Reality Bites
Last night’s Fringe episode may have pulled off something that’s never been done before: a lengthy flashback about events that nobody remembers. We weren’t delving into the memories of any particular character, because they’ve all blotted it from their minds. More »
Leave it to Microsoft Research to show off some cool stuff that may or may not actually happen on any thing you ever actually buy. Check out the video after the break to see the latest, Director of Microsoft Applied Sciences Steven “Stevie B” Bathiche showing off a variety of interesting interfaces. It all starts with gesture controls that take you well beyond the touchscreen, relying on a retro-reflective sash and a camera to detect hand position. But, things quickly progress to a flat lens called a wedge that can enable holographic-like imagery. Pair that with a Kinect and perspective shifts come into play, tracking your face to enable you to peer around like looking out a window. It’s all just waiting for you below — and maybe IRL sometime in the future.
Microsoft Research shows off next-generation gesture interfaces, Kinect integration, other neato stuff (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 25 Feb 2011 23:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Ottawa police have launched an internal investigation after a video posted online shows an officer throwing several punches during an arrest.
![Click here to read Is alien invasion movie "Battle: Los Angeles" actually based in fact?](http://betacache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/8/2011/02/small_factorfiction.jpg "Click here to read Is alien invasion movie "Battle: Los Angeles" actually based in fact?")
In next month’s Battle: Los Angeles, invading aliens go to war with the American military. It’s science fiction…except that a panel of UFO experts claims it’s factual. At a recent Sony Pictures press conference, the studio emphasized the movie’s “based in fact” premise by giving us a chance to chat with a pair of ufologists and two retired military officers who both claim to have had encounters with UFOs during their service. More »
We all know that women like funny guys (how else do you explain Woody Allen’s love life?), but empirical evidence for this phenomenon has been sorely lacking. Fortunately, in a recent study in the journal Psychological Reports, a French scientist took up the challenge of testing whether humor helps men pick up women. More »
Dear Lifehacker,
We’re about to replace our old HDTV. We’re considering a projector for our home theater system. What do we need to consider, and what kind of issues will we run into setting up a projector in our home? Is it worth it? More »
Intel’s spent the last nine months prepping its Oak Trail silicon to improve the battery life and performance of Windows 7 tablets, and come the end of next month we should finally have some slates with the new 1.5GHz Atom Z670 chip inside. While Fudzilla has heard that the tablets will hit in the general March time frame, the eagle-eyed guys at Netbook News spotted the Fujitsu Stylistic Q550 press materials stating that the new platform will launch on March 30, 2011. That seems to line up with what we’ve heard on timing, since both the Oak Trail-powered Samsung Sliding PC 7 and MSI WindPad 100W were announced with March availability. Chances are we will hear more about it all at CeBIT next week, but honestly, at this point we’re just really eager to get one of these in our hands to see what Chipzilla’s really improved.
Intel Oak Trail Atom Z670 tablets to arrive at the end of March originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 25 Feb 2011 18:43:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Scientists have found evidence that water was trapped for up to billions of years inside rocks deep in an African gold mine.
Tonight’s episode of Fringe is the best in ages. After a handful of somewhat weak storylines, tonight’s Fringe kicks your ass with a super-dark, messed-up tale of the aftermath of Peter Bishop’s kidnapping. Here are some things to watch for. More »
Gmail graduated two label-related Labs features to all Gmail accounts today: Hide Read Labels (to declutter your Gmail sidebar) and Hide Labels from Subjects (to make Gmail subjects more readable on smaller screens). If you already had these features enabled, you shouldn’t notice a difference. If you hadn’t, click on the drop-down next to a label in the sidebar to selectively show, hide, or show-if-unread your labels. [Official Gmail Blog] More »
Facebook for BlackBerry is getting ready for a fresh update soon. According to these leaked screenshots it shows that version 2.0 will be seeing a complete UI refresh along with – and finally – Facebook Chat. Other improvements that are expected to arrive are the ability to View friends’ profile info, pages and friends lists. […]
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Hey, look, at this point, we just want ourselves some good, old-fashioned copy and paste — but we’ll give Microsoft some credit for looking a year (or two, or ten) beyond that watermark at what could be coming down the pike for human-machine interaction — and specifically, how phones could play a role. In a presentation and promotional video pulled together this week, Microsoft Research boss Craig Mundie shows how you could tilt your smartphone to control a bubbly, colorful look into your personal life on your desktop machine and how you could snap a photo and then drop the handset onto a Surface for instant transfer (perhaps a bit like HP’s Touch to Share), among other gems. Of course, this is all pure research at this point — it’s any guess whether these comments could make the jump to production, and if so, when — but it’s fun to watch. Follow the break for video.
[Thanks, Jake]
Continue reading Microsoft Research teases Windows Phones controlling Surfaces and crazy desktop UIs
Microsoft Research teases Windows Phones controlling Surfaces and crazy desktop UIs originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 25 Feb 2011 04:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Two awesome things are happening with Google’s search engine. First, Google is finally going after the content farms that flood their search results with posts that care more about SEO than content. Wanting to filter that noise out, Google is pushing forward a new search algorithm which identifies posts from those types sites and lowers their search rank. That makes it harder for these sites to make it to the top of a results page for any given search string. It will affect approximately 12% of all queries on Google. More »
Today, Discovery reached for the stars for the last time in history. The launch almost got canceled because of a last-minute computer display problem, but the engineers saved the day a couple of seconds before the launch window deadline. Here’s the video of the launch. More »
Federal cabinet minister Tony Clement says expanding access to the internet in Canada is “critical.”
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