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Nvidia Comes Clean on Mystery Tablet: It's a Tegra Prototype

Pulkit Chandna — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:08:09 -0600

A day after NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang was snapped with what clearly resembled a tablet, the company shed some light on the mysterious device. According to Engadget, the graphics chip maker has revealed to it the true identity of the tablet. It is actually a Tegra prototype developed by original design manufacturer (ODM) called ICD.

The site also claims to have been tipped about some of the tablet's specs. According to Engadget's "credible" sources, the tablet currently runs Windows CE and features a resistive touchscreen. It went on to add that an Android-based variant, also featuring a capacitive touchscreen, is in the works. Apparently, the plan is to have the tablet ready for a March 2010 launch. The site even named T-Mobile as a likely carrier.

Image Credit: Shufflegazine

Sony Shows Off Prototype for 360 Degree 3D Display

Paul Lilly — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 09:58:46 -0500

Boy oh boy has 3D technology come a long way since the advent of those horrendous blue and red glasses that are still around today. Taking the technology to a new level, Sony says it has developed a 360-degree 3D display, which it plans to show off during Tokyo's Digital Content Expo 2009 this Thursday.

Sony says no goofy glasses are required to view the stereoscopic, 24-bit color image, which measures just 96 x 128 pixels. The image is viewable from all angles, but Sony didn't say if you'll be able to see the side of the image, depending on where you're oriented in relation to the display.

It's just a novelty at this point, but as research and development continues, Sony said it could see this technology being used as a 3D photo frame or in videophones.

Image Credit: Sony

Microsoft Research Demos Five Next-Gen Input Prototypes

Paul Lilly — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 08:40:04 -0500

Microsoft's Applied Sciences Group plans to present a paper on five different touch-sensitive mice prototypes during this week's User Interface Software and Technology Conferences in British Columbia, Canada.

With Windows 7 touting mutlitouch capabilities, this could be Microsoft's way appealing to the majority of users who don't own a touchscreen display. But don't expect to see all five designs come to fruition - it's much more likely that the five prototypes would end up being whittled down to one or two products.

FTIR (Frustrated Total Internal Reflection) Mouse

This prototype uses the principle of frustrated total internal reflection and has a built-in-camera to sense user's touches on top of an arc-shaped piece of acrylic.

Orb Mouse

Utilizes a hemispherical surface with an IR-sensitive camera for multitouch capabilities. Microsoft says the design allows for an easy to grip form-factor that remains comfortable, particularly for the fingers.

Cap (Capacitive) Mouse

Tracks the position of multiple fingers on its surface though the use of a flexible matrix of capacitive-sensing electrodes under the top of the surface. This is the most compact prototype of the five listed. It's also low on power consumption.

Side Mouse

Designed to rest under the user's palm and allow the fingers to touch the table surface in front of the device. The mouse then senses the proximity of the user's fingers as they touch the table instead of the mouse. Has the potential for two-handed input.

Arty (Articulated) Mouse

Probably the most other-worldly design of the bunch, the Arty Mouse builds on the Side Mouse design with a base for the palm of the hand to rest and two arms that can be freely and independently moved on the table by the thumb and index finger. Microsoft says this allows for a high-resolution optical mouse sensor to be placed under two of the user's fingers for high sensitivity computing.

Image Credits: Microsoft

Prototype

Logan Decker — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 11:30:00 -0500

An open-world brawler with lots of guts

Not many games let you turn your arm into a long steel blade and cut people in half—top half going this-a-way, bottom half going that-a-way. Even fewer let you turn your hands into giant claws to cut off your victims’ legs, too. And as far as we know, not one has ever let you run diagonally up the side of building, skitter over a collapsing fire escape, and take a leaping vault off the roof as your hand—now a 50-yard whip—tags a hovering ’copter and reels you toward the cockpit to the horror of the doomed pilots. Such is the awesome power you’ll wield in Prototype, Activision’s apocalyptic and wildly entertaining third-person action-adventure.

Events begin grimly, as Alex Mercer wakes up in a morgue. He quickly discovers that he’s become a nearly indestructible shape-shifter capable of creating weapons out of his flesh and disguising himself as anyone he consumes, among other interesting abilities—such as making giant spikes pop out of the ground to skewer his enemies. So, when the amnesiac Mercer wanders topside into a plague-ridden Manhattan and finds himself pursued by crazed pedestrians, the military, and genetic mutants, he doesn’t hesitate to break out the cutlery.

Alex's Blade Arm is one of the most effective--and gruesome--weapons in Mercer's repertoire. No word, though, on whether or not you can take it on the plane.

Prototype’s plot is sabotaged by inconsequential characters and the “Web of Intrigue,” a video montage of your victims’ memories that cough up bits of backstory. Like its enormous but undifferentiated re-creation of Manhattan (which you can traverse by running straight up the walls of buildings and leaping rooftop to rooftop from Battery Park to Harlem), Prototype substitutes scale for detail. But that’s fine with us, because Prototype is all about combat and improvising new techniques in crowd control.

The game never lets you settle into a comfy routine. A quiet infiltration into a military base turns into bloodshed when a genetic detector sees through your disguise; that tank you hijacked won’t last long against rocket launchers wielded by ground forces; and that airstrike team will pursue you relentlessly through narrow streets and underpasses and over rooftops until you go down or they do. As the difficulty scales up, so do your powers, which can be upgraded by cashing in the “Evolve Points” you earn throughout missions (keyboard and mouse controls actually have an edge over gamepad controls, thanks to faster swaps between your expanding catalog of abilities).

Once you've latched on, you can bring it down, or hoist yourself up to it for a nasty hijack.

Through the 14 hours of single-player missions, Prototype’s Manhattan essentially becomes a canvas upon which to indulge and refine Mercer’s spectacular badassery. Smash tanks with a 40-story freefall, lash yourself toward a copter with a Whipfist, eat the pilots, and rain missiles on rampaging genetic mutants from the air. And if you’re overwhelmed, let ’er rip with one of your kick-ass Devastator attacks, like the Air Tendril, which pierces everything in the same zip code with your own intestines.

Yes, a less pulpy story and more detailed Manhattan would have been welcome, but what Prototype does well it does awesomely well. Even better, after you finish the story mode, Prototype lets you start a new game with all your accumulated powers intact—why save Manhattan, we thought, when we could rip a hole through it instead? With great power comes great irresponsibility.

Game Theory: Summa Contra Sims

Thomas McDonald — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 11:45:44 -0500

Long ago, I came to the conclusion that The Sims was designed for Someone Else. I don’t know who. Hottentots, perhaps.

I played through The Sims 3 with awe, respect…and profound boredom. It’s a brilliant piece of work, and if God is kind I’ll never have to play it again this side of Purgatory.

Meanwhile, I’ve been returning to Prototype. I like Prototype. I also liked it when it was called Spider-Man 2 and Hulk: Ultimate Destruction. If a game is worth playing once, it’s worth playing two more times with different character models.

Games are all about wish-fulfillment and power fantasies. Some people are content to wield their mighty power to get three gems in a row. Others would prefer to jump 10 stories in the air and punch a helicopter out of the sky. If you have the opportunity to do the latter, I have no idea why you’d choose to do the former, but people are strange.

Adult male gamers tend to follow the groove of their childhood fantasies into adulthood. As a kid, my daydreams tended toward Conan, Professor Challenger, the Six Million Dollar Man, and G.I. Joe. (Also: I wanted a pet werewolf.) If someone makes a game in which a muscular Cimmerian gets fitted for a cybernetic arm with kung-fu grip and leads his Adventure Team into a jungle swarming with dinosaurs that time forgot, I’d never leave the house. Until then, Prototype will do fine.

My childhood fantasies never ran toward being, say, an interior decorator or a guy who humps his way to a crummy job and then home to a barely furnished tract house every day. That’s actually the polar opposite of “fantasy.” Some people call it “reality,” or perhaps just “life.” Others call it The Sims 3.

I’m baffled when people deride a certain piece of art or entertainment as “mere escapism.” What the hell else is it supposed to be? You may escape into high-minded flights of the intellect or emotional insight, or into a place where a man in a loincloth chokes a T-Rex with his mighty pneumatic hand, but you are escaping. I’d rather not spend those precious moments of escape redecorating someone else’s make-believe house.

Thomas L. McDonald has been covering games for 17 years. He is Editor-at-Large of Games Magazine.

Beep Beep go the Open-Source Jeeps

David Murphy — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 12:30:31 -0500

Open-source software is a pretty familiar concept to most geeks. But what about an open-source car? The idea is more than just a theoretical mash-up of computing terms and the automotive world. Quite a few companies are working to bring the collaborative nature of open-source idea generation to the pavement, and some of their prototypes certainly blow the best of today's auto market right out of the water. At least, they're pretty stunning in the design department. Because that's the problem with a piece of hardware as complicated as an open-source car -- a concept is one thing, but execution seems to be a bit more difficult than creating a piece of software.

First up is the Common car. It's actually called "c,mm,n," minus that extra comma in the end--that's actually for grammar's sake, not a part of the name. I'll leave it to you to decipher exactly why the Dutch originators of the concept decided to forgo vowels in the naming of this smart car-lookalike. Still, this prototype automobile caught my eye, as it was just recently on display at the big Amsterdamn car show, AutoRAI.

The details of the car are geared toward maximum sustainability. That's why you're not going to find a gas engine in the C,mm,n. It's a hydrogen-powered, zero-emissions vehicle that's attempting to use open-source as the backbone for future engineering creativity. The originators of the C,mmm,n vehicle hope that tinkerers of all kinds will contribute their ideas and technical know-how to the car's design--initially on a Wiki set up by the developers, but beyond that, in social groups and garages of their very own. At the very least, C'mm'n needs a translator, as much of the official site's English version is still wrapped in the mysteries of Dutch.

EDAG, a German company, recently unveiled its own open source vehicular prototype dubbed, "Light car - Open Source." It's safe to say that this, too, will be a car whose features can be tweaked and modified by members of the community. Although it's unclear whether EDAG will be as open to the general public with its schematics as the C,mm,n prototype. It seems that EDAG is willing to partner with other developers to further enhance the "Light Car - Open Source's" innovative technology.

The lithium-ion-powered car's futuristic exterior is accentuated by OLED lights, transforming the car's paneling from a slick, opaque design into a customizable, lit-up informational display. Drivers can allegedly customize the outline of the car's various lights as they see fit--an unheard-of technique that's sure to turn sports logos into brake lights, should this car ever see the light of day. Drivers can apply these same levels of customization to the interface panels inside the car, as well as the car's rear. EDAG envisions a future where drivers can gleam information about the road and condition of the car in front of them just by staring at the informative, changing display on its butt. Car-to-car communications--can it be done?

Third on the list is the OScar. But I mention this more to round out a full list than anything else. Established in 1999, the concept for this open-source, community-driven car design seems to have fallen by the wayside in the past few years. While the originators agree that the OScar is more than just a vehicle, perhaps they've found the most success in helping the rest of the community realize the potential of open-source development as it relates to complicated, everyday hardware. For I can't ever see a working, tangible OScar reaching the light of day--the site's primary documents haven't even been updated since 2006. And the main forums? Totally down.

If anything, the plight of the OScar serves as a gentle reminder of the old, unrepeatable adage related to ideas. A lot of people have ideas. A lot of people banded together on a common principle can turn their ideas into a wonderful, open-source discussion. And sometimes, even a product might emerge from the fruits of their labors. But building a car ain't like dusting crops--given how resilient the market is toward anything that doesn't run on gas in some variety, it's difficult to envision a future where lofty, high-tech ideas like hydrogen-powered vehicles and open-source skip hand-in-hand through the production line.

Firefox's Future Looks May Radically Redesign the Browser Interface

Mark Edward Soper — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 16:55:41 -0500

ReadWriteWeb brings us an interesting look at what future Firefox versions might look like. The short answer - not much like any web browser you've seen before.

How about an iTunes-style interface that shows web page or content thumbnails in the main pane with media libraries, browsing history, surflists, and statistics in the left pane? Or, how about tabs, applications, and work spaces in the left pane to take full advantage of today's widescreen displays? Either way, the once-sharp distinctions between a web browser interface and an operating system management interface like Windows Explorer have become very blurry. While the jury's still out on the Firefox of the future's interface, it looks as if the Ubiquity command-line interface will definitely make it into Firefox by version 3.6.

Are you ready for a new browser experience? Take a look at the prototypes, mockups, and demos, then hit Comment and sound off.

Lenovo's Mysterious Portable is a 2-year-Old Concept, Still Sexy

Paul Lilly — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 10:15:04 -0500

With the netbook craze in full swing and Intel's Atom processor opening all kinds of doors for smaller, low power devices, you can expect to see some groovy gadgets make it to market. And after two years in development, maybe we'll soon see Lenovo's svelte-looking pocket-sized PC.

Currently in concept form, the "Pocket Yoga" is an extension of a folding notebook with a detachable keyboard, says Johnson Li, director of Lenovo's Beijing Innovation Center. And like its larger inspiration, the Pocket Yoga comes covered in leather, a fitting touch for a device shaped like a large wallet.

From a usability standpoint, a 360 hinge transforms the Pocket Yoga into a multifunction device. Open at a normal angle and you can use it as a laptop complete with full-function keyboard. Flip the cover all the way back and it suddenly becomes a tablet notebook.

Ensuring that geek stays chic, the leather-covered Pocket Yoga comes with a belt. And ensuring that chic stays geek, that belt turns into a mouse when removed. Pretty slick.

No word on projected price or availability, but we already want one.

(Image Credit: Lenovo)