According to IDEO Labs, the iCube room is comprised of three white walls and a floor, all about 10′ x 10′ in size. Onto each surface is projected a high-resolution, stereoscopic image. A viewer stands in the room wearing polarized 3D glasses — like you might use in a 3D movie — with small markers that stick out a bit from the frames.
The markers are illuminated by IR LED floodlights located on the perimeter of the room, and IR-sensitive cameras use those positions to determine the precise location of each eye within the room. From those positions, stereo images for each projector are calculated and rendered on the fly.
Take a look at this video clip (although you really need to be there and use these 3D glasses to really experience it):
General Electronics created a website which allows you to play with this amazing technology. Go ahead and try it.
Here is a quick demonstration:
Total Immersion is one the leading companies in this field. Check out their amazing video gallery in addition to other videos around the web demonstrating Augmented Reality technology.
Seam Carving, sometimes referred to as content aware image resizing is an algorithm for image resizing (primarily shrinking) developed by Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir.
Watch this video to really understand what exactly this amazing technology is about:
Even you can play with Seam Carving by downloading it as a GIMP plugin or a standalone application (Windows/Mac/Linux).
Here are some other Seam Carving resources that you may find interesting:
- AS3 Content Aware Resizing or Image Seam Carving - contains links to many implementations, some with source
- Fast content-aware image resizing and Object removal using seam carving, still fast - more thoughts on the algorithms and an implementation in OCaml
- CAIR - Content Aware Image Resizer - a multi-threaded C++ implementation
- rsizr - a very slick Flash-based seam carving utility
- Seam Carving - a nice write-up that explains how the algorithm works
Is the woman pictured on the right more attractive than the woman on the left? Do her wider-set eyes, the longer distance between her hairline and the bridge of the nose, and the rounder shape of her face make her more beautiful?
The photograph on the right was doctored by the “beautification engine” of a new computer program that uses a mathematical formula to alter the original form into a theoretically more attractive version, while maintaining what programmers call an “unmistakable similarity” to the original.
The software program, developed by computer scientists in Israel, is based on the responses of 68 men and women, age 25 to 40, from Israel and Germany, who viewed photographs of white male and female faces and picked the most attractive ones.
Scientists took the data and applied an algorithm involving 234 measurements between facial features, including the distances between lips and chin, the forehead and the eyes, or between the eyes.
Continue reading this article on The New York Times.
Favicon is an icon associated with a particular website or webpage. Browsers typically display a page's favicon in the URL bar and next to the page name in a list of bookmarks. Browsers with tabs also show favicon next to the page title.
You can design your favicon online (supports uploading an image of your own also), or download one from free libraries on the web, like FreeFavicon and FaviconRUs. If you are aiming to recent browsers, your favicon can be of type PNG, ICO or GIF (also animated).
Once you got your your icon, it needs to be hosted somewhere on the web (Picasa, GooglePages, ImageShack, Photobucket etc.) and you must have an option to get a direct link to it.
Next thing is to include a reference on your website/blog. The following line should be added to your <head> section (replace http://myFaviconURL with the URL you have from the previous step):
<link href='http://myFaviconURL' rel='shortcut icon' type='image/vnd.microsoft.icon'/>
In Blogger’s template for example, search for the <title> section above the <head> and put it below:
<head>…
<title>…
<--- put it here --->
You are done!