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Steam Machine photos arrive

Ali “Ningauble” Aksöz — Tue, 05 Nov 2013 19:42:44 +0000

The first photos of Valve’s Steam Machine prototype are out.

The prototype has been built to give manufacturers a reference design to work towards for their retail versions which are expected to debut at CES in January.

Steam Machines are the customizable video game consoles that are designed to bring the power of PCs to the living room. The machines have separate zones for CPU, power supply and the video card, so Valve designed the case so the parts can breathe individually. The CPU blows air out the top, the power supply out the side, and the graphics card exhaust out back.

“Really we just wanna have confidence that all the customers on Steam are having enough options, and that the price/performance spectrum is as fleshed out as Steam customers want it to be. And right now, the indications that we have from the lineup that we’re gonna be talking about at CES, is that they are gonna have enough choice. So we’re gonna continue to treat this as a test platform and see how that goes.” Says Greg Coomer.

Those machines will be revealed at next January’s CES, as well as partners and more information and hopefully the pricing.

So circle January on your calendar.

Cassini catches a glimpse of Earth from Saturn

Ali “Ningauble” Aksöz — Tue, 23 Jul 2013 19:54:23 +0000

There’s no better thing to remind us how insignificant we humans are in the gargantuan scheme of things, than a photo taken from space.

This one was taken by NASA’s Cassini probe on 19 July, while the spacecraft’s orbit took it into the shadow of Saturn.

Do you see the blue dot on the right side of the pic? That’s us.

Boom.

Cassini, on the orbit since 2004, was able to spot Earth only once before, in 2006 but that one was taken with ultraviolet and infrared sensors. This is the first time Cassini has taken a picture of our blue dot in its true glory. To see our beautiful planet from Saturn, one would have to wait for the rare occasions when the Sun has just set or is about to rise and the Earth happens to hover just above the horizon.

Just like seeing Mercury from Earth: the planet is usually hidden in the Sun’s glare. To see it, we have to catch it shortly after sunset or shortly before sunrise.

Don’t you just feel MORTAL?

Via: SciAm

Google patent delivers Blade Runner style close-up photos

Ali “Ningauble” Aksöz — Wed, 26 Sep 2012 12:09:50 +0000

Google has just obtained a patent that could give the rest of us what Deckard did 30 years ago.

“Enhance” the pix.

The software could gauge a mobile device’s position and orientation to offer a closer photo that was taken before, from a server as a substitute. That photo may be a Street View shot or an image a globetrotter took before just for fun.

“Aspects of the invention pertain to enhanced zooming capability of user devices. A user device such as a mobile phone with a camera may capture images of different objects of interest. The capture and zooming limitations of the user device are overcome by replacing, supplementing or otherwise enhancing the image taken with one or more geo-coded images stored in a database. For instance, if the user attempts to zoom in on a feature of an object of interest and exceeds the zooming capability of the user device, a request is sent to a remote server to provide an image showing the feature of the object of interest at a desired resolution. The server determines which, if any, stored images correlate to the captured image of the object of interest. The resulting imagery is provided to the user device and is presented on a display.” -Abstract

The geocoded system could even cue photos based on the time of day and year to provide that extra dash of authenticity. We already get a trace of the concept through photo overlays within Street View itself, although we don’t know yet if Google will link our camera apps directly to a cloud of substitute photos or not.

Via: USPTO