Scanner puts any real object into full 3D model in under 25 mins

Quotation:

"…scans a broken [car] part and creates a new one out of plastic using a 3D printer. The scan is so good that they even scanned an adjustable wrench and, after printing it out in plastic, it was fully workable."

I've seen 3D scanners before, but they're hulking great beasts and seem to take 40 years to do the job. This, however, is remarkable. Scans an object in under 25 minutes and renders a massively detailed object.

Couple this with a 3D plastics printer (as shown in the 2nd video) and you get something far closer to the replicator from Star Trek than anything before. What's astonishing about the 2nd video, is that the objects it prints in 3D are actually moving, working parts. The wrench actually functions and they did not need to assemble the pieces themselves.

Seen on Singularity Hub

Sonos releases the Touch Screen Controller

I've had a Sonos system since I bought my house and I love it to bits - 2 wireless players on the ground floor, each with their own speakers, linked wirelessly to my network which has my 100Gb or so of MP3s on it. Stream any of your music instantly, at the touch of a button - and have different music per player, or synced - a great product.

But... their controller (CR100) sucks. Actually it probably was good when released, but when I got round to buying Sonos, the worls had moved on and it just seemed clunky, heavy and MASSIVE. The scrollwheel meant that it took forever to actually type anything in.

The MASSIVE CR100

Then Sonos launched the free iPhone app controller, which - it has to be said - is an absolute dream. I (genuinely) thought to myself last night, as I walked in the house, paused my music on the iPhone, fired up the Sonos app and played music in my kitchen straight away. I'm that much of a geek.

The excellent Sonos iPhone app

Sonos have now launched a new controller - a touch screen hybrid of the original CR100 and the wondeful iPhone app - CR 200. Anyone considering a Sonos will love this - and the fact that Sonos keep releasing updates and apps to their customer base for free is rarely-found excellence.

The new CR200 touch screen Sonos controller

Assassin's Creed 2 using Twitter to assassinate players

Nice idea, reminiscent of Burger King's Facebook campaign (CNet review | Official Whopper Sacrifice site). In this one, you use Twitter commands to virtually attack and avoid other Twitter users' attempts to take you down.

Results in a ton of spamming messages on the platform of course, but that's one of the risks of open developments.

Read more at The Escapist

Rhonda: 3D drawing

Wow. Never heard of this before. The Rhonda application allows drawing in 3D - well, drawing on a 2D plane, but manupulating a 3D object at the same time.

It looks nightmarishly fiddly in my opinion, but is certainly intriguing.

Seen on CreativeApplications.Net

Scientists Worry Machines May Outsmart Man

From the NY Times

Despite the many posts about the singularity I have on here, I'm also a stone-cold believer in the possibility that the robot race will simply rise up and start blasting ass with fricking laser-beam eyes and all that. Man has a loooooooong history of realising something's out of control at the last minute and then acting. With climate change, there's a chance that we'll reverse it in time and avoid flash-frying ourselves. But when you're dealing with an intelligence, how the hell do you go about reversing that, without having to destroy the very thing you have created (and indeed, probably now rely on to make you dinner or somesuch).

Scrabble's new ad campaign: mental

Scrabble’s not something you’d get excited about generally. Personally, I love the game – have it on my iPhone, Facebook, old mobile phones before the iPhone – anywhere. But I can’t say it’s an exciting brand.

So Ogilvy have done a cracking job with this new campaign. My favourite is the 3rd video (there are 3 in a row in the link below). Concept? Words linked together is how the game is played. Execution? Weave nutty illustrations of words from a game into a visual cornucopia, backed up with foot-tapping, high speed music.

Love it.

More info about the campaign: http://www.jawbone.tv/featured/2-featured/26-scrabbles-the-beautiful-word-campaign-true-collaborative-undertaking-.html

Realtime Ashes scorecard

This is really here so I have easy access to it, but it's a nice widget too :)

Great tracks - Hounds of Love (The Futureheads)

Love this cover of Kate Bush's classic. Good Brit stuff :)

This track too actually. Sounds a bit like My Sharona by The Knack :)

Murmur study - textually expressing the emotional web

There's something really compelling about this - an art installation that features 30 printers wired to an app monitoring for emotional statements (e.g. "ewwww" or "grrrr") that then get 'spat out' on paper feeds.

There's a coldness about digital communications (lack of face-to-face, physical contact and all that) but this - picking up the textual expression of emotional reactions goes some way to showing that there is warmth in it.

Murmur Study from Christopher Baker on Vimeo.

Via CreativeApplications.net

Google reveals the real reason for Chrome - taking on Windows itself

"In the second half of 2010, Google plans to launch the Google Chrome OS, an operating system designed from the ground up to run the Chrome web browser on netbooks. 'It's our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be,' Google writes tonight on its blog."

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/07/google-drops-a-nuclear-bomb-on-microsoft-and-its-made-of-chrome/

So?

• Many experts have long believed that Chrome was Google's first step to recreating the Operating System (http://tinyurl.com/mpxzt3).
• It will be free, unlike Windows.
• It will mean that (if you take it up) Google will know everything you do, not just what you do online – the holy grail for targeting & trending.
• They've already done it on mobile phones (Android) and Android has already been successfully ported to netbooks.
• Netbooks are so cheap now, that Google are likely to produce an end-to-end produc: Google laptops, with their OS and Chrome installed.
• It'll likely be an open-source OS (As Google writes, "We have a lot of work to do, and we're definitely going to need a lot of help from the open source community to accomplish this vision.")

UK grocery retailer Ocado releases iPhone app - Ocado on the Go

Just noticed this has arrived on the iPhone Apps list - Ocado - the UK delivery service for Waitrose supermarket have launched a free iPhone app called Ocado on the Go, allowing customers to browse groceries, place and manage orders, and effectively shop through their iPhone.

It's nice, cleanly designed app that goes through a number of steps when you fire it up for the first time:

• You have to agree to the ts&cs
• You have to login (or register)
• You then have the option to create a 'quick pin' 4-digit PIN, rather than remember your more complex web password (nice touch this - don't think I've ever seen that before).
• It downloads the 'product catalogue', which is a fairly hefty 21.16Mb, but means you can shop offline
• It loads your 'account data'

Once you're 'in', you can:

• Book a delivery
• View your orders
• Start shopping

Booking a delivery first lets you choose from the addresses stored in your account, then heads off to a calendar interface to choose a day and timeslot.

'View orders' allows you to view an overview of pending and past orders, and also delve into a full listing of all the items in the order, which is impressive.

Start shopping is of course the business-end of the whole app. Impressively, it shows full details and images of items, along with a functioning basket and total cost counter at the top of the app that updates - much like their site - without any need for a page reload, or iPhone equivalent.

The app's pretty chuggy when scrolling lists of items - it looks like it loads content as it displays it, leading to a delay for each item coming up. It's fairly annoying and may benefit from pre-cache, although the iPhone 3GS may be better (I have the original 3G).

Adding an item immediately updates the total cost shown at the top. You can tap an item for full info (ingredients, storage info, manufacturer, country of origin, country of packing, package type and even recycling info), the same as seen on the website.

Another nice feature is that you can 'zoom in and out' of shopping 'aisles' to show more info (i.e. pictures) or less (just titles) to get more or less on screen. Curiously, removing the pictures doesn't stop the chuggy list scroll so this may be a general issue of the iPhone having to parse data bit by bit and slowing down as a result.

My lady and I use Ocado all the time, so she'll be wrapped about this new app. We have an order already (correctly listed and displayed in the iPhone app I might add) so I haven't yet tested placing an order, although I made a fake one (but didn't submit it) and it worked exactly as I'd expect.

I work in digital - marketing specifically. One of the main triumphs of this application is that, not only have they made a great app that focusses exactly on what you need it to do without being distracted, it performs almost exactly like the website (albeit smaller, naturally). The huge benefit of this is that all of Ocado's customers will already be familiar with it. There's no need to re-learn what you know: getting product info is where you expect it to be; adding items to the basket works as you'd expect; the total cost is where I'd want it to be and works how I'd expect. The production team on this have done a great job of porting the business to the iPhone, and (presumably, at least based on my experience) have managed to keep the application focussed, without getting distracted by adding pointless Twitter-post functionality, or 'share my shopping list with the cloud', which would have delayed the release massively.

Overall, a really nice application that does what it says on the tin.

Gesture-glove becomes affordable

As if to validate my previous post that Human Computer Interaction (HCI) is becoming physically closer, and much faster than people realise, the AcceleGlove is now available for $499 and is open-source, allowing it to be programmed for pretty much anything.

Check out the video below to see it being demonstrated (press play - I've disabled its auto-play as it was annoying me :) )

Seen on Slashdot