Tech News (page 3)

A touch-sensitive digital table from Microsoft called Surface.

The company plans to unveil a computing device today called Microsoft Surface, featuring a 30-inch screen embedded in an acrylic tabletop. The device’s electronic guts are hidden in the low-slung table’s thick pedestal. At first glance, Surface is reminiscent of an old-fashioned arcade game table around which patrons played Pac-Man. But there is no joystick here, and no mouse or keyboard either. The device is controlled by touching the tabletop display. Microsoft says this touch screen will allow people to “interact with digital content the same way they have interacted with everyday items such as photos, paintbrushes and music their entire life: with hands, with gestures and by putting real-world objects on the surface.”

For example, when a digital camera with Wi-Fi capabilities is placed on the display, the table recognizes the camera and, at a touch of the screen, downloads its photos and video clips. The digital pictures can be sorted and sized by “handling” them as if they were physical prints.

The device uses cameras under the display to detect touches, and unlike traditional touch screens it can handle multiple touches at the same time, said Jeff Gattis, the director of product management for Suface. Similarly, Surface can read bar codes and identification tags embedded in objects like hotel chain membership cards.

Microsoft hopes this technology will someday be common in homes, but its first uses will be commercial.

The device’s cost was not disclosed.

Controlling things by mere thought is a staple of science fiction. That fiction, though, is often based on a real technique known as electroencephalography (EEG). This works by deploying an array of electrodes over a person's scalp and recording surface manifestations of the electrical activity going on under his skull.

At the moment, EEG's uses are mostly medical. Though the output of the electrodes is a set of crude brain waves, enough is now known about the healthy patterns of these waves for changes in them to be used to diagnose unhealthy abnormalities. Yet, because parts of a person's grey matter exhibit increased electric activity when they respond to stimuli or prepare for movements, there has always been the lingering hope that EEG might also manifest someone's thoughts in a machine-readable form that could be used for everyday purposes.

To realise that hope means solving two problems—one of hardware and one of software. The hardware problem is that existing EEG requires a helmet with as many as 120 electrodes in it, and that these electrodes have to be affixed to the scalp with a gel. The software problem is that many different types of brain waves have to be interpreted simultaneously and instantly. That is no mean computing task.

Both Emotiv, which is based in San Francisco, and NeuroSky, of San Jose, think they have cracked these problems. Emotiv recently unveiled a prototype headset that has a mere 18 electrodes. Moreover, no gel is needed for these electrodes to make a good contact with the headset-wearer's scalp. Emotiv claims that its system can detect brain signals associated with facial expressions such as smiles and winks, different emotional states such as excitement and calmness, and even conscious thoughts such as the desire to move a particular object. It will not say precisely how this trick is done, but it seems to work well enough to make a virtual character in a game mimic a player's own facial expression, as well as permitting that player to move things around just by thinking about it.

Then things turned really nasty: Mr. Folds pulled out a light saber and attacked the audience. To avoid him, I levitated 20 feet, hoping he wouldn't notice. It worked; I survived.

As concerts go, this was a fairly normal one at least in Second Life, the virtual-reality universe where I recently spent a weekend as a (virtual) tourist. In fact, if the Ben Folds show was unusual in any way, it was that it marked the opening of Second Life's first boutique hotel, an online version of Star wood Hotels' new "urban loft living" brand, Aloft. (A bricks-and-mortar aloft won't open until 2008.) And Aloft's arrival on a digital tropical island somewhere in a vast virtual ocean may itself signal the beginning of Second Life as a casual travel destination. For Second Life is, quite literally, a world unto itself, with three-dimensional mountains, oceans, forests and cities spanning tens of thousands of virtual acres. (It can be entered at www.secondlife.com.)

A player or resident, in Second Life parlance navigates this space through an avatar, a digital persona whose features can be adjusted to suit almost any whim (pointy chin, neon-green irises, the thick and full head of hair I remember having for a split-second in 11th grade).

But unlike other multiplayer online role-playing games, like the insanely popular World of War craft (www.worldofwarcraft.com), Second Life is not really a game.

There are neither princesses to save nor orcs to slaughter. Instead, the goal is simply to interact with the million-plus other residents, explore the planet and, in a unique twist, create new parts of it.

For Second Life lets residents build objects using small, basic shapes called prims. Almost everything you encounter from ice-cream cones to modernist houses to cans of Duff has been created by a resident, and much of it is for sale.
It's that commercial aspect that has lured real-life businesses like American Apparel to open in-game boutiques in an attempt not only to build their brands but also to take in a few Linden dollars, the virtual currency named for Second Life's developers, the Linden Lab, and convertible to actual money at a rate of about 250 Linden dollars to $1. Secondlife.com tracks the amount of money spent in-game in the last 24 hours; the record is over $575,000 and that's U.S., not Linden!

Actually, it was American Apparel that took my first stack of digital cash. I or rather, Urge Gainsbourg, my avatar had arrived in Second Life looking like the tourist that I was, with a generic yellow T-shirt, white button-down shirt and calf-length khaki pants. So I teleported (residents generally walk, fly or teleport around) to American Apparel's store, a glass-walled two-story structure decorated with the same cheerfully sleazy photographs that I'd seen in the company's real-world stores.

There were no other customers and no model-gorgeous employees; all I had to do was click the racks of brightly colored clothes, and the system would offer to take my money in exchange for a T-shirt. I walked that is, teleported out of there in a teal T-shirt and blue-and-white hoodie, feeling less like a tourist for having spent 600 Lindens.

The actions and expressions, down to the soul, being captured into computer animations ... the cyberface.

What’s up on-screen in the conference room, however, immediately focuses the mind. In one corner of the monitor, an actress is projecting a series of emotions — ecstasy, confusion, relief, boredom, sadness — while in the center of the screen, a computer-drawn woman is mirroring those same emotions.

It’s not just that the virtual woman looks happy when the actress looks happy or relieved when the actress looks relieved. It’s that the virtual woman actually seems to have adopted the actress’s personality, resembling her in ways that go beyond pursed lips or knitted brow. The avatar seems to possess something more subtle, more ineffable, something that seems to go beneath the skin. And it’s more than a little bit creepy.

“I like to call it soul transference,” said Andy Wood, the chairman of Image Metrics, who is not shy about proclaiming his company’s potential. “The model has the actress’s soul. It shows through.”

You look and you wonder: Is it the eyes? Is it the wrinkles around the eyes? Or is it the tiny movements around the mouth? Something. Whatever it is, it could usher in radical change in the making of entertainment. A tool to reinvigorate the movies. Or the path to a Franken-movie monster.

The Image Metrics software lets a computer map an actor’s performance onto any character virtual or human, living or dead.

Its creators say it goes way beyond standard hand-drawn computer graphics, which require staggering amounts of time and money. It even goes beyond “motion capture,” the technique that animated Tom Hanks’s 2004 film “The Polar Express,” which is strong on body movement but not on eyes, the inner part of the lips and the tongue, some of the most important messengers of human emotion.

“One of our principal tenets is to capture all the movements of the face,” Mr. Wood said. “You can’t put markers on eyes, and you can’t replicate the human eye accurately through hand-drawn animation. That’s pretty important.”

Ultimately, though, Image Metrics could even go beyond the need for Tom Hanks — or any other actor — altogether.

“We can reanimate footage from the past,” said Mr. Wood, a stolid man with a salesman’s smile. He was hired to introduce Hollywood to the technology, which the computer scientists who founded the company sometimes have difficulty articulating.

It's taken 19 long years of painstaking, high-precision experiments, but it's finally official: Physicists have announced the observation of a subatomic particle known as the B_s (pronounced "B sub s") meson switching between matter and antimatter states at a mind-boggling 3 trillion times per second.

The work could lead to a better understanding of the early universe, in which these particles were present in great abundance. It will also help physicists refine different theoretical models in high-energy physics.

Christoph Paus, associate professor of physics at MIT, led the analysis of years' worth of data from the world's highest-energy particle accelerator. Representing the 700-member team of the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) collaboration, Paus presented the discovery to the scientific community Sept. 22 at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois.

Microsoft Corp.'s effort to compete against Apple's iPod juggernaut will focus on the idea that people want to be able to easily share music with friends and others.

Microsoft said Thursday that its portable Zune media player, scheduled to be available around the holiday season, will include wireless technology to let people share some of their favorite songs, playlists or pictures with other Zune users who are close by.

• Those users can listen to the songs three times over three days before deciding whether to purchase it themselves. "The idea is to legitimize peer-to-peer sharing in a healthy way that works for everybody," said J Allard, a Microsoft vice president in charge of the Zune product line.
• The device, to be made by Toshiba Corp., will have 30 gigabytes of memory (enough to hold about 7,500 songs), a 3-inch screen and a built-in FM tuner.
• Microsoft said the song-sharing capability will be available for most songs available through its forthcoming Zune Marketplace service, although some music publishers won't allow it.
• Zune Marketplace music service, designed to compete with Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes store, will let users buy songs individually or listen to unlimited tracks for a flat subscription fee.

The company did not disclose pricing or a specific launch date for the first Zune player.

Put the 70-80 marketplaces like RAC together and a picture emerges of approximately one lakh Indian software programmers who generate about a billion dollars every year.