Researchers at Cornell University are hard at work on a project that sounds odd at first, but is in fact a perfectly natural extension of existing 3D and computing technology. They’re making an engine for producing the sounds of colliding objects by simulating the materials of the objects themselves in a virtual space, and then calculating the forces and vibrations that would be produced. Academically it’s a challenging proposition, but it has plenty of practical applications as well.
The simulation of noise propagation perhaps would be most easily applied in 3D games, which despite having nearly photorealistic models, textures, and lighting, still rely on a limited cache of pre-recorded sounds to play when, say, a table tips over. By simulating every object on the table and tracking the physical effects of collision with the floor, other objects, and the resulting reverberations, a more realistic and accurate sound can be created on the fly — or at least that’s the theory. → Read More
Nikon publishes a program called Camera Control Pro, a software program intended to help the studio photographer by allowing them to tether their camera to a computer. The problem is, Camera Control Pro doesn’t support some of the latest cameras, and it has a $150 price tag. This inspired Nikontrol 3K, a free program that does basically the same thing, but for free. → Read More
The Pew Internet organization put out results of a survey on how many people pay for digital content online. The study found that 65 percent of people online have paid to download some form of digital content or for a subscription to a digital media service. The survey excluded physical goods bought online and was focussed only on digital content such as music, software, news, and other online or electronic publications.
For those who do spend money online on digital media, most spend between $1 and $10 a month, with 68 percent spending less than $30 a month. (You can see the distribution of amount spend in the chart above). The two kinds of digital goods people are most willing to pay for by far are music and software. One third of respondents (33 percent) say they have paid for either digital music or software online. And 21 percent have paid for mobile apps. So if you combine mobile apps and other forms of software, that is the largest single category even accounting for overlap in the numbers. Paying for digital games comes in fourth at 19 percent.
What about digital newspapers or magazines behind paywalls or for sale for tablets like the iPad? → Read More
This is no secret, but developers will have to play by Apple’s rules if they want their Apps to live on the Mac App Store in the future. Apple notes that developers should only submit finished products to the store, and that demos or trials of any kind should instead be made available on developers’ Web sites. This may also apply to “lite” editions of Apps. → Read More
Dow Jones is releasing its third quarter venture capital numbers today, and the amount of money raised was down sharply from last quarter’s heady $7.7 billion distributed across 740 deals.
In the third quarter of this year, 662 companies raised just $5.4 billion. It’s not uncommon to see a muted third quarter in the venture business due to summer vacations, but this was the smallest amount raised in a summer quarter since at least 2005. Unless the fourth quarter outperforms, the industry will likely wind up in the same range as 2009′s total of $23 billion raised by US companies, which is down by about 30% from recent years. That’s not surprising given the dearth of IPOs and the fact that venture firm fundraising is down too.
Still, there were few interesting surprises in the numbers. → Read More
Is there really any doubt the Mac App Store will be anything other than a huge hit when it debuts in 90 days? Seven billion downloads on the current App Store would suggest that Apple knows what it’s doing (and that people really love to slingshot cartoon birds into buildings). And the benefits of the App Store are clear: it’s an easy-to-use, one-stop source of safe, tested software. Usually. Maybe not all of that software is worth your time—how many fart Apps do you really need?—but the platform itself is sound, and Apple is keen to make sure it stays that way. But the platform is closed. Only with Apple’s approval (not to mention its 30 percent cut of the action) can your App find a home on the App Store. But is that scenario ideal when it comes to desktop operating systems? → Read More
Have you launched VLC today? If so then you’ll already know that it has been updated to version 1.1.0. The biggest feature in this version is the addition of GPU decoding for Windows (Vista and 7 only) and Linux users. That is, you can use that fancy GPU of yours to help decode that 1080p MKV you’ve got there, leaving your CPU with enough room to breathe, or whatever. Fair warning: if you’re on Windows, hope you’ve got an nVidia GPU… → Read More
So you’re at the coffee shop, and you’ve walked over to the counter to order another half-frap-double shot raspberry no fat mocha, and left your iPad (or iPod) plugged into your laptop. Suddenly, that skeevy looking fellow who was sitting two tables away makes a grab for your iPad, and runs for the door! You don’t see him because you were looking away, but you still know your kit has been boosted! How do you know? Well, you had the PadLock installed. → Read More
Adobe has released Photoshop Lightroom 3, the popular photo manipulating and management tool. It’s been in beta for a while, so none of the features will be particularly shocking, but the final version being made available today does have a few tricks up its sleeve. We’ll take a quick look tonight, but I have a copy on my hot little hard drive, and want to give it a good week or two of use before publishing a full review.
Click on through for all the fun new features. → Read More
What would you do with the openFrameworks and an hour to kill? Would you create an application to detect when you’re smiling and automatically insert “:)” into whatever program is currently running? Theo Watson did, and called it Auto Smiley! He released it as open source! We can’t possibly have enough smiley icons embedded into our emails and IMs can we? I mean, we all spend all day every day smiling maniacally, right? → Read More
There’s a disturbing trend in music technology. Although home studios are rising, music is generally still recorded in specially designed environments and at high fidelity. Then for distribution, we compress the hell out of each track and do all sorts of terrible MP3-related things to them. And now, in order to repair the damage, we’re seeing a rise in after-market software designed to make the bad sound good. The Digital Power Station is one such plug-in, and just for you guys, we took it for a test run. → Read More
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last couple months, you know that Toyota has had problems with sudden acceleration of some of its vehicles. Apparently, the root cause of the problem is still unknown, which is a little troubling to the average consumer. Toyota claims to be doing everything they can to investigate, but that doesn’t seem to be enough. Now everyone and their brother are suddenly product design engineers and have the gall to tell Toyota what to do and how to do it. → Read More
Right around the time the world’s financial markets started to collapse, back in 2008, RealNetworks, the folks behind RealPlayer, released RealDVD. It was a short-lived piece of software that made making DVD movie backups fairly painless—too painless for Hollywood, which immediately took RealNetworks to court, claiming all sorts of copyright infringement hokum. That’s all in the past now, for RealNetworks has settled with the six “major” Hollywood studios to the sum of $4.5 million. Ouch. → Read More
Check your calendar, friends, for the first time in a long time I was just wowed by a tech story. Google says it’s working on smartphone software that would automatically translate foreign languages into your native tongue. So, if you’re talking to your Venezuelan pen pal, and he says, “No me gusta el fútbol americano,” you can react in horror as you try to explain to him the importance of a game where more time is spent setting up plays than actually executing them is the greatest sport in the world. Porqueria. → Read More
Another year, another release of iLife. This time, though, with full iPadsupport. Yes, Apple showed off iLife 2010 at its big press conference today, and the updates are about what you’d expect from the application suite: incremental and filled with one or two things that make you say, “Wow, neat.” That being the multi-touch support. → Read More
As far as XBMC forks go, Boxee certainly appears to have the most heat. It has VC money pouring in, flashy deals with content providers, and you’ll soon be able to buy a dedicated D-Link box to more easily use it on your TV. But Boxee isn’t the only XBMC-based media center that’s worth your time. It’s not even the first XBMC fork to go out and make a name for itself. Plex, which is exclusive to Mac OS X, was Boxee before Boxee was cool. I recently talked to the lead developer, Elan Feingold, to get a better understand of what Plex is, what it does, and where it’s going. Needless to say, if you’re running Mac OS X, you ought to give it a shot. It’s good. → Read More
It makes a lot of sense, but it seems to be hard to realize: Using the cell phone for instant voice translation of basic sentences whenever you’re in a foreign country. But Toshiba is one of the companies working on this, and apparently they’re almost ready to offer a decent solution.
Their translation software, in its current iteration, enables cell phones to interpret between English, Chinese and Japanese. Toshiba says that the database, used on their TG01 “smartphone” (pictured on the left), for example, boasts a database of 30,000 words spoken in each of these languages. Toshiba optimized existing PC software for use in cell phones, which obviously have less processing power. → Read More
You sorta knew this was going to happen. Microsoft COFEE, a highly secretive forensics tool used by law enforcement, leaked onto the Internet several weeks ago. People far smarter than I got a hold of it, and have created what has been dubbed DECAF, an anti-COFEE set of tools that you can install to block the effects of COFEE. → Read More
It was one of the most sought after applications on the Internet until it was leaked earlier today. And now that it’s out there—and it is all over the place, easily findable by anyone able to use a search engine—we can all move on with our lives. Yes, Microsoft COFEE, the law enforcement tool that mystified so many of us (including Gizmodo~! and Ars Technica~!), is now available to download. If only there were a “bay” of some sort where, I don’t know, pirates hang out… → Read More
Years ago, when Microsoft started pushing Internet Explorer, it enjoyed favorable adoption rates because, well, it’s already on there, so why not use it? (Law-breaking aside, of course!)That may be what Microsoft is thinking this time around with Office 2010. Redmond will allow OEMs to install Office Starter 2010 on brand new Windows 7 PCs. It will be a pared down version of Office, and one that will be ad-supported. That, of course, has caused the Internet to freak out. → Read More
