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Augmented reality demo: junaio takes advantage of iOS 4 camera access.

Posted: 06 Jul 2010 04:00 AM PDT

A while back, I posted a bit about a new augmented reality game called Zombie ShootAR. It is a shooter game where you kill zombies that appear only in the augmented reality of your mobile phone’s viewfinder. The game relied on some imaging technology that “watched” for horizon lines and therefore effectively planted the creeping zombies on the ground or in exact places (instead of having them float around in space if you moved your phone suddenly). It worked pretty well actually and I heard many responses about that game inquiring why it was only available for Symbian OS and not for iPhone. As it turns out there was a pretty good reason. Low level access to the iPhone’s camera data, which is necessary for that kind of imaging technology, had been suppressed by Apple…until now.

With the latest release of iOS 4, Apple is allowing much deeper access to the iPhone’s camera API and therefore many new augmented reality experiences, that were not possible before, are now ready to come to iPhone owners.

Metaio, the company that brought you Zombie ShootAR, is set to take advantage of this new capability with an update to their Unifeye Mobile SDK (version 2.1). This augmented reality SDK, as well as a new version of their free augmented reality browser called junaio, will be available today, July 6th. If you have junaio installed, you may have gotten the update for it already.

In an effort to show some of junaio’s new abilities, Metaio prepared this little AR demo in their press release. Anyone with junaio app and iOS 4 installed on their iPhone can try it out. You can talk about 3D AR features until you are blue in the face; seeing the features sums it up better, no doubt. It’s a clever idea. I tried it and it works, but keep in mind it is just a demo. They may be tweaking it here and there.

The press release came with this computer generated image of a superhero (a.k.a Metaio Man) that is used as your AR target. Basically, you look at the picture of Metaio Man with junaio, and you should see a 3D version of him superimposed over top. Just in case, here are some more detailed instructions:

1. Download free version of junaio for iPhone (should work for Android too if you want to get crazy and try it).

2. Make sure your iPhone is running iOS 4.0.

3. Subscribe or “Tune in” to junaio glue demo channel. To do this you press the “Channels” button in the upper right corner, then press the “Featured” channel set, and then finally press the junaio glue demo item. If you can’t find the junaio glue demo channel for some reason, you can always search for it by clicking the text field at the top that says “subscribed channels.”

4. After opening the channel, just pass your iPhone viewfinder over the picture of the superhero below and you should see a 3D version of him on your iPhone’s screen. If you tap the screen, he does an action pose.

This is definitely an interesting way to advertise a new app for interacting with real-time environments. And while it is “neat”, believe me, I know this demo is fairly simplistic. Some of you may be thinking “Whoop-dee-doo, it’s a 3D guy and he’s not even in any real context.” This may be true, but from a market standpoint, I think it is more important to focus on the potential of this platform and the creative, useful toolset AR is destined to become. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again that while this technology is in its infancy developers are doing something important by pushing these concepts forward.

Besides, it’s bound to catch on anyway due to the avalanche of advertising opportunity it represents, for better or worse. But there are also many other capabilities that could or already have come out of this kind of technology: Pre-purchase product demonstrations, product X-Rays to see inside contents, integrated audio/video samples of music from physical CDs (what are those eh). These are just a few things that pop into my mind.

What are some of the possibilities you imagine? Where do you see this whole thing headed? Did this example work for you all? Let us know.

Japan gets white PS3 slim and a black model with a 320GB HDD

Posted: 05 Jul 2010 11:01 PM PDT

Sony in Japan just announced [JP, PDF] a bunch of changes and news regarding domestic sales of the PS3. The company said they’ll be bringing a PS3 in “Classic White” to the local market, in addition to the existing “Charcoal Black” (the first version of the PS3 in “Ceramic White” went on sale in 2008). There will be no technical changes, but Sony generally plans to ship bigger HDDs with the PS3 Slim in the future.

The new white PS3 Slim (also dubbed CECH-2500A LW) will be available with a 160GB HDD only, while the black model will be sold with a 160GB HDD (CECH-2500A) or with a 320GB HDD (CECH-2500A LW). Sony also says in Japan, the 120GB PS3 Slim will be sold under an open price model starting July 7.

Japanese buyers will be able to lay their hands on the new CECH-2500 series from July 29. Prices: $341 for the 160GB models (black or white) and $398 for the 320GB version. No word yet from Sony regarding international releases.

Hurt Locker copywrite owners not trying to stop the sharing

Posted: 05 Jul 2010 08:52 PM PDT

While the producers of Hurt Locker have been quick to sue anyone they can find that’s downloaded the film, they’re not following the typical pattern of movie producers. Typically, after the producers start suing everyone they can find that downloaded the movie, they send out cease and desist orders. Not in this case.

Of course, everyone has heard the story about the movie, the Hurt Locker. The movie pretty much failed at the box office, so the producers have decided make their money back by suing everyone who downloaded a copy of the film. This of course has been met with some derision amongst film viewers, since the film was considered to be of less then stellar quality. Of course, most companies immediately go after the bittorrent sites and tell them to cease and desist. Instead, the Hurt Locker people haven’t done that. It’s really not a stretch to suggest that they are doing this in order to get more people that download the movie. I guess they have to try and make money in some way.

via TorrentFreak

Prince declares the internet “over”

Posted: 05 Jul 2010 12:23 PM PDT


In an rare interview granted to The Daily Mirror published earlier today, Prince declares:

The internet’s completely over. I don’t see why I should give my new music to iTunes or anyone else. They won’t pay me an advance for it and then they get angry when they can’t get it. The internet’s like MTV. At one time MTV was hip and suddenly it became outdated. Anyway, all these computers and digital gadgets are no good. They just fill your head with numbers and that can’t be good for you.

I guess we can’t blame the man for this off-hand nullification of everything that is modern and good, and which in all likelihood have made his career longer and more lucrative. Like other divas led into the intellectual oubliette of narcissism, he has no concept of the world, because his world is himself.

As for his music, there is no doubt it is popular. His new album, 20TEN, is the occasion for the interview, and the occasion for the quote above was discussion of his releasing his music exclusively via the Mirror. His “ongoing battles against internet abuses,” as the interviewer politely puts it, take the usual form of having unofficial YouTube videos taken down and not distributing his music via digital means. Very effective, I’m sure.

I won’t comment further on this (admittedly talented) man’s mystifying backwardness. I’ll only say that deliberately alienating his existing fan base and preventing a new generation from accessing his music natively, as it were, are tactics certain to be detrimental to his legacy — if not his immediate record sales.

How Steam stopped me from pirating games and enjoy the sweet DRM kool-aid

Posted: 05 Jul 2010 10:11 AM PDT

Note: A reader sent us this interesting take on Steam and DRM, but requested to stay anonymous due to the nature of the article. We of course obliged.

Up until a few weeks ago, the last PC game I purchased and didn’t pirate was Team Fortress 2 via the digital download service, Steam. The last PC game I purchased in a retail box was Half Life 2. Yet like many, I’ve still managed to play every PC hit over the last decade. I simply couldn’t justify spending $50 on a game when pirating offers so many real benefits verses owning a legit copy.

Part of my motivation was that it’s just so damn easy to pirate a game. It’s like three clicks of the mouse to download a torrent and even less on Usernet. The files download as fast as my cable modem allows and I have the full game with simple cracking instructions a few minutes later. Why in the world would I want to drive to a store and give them $50 for the same thing?

Actually, I can answer that. Besides the moral issue of stealing, the primary reason people buy games retail is for the multiplayer modes. Most pirated games do not allow for multiplayer as the game often has to connect to an official server where its legitimacy can easily be verified by some sort of authentication service. So while I played through Modern Warfare 2’s single player mode twice, I haven’t seen one minute of the mutliplayer mode.

Those of us that download games understand this limitation. But for the most part it’s not a huge deal as great games are coming out at such a rapid pace. As soon as I finished my first time through MW2, Battlefield Bad Company 2 was released. Perfect timing. Sometimes we get lucky and games like Borderlands and the original Modern Warfare have an online mutliplayer mode that plays nicely with cracked versions, but that’s getting somewhat rare.

So in a way the main reason I was pirating games was that I was lazy and there wasn’t a service that catered to me. Either buying a game retail from Amazon required me to wait for it to ship or I had to drive to Best Buy. Once I own the game I can’t ever lose the CD key or it would be worthless. And the worst excuse is that it required me to have a DVD-ROM in all of my computers just to install these games. That’s silly. What the world needed was a service where I could buy a game once and never have to worry about losing the physical media or my rights to play it ever again.

Steam. That is what Steam is all about and I was completely ignoring it for years even though it was on most of my PCs so I could play Team Fortress 2. Steam is to games as iTunes is to music. Both platforms make a strong case for digital rights management and purchasing media, but I believe Steams’s case is a bit stronger.

Valve, the makers of Half-Life, released the digital download service back in 2003. Nearly every major game publisher has distribution via the platform now. Gamers can easily browse, purchase, and enjoy PC games with the service even though DRM is a central part of the ecosystem.

Digital Rights Management is a curse word around the Internet. It’s not that most people want to take money away from the developers and engineers that worked day and night for years. No, but rather most DRM schemes are obtrusive and get in the way of actually enjoying the game — or music, ebooks, or movies.

Look at Ubisoft. In order to counter piracy, they require all their games to have a constant internet connection. This means you’re SOL if your Internet drops or you wanna play a game on an airplane. Craziness. It’s this sort of scheme that forces people to pirate games.

Steam’s system wasn’t always so nice. In fact, its offline mode wasn’t all that great in the early days. Even now sometimes the online service goes offline, stripping all the logging and extra features out of some games. But it’s the benefits that keeps it relevant and why I started actually started purchasing games through it.


I already established I’m lazy. Steam understands that’s the norm for most gamers. That’s why Steam makes it so damn easy to buy games. There are top sellers lists, coming soon lists, demo lists, and best of all, legit sales and free-play weekends. I have spent over $50 during Steam’s summer sale on old random games just because it’s so easy and novel. (Today, July 5th, is the last day, btw) There are so many different ways for me to easily buy a game on Steam that’s detrimental to my checking account. Once I click the purchase button, Steam gives me the option to start the install process right away and I know that I will be able to install this game on any computer in the future thanks to the library mode. That’s big.

Then there’s built-in friends lists, achievements, easy installs on other machines, and so much more features that justifies Steam’s DRM. Simply put, there are more advantages to use Steam than there are DRM disadvantages. That’s the way it should be.

The movie industry really should look to Steam for guidance. The ecosystem could very easily be applied to purchasing movies as well.

One redditer made a graphic showing the pains of current movie DRM. It’s crazy the steps required to use one of these legal downloaded movies. Even experienced nerds have trouble with it. How do these companies expect novice computer users to “do the right thing?”

DRM schemes hate your freedom. They don’t want you to be able to travel abroad or enjoy your content on any system you want. That doesn’t really describe Steam, though, so at least one company is showing the whole industry how it should be done. I know it has converted this former pirate into a honest-to-goodness purchaser of digital goods.

Have something to contribute to our online audience? Maybe a counter to this article or something totally different and random? Contact us at Tips@CrunchGear.com.

Fantastic European Space Agency photo shows light from the time of the Big Bang

Posted: 05 Jul 2010 08:30 AM PDT

Oh, the joy this photo brings me. It was taken by the European Space Agency’s Planck telescope over the period of a year, and it shows, among other treasures, some of the oldest light in the universe. We’re talking light from right around the time of the Big Bang, light that’s 13.7 billion years old. I dare you to look at this and not be completely amazed.

A little big of explanation may be necessary.

The center disc-like structure? That’s the Milk Way—that’s us! If you look closely, you can see me collecting flowers in Red Dead Redemption.

Off toward the right are the stars that make up the Orion constellation. To the left, Perseus.

Now, here’s where it gets good. You see the comparatively sparse areas on the top and bottom? That would cosmic background microwave radiation, present since the time of the Big Bang.

Tremendous in every sense of the word.

Back to flower collecting…

The Three PC Features I Want On My Next Mac

Posted: 05 Jul 2010 06:31 AM PDT

This is a counterpoint to The Three Mac Features I Want On My Next PC

PCs suck. They’re underpriced, underpowered, and nothing more than disgusting commodity hardware stuck into a box with no regard for usability and peripheral compatibility. But I still want one. Well, sort of. I don’t want to give up OS X my Mac’s performance record or, well, my freedom. So I guess really what I want is a few PC staple features in my next Mac notebook.

First, I’d like the range of hardware that can run Windows to also be able to run OS X. Having a maximum of four laptops to choose from is a bit off-putting and whenever I need upgrade I feel like a doofus essentially buying the same laptop, again and again. That said, I don’t miss OS X’s ability to handle most hardware with aplomb. Although I still get Grey Screens of Death now and again due to a hardware incompatibility, I’ve never had the horrible “week of pain” that I had with Window machines over the years where a memory upgrade has reduced my PC to a quivering hunk of metal.

An I know that I could feasibly Hackintosh a standard PC and I’d probably be happy. However, I’d like to return to the days of the Power PC and commodity hardware running Cupertino’s best.

Second, I’d like more cooling options. My Mac Pro is great in 80% of cooling situations but recently it got hot in my attic and the fan started running like a Camaro with a stuck valve. Ditto for laptops – if I run my Macbooks for any period of time they start to cook my legs. I’d love a little liquid cooling or maybe sacrifice a little high styling for more air circulation? Too much to ask?

Finally, I’d like the option to tweak OS X a bit more. Tools like the excellent QuicKeys and Divvy offer a bit of a refuge to the power user but there’s no real way to change the way you work with OS X. While 95% of the time this isn’t a big deal – there is a rich command-line interface, after all – it would be nice to skin OS X a bit now and again.

Would I ever switch? Probably not, but these few things might make things a bit easier to take the plunge.

Be sure to read the other side in Matt’s The Three Mac Features I Want On My Next PC article.

The Three Mac Features I Want On My Next PC

Posted: 05 Jul 2010 06:31 AM PDT


This is a counterpoint to The Three PC Features I Want On My Next Mac

Macs suck. They’re overpriced, underpowered, and nothing more than disgusting status symbols. But I still want one. Well, sort of. I don’t want to give up the PC’s wide range of hardware options available or Windows 7 or, well, my dignity. So I guess really what I want is a few Mac staple features in my next PC notebook.


Multi-platform power adapters (and a clever power brick)

I have a few HP, Gateway and Asus notebooks in my house right now. That means there are 6 different power bricks laying around, which has forced me to label each one for easier identification. More times than not though, the wife and I play the match the ends to the notebook game in a desperate hunt for the proper power source. Our Macs? They use the same MagSafe charger even though they are a generation apart. Better yet, it’s easier to tell which notebook they go to as the big ones charge the MacBook Pros and the small ones are for the MacBooks. It’s that easy.

I don’t expect different PC manufacturers to unite together and decided on a universal adapter — although that would be awesome — but PC makers really need to consolidate their huge range of notebook power supplies into just one or two power bricks. Imagine a world where you could use your HP power adapter on *gasp* other HPs even from different generations and product lines instead of the 14 different power adapters currently used across their whole line.

While we’re on the topic, why is it that only Apple has a handy power brick that has great cable management and compatible with multiple international power tips? It’s that sort of attention to detail that makes Apple great. Us PC users are forced feed random sized black power bricks that at the very most might have a small strap of Velcro to help manage cables. If we’re going to universalize power anyway, why not stick a couple of designers in a room and have them come up with some a bit more classy.
A working trackpad
A working trackpad might be a bit erroneous. From what Devin gathered talking to Synaptics — the maker of Apple’s and most PC trackpads — all the trackpads they have produced over the last few years are nearly the same. It’s the combination of poor multitouch support in Windows and bad trackpad drivers that much things up in most PCs. That’s it. So in reality all we need is a better drivers, not trackpads.

I was using an HP Envy 15-inch (2nd gen) for a while and hated the mutlitouch, button-less trackpad. I cursed its name (I named it Stan – Screw you, Stan!) every time I used it. It didn’t work and convinced me that button-less trackpads were the devil. Then I used Devin’s new MacBook Pro. The damn thing worked like it was supposed to. I had to rewire my brain to use the trackpad as I should since the mutlitouch actually worked 100% of the time. I could actually click with one finger while another one rested elsewhere on the pad. It blew my mind.

But it’s just not that HP. I have never used a PC trackpad that’s as good as those found on my Macs. Even my 5-year old iBook’s trackpad that only supports two finger scroll works better than any other PC I have right now. It’s really pathetic.

I’m not sure who is to blame here. It could be Synaptics for not providing enough driver support, Microsoft for not supporting mutlitouch early enough, or even the PC manufacturers for constantly opting for the cheapest solution. I really don’t care, either. Just someone, please, get me a working trackpad on a PC.
A clutter-free keyboard
Oh how I envy the keyboards found on Macs and it’s not really the tactile sensation, either. It’s that the keyboard doesn’t have anything extra added. Out of the ten PC notebooks I have right now, there aren’t two the same. Each one has random media controls along with slightly different layout schemes. It’s not too much to ask that the very bottom left button be the Ctrl key and delete always be in the top right spot.

I understand that notebook makers want to make their models stand out from the rest and an easy way to do that is with randomly colored media playback buttons. But nobody uses those. (at least no one should use them) If bright media buttons aren’t enough, sometimes a notebook will spice things up with a slightly different keyboard layout that adds, I don’t know, shortcut buttons for email, web browsing, calendar, and whatnot. Once again, silly.

The keyboard and trackpad are some of the most important hardware found on a notebook. It’s how users interact with the device so they should be a top priority, but yet it seems only Apple invests significant resources in their development.

I’m not switching back to OS X from Windows 7 anytime soon. It’s my OS of choice now partly because it runs great on the huge range of inexpensive, but yet very capable PC notebooks available from every manufacturer. None of the items I listed here are that big of a deal that to cause me to switch back, but I hope that a few PC manufacturers realize that Apple’s attention to the small things is what defines its identity. There comes a point when selling products that are just good enough stops working. GM and Chrysler know a little about that.

Be sure to read the other side in John’s The Three PC Features I Want On My Next Mac article.

New quick charger for electric cars is really quick

Posted: 05 Jul 2010 06:21 AM PDT

One of the biggest hurdles on the road to make electric vehicles attractive for the mass market is the long time it usually takes to charge batteries. But a Japanese company called JFE Engineering now claims it has found a solution for that problem. According to JFE, even so-called “quick battery chargers” often take 30 minutes to charge a car’s battery to 80% of its capacity.

But their self-developed charger apparently needs just three minutes for a 50% charge, or five minutes for a 70% charge. In tests JFE conducted with the device, Mitsubishi’s electric car i-MiEV (pictured above) was able to drive for 80km continuously after a 5-minute charge (the vehicle has a driving range of 160km on a full charge).

JFE also developed a low-cost version of its charger, which doesn’t require a power transformer and therefore costs just $60,000 to install (roughly half the usual amount). Both that device and the high-cost model meet the specifications of the CHAdeMo standard for electric cars that was brought to life by a group of Japanese and international companies back in March.

JFE expects its charger to be used mainly at gas stations and convenience stores all over Japan by the end of March 2011.

Via 47News [JP]

Get A White iPhone 4 Right Now — If You Have Money, Steady Hands, And No Fear

Posted: 05 Jul 2010 05:40 AM PDT

In the past week or so that the iPhone 4 has been available, there's been one major thing holding people back from from getting one. No, not the antenna issue. Instead, more people I talk to say they're simply waiting for the white one to come out. Sadly, that's not happening until the end of this month. But if you have cash to burn and don't mind taking some risks, you can get one right now. Sort of. The site WhiteiPhone4Now.com is promising to make you "one of the first in the world to own the white iPhone 4." How? They have a DIY kit they're selling to convert your black iPhone 4 into a white one.


CrunchGear Week in Review: Liquid Tetris Edition

Posted: 05 Jul 2010 12:00 AM PDT
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