SOLAR BAGS-the mobile power generators

Solar bags are mobile solar power generators designed to charge virtually all handheld electronics. For this there is a Powerful Solar Panel which is embedded in the outside of the bags This panels can generate power up to 14.7 watts, which is enough to fully charge a typical laptop from a day of direct sunlight All bags come with a battery pack which stores any surplus power generated, so it is available when you need it - not just when the sun is up. The battery packs can also be charged using the included AC travel charger or car charger All bags include standard adaptors for common cell phones and other handheld devices. The Generator also includes common laptop adaptors. The solar panels are lightweight, tough, waterproof solar panels. So it will be easy to carry it around. The main disadvantage is that if your laptop runs its batter down in say 4 hours, it will take about 12 hours minimum to recharge it, in bright sunlight. It would be beneficial to people who are out in the sticks somewhere far from civilization doing research.

WHOLE BODY GAMING

Softkinetic, a company based in Belgium, is working to let video-game players use a wider range of more-natural movements to control the on-screen action. Softkinetic's software is meant to work with depth-sensing cameras, which can be used to determine a player's body position and motions. In this whole body gaming, there is no need to wear a special outfit.Designing programs that work with the cameras, however, is difficult: translating depth measurements into a map of a human figure, and determining what motions that figure is making, are computationally daunting tasks. This is where Softkinetic comes in.

Softkinetic's technology started out as research at the University of Brussels, in Belgium, aimed at exploring the user interfaces made possible by stereoscopic cameras, which sense depth by using two input sources, in much the way that the human brain perceives depth by comparing data from two eyes. The group created Softkinetic in mid-2007 and has adapted its research to work with newer depth-sensing cameras as well.

The new cameras sense depth by using infrared light in one of two ways. First, the camera might send out infrared light and receive the reflections of that light off objects in a room. The sending and receiving information can be compared to determine details of position and depth around the camera. Alternatively, the camera could project a grid of infrared light onto a room, and calculate the positions of objects based on how the grid is distorted.

Whatever the specific depth-sensing tactics of a given camera, Softkinetic aims at developing a software which is built to work with the four major depth-sensing cameras on the market, including the ZCam from 3DV Systems, With Softkinetic's software, game designers can avoid retooling their applications to work with each of those cameras.

Interpreting data from different types of hardware isn't the toughest part that Softkinetic does. To classify the scene and how to find the player and remove the rest, and reconstruct the person's structure is the difficult part regarding the developing of software. The first half of that task involves filtering out a great deal of noise from the signal. For this it’s need to zoom in on the important thing i.e. the player, and not the person next to you sitting on the couch and making fun of you. Secondly, the software creates a 3-D volume from the fuzzy cloud of points the camera detects and identifies body parts important to an application. So instead of interacting directly with the depth map produced by the camera, designers get information from Softkinetic's software about which body parts are moving and how quickly. The company has also identified sets of gestures people commonly make when trying to control a program in a particular way.

It’s a really exciting thing for the field, and not just for gaming. For example: knowing a person's body position could help with applications such as health-care monitoring in the home, or other
applications in the field of ubiquitous computing.

AUGEMENTED REALITY

Augmented Reality on mobile phones!!!!!!!!!!!

What is augmented reality???

Augmented Reality (AR) is a variation of Virtual Environments (VE), or Virtual Reality as it is more commonly called. VE technologies completely immerse a user inside a synthetic environment. While immersed, the user cannot see the real World around him. In contrast, AR allows the user to see the real world, with virtual Objects superimposed upon or composited with the real world.Therefore, AR Supplements reality, rather than completely replacing it.

Applications???

Medical

Manufacturing and repair

Annotation and visualization

Robot path planning

Entertainment

Military

AR in mobiles

Research works has started to incorporate the technology in mobile phones has started from 2000 .extensive study has been going on in this field from 2003 to 2007.. From 2003-2007 the work was aimed at introducing Augmented Reality to mobile phones and PDAs. This has beenachieved by most of the mobile majors such as nokia.

How it works???

Last October, a team led by Markus Kähäri( project manager of nokia research center) unveiled a proto­type of the system at the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality. The team added a GPS sensor, a compass, and accelerometers to a Nokia smart phone. Using data from these sensors, the phone can calculate the location of just about any object its camera is aimed at. Each time the phone changes location, it retrieves the names and geographical coordinates of nearby landmarks from an external database. The user can then download additional information about a chosen location from the Web--say, the names of businesses in the Empire State Building, the cost of visiting the building's observatories,or hours and menus for its five eateries

Nokia researchers have begun working on real-time image-recognition algorithms as well; they hope the algorithms will eliminate the need for location sensors and improve their system's accuracy and reliability

A video of the same can be viewed in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_7Yy-zQiRo