Certainly 3D TV can look great -- as when you experience a basketball game shot from the corner of the court, and the players fast-break down for a dunk. But 3D is yet another new technology, with the usual issues of early products with high prices and limited content.
To start, you'll need to get new 3D TV with new display technology, plus a new 3D Blu-ray player to watch movies in 3D. (Access to 3D content should be improved over time with new 3D cable boxes and broadcast 3D digital TV receivers.)
But unlike earlier new technologies, 3D has an additional issue -- the glasses. Eyewear does not fit well with casual viewing, and yet also is not great for hosting a big party to watch the big game -- when you have to buy tens of pairs of glasses at $150 each, and then check that all the batteries are charged.
As a result, the consumer electronics industry recognizes that 3D TV will require an gradual ramp-up, much like the early adopter days of HDTV and DVD, with emphasis on event and sports programming to drive interest. Still the Consumer Electronic Association is optimistic -- projecting that by 2013 over a quarter of TV sets sold will be 3D TVs.
See my full article for One to One Magazine: CES: to 3D and Beyond (digital edition).
See my Consumer HDTV Gallery for more on 3D TV technology and deployment.
Find the Samsung 55” LED 7000 Series 3D TV on Amazon.com
Cool Gadgets for 2010 - From 3D TV to Smartphone Apps
Tues., March 9, 2010, 7:30 pm
Princeton Macintosh User's Group
Room 006, Friend Center, Princeton Univ.
The new Google Gesture Search app takes this idea to the next level. The idea is that you draw letters on the touch screen, and it instantly displays matching items on your phone -- contacts, bookmarks, apps, and music. Just enter a couple of letters to display any names that contain that sequence.
But how can this work? Can you really depend on each letter being correctly recognized? It doesn't matter with Gesture Search -- it just searches on multiple possible letters for each of your gestures, and shows all possible matches.
As a result, you can write quite loosely. You can enter upper or lower case. You can draw the full character with multiple strokes (like the cross bar on "A" or "F") -- but why bother? Just keep entering more loose letter gestures, and the list of matches will reduce down to what you are looking for. (Of course, this works so well because Gesture Search is working with a known list of items on your phone -- this would be less useful for doing general text searches of the web.)
This is another fun Android application from Google Labs, experimenting with new ways to use our mobile devices (see previous posts on Google Shopper and Google Goggles). Gesture Search is currently English only, and has options to select the items to search (i.e., omit the music library), to regenerate the search index, and to send gesture data to Google to help improve the application.
See my Smartphone Apps Gallery for more on mobile apps
But why require barcodes? The new Google Shopper app for Android offers three forms of product search: plain old text search, voice search (say the product name), and image search.
With image search, Shopper continuously scans the image from the camera, looking for a recognizable product -- not only barcodes, but also cover art from books, CDs, DVDs, and video games.
In seconds, it identifies the object and returns information including prices, reviews, detailed specs, and links to sellers. You also can save history and favorites to access even if the phone is offline.
And Shopper does not even need to see the entire cover -- I was able to use it to quickly recognize books from just the top of the cover, and CDs from just the artist's face.
Shopper packages the product search features demonstrated in the earlier Google Goggles app (also free for Android), which does more general visual search. It identifies products, also including wine labels, as well as generally recognizable objects including landmark structures (buildings and bridges) and famous artworks.
Plus, Goggles does text recognition for business cards to extract contact information, and Google has demonstrated a new version that does more general text recognition and transition, for example for highway signs. While Shopper just constantly looks for something recognizable, Goggles waits until you take a picture to start the search.
These are amazing -- and useful -- apps, harnessing the Google image search and product search engines and databases in the cloud to turn your phone into an almost real-time recognizer. And this is just the beginning -- Google is not terribly specific about exactly what kind of stuff these apps recognize. For example, it turns out that Goggles also does general image search to find matching images on the web, whether or not they are further identified as known products, landmarks, or artworks.
So keep a look out for further updates -- There are plenty of other objects around us that would be useful to recognize, including faces. Hmmm ...
See my Smartphone Apps Gallery for more on mobile apps
See my article Augmented Reality Goes Mobile - for more on AR apps, including Google Goggles]]>
An App A Day: Tasty Apps for iPhone and Android
Wed., Feb. 24, 2010, 12:00 noon
Or try Wikitude (shown here), which adds geo-tagged user-created content including Flickr photos, YouTube videos, and Wikipedia info (iPhone, Android, Symbian), and Layar, which imports user-created or partner content "layers" for customized tours of local areas (iPhone, Android).
However, these apps still are limited by the handheld mobile platform. It's awkward to hold up a device and look around with it, especially when the small screen can only show a rather limited field of view within the surrounding scene. In addition, the inexpensive sensors in handheld devices can have significant errors. As a result, current mobile AR apps cannot precisely register information to the background scene, and instead typically indicate objects of interest in a general direction, and show their relative positioning.
So augmented reality is just beginning on smartphones. Still, these devices are good enough to do real-time GPS navigation, for example, and support AR-style apps that display information about upcoming traffic cameras, or help you retrace your route to where you parked your car.
Maybe it's time to put on wireless eyewear to go with our Bluetooth headsets.
See my full article - Augmented Reality Goes Mobile - for more on the development of mobile AR, from early research prototypes to desktop AR to mobile devices
See my Smartphone Apps Gallery for more on apps and app stores.
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Windows Phone 7 is a significant change for the former Windows Mobile platform (see previous post). It combines a Zune-like smooth-flowing user interface, the Zune music and video experience, and Xbox LIVE games and service. And it tightens the platform requirements, including requiring a touch screen.
But the biggest news is Microsoft's push to move beyond individual apps, to make your phone the "hub" of data and information, especially updated from online sites -- using "live tiles" on Start screen.
At a first look, the Windows Phone 7 design brings together several ideas from other smartphones:
- Like the Apple iPhone, it's now a full-fledged media player, albeit designed to work like the Zune HD (see previous post) and to sync with the Zune PC software.
- Like Android phones, all Windows Phone 7 devices now will have dedicated hardware buttons for Back, Start (the Windows button), and Search (although there's no Menu button -- instead there's an app options bar / bar at the bottom of the screen). The design finally abandons the Windows Mobile phone buttons for Start and End Call, and updates the Zune design which had only one button for Home.
- Like Palm OS, Windows Phone 7 provides integrated views of information from the different aspects of your life -- personal and business, local and online, and social networking sites -- to view all your photos or contacts or calendar entries together, even though they come from multiple sources.
- Like Android, Windows Phone 7 lets you organize and customize your home screen, not just with favorite apps and contacts and links, but with dynamic "live tiles" (i.e., widgets) that display live feeds from applications and Web services.
But the deeper change in Windows Phone 7 is the move away from individual apps to more integrated "hubs" that provide common access across multiple sources. The tiles on the Start screen are doorways to these hubs, including People, Pictures, Games, Music + Video, Marketplace, and Office.
For example, for communicating with people, on Android you need to run different applications for Messaging vs. Gmail vs. other Email, plus separately check for friend updates on a various social networking sites by downloading individual associated apps. But on Windows Phone 7, the People hub integrates contacts and social network updates in one view -- and you also can post your own updates to these sites.
Similarly, the Pictures hub presents combined albums for your local and PC and online photos, plus updated photos from your friends online. And all these use the Zune interface approach, with automatic organization including Recently viewed items and What's New updates.
The open question, then, is how this more controlled and tightly integrated platform can still allow phone manufacturers and cellular carriers to customize and distinguish their offerings, and allow software developers to create innovative apps. At the announcement, Microsoft insisted that there was still room for customization and innovation, for example though extensions to the hubs in lieu of separate apps.
But this was still an early announcement of plans for products that are due out around the end of the year, so there are more details to come.
See the Windows Phone news site for videos of the introduction and key features of Windows Phone 7
See my Mobile Communications Gallery for more on smartphones
See my Media Players Gallery for more on the Zune and wireless media players
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Since smartphones are strongly connected devices with wireless broadband services, they are no longer constrained by whatever performance and functionality might be reasonable to expect from handheld processors and storage.
For example, the free Google Translate app for Android brings the full functionality of the Google Translate online service into your hand, with over 50 languages currently supported.
And, of course, it supports voice input (to speak the phrase to be translated -- in English only, for now). And it provides text to speech output for the translated text in the target language. It also remembers the recent history of your phrases, and you can star specific items for later recall (even if the phone is offline).
As another example, Talk To Me, another free app for Android, provides several convenience options around this same set of services.
To help communicate with others, Talk To Me has a simple mode for quick voice translations from English to common languages -- just speak, and then listen to the translation (which is also displayed as text so it's easy to show). The app also has options to slow down the speech rate and pitch to help make it more intelligible.
Even simpler, you can create a Widget on the Android desktop for instant translations. And you can send the translated text in E-mail or as a text message.
Not bad for what are basically simple dialog boxes to select the languages and listen to the translation -- with the heavy lifting done in the cloud. In this way, handheld apps are breaking free of the apparent limitations of the small platform, and are going to get a lot more sophisticated.
See my Verizon Droid article for more on the Android interface
See my Mobile Communications Gallery for more on smartphones.
See my Smartphone Apps Gallery for more on apps and app stores.
Even an apparently straightforward app like The Weather Channel (see iTunes preview) can provide an impressive range of useful features, albeit not all the same across all the supported platforms (it's free for the iPhone, Android, Palm, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and BREW & Java).
Besides local forecasts and conditions (customized to your list of locations), the Weather app also displays a map view with animated radar / satellite and other customized overlays. Or you can watch local, national and international video forecasts, as on TV.
On the Android platform, The Weather Channel takes advantage of several additional useful features. You can configure small widgets to display on the main home screen, showing current weather summaries for selected locations. (With Android, can configure the home screens with your preferred layout of favorite app shortcuts and widgets -- see Verizon Droid article.)
Even better, the app can run in the background on Android, checking for weather alerts, and then warn you of impending issues using the Notifications area across the top of the screen (the red circle with the exclamation mark). Just pull down and tap to launch the app and display the text of the alert from the National Weather Service.
As a result, the weather alerts can be treated in a standard way, like other notifications like alarms or incoming text messages -- and without interrupting your work in progress, so you can then review and choose how to respond to them when you're ready.
See my Smartphone Apps Gallery for more on apps and app stores.
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