeurs par hasard et peuvent jouer de la musique devant des gens en directe par webcam. Je crois que cette video a presque autant buzzé sur le net sur le site que lequel elle a été faite, il s’agit d’un jeune homme qui [...]

Source : Chatroulette FR (s'abonner)

Explorer : Chatroulette, Internet

Le frisson du moment sur Internet depuis quelques semaines, c’est le site ChatRoulette — de chat, discussion, et roulette, comme le roulette du casino —, système créé par un jeune russe de dix-sept ans nommé Andrei Ternovskiy. Le principe est simple : des gens situés derrière leur webcam sont mis en relation avec d’autres gens de manière automatisée [...]

Source : Le dernier blog (s'abonner)

Explorer : Chatroulette, Internet

Charles Arthur investigates how the ways in which we watch sport, read magazines and do business with each other could change for ever

Don't act too surprised if, some time in the next year, you meet someone who explains that their business card isn't just a card; it's an augmented reality business card. You can see a collection and, at visualcard.me, you can even design your own, by adding a special marker to your card, which, once put in front of a webcam linked to the internet, will show not only your contact details but also a video or sound clip. Or pretty much anything you want.

It's not just business cards. London Fashion Week has tried them out too: little symbols that look like barcodes printed onto shirts, which, when viewed through a webcam, come to life. Benetton is using augmented reality for a campaign that kicked off last month, in which it is trying to find models from among the general population.

Augmented reality – AR, as it has quickly become known – has only recently become a phrase that trips easily off technologists' lips; yet we've been seeing versions of it for quite some time. The idea is straightforward enough: take a real-life scene, or (better) a video of a scene, and add some sort of explanatory data to it so that you can better understand what's going on, or who the people in the scene are, or how to get to where you want to go.

Sports coverage on TV has been doing it for years: slow-motion could be described as a form of augmented reality, since it gives you the chance to examine what happened in a situation more carefully. More recently cricket, tennis, rugby, football and golf have all started to overlay analytic information on top of standard-speed replays – would that ball have hit the stumps, the progress of a rally, the movement of the backs or wingers, the relative flights of shots – to tell you more about what's going on. Probably the most common use is in American football where the "first down" line – the distance the team has to cover to continue its offence – is superimposed on the picture for viewers.

But those required huge systems. AR took its first lumbering steps into the public arena eight years ago: all that you needed to do was strap on 10kg of computing power – laptop, camera, vision processor – and you could get an idea of what was feasible. The American Popular Science magazine wrote about the idea in 2002 – but the idea of being permanently connected to the internet hadn't quite jelled at that point.

"AR has been around for ages," says Andy Cameron, executive director of Fabrica, an interactive design studio which works with Benetton, "maybe going back as far as the 1970s and art installations that overlaid real spaces with something virtual." He mentions in particular the work of pioneering computer artist Myron Krueger.

What's changed in the past year is that AR has come within reach of all sorts of developers – and the technology powerful enough to make use of it is owned by millions of people, often in the palms of their hands.

The arrival of powerful smartphones and computers with built-in video capabilities means that you don't have to wait for the AR effects as you do with TV. They can simply be overlaid onto real life. Step forward Apple's iPhone, and phones using Google's Android operating system, both of which are capable of overlaying information on top of a picture or video.

Within the small world of AR, one of the best-known apps is that built by Layar, which – given a location, and using the iPhone 3GS's inbuilt compass to work out the direction you're pointing the phone – can give you a "radar map" of details such as Wikipedia information, Flickr photos, Google searches and YouTube videos superimposed onto a picture you've taken of the scene. For Americans, it will also pull in details from the government's economic Recovery Act – so that if you're on Wall Street and want to see how many billions went into which building, it will show you.

Or, more usefully, Yelp offers an augmented reality application that will show you ratings and reviews for a restaurant before you walk in – the sort of thing that could make restaurants quiver with delight, or shudder in horror.

Or maybe it wouldn't need to know where it is; only who it's looking at. A prototype application demonstrated at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February took things a little further again. Point the phone at a person and if it can find their details, it will pull them off the web and attach details – their Twitter username, Facebook page and other facts – and stick them, rather weirdly, into the air around their head (viewed through your phone, of course). "It's taking social networking to the next level," says Dan Gärdenfors, head of user experience research at The Astonishing Tribe, a Swedish mobile software company.

And there are fabulously useful applications: at Columbia University, computer science professor Steve Feiner and PhD candidate Steve Henderson have created their Augmented Reality for Maintenance and Repair (Armar) project. It combines sensors, head-up displays, and instructions to tackle the military's maintenance needs: start working on a piece of kit, and the details about it pop up in front of you. Imagine if you could put on a pair of special goggles when you needed to investigate your car's engine, or a computer's innards, and the detail would pop up. That's the sort of idea that Armar is trying to implement, though for the military at first..

Yet it's fashion which seems to have leapt quickest into this technology. The T-shirt with AR in London Fashion Week was developed by Cassette Playa, a label that has been worn by Lily Allen, Rihanna and Kanye West. Carri Munden, who designed it with the Fashion Digital Studio at the London College of Fashion, described it as "mixing reality and fantasy". Adidas, too, has launched trainers with AR symbols in the tongues: hold them to a webcam and you are taken to interactive games on the Adidas site.

The process by which the strange symbols get translated into images is simple enough: the website takes the feed from your webcam (you have to explicitly allow it to do so, so there are no security worries) and analyses it for the particular set of symbols that the program is looking for. (Some easy calculations mean the symbols can be detected whichever way up you hold the item.) Videos and pictures are then sent back to you.

Andy Cameron says that the arrival of an open-source, hence free, AR tool kit has let companies build their own AR applications, using Flash – the pervasive animation and video technology used for many online ads and YouTube's videos – "which immediately meant you had huge penetration, because Flash is everywhere". (Something like 98% of all computers are reckoned to have Adobe's Flash Player installed.)

"If you build your AR application with Flash, then you can get it out to everybody in the world with a computer with a webcam," says Cameron.

Benetton is using AR in its latest campaign, called "It's My Time" which aims to get members of the public to put themselves forward as potential models, and uses AR to show more details about existing models. But its first most visible use of AR was last year in issue 76 of Benetton's Colors magazine, a quarterly fashion product. Dozens of pages have AR symbols: hold the page up to a webcam, and you see film and more photos of the person on the page. "The Colors editor and the creative director of Fabrica got very excited about it," says Cameron.

Cameron can see huge potential which could even revive the fortunes of print advertising. "Think of a commercial page, an advert, in a fashion magazine. It's pretty expensive. With this – and this is the way that the more hard-nosed people in Benetton saw the advantage – it means that you can get more products on the page." Print an AR code, get people to come to the site, and you can show them so much more, while measuring the return from your effort.

The technical cost is a tiny part of the overall effort. "The printing and photography cost [of the advert] is the same. And the development cost is pretty small."

And of course where advertisers go, the publications that house them are sure to go as well. Esquire magazine in the US and Wallpaper* in Europe have done "augmented reality" editions, with Robert Downey Jr coming to life on the cover of the former, and AR text providing videos and animation in the latter. But there are more possibilities for journalism using AR: for example if you "geotag" newspaper articles (so that you say that an item relates to a particular place) then someone visiting a site could learn about events relevant to the area via their smartphone.

Book publishers too are leaping in: Carlton Publishing will release an AR book in May, featuring dinosaurs that pop out of the pages when viewed, yes, through a webcam. Future releases include war, sport and arts titles which will also have extra AR elements.

Yet in media it's the advertisers who are most excited. The possibilities of geotagged, targeted adverts – which in effect hang in the air until someone comes along to find them with a smartphone – or of AR adverts which open up a whole new world of opportunities (and perhaps discounts or loyalty bonuses) when you follow them through – are yet another glimpse of the holy grail ofads that know exactly who and where you are.

Is there a risk that we'll all become AR'd out – that it will become boring as advert after advert invites us to hold it up to a webcam? "What's hot today is ancient history tomorrow," says Cameron. "There have been a lot of bad uses of this technology with a rush to use it. We have had the chance to reflect on what it means and how to use it. The key is that it should be an enhancement of the stuff on the printed page."

Even so we're still in the early stages, he argues. "It's very primitive – having to use a webcam, holding a magazine up to it. Obviously we're really interested in the opportunities with handheld devices. It's very frustrating that the iPhone doesn't allow access to the live video stream." (Nor does it run Flash, another problem for would-be AR designers.) "People in design are very annoyed with Steve Jobs," he observes. "We don't really understand why Apple won't allow that."

Given that access, he says, "you could hold your iPhone up to a billboard and get something amazing right there". What about the alternative, such as Google's Android-based Nexus phone? "It looks like you could do it on that," he says. But of course the iPhone is a target market. "Maybe Apple wants to keep that for itself," Cameron says. "Maybe they're lodging patents. Or maybe the processor on the iPhone isn't fast enough."

Yet there are some who think that AR has already had its brief time in the sun. At the Like Minds conference in Exeter at the beginning of March, Joanne Jacobs, a social media consultant, described an AR application that demanded you buy a T-shirt and then go and sit in front of your webcam – so you could play Rock, Paper, Scissors. By yourself.

"It's hopeless," Jacobs said.

Cameron admits to some uncertainty about AR's measurable impact. "I don't know if it sells more things, but it seems clearly a good thing if we can get people who may be customers to participate in the adverts." But, he adds: "If people start to play with the adverts in a way that exposes them to more products, that's got to help bring a commercial return."

• Augmented reality
• iPhone
• Social networking
• Advertising

Charles Arthurguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Si l’on en croit le site espagnol Clipset, la tablette HP Slate fera son apparition en juin, ou du moins “avant septembre”. Le prix?Moins de 400€ pour une tablette qui supporte le Flash, tourne avec une puce Atom et disposera d’un port USB, d’un lecteur de carte mémoire et d’une webcam [...]

Si l'on en croit le site espagnol Clipset, la tablette HP Slate fera son apparition en juin, ou du moins "avant septembre". Le prix?Moins de 400€ pour une tablette qui supporte le Flash, tourne avec une puce Atom et disposera d'un port USB, d'un lecteur de carte mémoire et d'une webcam ...

A lire et relire!

Le Valaisan est le seul être à pouvoir aligner 6 verbes de suite. (”Regarde voir aller faire monter boire les bêtes.” Cela pourrait s’expliquer ainsi: l’élocuteur de la phrase interpelle une personne voisine afin d’attirer son attention sur le chien (ou le berger) qui est en train de diriger du bétail en direction d’un bassin situé un peu en amont. Soit :”Ma chère, oserais-je vous suggérer de vous approcher de ma personne, afin que vous puissiez constater par vous-même l’activité courageuse de cet homme de la terre accompagnant son troupeau de la noble race d’Hérens jusqu’au point d’eau du village, tout ceci pour rééquilibrer le déficit acqueux de ces vaillants animaux ? Vraiment, quelle tableau magnifique !”)

Source: Valais – Désencyclopédie

Tags: fun, valais
Continuez la lecture avec les articles suivants

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Les Buzzman sortent pour Eurosport un site autour de la Coupe du Monde lundi prochain. En avant première, vous trouverez ici un lien qui embarquera vers un site de qualification et de recrutement mais surtout vers un site pour sauver votre couple si vous aimez le foot. Oui, dans quelques jours vous allez préférer votre télévision à votre femme...

Voici ce qui sera indiqué dans le communiqué de presse :

"Ce site va vous permettre d’envoyer votre femme faire un safari en Afrique du Sud avec 10 de ses copines, pendant que vous passerez 1 semaine avec 10 de vos potes dans une villa en Corse, tout équipée, pour vivre une Coupe du Monde 2010 inoubliable ! (écran géant, champagne à volonté,...)

Comment ça marche ? Sur http://www.sauvezmacoupedumonde.com, vous avez 90 secondes pour enregistrer un témoignage vidéo convaincant, via votre webcam, qui explique pourquoi votre femme doit partir loin de vous pendant la Coupe du Monde. Celui qui récolte le plus de votes des internautes remporte le safari et la semaine en Corse. Pour préserver votre anonymat, et votre couple, votre visage est masqué et votre voix déformée ! "

Pour me suivre sur Twitter : http://twitter.com/MryEmery

Shuttle announced a compact, all-in-one PC featuring a 15.6-inch touchscreen and a dual-core Intel Atom D510 available with SUSE Linux. The X50V2 includes a 1366 x 768 display, webcam, 4-in-1 card reader, a 2.5-inch hard drive bay, and up to 4GB of RAM, says the company.

Shuttle announced an all-in-one PC featuring a 15.6-inch touchscreen and a dual-core Intel Atom D510 processor available with SUSE Linux. The X50V2 includes a 1366 x 768 pixel display, webcam, a microphone and stereo speakers, a 4-in-1 card reader, plus room for a 2.5-inch hard disk drive and up to 4GB of RAM, the company says....

A Berlin-based software company is preparing an Intel Atom N450-based e-reader that runs Linux with Android extensions. Billed as the & tablet PC for publishing houses,& Neofonie GmbH's & WePad& tablet sports an 11.6-inch touchscreen, 16GB of flash storage, a SD card, WiFi, Bluetooth, USB, and a webcam, says Neofonie....

If you are bored to death with the typefaces that come by default on social sites and you long for a more jubilant experience when typing down anything, then this site might be of aid. In essence, it will empower you not only to find and download cooler fonts, but also to design typefaces of your very own to go with.

The creator itself will let you come up with your own smileys and illustrated words, and webcam support for capturing your own illustrations is provided.

Read more

Learn more about Fontself.com in Dataopedia.com

Find out how much Fontself.com is worth with Stimator.com

While every man and his dog is waiting for their preordered iPad to arrive, some Germans went their own way and yesterday presented a Slate that appears to have, well, better features. The Neofonie WePad has similar form and function as the wet dreams of our Crunchgear editors, but facts are that the German Android device has a bigger multitouch screen and a faster CPU than the iPad. Also it runs Flash, has USB ports, an inbuilt card reader and expandable memory. Additionally it allows complete multitasking and has a webcam. Beat that baby.

Nouvel iPad-like que ce WePad proposé par le constructeur Neofonie, doté d’un écran 11.6″ (résolution 1366×768 pixels), d’un processeur Intel Atom N450 cadencé à 1.66GHz, d’une Intel GMA 3150, d’une batterie affichant une autonomie de 6 heures, d’une webcam, de 2 ports USB, d’un lecteur de cartes mémoire ainsi que d’Android, ce qui lui autorise un accès à l’Android Market, mais également au WePAD App Store.

Bon, on attend plus que son prix et sa date de sortie.

via ndevil

La Slate d’HP, cette tablette montrée par Steve Ballmer lors du dernier CES et qui doit en remontrer à l’iPad, reste encore bien mystérieuse. On en sait aujourd’hui un petit plus grâce à un site espagnol, qui dévoile de source «sûre» que l’appareil coûtera 400 euros, soit certainement pas loin du prix de l’iPad.

La tablette intègrerait un processeur Atom, le support de Flash, un port USB, un lecteur de carte mémoire ainsi q’une webcam au dos. Sa sortie est prévue «avant septembre».

• Source

Copyright L8RMEDIA 1998-2009 - Tous droits réservés - L'intégralité des articles est à consulter sur mobilehub.fr

La Slate d’HP, cette tablette montrée par Steve Ballmer lors du dernier CES et qui doit en remontrer à l’iPad, reste encore bien mystérieuse. On en sait aujourd’hui un petit plus grâce à un site espagnol, qui dévoile de source «sûre» que l’appareil coûtera 400 euros, soit certainement pas loin du prix de l’iPad.

La tablette intègrerait un processeur Atom, le support de Flash, un port USB, un lecteur de carte mémoire ainsi q’une webcam au dos. Sa sortie est prévue «avant septembre».

• Source

Copyright L8RMEDIA 1998-2009 - Tous droits réservés - L'intégralité des articles est à consulter sur generationmp3.com

Marwell, tras presentar un prototipo hace unos días, ya ha anunciado que tiene lista para salir al mercado una tableta de Internet que podría ser el equivalente al proyecto OLPC pero en el mundo tablet.

Moby es como se llamará este ordenador de pantalla táctil con 10.1 pulgadas y que se parece en el concepto a la Slate de HP por ser más un portátil transformado que un producto nuevo. En estos nuevos equipos, la novedad viene de la mano del sistema operativo, que en el caso del Marvell Moby será Android. También se conoce el procesador que llevará, un Marvell ARM 600 con capacidad de reproducir vídeos a 1080p, soporte de flash y webcam integrada.

La orientación académica de este Moby se recoge principalmente por el precio, que parece que podría ser de 100 dólares. Ya veremos si sale a la venta para el público general o se queda como un elemento que solo podrán comprar los países interesados.

Vía | BTR.