NVIDIA’s AI will help USPS handle packages 10 times faster

Posted on 05/11/2019 by Engadget RSS Feed

The US Postal Service (USPS) delivers an estimated 146 billion pieces of mail annually, including 6 billion packages. In an attempt to process package data more efficiently, USPS is experimenting with AI. Today, NVIDIA announced that it will provide...

Google backs its Bristlecone chip to crack quantum computing

Posted on 06/03/2018 by Engadget RSS Feed

Like every other major tech company, Google has designs on being the first to achieve quantum supremacy -- the point where a quantum computer could run particular algorithms faster than a classical computer. Today it's announced that it believes its...

Horror Movie Scenes Help Map Brain Areas Involved in Fear Processing

Posted on 09/02/2017 by hira

What goes on in your mind when you are frightened? Understanding how the human brain processes fear has been a topic of intense scientific research for years. Previous studies have used...

Horror Movie Scenes Help Map Brain Areas Involved in Fear Processing

Posted on 09/02/2017 by hira

What goes on in your mind when you are frightened? Understanding how the human brain processes fear has been a topic of intense scientific research for years. Previous studies have used...

Clever photog builds a fully-automatic photo processor

Posted on 08/12/2015 by Andrew Tarantola

German photographer Lukas Fritz has spent the last year developing an easier means of processing his film negatives at home, without the need for a dedicated dark room. He recently published a video of his completed work, the Filmomat, and it is noth...

Future PS4 games will have more power to play with

Posted on 01/12/2015 by Nick Summers

It seems the PlayStation 4 is now just a little more powerful than before. At least for game developers, anyway. None of the console's components have changed -- instead it's being reported that a seventh core has been "unlocked" in the CPU. Until no...

Ebook Cover Generator: Something to Judge

Posted on 04/09/2014 by Lambert Varias

The New York Public Library (NYPL) is working on an ebook borrowing app. Some of the ebooks will come from public domain sites like Project Gutenberg. The problem with many of the public domain ebooks is that they lack (decent) covers. This led NYPL’s Mauricio Giraldo Arteaga to make programs that automatically create ebook covers.

Mauricio’s first program is based on the generative art project 10 PRINT. It draws graphics and creates color schemes based on the letters in a book’s title. The graphics are mostly based on the PETSCII character set, while Mauricio came up with his own process for selecting the colors. You can see some of the results in the image above.

The image below is from his second ebook cover generator. It’s for ebooks that have illustrations embedded as image files. Mauricio made a program that extracts the illustrations and turns them into book covers. Both programs have adjustable parameters, such as brightness and saturation. The second program also has an option for picking only the pictures with a face or faces in it.

You can download both programs on Mauricio’s GitHub page. Mauricio made them in Processing, but he also made an iOS/Objective-C version of the abstract cover generator.

[via NYPL]

Diffuse Laptop Light Makes Screens Easy on the Eyes: Ambif.lux

Posted on 05/04/2014 by Lambert Varias

Carolina Ferrari, Ilaria Vitali and Mengdi Xu designed Diffuse, a lamp designed to make laptop screens easy on the eyes in two ways. Diffuse can provide complementary ambient light or it can compensate for a dark environment with a soft white light. It’s Ambilight and F.lux in one.

Diffuse consists of a felt diffuser and a wooden box containing its electronics, which are mainly an Arduino Uno, two RGB LED strips and a light sensor. The box also houses a 12v rechargeable battery and a switch between the “Eye Pleasure” and “Eye Relief” modes. The felt diffuser attaches to the box via two magnets.

To use Diffuse, you just connect it to your laptop via its USB cable, turn it on and select which mode you want to use. In Eye Relief mode, Diffuse’s light sensor will analyze the brightness of the area immediately behind your screen. The lamp’s LEDs will then emit a white light to balance the brightness of your screen and your surroundings. To use Eye Pleasure mode you also need to install an application on your laptop. The application will read the average color of your screen in real time and relay it to Diffuse, which will then match the given color.

Sit back, relax and check out the Diffuse Team’s website for more on the lamp.

Real Life Luxo, Jr.: I Love Lamp

Posted on 02/12/2012 by Technabob

Remember the classic Pixar animated clip, Luxo, Jr.? You know, the one with the pair of articulating Anglepoise lamps playing around, and shown with the Pixar logo at the beginning of their flicks? Well, in the latest occurrence of life imitating art imitating life, some guys have actually built an animatronic lamp that moves around like the one in the movies.

pinokio luxo lamp

Well, maybe it’s not exactly like the one in the movies – for starters, this lamp is black, and both Luxo, Sr. and Jr. were white. Plus, this lamp is designed to interact with humans, tracking faces and sounds – not bounce around on a little rubber ball. Using custom code, the lamp is able to express a personality in much the same way that the lamps did in the movie.

The robotic lamp, named Pinokio, was created by Victoria University students Shanshan Zhou, Adam Ben-Dror, and Joss Doggett using Processing, Arduino, and OpenCV. If they ever manage to mass-produce these things and then license them through Pixar, they’ll sell millions.

[via TDW via io9]

Etch-a-Sketch 3.0 hands-on (video)

Posted on 16/05/2012 by Terrence O'Brien

The Etch-a-Sketch. A standard bearer for childhood, and one that most of us never really mastered. While Yelizaveta Lokshina can't help you create awe-inspiring portraits from aluminum powder, she has managed to update the toy for the digital age. Using an Arduino, a few buttons and a pressure sensor crammed inside a hollowed-out Etch-a-Sketch, the 3.0 version of the doodler is able to draw in old school gray, as well as vibrant colors created by blending an RGB palette. While holding down the red, green or blue button you squeeze the pressure sensor to add more or less of individual hues. The same sensor is used to change brush width when you hold down the black button. There's even a secret mode that automatically cycles through colors and thicknesses for creating vibrant, almost hallucinatory patterns.

At the moment, the dual doodle knobs need to be physically connected to a computer so that a Processing script can work its magic and render the virtual Etch-a-Sketch. But, future versions may include wireless for sketching out images from the comfort of a couch and an accelerometer for the replicating the satisfying sensation of shaking the red fram to erase your creation. Basically, it's still a work in progress. Drawing with the Etch-a-Sketch 3.0 is just as satisfying, in a tactile sense, as the original, though we struggled slightly to get the hang of the pressure sensitive selector. One thing's for sure, though, the kids love it even more than the 1960 creation. Check out the video after the break to see it in action on the floor of the ITP Spring Show.

Gallery: Etch-a-Sketch 3.0 hands-on