杏吧原创

Augmented reality, augmented

A new augmented reality app could link any real-world object to online content. Aurasma, built by UK-based software firm Autonomy, is powered by algorithms originally designed to find patterns in police crime reports and CCTV footage from the London Underground. Once installed on an iPhone or Android-based smartphone, the app can recognise magazine pages, buildings and other objects in the real world that have video and other online content attached. Autonomy plans to release free software tools that will allow anyone to add augmented reality content to objects.

Imaginary iPhone is always with you

Next time your cellphone is ringing and you can鈥檛 find it, don鈥檛 fret: just hold out your palm and press the imaginary 鈥渄ecline call鈥� button. Seriously. Using a head-mounted camera that can sense gestures, Sean Gustafson and colleagues at the University of Potsdam in Germany have created an 鈥渋maginary iPhone鈥�. A small computer converts users鈥� palm movements into a signal that it beams wirelessly to their real phone, wherever they are. The system can forward incoming calls to voicemail and also access apps on the phone 鈥� as long as users remember where on the physical screen the apps are located.

When the post is quicker than the cloud

Storing music and other files on servers in the cloud has become all the rage, but uploading big files 鈥� we鈥檙e talking terabytes 鈥� can take days and cost hundreds of dollars. Sometimes sticking a hard drive in the post is cheaper and faster. To work out what combination of the internet and snail mail is the best way to send data, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed the Pandora system. Users tell the software how much data they have, whether it is in one place or scattered across many locations, and where it all needs to go. Pandora returns with a solution that tells them whether they should click 鈥渦pload鈥� or head for the post office.