Incredible Connection Blog | Dedicated to Technology, Dedicated to You

Here’s a confession. From an Apple fanboy. I think Apple’s mice are a joke. Anyone who has ever spent any time, feeling like a dork, with a R600 Mighty mouse upside-down on a sheet of clean white printer paper, rolling the scroll-ball round and round to leech the oil/dirt/whatever from the microscopic ball and it’s rollers, so that the blessed thing will scroll up and down like it should, knows JUST what I mean. Now, I’ve only briefly tried the Magic mouse (and I DID like it..) so maybe I’m a little behind the curve, and Apple was in agreement, and did something about it, but still…They WERE diabolical.

Apples trackpads, however, are simply full of awesome. They are the stuff that other PC-makers dream of, and aspire to. Matched by innovative software and cleverly cross-pollinated from bred-in Touch devices like the iPhone, Apple’s trackpads are the gold-standard to be measured against. And now, there are serious rumors, backed up by an FCC match-up of reference numbers, of an external multitouch touchpad. Here’s what it looks like:

The wedge-shaped trackpad, which was leaked in June, has had its model number matched up with a device on the FCC site, so we think the rumors, might really be facts. The timing of the FCC report is interesting, because Apple, in it’s uniquely paranoid way, files confidentiality requests to hide new goodies for as long as possible to maximise announcement-day impact, so if it’s posted on the FCC site now, that means the product is going to be announced soon. Yay!

Sharp has announced the upcoming launch of a 100GB recordable triple layer Blu-ray format. Available in Japan at the end of July, the VR-100BR1 disc can store up to 12 hours of regular digital TV broadcasts or nearly nine hours of digital satellite broadcasts, according to Sharp.

The VR-100BR1 adheres to the new BDXL format specifications introduced by the Blu-ray Disc Association in April. The BDXL format allows for a maximum 128GB of write-once capability for Blu-ray discs and can support up to 100GB of Blu-ray data in rewritable disc format. The extra capacity is achieved by adding layers to the disc. The current 50GB disc have two layers, the 100GB discs will have four.

The Blu-ray Disc format has gone through a difficult childhood, and as a result we now have a tricky, fragmented market with different players supporting (or not supporting) different Blu-ray features. Of course, to take advantage of the new standard, you’ll need new hardware. Sharp says they have two new Aquos Blu-ray recorders coming up in Japan. One thing you can be sure of. Sharp may be first, but other manufacturers won’t be far behind. it shouldn’t be too long until rewritable 100GB and write-once 128GB BDXL discs become available.

Clearly poking a bit of fun at Apple, after the roasting they’ve taken regarding Flash (or more accurately no-Flash-on-iPhone/iPad), Adobe has demo’d what can only be described as a “lets-do-it-better-with-more-features” clone of the FaceTime application, that Apple announced recently with the launch of the iPhone 4.

Named… wait for it….FlashTime, The application is based on the soon-to-be-released Adobe Air 2.5 for phones running Google’s Android operating system and will enable Android phones and tablets which have a front-facing camera, to to peer-to-peer video chat, over both WiFi and 3G connections.

Adobe’s Mark Doherty, speaking on his own blog, did warn that: “although all the features shown in the demo video are working, some of them might not be stable enough to make it into the v1 product.” The video demo shows the text chat feature, and then the video calling capability.

Well played, Adobe!

Most likely, if you were to ask a mixed-mash group of geeks the question, “Which Operating System has the best desktop?”, the most likely answers you’d hear would be Windows 7 or Mac OSX. And, you might be forgiven for taking that wisdom as a done deal, and not looking any further, but you’d be missing some excellent work in the Linux space, from two ostensibly competing camps. KDE and Gnome are the two big players on the Linux desktop, and the folks behind these two desktops, have certainly not been watching Windows and Mac whizz by. They’ve been out there, thinking long and deep about how we actually use the desktop, and how best to mould the GUI to OUR hard-wired needs and wants, all in the name of? Usability.

We’re looking at Gnome 3, in this post. Slated for release in September this year, it represents around two years of the best work from a number of the Linux developers who, back in 2008 decided that the panels and menus just didn’t adequately describe the way humans interact with the desktop. Using Gnome 3, they hope you will think more in terms of how you start an activity, and how you switch between activities. For instance: What you see in the upper right corner is the Activities hot spot and when you activate this window, the “desktop” moves aside, giving way to the Activities Window, which has sections for finding stuff, applications, favourites, places and devices and items you’ve used recently.

The concept of workspaces gets a similar rethink and workover. The assumption of a fixed predetermined number of workspaces with cumbersome methods of creation and destruction, are gone. Need a workspace? Add one. From the activities area. Click. Then drag a Word-processing app icon into the workspace to open the app in the space. Slick and easy.

Watch out, Microsoft. Watch out, Apple. Linux may yet eat your lunch. While you’re looking.

Heads up. The “secret” is out. The official branding for Microsoft’s project Natal? Microsoft Kinect for xBox 360. Now, we’ve been talking about Kinect for a while now, so this official branding comes as no surprise, but lets take a closer look at how the technology works.

We know that Kinect uses a multi-sensor strategy to track a ton of 3D data, about what’s going on inside a room. To start, there are a pair of cameras. A simple colour camera for metadata (pictures, face-recognition, etc), and an interesting monochrome CMOS camera sensor working together with an IR emitter. Called the “depth sensor,” the combo acts very much like a radar setup, the IR emitter “painting” the area, and the camera watching and reading the “paint-work”, to build a 3D map of the objects within Kinect’s field of view. These opticals are backed up with some audio tracking, with a multi-array microphone setup to detect location of voices and to cancel out ambient noise. Like sonar…

The sensor array is mounted in a motorised, articulated base. Yes, you heard right. Like a target-tracking radar dish, the Kinect pans and tilts to keep its sensors locked on you as you move around the room. Too cool! The base is quite power-hungry, so unless you have one of the brand new Xbox 360s, which include a special powered USB port, you’ll have to plug Kinect into the mains, as well as your console.

Now for some bad news. Kinect is a slave device. It doesn’t have it’s own dedicated processor for all this tracking alchemy. It’s a cost issue, and the upshot is that the xBox processor runs the whole show. That means a performance hit on both ends and consequently, the Kinect/xBox 360 combination is just not as snappy as the Sony Playstation Move.

Finally a couple of numbers to describe the system:
1. Kinect “sees” 57 degrees of azimuth and 43 degrees of elevation Field of view. (The motorised base contributes 27 degrees.)
2. Depth of field extends from just over a meter to almost 4 meters.
3. Skeletal tracking (accurate, full-body data), tracks 2 active players at a time, while the Kinect tracks up to six people in the background.
4. Resolution is 320 x 240, 16-bit at 30 fps (IR camera), 640×480 32-bit color at 30 fps (colour camera).
5. Audio is 16-bit, at 16 kHz