CrunchGear |  |
- Ropid: New robot runs, jumps 8 centimeters high (2 videos)
- Digital Contents Expo Tokyo: “Morphing Bumpy 3D Display For Embodied CG Art” (2 videos)
- GM to offer in-car wi-fi access starting next year
- App Store gets 100,000 approved apps
- Helmet radar: coming to a supersoldier near you
- In case you forgot: tomorrow is Droid Day
- Canon 7D shots can carry over ghost image to next shot (fix imminent)
- First look: BFG Deimos gaming laptop
- Rock music is dead, and all the Rock Band in the world won’t save it
- Peek goes Twitter and is now available at Blockbuster
- What’s missing from this press release?
- Buy your kid this Astro Boy netbook but keep it for yourself
- Arudino DIY Football Hero
- Big Day in Gaming, October 27th edition: Forza Motorsport 3, Tekken 6 & DJ Hero
- PETMAN robot walks like a human
- Photo frame looks like a Mac window
- Here’s an idea, stop including standard A/V cables with Blu-ray players
- Is World of Warcraft too big to be displaced at this point?
- Libraries seeing huge increase in patrons thanks to ebooks
- First agricultural robot that can autonomously work on fields
| Ropid: New robot runs, jumps 8 centimeters high (2 videos) Posted: 28 Oct 2009 04:21 AM PDT
Japan has produced many humanoids in the past years, but making them move in one way or the other is usually a challenge. Kyoto-based Robo Garage has unveiled Ropid [JP] today, a mini robot that runs on two legs and can jump as high as 8cm.
Ropid stands 38cm tall and at 16kg, it’s pretty heavy. The little guy has 29 joints and four gyro-sensors in the body and is powered by a lithium-ion battery. He can react to voice commands, so if you tell him to jump, he will do so. His movements aren’t really elegant but OK.
Ropid (the name is a mix between “robot” and rapid”) is currently just a prototype, with Robo Garage saying there isn’t a release date set yet. This video shows how he runs: This video shows how he jumps: Via Robot Watch [JP]
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| Digital Contents Expo Tokyo: “Morphing Bumpy 3D Display For Embodied CG Art” (2 videos) Posted: 27 Oct 2009 11:40 PM PDT
One of the most spectacular booths at the Digital Contents Expo in Tokyo (which ended Sunday) was the one of the Yoichiro Kawaguchi lab at the University of Tokyo. Their so-called “world’s first spherical bumpy display” can be touched by viewers to feel the surface moving and morphing. The lab says their display is perfect to present “embodied” 3D CG, but it’s actually a piece of art itself. And the thing is pretty large, too. Just have a look at those videos I took at the expo. Video 1: Video 2:
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| GM to offer in-car wi-fi access starting next year Posted: 27 Oct 2009 11:00 PM PDT
Installation will set you back $500, and will be installed in your new GMC, Chevy, Buick, or Cadillac, setting you back about $29 for 1 GB of service. Go over 1 GB of transfers, and you’re cut off, unless you pay for the 5 GB version. Range is limited to about 150 feet from your vehicle, which would be fine for camping, but you wouldn’t want to use it for torrenting or anything. Or you could just get a Mifi. [via Autoblog]
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| App Store gets 100,000 approved apps Posted: 27 Oct 2009 10:15 PM PDT  Keep in mind, 100,000 approved apps doesn't mean 100,000 GOOD apps, but according to the App Shopper, a major milestone has been hit. There are a few technicalities though.
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| Helmet radar: coming to a supersoldier near you Posted: 27 Oct 2009 08:50 PM PDT
The Helmet Mounted Radar System (HMRS) is “a miniature, low power, near 360-degree field of view Moving Target Indicator (MTI) radar sensor that will alert the soldier to the whereabouts of a target out to at least 25 meters.” 25m isn’t very far, but providing even a hint of a nearby enemy could be the difference between life and death. The only trouble, it seems to me, is that the modern soldier is going to be so weighed down with all the gadgets and armor made to save his life that he won’t be able to maneuver. Not to mention, this may lead to extremely scary moments like that part in Alien where the guy is in the tunnels and IT’S RIGHT BEHIND YOU AAAAAARGH [via Gizmodo]
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| In case you forgot: tomorrow is Droid Day Posted: 27 Oct 2009 05:00 PM PDT  I don't know how you could forget, considering we've been posting Droid updates just about every day, but according to our calculations, tomorrow is October 28th: the day Droid drops. Now, we don't expect the Droid to set the mobile world on its head exactly, but we're pretty sure that it's going to be the premiere Android device — until the next premiere device comes out.
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| Canon 7D shots can carry over ghost image to next shot (fix imminent) Posted: 27 Oct 2009 04:10 PM PDT
A fix should be here soon, I’d guess within a day or two. In the meantime, those of you with 7Ds should try to replicate it! It sounds kinda cool. I get an effect like that when I’m doing a flash+long exposure and a second flash goes off in the background. It looks crazy as hell. The 7D bug should be nothing like that, but hey. [via CameraTown]
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| First look: BFG Deimos gaming laptop Posted: 27 Oct 2009 04:00 PM PDT
BFG is new to the laptop world, and it kind of shows. The box was very basic, without all the pointless extras that some manufacturers include. I’m fine with that, I don’t particularly feel a need to have a BFG hat or mouse pad. I’m here for the gaming performance. The machine looks good. And it’s not ridiculously heavy like certain other gaming laptops. It’s still huge, but not in an overwhelming way. More importantly, everything works. Sure, there’s isn’t any gimmicky “facial recognition,” but that hardly ever works right anyway. First impression is a solid machine with enough bling to keep me happy. I have to admit, I’m a sucker for blue LEDs. So I’ve fired up my Steam account, I’m downloading some machine-melting games, and looking forward to putting this thing through its paces. As always, I’ll ask: any particular questions about the machine? Anything you’d like me to take a look at in particular in the full review? Also, if you like the look so far, keep in mind you can get 10% off the price if you pre-order by this Friday.
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| Rock music is dead, and all the Rock Band in the world won’t save it Posted: 27 Oct 2009 03:00 PM PDT
In the interest of bringing Ron and Fez’s fantastic radio show topics to a more tech-minded audience, I propose the following: games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band, while fun and, generally speaking, "good," will not save rock music. Rock and roll, for all intents and purposes, is dead. Bear with me for a minute, I’ll make this relevant to CrunchGear.
So the topic on today’s show was: U2—you may have heard of them—recently released a new album, but it didn’t sell too well. This created the discussion: is rock dead? Someone brought up the idea that kids today just aren’t buying music anymore, that they’re playing video games instead; you have but so many entertainment dollars to spend, right? But even if kids (and by kids I mean the 30 and under crowd, a completely arbitrary cutoff point) are going out and buying these games left and right, does that mean they’re experiencing music in a new way, as proponents of the idea that Guitar Hero will save the music business would have you believe, or are they just killing time? To paraphrase Ron Bennington, if the only thing these kids are doing is playing Simon with Pearl Jam in the background, Pearl Jam might as well be the Pac-Man theme song. The kids aren’t paying attention to the music, aren’t getting "into it," per se, but are merely following along with whatever random melody is playing in the background. (Incidentally, a caller tried to blame the decline of rock music on Pearl Jam’s anti-everything antics back in the 1990s and 2000s, driving kids into hip hop’s flashy embrace. Kids want to look up to Rock Stars, and the lifestyle they live, and not necessarily people who, while armed with guitars, are generally against the whole rock "scene." That’s partially why rapping about money, women, and cars caught fire in the 1990s: it filled a void that rock had left behind. I sure as hell would rather listen to Jay-Z than, say, The Strokes, who, if I recall correctly, were once promoted as the saviors of rock and roll.)
What new (and I do mean brand new, and not merely new to you) rock music have you heard in one of these games that made you think, "Hey, this band is pretty good. I’m gonna buy their album from iTunes and buy a t-shirt from their Web site."? You may well be able to play along just fine with a Weezer or Peter Frampton song, and you’ll have a good time doing so, but in doing so you’re not exactly discovering Bruce Springsteen back when he was just a local Jersey act. You’re not discovering new music, but rather pressing a fisher price fret along with the melody to a classic rock song. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but that’s not going to save rock music, now is it? And by save I just mean to make it popular again. I’d love to see a sales comparison between rock music and hip hop over the past 10 years. I bet it’s pretty one-sided. Now these games are great for bands like The Beatles that are trying to introduce their catalog to millions of new eyeballs, but you’re not necessarily creating any new talent. It’s sorta like WWE in that sense: I stopped watching regularly back in high school (2004ish), but I turn on Raw or Smackdown today and the very same guys are who were main-eventing then (Triple H, Undertaker, John Cena, etc) are main-eventing now; no new stars have been created in the past five years. That’s not good! So yeah, sorta rambling, but you get my point: Rock Band & Co. may be great for the record labels looking to make a extra few dollars on licensing deals, and may be great for old bands looking to introduce new fans to their music, but you’re crazy if you think these games will make rock music the music of this generation’s young people; hip has already won that battle. No new rock talent is being cultivated with these games, and the relationship between the actual music and the player isn’t genuine: you’re playing a video game with your friends as part of an event or fun social gathering, and aren’t carefully digesting the melodies and lyrics of "Gouge Away" for the sake of the music itself. That is all.
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| Peek goes Twitter and is now available at Blockbuster Posted: 27 Oct 2009 02:09 PM PDT
The Pronto costs $59.99 with $14.99/month service. The Classic costs $19.99.
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| What’s missing from this press release? Posted: 27 Oct 2009 02:00 PM PDT
Samsung has just announced a pair of LCD monitors with built-in TV features that promise to "eliminate the line between work productivity and HD entertainment," according to the press release. And speaking of that press release, it appears that Samsung has also eliminated the most basic and important spec from the products' list of features. Price? Nope, that's there — $250 for the 933HD+ and $330 for the 2333HD. Resolution? 1360×768 for the 933HD+ and 1920×1080 for the 2333HD. Response time, contrast ratio, that stuff is all there too. It’s a little known fact that for every one person that writes about technology products, there are 50 public relations people. Maybe 100. It might even be 1000. I don’t know the exact number except to say that they're everywhere and they all somehow have my phone number and they all somehow know where I live, so I certainly don’t want to brass anyone off but see if you can tell me what's missing from this press release:
Here's the live copy, which will hopefully be updated by the time you read this (it's been over two hours already, though). UPDATE/SPOILER: Samsung e-mailed saying that the 933HD+ and 2333HD displays are 19 and 23 inches, respectively. So there you have it. Sweet, sweet closure.
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| Buy your kid this Astro Boy netbook but keep it for yourself Posted: 27 Oct 2009 01:27 PM PDT
The $616 special edition kit comes with a lunch box-like case, USB hard drive, flash drive, external optical drive, MP3 player, and portable speakers. Keep the netbook and external optical drive and give the rest to your 10 year old for Christmas. He’ll love ‘em. An Astro Boy MP3 player! Alright! To bad it’s only in Taiwan. [via Blogeee.net]
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| Posted: 27 Oct 2009 12:30 PM PDT Playing guitar with your hands is so 4 years ago. So this team of DIYers and soccer football players crafted the first ever, wall mounted, full sized, football hero. The control pads are large piezo sensors controlled with the Arduino electronics platform. But let the video do the talking. A behind the scene video is also available below: via [Hack N Mod]
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| Big Day in Gaming, October 27th edition: Forza Motorsport 3, Tekken 6 & DJ Hero Posted: 27 Oct 2009 12:00 PM PDT
Today’s a pretty big day in gaming, ladies and gents. You’ve got DJ Hero, Tekken 6, and Forza Motorsport 3 all coming out today. (Incidentally, I’ll have like a mini FM3 "review" tomorrow, and we may have some fun Tekken news this week to share—stay tuned!) So I decided to go around some of the big gaming sites, and take select quotes, completely out of context, and share them with y’all here. Let’s go~! Let’s start with FM3, since it’s the game I’ve actually played. From Edge:
From IGN:
From 1UP:
So, surprise, it looks like FM3 is good. Again, I’ll have my take on the game here tomorrow. Not that you care ;-) Next, Tekken 6. Remember: we may have some exciting Tekken-related news here later this week, so keep your eyes peeled! From IGN:
That’s the only "big" review I could find. If you guys find more, I’ll add ‘em later, such is the POWER of the Internet. And lastly, DJ Hero. From IGN:
Again, I couldn’t find any more DJ Hero reviews. Is today a holiday or something? Because if it is I’m out of here! So, yeah, just some random comments.
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| PETMAN robot walks like a human Posted: 27 Oct 2009 11:30 AM PDT
If that BigDog robot from Boston Dynamics didn’t amaze and/or horrify you, maybe its human-like big brother "PETMAN" will catch your attention.
I, for one, like that the torso section of PETMAN looks like a sweet boom box and I hope that someday Boston Dynamics sees fit to let the robot loose in the business district of a small town, just walking around and taking in the scenery while pumping out some old-school rap. And I mean really old-school, like the kind they used to use for break dancing. All the townspeople would be like, "Hey, check out that walking boom box! It has red shoes! Try to push it over! You can't! Why is it walking towards me?! Nice boom box! Niiice boom box!" According to the company, PETMAN will be used to test chemical protection clothing for the U.S. Army – not for scaring various townspeople:
Let’s be honest, though. There’s no reason you couldn’t test chemical protection clothing AND walk around the town square blasting some Grandmaster Flash. Oh, except for the whole "exposure to chemical warfare agents" part. You know what? Forget the boom box thing. PETMAN – BigDog gets a Big Brother [Boston Dynamics via Geekologie]
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| Photo frame looks like a Mac window Posted: 27 Oct 2009 11:00 AM PDT
It’s a wooden photo frame made to look like a Mac window with "image.jpg" in the title bar. There’s nothing digital here, it’s just your standard old-school frame that holds a single tangible photo. If you don’t have any tangible photos anymore the frame comes with the transparent background pattern from Photoshop, which may or may not get a chuckle out of the graphic designer at your office that rolls his eyes any time someone requests a tiny revision. image.jpg Photo Frame [ThinkGeek.com]
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| Here’s an idea, stop including standard A/V cables with Blu-ray players Posted: 27 Oct 2009 10:30 AM PDT
Manufacturers, let me save you some money. It won’t be much, but something is better than nothing. But more importantly you would be helping out the consumers actually spending money on your products. So please, stop including standard A/V cables with Blu-ray players. We don’t need anymore of them, thankyouverymuch. Every household in America already has a drawer full of red/white/yellow cables and plus, Blu-ray players shouldn’t be hooked up with them anyway. But if you simply must include a set of cables with your players, how about a set of component cables or even an HDMI cable? After all Blu-ray player buyers are probably – hopefully – getting the player to watch high-def content and those simple red, white, and yellow cables don’t provide that last time I checked. I understand that some companies like Monster Cable and Best Buy might be a little peeved if suddenly they lost some sales of high-margin cables, but don’t think of them, think of us. Think of the thousands of consumers that get duped into buying these incredibly overpriced and unnecessary cables everyday. As it stands right now, a salesmen can easily say you need this $120 HDMI cable because your $150 Blu-ray player doesn’t come with one. But by simply including a basic HDMI cable, a few less people might get scammed, which is totally a win. Amazon and other online retailers always have HDMI cables for around a dollar so buy up a crapton of those and start stuffing them in with Blu-ray players. Besides, including standard composite cables with Blu-ray players is sending the wrong message anyway. It’s saying that you, the manufacturer, are suggesting that the player will work fine with them. But it won’t. The player will only output the picture at a 480i signal with composite cables, which is no where near the 1080p capability. It’s an injustice to both the consumer and the Blu-ray format. It’s true that maybe some people are buying Blu-ray players right now to use with their older non-HDMI and non-component equipped TV sets and they need the red/white/yellow cables to watch the player at all. But I’m sure those folks will get by just fine. Worst case scenario is that they have to make a trip to Radio Shack if they don’t happen to have a set of composite cables laying around. There’s simply no reason to continue including old cables with a high-def player. Save the money or better yet, include appropriate cables. You do know that component cables can be used as composite too, right?
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| Is World of Warcraft too big to be displaced at this point? Posted: 27 Oct 2009 10:00 AM PDT
Back before I started playing World of Warcraft (because of something that was work-related, incidentally), I used to tease my then-roommate about playing it well into the night, every night. I was a freshman at a certain horrendously expensive school, and my gaming started and stopped with my Xbox; I had no time for time-sink PC games. Not my roommate, no sir. The day the game came out—he had also been part of the beta—he plopped into his small, uncomfortable chair, Sunkist in hand (man alive did he love Sunkist for some reason), and quested well into the night away. That was five years ago, and, correct me if I’m wrong, but no other game has even come close to de-throning Blizzard’s little engine that… still does. Look at the game’s subscription numbers. The current estimate is that some 13.1 million people subscribe to the game in one shape or fashion. Lump all these people together in the same geographic area, and it would be the third biggest city in the world, after Mumbai and Shanghai. (Or, to put it in American terms, that’s nearly twice the population of New York City proper.) That, and the game is still growing… Wrath of the Lich King isn’t even available in China yet! When that hits, bam! Hello, even more money. So we’ve established that WoW is big; that’s not exactly breaking news. Its closest competitors, I think, at least in the West, are Warhammer Online and AION. Apparently AION has had some technical issues that has driven players away, and Warhammer Online sorta came and went. And it’s not that these games aren’t good, but that, well, if all my friends play WoW, why would I abandon them? That’s why WoW is where it is, and why it’s not going anywhere any time soon: too many people are playing for someone to come along and not it off its perch. That’s not to say that another game won’t come along and find a successful niche of its own—my money’s on Star Wars: The Old Republic, whenever that comes out!—but you’re crazy if you think another game is going to "kill" WoW. And what will kill WoW? WoW 2, provided Blizzard wants to rock the boat, so to speak. The gist is, WoW seems to be pretty much unbeatable right now. It launched at just the right time, with just the right lore, with just the right number of updates, with just the right fanbase. If that’s a good thing or a bad thing, I don’t know.
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| Libraries seeing huge increase in patrons thanks to ebooks Posted: 27 Oct 2009 09:30 AM PDT
The The Telegraph believes these downloads could help save libraries. Quoth some librarian dude:
Exciting development indeed. Now when are they going to clear out all those pesky “paper books” and turn libraries into huge computer clusters?
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| First agricultural robot that can autonomously work on fields Posted: 27 Oct 2009 09:00 AM PDT
Robots now enter the agriculture industry, too. First the award-winning rice-transplanting robot, now this: Major Japanese conglomerate Fuji Heavy Industries has developed an agricultural robot that can tend fields autonomously. The company says the robot is the first of its kind. It runs on gas and is 2m long, 60cm wide and 1m high. It emits and receives laser signals to orient itself, gauging the distance to special reflective plates (which are placed at regular intervals of about 10 meters). Fuji Heavy says the robot can grow fruit and vegetables independently, and it can even be used inside greenhouses. The company plans to start selling the machine next fiscal year for around $100,000. My apologies for the small picture, but that’s all that’s available now. Via Nikkei [registration required, paid subscription]
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Taking wi-fi hotspots to the extreme, GM has announced that certain models of their vehicles will feature Autonet, a mobile wi-fi solution built into your car and designed to provide you internet access no matter where you are. It’s only going in certain models, but you can probably get one for that old Monte Carlo if you really want to.
A helmet-mounted radar unit seems redundant with the kind of crazy surveillance and intel they already have available or in the pipes, but hey, whatever helps our boys. While satellite and air-based imaging are invaluable to the modern field commander, an individual infantryman has little feedback in an more local tactical situation. So why not have an imaging system for individuals?
We just got a 
Perhaps you find yourself in the overlapping section of a Venn diagram consisting of a circle called "People who like Macs," a circle called "People who hate digital photo frames but are okay with computer-themed standard photo frames," and a circle called "People who have at least $25." Sound about right? Then here's the $25 
Libraries, the places where homeless people, famously, shave and go BM, are seeing an uptick in subscribers thanks to their embrace of ebooks. Our own Brooklyn system has had downloadable ebooks for a few years now and the system is fairly simple: you check out a book to read on your device and then “check it back in” when you’re done. This frees up the download for the next person. The book deletes itself automatically past the due date.
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