Blog posts related to Hardware

Robotic Kinect Hacks

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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

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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.

Photorealistic Rendering for AR

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Probably the most impressive examples of AR I have seen in a while. Finnish VTT Team has done some impressive work in the past and this example is nothing sort of spectacular in my book. The video was recorded a Dell laptop with a Quadro FX 3700M video card, a Core Duo processor and a basic Logitech webcam. The graphics itself is drawn using OpenGL and GLSL.

VTT’s description of the above video is:

Photorealistic rendering for Augmented reality. Uses soft shadows, indirect lighting and image quality matching. Various materials like glass, chrome or plastic are possible. Lighting is automatically determined from a ping pong ball.

For us it is a demonstration how realistic things can appear with modern hardware – albeit not of the ‘handheld’ type – and GFX APIs, hinting that the more we push the envelop and exploit technological advancement, the more immersive things will appear.

Kinect adventures

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Kinect, the much awaited ‘controller-free gaming device’ has been very popular the last few days through the blogsphere and twitter (Wikipedia entry here). The offspring of Project Natal has been hacked by UC Davis visualization researcher Oliver Kreylos, using open-source drivers by Hector Martin. The same NUI group that hacked the PlayStation Eye in 2008 probably got there first but did not release drivers to the public.

Check the following videos by O. Kreylos on YouTube:

Very ‘funky’ videos! This can spire new work on 3D capturing and can not help wondering if more than one Kinect’s can be combined into something. We will keep an eye on Kinect-related hacks and research efforts.