Robotic Kinect Hacks

After a brief period playing around with our layout we are back. Today we overview an article from IEEE Spectrum on Robotic related Kinect hacks, found here. Although Robotics are a bit out of our scope, we are fans of the Kinect and we could not pass on the information. We very much liked the autonomous Kinect vacuum concept, that would make our wives happier!

Kinect Quadrocopter STARMAC @ Hybrid Systems Lab, UC Berkeley

Kinect Quadrocopter STARMAC @ Hybrid Systems Lab, UC Berkeley

What is also noteworthy is that Microsoft is releasing a Kinect SDK, aimed for researchers and enthusiasts, enabling the latter to play around with the technology and create even more projects and buzz. We, at Synthetic Toys, are also contemplating future experimentation if our current batch of projects goes as planned!

Dual Boot Handsets

Many people, we are sure, remember the early days where everyone was struggling to setup their PC in a way that it had two Operating Systems (Windows & Linux) on a Dual Boot mode. People may still struggle for that matter! If it was correctly setup GRUB would display an option to choose the OS to boot. Those where the days…

And then came virtualization…

Using the new concept a user did not have to reboot all the time, switching from one OS to the other. They were running in parallel.

When smart phones came along the same idea was born: What if you wanted to run Android on your HTC HD2 even though it shipped with Windows Mobile 6.5? Well, the XDA Developers did an excellent job on this by making this possible for hand held devices. ROMs were ‘cooked’, OS were tweaked and so on, in order to reach a point where a user could choose the OS to load.

And then came virtualization ??? Deja Vu …


VMWare and LG presented a virtualized  Android phone in MWC 2011 and the potentials of this are very impressive. VMWare has started with Android and LG but i am pretty sure that there is a lot to come on this field.

Check out the video from Engadget along with some comments here.

Synthetic Toys @ International Workshop on AR Standards

One of the aspects the AR community is currently working on is standardisation throughout the spectrum of technologies, services and paradigms within the field. Meetings are being held annually, to discuss the progress of this effort, bringing together companies, researchers, innovators and analysts.

This year’s meeting will be held on February 17-19, 2011 in Barcelona. Synthetic Toys will be there to present their position on user experience in augmented reality (Ux4AR). You can check the draft agenda at the AR Standards website, here with our position paper amongst them.