Turning living rooms into virtual gyms
Your living room could soon become a virtual gym. Sony鈥檚 EyeToy games for its PlayStation 2 console use a set-top camera to project an image of the gamer immersed in a virtual world. Software interprets their gestures, allowing them to control the game by waving their arms or nodding their head, instead of having to use joypads.
Now a fitness-oriented version called EyeToy Kinetic is planned for early 2005. It 鈥渋mproves the fitness, posture, balance, all-round body toning and reactions鈥� of the player, Sony claims.
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EyeToy Kinetic will prompt the player to kick, punch and flex at virtual objects as if they were in a gym or taking a fitness class. The energy you need to expend will vary widely: moves are inspired by tae kwon do, modern dance, kick-boxing, aerobics, t鈥檃i chi and yoga.
GOOGLE鈥橲 BEST GUESS
The world鈥檚 most popular search engine has launched a provisional version of a tool that tries to work out what you are looking for before you even finish typing your query.
As you begin to type in a keyword to the 鈥淕oogle Suggest鈥� search page (), a drop-down menu immediately lists a variety of search terms that could emerge from the letters you have typed so far. Your intended query, or a better one, may appear before you have finished typing, speeding up the search as well as preventing ambiguous queries. The number of results each search would find is also listed, helping to evaluate its usefulness.
DOUBLE DEFINITION
The backers of one of the two high-definition (HD) DVD formats to be launched next year have added a feature aimed at easing the transition from conventional DVDs. By making a single disc that can store both HD and ordinary DVD data, they have ensured that shops won鈥檛 need to store two versions of every movie.
Toshiba, inventor of the blue-laser HD-DVD format, has developed a dual-layer disc on which DVD data is pressed into an upper layer while HD footage is stored in a lower layer. The red laser in a DVD player reads only the top layer, while an HD-DVD player鈥檚 blue laser extracts data from the lower one.
The rival Blu-ray HD format, backed by Philips, Panasonic and Sony, does not yet offer DVD playback.
