People finder using iMovie facial recognition tech (military)

10/24/2010

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Nintendo patents new Augmented Reality Shopping App that plans shopping routes in stores

10/18/2010

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From ENGADGET

Nintendo patent application describes a grocery list app, takes the DS shopping
By Tim Stevens  posted Oct 15th 2010 9:34AM


If your pocket or purse makes room for a smartphone there's a good chance you've started managing your shopping lists digitally. Nintendo, however, is trying to make an ever-greater case for taking your DS with you instead, and if instant trading of content with strangers isn't enough incentive, maybe tracking groceries is. Nintendo of America has applied for a patent describing an "in-store wireless shopping network using hand-held devices." Those devices are, of course, game systems, and the images with the patent app all show a DS being used to track needed quantities of such exciting items as milk, eggs, and salsa. The picture below gives an idea of what the interface might look like, talking to a database of items and their locations to give shoppers an idea of where to find things in the store. Net result? Planning your route becomes a thrilling strategy game -- or at least keeps you from getting lost in the supermarket, ensuring you can continue to shop happily.


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iPhone to tell you how ugly you are

10/16/2010

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From intomobile

Ever wonder how good looking, or in the case of this app, how UGLY you are? With the Ugly Meter app for iPhone, you can find out for yourself.

Put together by the developers known simply as the ‘Dapper Gentlemen’, this light-hearted app uses the built-in camera in your iPhone to analyze facial pictures for levels of ugliness. Wonderful. 

When taking a picture for analysis, the app directs you with a guide to help you line up your facial features. Obviously, ensuring a proper picture is taken is key for giving you the low-down on the ugliness meter 

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Scan Someones License and send message to them Instantly with app for iPhone

09/17/2010

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I thought they just made texting while driving illegal???

From technology Review
Wednesday, September 15, 2010

License Plates Used for Public Messaging


Apps that read license plates can send notes to their owners, and help businesses track customers.By Tom SimoniteNext time you're stuck in traffic, take a look at the license plates on the cars around you. To a user ofbump.com--which launches today--each one is like an email address that can be used to contact the owner, whether to tell them a rear light is out or that you like their bumper sticker.

"To send a message you just need to specify state and plate," Bump's VP of technology John Albers-Mead told me at the DEMO conference in Santa Clara, California, where the La Jolla, California, firm will launch this afternoon.

Anyone that has registered their license plate can pick up those messages while an upcoming smartphone app--initially for iPhone but later Android too--will use image recognition to make sending messages easier. When using it you simply snap a photo of a license plate after which it is processed in the cloud to direct your message appropriately. Initially you have to specify a plate to contact manually, or using an automated call-in service.

Developing the image recognition software wasn't easy, says Albers-Mead, because different states use different styles and fonts on their plates. He and the rest of the bump team have been using the retired police cruiser below to test the software's abilities. When hooked up to a collection of cameras and infrared lights on the cruiser's light rack the software proved capable of identifying up to five plates a second even at freeway speeds.

Using license plates for a novel communications network may sound like fun, even if Bump will surely have to deal with problems like spam. But the firm also says that being able to recognize license plates and message a car's owner could has the potential to be of serious interest to businesses.

"It allows us to track users, it's like putting a cookie on a car," says Albers-Mead, likening his technology to the small files used to track web users and offer functionality like autologins online. Once connected up to Bump's tech, a camera at a store or drive-in burger joint could, for example, showing menu choices similar to those you've selected before. That extra data could be valuable to store owners, Bump say, who could also make use of the messaging functions. "You could register as a fan of the Dodgers and then receive a message welcoming you to the stadium and offering discount vouchers when you visit," says Albers-Mead.



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"iSchool" to open

09/01/2010

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Apple to implement fullscale biometrics

08/22/2010

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From Engadget 
Just about every mobile operating system manufacturer can remotely delete apps from the smartphones they help provide, but if a recent patent application is any indication, Apple's looking to lock down the whole enchilada on future devices. The basic concept is as simple as the diagram above -- certain activities trigger the phone to think it's in the wrong hands -- but the particular activities and particular remedies Apple suggests extend to audiovisual spying (to detect if a user has a different face or voice than the owner), and complete remote shutdown. While the patent mostly sounds targeted at opt-in security software and would simply send you an alertor perform a remote wipe if your phone were stolen or hacked, jailbreaking and unlocking are also explicitly mentioned as the marks of an unauthorized user, and one line mentions that cellular carrierscould shut down or cripple a device when such a user is detected. Sounds great for securing phones at retail, sure, but personally we'd rather devices don't determine our authority by monitoring our heartbeat (seriously, that's an option) and we're plenty happy with the existing Find My iPhone app.


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New military apps to help kids kill other kids for eiltes

08/10/2010

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Apple pays guy to camp out in front store for iPhone a week before release as publicity stunt on ziovision

06/18/2010

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Cops get facial recognition app

06/16/2010

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Eyephone eye tracker

05/24/2010

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from Technological reviewIt's hard sending a text message with arms full of groceries or while wearing winter gloves. Voice control is one alternative to using your fingers, but researchers are also working on other hands-free ways to control mobile devices. A team at Dartmouth College has now created an eye-tracking system that lets a user operate a smart phone with eye movement.

Mobile moves EyePhone, developed at Dartmouth College, tracks a person’s eye relative to a phone’s screen, letting users activate applications by blinking. 
Credit: Dartmouth UniversityMULTIMEDIA Watch the researchers explain and demo EyePhone.Eye tracking has been used for years, primarily as a way for people with disabilities to use computers and to enable advertisers to track a person's focus of interest. "The naturalness of gaze interaction makes eye tracking promising," says John Hansen, an associate professor at the IT University of Copenhagen in Denmark who works on gaze tracking. "Most of the time we are looking at the information we find most interesting."

Mobile eye tracking could be useful for all mobile phone users, says Dartmouth professor Andrew Campbell, who led the development of the new system, called EyePhone. But so far, little work has been done on eye tracking on mobile phones. This isn't surprising--keeping track of a gaze via a mobile phone is much more challenging than on a desktop computer because both the user and the phone are moving, and the surrounding environment is so changeable.

"Existing algorithms were highly inaccurate in mobile conditions--even if you are standing and there's a small movement in your arm, you'd get a large amount of blurring and error," says Campbell. The Dartmouth researchers got around this with an algorithm that learns to identify a person's eye under different conditions. During a learning phase, the system is trained to identify a person's eye at varying distances and under different lighting. A user must calibrate the system by taking a picture of the left or right eye both indoors and outdoors.



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