杏吧原创

Turn yourself into a 3D model

Want a 3D scanner but don鈥檛 have a small fortune to spare? A new iPhone app turns your face or other object into a 3D computer model that can easily be edited 鈥� or even reproduced with a 3D printer. The app, called Trimensional, was created by Grant Schindler, a computer scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. It uses the iPhone鈥檚 screen to project four different patterns of light onto the object being scanned and snaps photos with the iPhone 4鈥檚 front-mounted camera. The app then analyses every pixel under each lighting pattern and stitches the photos together to produce the 3D model.

鈥楪looper-computer鈥� solves problem

Modern computers take many different forms but all are based on shunting electrons through silicon. But Andrew Adamatzky, a professor of unconventional computing at the University of the West of England, Bristol, is building computers based on chemical reactions. Mixtures of certain chemicals form waves of reactions that can be used to solve basic puzzles. Different waves are interpreted as 1s and 0s and the way they collide determines the computations they perform, says Adamatzky. The latest version of his chemical computer can help calculate a Voronoi diagram, he claims 鈥� a geometric puzzle which helps map the coverage of a network of cellphone masts.

Futureful predicts your desires

Last year, Google boss Eric Schmidt said: 鈥淭he ability to tell me things I didn鈥檛 know but am probably very interested in is the next great stage of search.鈥� Now a Finnish internet start-up called Futureful appears to have beaten the big boys to the punch with a predictive iPad app that claims to do just that. Futureful鈥檚 algorithms glean information from social feeds from the like of Facebook about topics that are trending, and then analyses its users鈥� interests and online behaviour to recommend new subjects that might interest them. Tapping these subjects on the touchscreen generates a set of web pages that can be browsed with finger-swipes like a magazine.