- Switched On: Missed app-ortunity
Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.
It’s difficult to remember as jam-packed a week in terms of industry announcements from major OS providers as the recent seven-day stretch that included a bevy of hardware announcements from Apple, a new tablet and OS upgrade from Google, and two major operating system releases as well as an unprecedented hardware release from Microsoft. Of course, as would be expected from these dominant digital ecosystem stewards, all of the new products included elements of hardware, software and services, even if they were sometimes implicit. But each company could have done significantly more to highlight new third-party apps that were really taking advantage of that combination.
Continue reading Switched On: Missed app-ortunity
Filed under: Tablets, Software, Apple, Microsoft, Google
Switched On: Missed app-ortunity originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 04 Nov 2012 17:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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- Proportional VR experiment shrinks man down to rat size, lets us play games with rodents
Sure, you can always play catch with the dog, but what kind of game can you play with a caged rodent? Well, “find the poster,” apparently. A team of researchers from Universities in Spain, Germany, Austria, England and the US have put together a virtual reality system designed to let humans interact with rats at the rodent’s scale, challenging human participants to find and lead the rodent to a unmarked goal. According to a paper published in PLoS One participants were “beamed” into the rat’s environment by linking a head-mounted display and joystick to a rat-sized telepresence robot. Human players were then treated to a proportionally accurate representation of the game arena. The rat was there too, tracked with an overhead camera and represented by a human avatar.
Participants were tasked with coaxing their opponent in front one of three posters in attempt to sleuth out which one represents the “winning” position. When both players are in front of the correct mystery poster, a bell sounds and the game ends. The game was primarily created to test a scaled immersive virtual reality teleoperator system, but researchers are optimistic the technology could be used to observe animal behavior from a new perspective. Check out the setup in action after the break, or read on through to the source link below for a detailed description of how mankind and some of nature’s smaller creatures can get along in a virtual space.
Proportional VR experiment shrinks man down to rat size, lets us play games with rodents originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 04 Nov 2012 14:36:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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PLoS One | Email this | Comments - IRL: iPhoneTrip, PDP Afterglow headset and Western Digital’s My Net Wi-Fi Range Extender
Welcome to IRL, an ongoing feature where we talk about the gadgets, apps and toys we’re using in real life and take a second look at products that already got the formal review treatment.
It’s a mixed bag this week, with Zach trying out the SIM rental iPhoneTrip, Jason adding a budget gaming headset to his collection and Darren finding success with a Western Digital WiFi range extender. Turns out, it’s thumbs up all around. Click through to see what we liked.Filed under: Misc
IRL: iPhoneTrip, PDP Afterglow headset and Western Digital’s My Net Wi-Fi Range Extender originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 04 Nov 2012 12:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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