The FX Studio competition is closed with the winners announced, and animation underway for the winners. If you’re not familiar with FX Studio, it’s a joint project by FrameStore & Nokia to create a mobile-platform & web application to allow people to embed hollywood-style VFX directly into home videos shot with mobile devices. You can view the video above showing some of the entries, and visit their website to see the winners. The winning entry:
Srikapardhi Kala India
MAGNET MAN Concept: A simple marker acts as a magnetic power source attracting animated iron objects to it. Comment: “This is imaginative and different. The dynamic nature of how all the objects can behave is the winning element. It promises huge amounts of fun for the user, and a chance to achieve a really believable finish. We look forward to developing powerful sci-fi magnets from a galaxy far away!”
Next time you start to suffer eye-strain headaches, you may find yourself grabbing the phone not to call the Optometrist, but rather to find there really is “an app for that” courtesy of some MIT researchers.
The application shows two lines on the phone’s screen. It asks users to align them using the phone’s arrow keys while looking through the small plastic device placed atop the screen. The test is repeated eight times with the lines in different places on the screen, after which the application calculates the user’s prescription. The whole process takes about two minutes.
The process requires a small plastic cube that can currently be manufactured for only $2, but at volume could be mere pennies. The work is to be presented next month at SIGGRAPH.
A new infographic from John Kumahara and Jonathan Bonnell gathers up all of the available information about the Apple iPad sales into a fairly large graphic.
The graphic, included below, offers an interesting perspective on iPad data — think factoids like consumer expectations and adoption rates by state — that we may have otherwise overlooked (though updated sales and apps figures were released yesterday).
Here are some points of interest that stand out:
- The average price for an iPhone app is three dollars less than the price for an iPad app.
- 80% of iPad apps come with a price tag.
- There were 26,668 tweets per hour on the iPad at its peak.
See the graphic after the break. My only real complaint is that the text is a bit difficult to read, a bit narrow in parts. Other than that, some of the numbers are a bit confusing, such as the “Aided Awareness” section. What does that mean? And then the “Researched Online” section, is that how many people researched those devices? Or how many people bought the device based on their online research?
Sharp is developing a LCD panel for mobile devices, like cell phones, that can give you the illusion of 3-D without needing to wear any glasses. If this reminds you of the Nintendo story we published earlier, then good for you. Sharp provides LCD panels to Nintendo, and it is expected that this panel will be used in the Nintendo 3DS. Martyn Williams from the IDG News Service reports that:
To get the 3D illusion viewers must hold the screen about 30 centimeters in front of them — about the same distance at which a cell phone or digital camera is typically held. If they get the angle right, they will see an image that appears to have depth; if they get it wrong they will see a blurred image that's difficult to decipher.
The screen can be switched between 3D and conventional 2D modes. This is accomplished with a switchable layer inside the screen, called a parallax barrier, that splits light from the screen and directs it towards the right or left eyes when energized.
The ABS News link below has an AP photo showing it in action.
Flowtown has an infographic that analyzes the various social media website that are popular these days (Facebook, Twitter) and charts the various percentages of their user base that are on mobile devices like smartphones.
Have you ever wondered about the relationship between mobile phones and social media? The mobile web is growing at an exponential rate, and this trend shows no signs of slowing down. This graphic illustrates the rates at which people access the mobile, social web, as well as what they do once they are connected.
GigaOM has a short infographic, based on data from Gartner , of the Smartphone OS market. The top uses stacked percentage bars to visualize the changing market over the last 3 years, and does a relatively good job at showing Symbian, Linux, and Windows mobile shrinking in the face of RIM, iPhone, and Android. I would complain about the lack of numbers, however they include those in the vertical bar-graph right below, which shows the exact same data.
What do you get when you combine Virtual Pets with everyone’s favorite whiz-bang technology Augmented Reality? Zenitum hopes it’s a new cash cow in ‘iKat’, a markerless augmented reality pet simulator.
Virtual pet’s and augmented reality are nothing new, but the real neat feature of this particular app is the markerless nature. No marker is required, after a few seconds of analyzing video the app has gathered enough information to construct basic geometry of the surroundings and is able to track motion. Even this technology is old hat, having been demo’ed on the PS3 long ago as Sony’s Virtual Pet game EyePet, but this is the first time I’ve seen similar results from a mobile device, an Android Phone from the example videos.
Looks pretty neat, although still in early beta. See two demonstration videos of the technology below (one after the break).
Cover your eyes and hide your children, this new infographic from iStrategy2009 attempts to show the various types of mobile media around the world and their penetrations. The circles up top show various percentages like:
The blue compares the percentage of SMS users vs IM and Email users
The big red compares Mobile Phones worldwide vs Internet, Television, and Newspapers
The yellow on the right compares content coming from entertainment news, Social networks, and something else because they printed it in white on flourescent yellow.
But the disasters don’t end with just dreaded pie charts. They have arrows and text written so small that even at full-size I can’t read it, and they all overlap and change directions without rhyme or reason.
Across the bottom is a chart showing the number of mobiles per 100 people, separated by country. On the left is Taiwan with 59.3, with the US being the greyed-out entry toward the right (again yellow).
There’s just so many bad design decisions here, this one is an early contender for worst of 2010.
Last week we brought you news of the “Google Nexus One OLED Display ShootOut” from the guys at DisplayMate, which showed that the display was lacking in features, resolution, and brightness compared to the LCD iPhone 3Gs Screen. Well, the OLED Association has responded saying that while Dr. Soneira found some important issues, his test wasn’t entirely accurate given the technology of OLED.
Dr. Soneira compared images using his own test equipment and concluded that the images on the Nexus I had some serious flaws and showed these images in his report. His diagnosis was that the PenTile OLED subpixel arrangement, the 6-bit color depth, (really 5-6-5) and the high color saturation in the OLEDs were the cause. The Nexus I, however, has a feature that allows the system to use modes of both 5-6-5 bit or 8 bit color depth depending on the image and the designer’s choice. Typically, 8-bits are invoked when the user touches the screen. While Dr. Soneira acknowledges that nonbandwidth-limited content of text, icons and graphics are very crisp, he seems to indicate that the less challenging bandwidth-limited image content is less well rendered. He suggests that the PenTile configuration somehow reduces the resolution and limits the gray scale. This conclusion is just incorrect.
OLED-Display.net has the full response, although it’s a bit difficult to read. I invite Barry Young to send us his rebuttal so that we can post it here as well, hopefully with some better formatting.
The Google Nexus One Android phone is the pinnacle of Android mobile handsets, and boasts one of the new OLED screens in use in readily available mobile handsets. However, just how good is the screen? The guys at DisplayMate took a very in-depth and scientific approach and compared it to various displays, mostly the iPhone 3GS LCD, and found it woefully lacking. This summary says it all:
OLED displays are at the leading edge of display technology – they are still under development and still being perfected as a production display for use in consumer products. That’s interesting, but they still need to be judged in comparison to LCDs, which are the dominant display technology in all current mobile devices. In that regard, if the Nexus One display were an LCD it would rank among the worst displays we have ever seen in a shipping product. Some of this is undoubtedly due to poor integration of the display hardware with the Android OS and software. Much of it, however, is simply due to very poor factory calibration and quality control, especially with the lack of any credible color and gray scale calibration
Their tests include details on the PenTile pixel arrangement in use, the color-depth, and image qualities. The tests are still underway, as well, so keep checking back for upcoming results on color temperature, gamuts, and color shifts.
A new infographic from 
Flowtown has an infographic that analyzes the various social media website that are popular these days (Facebook, Twitter) and charts the various percentages of their user base that are on mobile devices like smartphones.
GigaOM has a short infographic, based on data from Gartner , of the Smartphone OS market. The top uses stacked percentage bars to visualize the changing market over the last 3 years, and does a relatively good job at showing Symbian, Linux, and Windows mobile shrinking in the face of RIM, iPhone, and Android. I would complain about the lack of numbers, however they include those in the vertical bar-graph right below, which shows the exact same data.
What do you get when you combine Virtual Pets with everyone’s favorite whiz-bang technology Augmented Reality? Zenitum hopes it’s a new cash cow in ‘iKat’, a markerless augmented reality pet simulator.
Cover your eyes and hide your children, this new infographic from iStrategy2009 attempts to show the various types of mobile media around the world and their penetrations. The circles up top show various percentages like:
Last week we brought you news of the “
The Google Nexus One Android phone is the pinnacle of Android mobile handsets, and boasts one of the new OLED screens in use in readily available mobile handsets. However, just how good is the screen? The guys at DisplayMate took a very in-depth and scientific approach and compared it to various displays, mostly the iPhone 3GS LCD, and found it woefully lacking. This summary says it all:
VizWorld.com 
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