[From Tech2] Miss London? See It In A Record Breaking 80 Gigapixels By: Padmini Harchandrai   |   Nov 20, 2010 Talk about being an avid photographer! Whew! Here is a record breaking 360 degree panoramic view of London made from 7886 individual stills, compiled into an 80 Gigapixel photo. The entire image is 400,000 x 200,000 pixels. This panoramic photo was stitched on a Fujitsu CELSIUS workstation comprising dual 6-core CPUs, 192GB of RAM, and a 4GB graphics card. The camera was a digital SLR that used a 400 mm lens and was mounted on a robotic camera mount that seamlessly…

[From Switched] Kinect’s Second Life: 5 Awesome Hacks, from Puppets to KinectBots by Terrence O’Brien on November 20, 2010 The Kinect hasn’t exactly wowed gamers, and reviews of the add-on have been tepid at best. Still, the rather elaborate motion-controller for the Xbox 360 has found fans among the hacking community, thanks to its impressive array of cameras and sensors. Resourceful modders have hooked the device up to computers, created elaborate shadow puppets and mapped 3-D models of rooms. Read on to check out a few of our favorite Kinect hacks floating around the Web.…

[From APCMag.com; a 3:12 minute video is available here] [Image: Part of the calibration test from MyEars. Shapes headphone sound to match your ears.] Dramatic surround sound improvement for gamers blows Dolby away Software that generates an audio profile of your ears and improves gaming surround sound piped to your headphones is now available for subscription. Get set for amazing sound. Bennett Ring 19 November 2010 While graphics in games show what’s immediately in front of players, it’s the soundscape that envelops and surrounds them, instilling a sense of place. Unfortunately many gamers use headphones, and this is a major…

[From just-style; a 1:18 minute video is here] [Image: Dassault’s 3D tool at online retailer Espacemax.com] 3D technology takes online shopping to new heights By: Leonie Barrie | 9 November 2010 One of the leading suppliers of PLM software is hoping its expertise in 3D virtual reality tools will provide another option for the fashion industry to stay competitive. Dassault Systèmes, perhaps best known in the apparel industry for its Enovia global product lifecycle management (PLM) system, is also ramping up applications for its 3DVIA software to offer a new interactive environment for brands, products and consumers.…

[From New Scientist’s CultureLab blog] (Image:As stories migrate from print to screen, new possibilities are transforming the art of telling a story and ourselves with it(Phil Ashley/Getty)] Storytelling 2.0: Metamorphosis of the storybook 15 November 2010 Amanda Gefter, CultureLab editor Stories have become synonymous with books so it is easy to forget that books are just one technology for storytelling. With digital technologies ubiquitous and growing more sophisticated will the book simply fade away? It’s hard to say, but storytelling is certainly undergoing a dramatic makeover, with so-called electronic literature paving the way. Over the next six pages, writers, scientists…

[From Fast Company]   Nov 15, 2010 Almost Genius: An Interface That Responds to Poking, Pushing, and Tilting Is this a taste of the way touchscreens might evolve? The video [here] might just offer a taste of what mobile interfaces will become in the near future. Tangible, designed by Georg Reil and Christoph Döring, is simply a device whose onscreen images change in response to tilting, pressure, and movement. Which sounds simple, but think about it: Touchscreens like the one on iPad might respond to tilting, but they do so in an effort to keep the image static.…

[From The Los Angeles Times Technology blog] Japanese pop star Hatsune Miku takes the stage — as a 3-D hologram November 10, 2010 Pop princess Hatsune Miku is storming the music scene. With her long cerulean pigtails and her part-schoolgirl, part-spy outfit, she’s easy on the eyes. Yes, her voice sounds like it might have gone through a little –- OK, a lot –- of studio magic. Legions of screaming fans and the requisite fan sites? She’s got ’em. And, like many of her hot young singer peers, Miku is extremely, proudly fake. Like, 3-D hologram fake.…

[From the DLR Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics; the original story includes additional images and a 3:51 minute video] [Image: Five metres above the ground, Andreas Knoblach from the DLR Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics starts a virtual flight in the Robot Motion Simulator. The 10-metre-long track along which the robotic arm moves permits larger manoeuvres. The ‘pilot’ communicates with the team on the ground via radio and a camera. During the virtual flight he experiences the same forces as would affect his body during an actual flight.] Virtual flight on a robotic arm 2 November 2010 By Manuela Braun Only Andreas Knoblach’s…

[From Telepresence Options] The Immersive Technology Summit – A Review November 10, 2010 | Howard Lichtman Two weeks ago I spoke at the Immersive Technology Summit in Los Angeles, an event put together by the non-profit ImTech, which is supporting the development and adoption of immersive technologies.  The one-day summit, emceed by Ken Rutowski of KenRadio,  drew hundreds of participants from around the world with tens of thousands more watching the live streams.  The summit took place at Los Angeles Center Studios in the heart of Hollywood and created a hot tub atmosphere that brought together luminaries from technology and the arts…

[From the MIT Technology Review blog Mim’s Bits, which contains an additional image and reader comments] [Image: Google Trend shows the steady decline in searches for “Virtual Reality”] Whatever Happened to … Virtual Reality? Remember the movie Lawnmower Man? Here’s why we’re not even close. Christopher Mims 10/22/2010 The early 90’s were awesome. Bill Watterson was still drawing Calvin and Hobbes, the tattered remnants of the Cold War were falling down around our ears, and most of Wall Street was convinced the Macintosh was a computer for effete graphic designers and Apple was more or less on its way out.…

[From PC World; more information is in a news story here; the Intellitar web site is here] Digital Afterlife Beckons From Cloud-based Service By Stephen Lawson, IDG News People who die in Hollywood movies often find themselves floating around on a cloud as angels. Now a startup in Huntsville, Alabama, will let you go to a different kind of cloud after you die: the computing kind. The two-year-old company, called Intellitar, lets people create intelligent avatars or “intellitars” of themselves now, so they can spend time with their ancestors forever. The avatars are designed to look and talk like their…

[From iPhone World] Apple’s new patent for multiplayer GPS enabled interactive iPhone games November 5, 2010 by iPhoneWorld A newly unveiled Apple patent (USPTO #20100279768) reveals Apple’s plans for multiplayer, location-aware interactive iPhone games. In a nutshell the patent describes how iPhones could be used for real-world cooperative gameplay, using the iPhone’s sensors, camera, GPS module and WiFi/wireless internet connection.…