Entries tagged with “webcast” from O'Reilly Radar
Tue
Nov 17
2009
The iPhone: Tricorder Version 1.0?
by James Turner | comments: 4
The iPhone, in addition to revolutionizing how people thought about mobile phone user interfaces, also was one of the first devices to offer a suite of sensors measuring everything from the visual environment to position to acceleration, all in a package that could fit in your shirt pocket.
On December 3rd, O'Reilly will be offering a one-day online edition of the Where 2.0 conference, focusing on the iPhone sensors, and what you can do with them. Alasdair Allan (the University of Exeter and Babilim Light Industries) and Jeffrey Powers (Occipital) will be among the speakers, and I recently spoke with each of them about how the iPhone has evolved as a sensing platform and the new and interesting things being done with the device.
Occipital is probably best known for Red Laser, the iPhone scanning application that lets you point the camera at a UPC code and get shopping information about the product. With recent iPhone OS releases, applications can now overlay data on top of a real time camera display, which has led to the new augmented reality applications. But according to Powers, the ability to process the camera data is still not fully supported, which has left Red Laser in a bit of a limbo state. "What happened with the most recent update is that the APIs for changing the way the camera screen looks were opened up pretty much completely. So you can customize it to make it look any way you want. You can also programmatically engage photo capture, which is something you couldn't do before either. You could only send the UI up and the user would have to use the normal built-in iPhone UI to capture. So you can do this programmatic data capturing, and you can process those images that come in. But as it turns out, at the same time, shortly after 3.1, the method that a lot of people were using to get the raw data while it was streaming in became a blacklisted function for the review team. So we've actually had a lot of trouble as of late getting technology updates through the App Store because the function we're using is now on a blacklist. Whereas it wasn't on a blacklist for the last year."
Powers is hopeful that the next release of the OS will bring official support for the API calls that Red Laser uses, based on the fact that the App Store screeners aren't taking down existing apps that use the banned APIs. Issues with the iPhone camera sensors pose more of a problem for him. "In terms of science, it's definitely a really bad sensor, especially if you look at the older iPhone sensor, because it has what's called a rolling shutter. A rolling shutter means that as you press capture or rather as the camera is capturing video frames or as you capture a frame, the camera then begins to take an image. And it takes a finite number of milliseconds, maybe 50 or so, before it is actually exposed to the entire frame and stored that off into a sensor. Because it's doing something that's more like a serial data transfer instead of this all at once parallel capture of the entire frame, what that causes is weird tearing and odd effects like that. For photography, as long as it's not too dramatic, it's not a huge deal. For vision processing, it's a huge deal because it breaks a lot of assumptions that we typically make about the camera. That has gotten better in the 3GS camera, but it's still not perfect. It is getting better, especially when the camera's turned on the video mode."
tags: augmented reality, image recognition, interviews, iphone, science, sensors, webcast, where 2.0
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Tue
Feb 3
2009
Everyone's New Favorite Question About Twitter
by Sarah Milstein | comments: 12
For a while there, you couldn't surf a single drop of the web without smacking into the question, "How will Twitter make money?" Although that question remains unanswered, Internet interest has shifted. Today's favorite question about the micromessaging service is: "Has Twitter has gone mainstream?" Or, somewhat less optimistically, "Will Twitter go mainstream?"
Of course, the question isn't new; people have been asking it since about three minutes after Twitter debuted. But with an ever-rising tide of media exposure, it's becoming more likely that Twitter has become part of everyone's everyday experience.
As the mother of all mainstream events, the Superbowl gives us a handy gauge of Twitter's reach. On the one hand, Twitter played a big role in fan reviews of the ads during the game. In addition, traditional media outlets now regularly refer to Twitter without feeling the need to explain to readers what the service is. Check out this this cool, Twitter-driven post-game report from The New York Times, or Forbes' casual mention of tweetups.
On the other hand, NBC didn't incorporate Twitter into its broadcast, and--more telling--not a single ad included a sponsor's Twitter handle. While a few brands did use Twitter to reach fans, you'll know for sure that Twitter has hit the big time when you begin to see @CompanyNames in television and print ads.
Meantime, if you're looking to incorporate Twitter into your own company's communication strategy, join us this Friday, February 6, at 10a PT for a new webcast, "Advanced Twitter for Business." We've posted a preview with a couple of juicy tips, and I'll be offering discounts from @TweetReport.
tags: twitter, webcast
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