Tagged: iphone

April 24, 2012

The birds and the city

Heiko, our German development guru found a passion for the birds in Sydney and he wasn’t alone. Here is the story of Wingtags told in his own words:

“Ever since my fiancée and I arrived in Sydney two years ago, there was something we particularly liked about this city. It’s probably because we both grew up in Germany, not a place exactly famous for abundance of wildlife, but we were always delighted to see these large, noisy, sulphur-crested cockatoos flying low across our heads, chasing tourists in parks and stirring up the CBD area with their distinctive raucous calls. Having had the chance to live close to the botanic garden for almost our entire stay, we started to study and eventually grow fond of these remarkable birds that turned out to be surprisingly intelligent.

Earlier this year we started to collaborate with the University of Sydney & the Royal Botanic Gardens & Domain Trust to monitor their movements, breeding and habitat preferences with the aim to better live alongside urban wildlife. Even the SMH talked about it already here. Being both experienced mobile app developers, we couldn’t ignore the crowdsourcing potential and started to design a little iPhone app that comes with a simplified interface to report sightings of tagged birds. The App is called Wingtags and you can download it from the link here and below. Just spot the number on the wingtag, enter it into the app and feel free to attach a photo of your encounter if you get close enough for a nice shot.

Download the app from the App Store

We hope this project gets one or two Sydneysiders a little more curious about the feathery inhabitants of this extraordinary city. Once the database starts filling up, we’ll also be able to visualize the movements of birds right within the app. Spot a bird in Potts Point in the evening just to find out that it had breakfast in Manly – that may pretty much coincide with your own commute.

Special thanks goes out to Robbie Tapping (Amnesiafish in Melbourne) for building the API for the database and to Amnesia Razorfish for sponsoring hosting and bandwidth. The birds do very much appreciate it.”

Let the bird catching and cataloguing begin.

@maniac13

August 15, 2011

The biggest projected capacitive display in the world

and I want one.

I finally had the time to read about this “little” screen at SIGGRAPH, the article has been open in my browser for about 6 days.

And it was well worth the wait.

A projected capacitive display is nothing new, multiple smartphones, including the iPhone has one, but having an 82 inch one is something very special.

check out the video below and dream about having one of these puppies in your living room some day.

http://www.viddler.com/embed/33ac8f58/?f=1&offset=0&autoplay=0&disablebranding=0

Right now this kind of screen is still really expensive ($120 000) and even the CEO said that consumers will see this in the market as soon as it is more affordable.

I am saving my pennies now.

@maniac13

August 10, 2011

The Future of Shopping: Some Retail Stores will probably look like this:

The success of Tesco’s new retail store in Korea is something to behold:

Why? Because there is no physical store and no physical product. However the experience of the store has been fully recreated two dimensionally as a backlit poster with the products and ordering fulfilled using mobile and QR codes. It’s a neat idea and solves a number of issues:

1. The familiar supermarket experience. Tick!
2. Impulse shopping. Tick!
3. Cheap rent. Tick!
4. Open a new store in high traffic areas in one day. Tick!
5. No internal fit out costs. Tick!
6. No need to stock shelves Tick!
7. No Staff wages. Tick!
8. Open 24hrs. Tick!
The list goes on.

Personally I’d like to see NFC integration as well as QR codes. I think we can also expect to see these walls become screens rather than printed products in the very near future.

February 17, 2011

Ultimate list of Cool Touch and Gesture Based Video Walls

So who has the best interactive walls? Here’s some of our picks below. As we move into a world which is transitioning to devices using the NUI (Natural User Interface) there’s a lot to keep an eye on. If you know any more please post them in the comments.

1.University of Groningen:
Pros: Looks awesome, very responsive. Multi-user capable.
Cons: You can’t go out and buy one off the shelf. Touch based only?

2. Microsoft Xbox 360 Kinect AND Windows Phone 7, working together!
Pros: Kinect SDK on the way for PC (fingers crossed) so a very affordable way to develop. Multi user. Facial recognition. Supports second screen in this video.
Cons: None. Seriously! SDK pending, this will be the easiest entry point to start building your first video wall.

3. Toyota Vision Multi Touch Wall:
Pros: Massive 82 inch screens at high res. Very responsive.
Cons: Expensive setup.

4. HD 18 Screen 20 ft Paint Wall with iPad integration.
Pros: Very cool. Huge. HD. Responsive. Works with a second screen (iPad)
Cons: Looks a bit like a one off application for now. Can’t go out and buy one.

5.Yahoo’s Gesture based Video Wall. http://vimeo.com/19177169
Pros: Looks good, hi-resolution and seems responsive.
Cons: Tiled screens. Looks like only one user at a time?

6. Microsoft LightSpace
Pros: It’s a true 3D interface for an entire toom. It projects working interfaces onto your arm/ hand.
Cons: Early days. Long way to go here (but still very cool).

7. Hard Rock Cafe Vegas:
Pros: Multi user. Smooth and responsive. Great content.
Cons: Looks expensive?

8. Ring Wall http://vimeo.com/6648869
Pros: It’s a massive 425 square metres in size. Enough room for everyone to play.
Cons: With 15 HD projectors we’re betting the ongoing running costs might stack up?

9. The Schematic TouchWall with RFID
Pros: It recognises RFID cards allowing you access to personal info. Social integration.
Cons: Nothing obvious. This wall is pretty cool.

10. The BendDesk.
Pros: It’s horizontal AND vertical.
Cons: Not quite wall sized! It’s a prototype so a little rough round the edges.

11. Canon’s big wall – Expo 2010
Pros: It’s looks big and multi user.
Cons: We can’t quite tell if this is a ‘smoke and mirrors’ job. This video is more about the camera than the wall itself.

12. HP’s video wall of touch (link):
Pros: Nice tight looking tiled screens. Cons Already looking a bit dated compered to the others. Touch only. Touch looks a little laggy.

13. The Giant iPhone – Table Connect
Pros: Pretty simple concept. Just plug in your iphone and mount it on a wall!
Cons: Do they make a wall sized one yet?

We’re pretty sure we’ll be seeing a lot more of these soon. Please send us any good ones we might have missed!

December 18, 2010

The Future of Translating

From now on if you are in a (spanish for now) restaurant and you don’t know what it says on the menu or you are in Spain and you can’t read those street signs, all you have to do is take your iPhone out and point Word Lens at it.

It will translate on the fly and looking at the video below it is pretty amazing tech – check it out.

It tries to find out what the letters are and then looks in the dictionary. Then it draws the words back on the screen in translation.

From what I have read it doesn’t work as smooth as it does in the video and it only works on iPhone 3GS, 4 and the latest iPod, but it is still impressive. I’d love to try it, but it isn’t available on Android (hint hint).

It is available on the App store, so check it out. If you do let me know in the comments what you think

maniac13

November 4, 2010

Is you iPhone screen big enough?

If you just answered no then you should get yourself one of these:

simply connect your iPhone and start up the app (for now it is still an app, but they working on not even using that) and you can see your iPhone on a 58-inch multitouch display.

awesome – yes
fun – yes
practical – no

@manaic13

October 26, 2010

Unboxing the Parrot AR Drone

We love unboxing gadgets! …and the AR Drone from Parrot is GREAT fun. The Drone is controlled via an iPhone app which works by tilting your phone to steer whilst viewing a live video feed through a camera mounted in the Drone. It’s a truly usable Augmented Reality device.

How to buy in Australia: We ordered it from Amazon.com. It took 3 days to be delivered to Sydney from the US and cost just under $350.00 AUD including delivery.

So here it is the unboxing through to a test flight…

Amazon delivers it in a HUGE box…

Slightly smaller, but still big box inside…

The Drone is neatly packed surrounded by protective cardboard.

No unwrapping necessary. It pops straight out. Nothing to assamble.

Battery, battery pack and stickers for the external shell.

It comes with the outdoor shell, and adaptors for Au, UK, US, EU.

Below: Unboxed looking at home in the studio…

Below: @bradyohalloran takes an instagram photo of the AR Drone:

Below: Flight Test: This a video taken from the Drone’s camera in the studio.

Below: We do like the idea of attaching a GoPro camera to the Drone to attain HD video – here’s a nice clip of someone flying the drone pretty high… (you can unlock the altitude sensor in the iphone app allowing you to go up as hi as the wifi lets you).

Below: The Promo Vid for the AR Drone.

Things you should know before you buy:

You get one battery that lasts for about 15 mins flying time.
Charger comes with four adaptors incl AUS, UK, US, EU.
You need an iphone or ipod touch to control it.
You don’t need a wifi network (the Drone creates one).
It takes about 5-10 mins to get to grips with the controls.
You need a seperate app to record video.
Onboard Video is 15fps
There is a secondary camera on the bottom of the Drone.
You need 2 of them to have a virtual dogfight.
It’s much bigger than it looks.
It’s a lot of fun.

October 14, 2010

Share pretty pictures with Instagram

Last week saw the launch of the free micro-photo-blogging (coined) iPhone/iPod app Instagram, which allows to to quickly share pictures from your iDevice to share with friends through Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Flickr and the application itself. In that time, it has reportedly been downloaded over 100K times.

Instagram works like a streamlined Tumblr, managing the photo snapping, titling and even location tagging through the Foursquare API. In addition to making the whole photo-sharing thing quick and easy, Instagram lets you apply one of a whole bunch of image filters that make your shots look all arty/old and suprisingly not naff.

The shot above is one I took fairly recently.

Check it out!

September 24, 2010

The mobile phone of the future

and no, it’s not an iPhone.

This is a concept mobile phone of the future that was put together by Billy May. He gathered community feedback and followed up on some rather mundane visions for the mobile future to bring us the Mozilla Seabird.

The big innovation is the use of dual pico projectors on the side of the handset, which can provide different functionality based on the phone’s orientation: flat on a table they pump out the two halves of a QWERTY keyboard, up on a dock they offer the dual purpose of a large viewing screen above and a seamless projected keyboard below. Other features, like the pop-out wireless pointer / Bluetooth headset are slightly less realistic but no less charming.

unfortunately Mozilla is not planning on building this phone (or any other phone for that matter)

But check out the video – what I like is that it runs Android, but when you dock it it runs Windows 7 – nice!

simply put – I want one!

@maniac13

June 2, 2010

It's almost here: The iPhone controlled quadcopter drone

Update: I’ve been waiting to buy one of these since I blogged it back in January. Well – the wait is almost over. June 15th sees the launch and pricing details of the AR Drone. Sick … as a Parrot. Details here

I’m planning to get one shipped over. Let me know in the comments below if you want to come and have a play with it

Here’s my original post.

Santa didn’t bring me one, but I wish he had. An iPhone controlled quadcopter drone with onboard cameras … yes really. It says it’s controlled using ‘wifi technology’ so I’m hoping you can’t just fly within a wifi zone. Big brother footage of Sydney coming soon. More here

@handypearce