eye

U.S. contracts fund next-gen satellite imagery

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, an arm of the U.S. government that oversees satellite imagery collection for military and intelligence work, has awarded two satellite imagery companies contracts worth more than $3 billion each.

The two 10-year contracts are part of a program called EnhancedView to produce a new generation of satellite imagery. GeoEye, based in Dulles, Va., was awarded $3.8 billion, and DigitalGlobe, based in Longmont, Colo., was awarded $3.55 billion.

Each contract is paid annually, subject to congressional approval, and can be canceled annually. The long-term funding paves the way for development of next-generation satellites with … Read more

Cooliris turns Wikipedia into an iPad magazine

The first thing that should come to mind when you think of Cooliris is photos. The company is well known for its imaging products, which include a very snazzy cross-platform browser add-on, an iPhone app, and embedded Web site and mobile phone technology. All of these are able to turn a collection of photos into an interactive, 3D wall, be it in on your browser, Web site, or cell phone.

But with its latest creation for Apple's iPad, called Discover, Cooliris is moving beyond the presentation and organization of photos and into something a little more pedestrian: text.

Discover, which was submitted to Apple on Tuesday, takes content from Wikipedia--both text and still images (but mostly just text), and splits it up into sections. These can be flipped through with your finger, instead of scrolling down a large page in Safari. The app also keeps track of where you've been so you can retrace your reading path if you've gone several pages deep.

"When the iPad came out, we took an idea we had, and said 'this is probably a perfect platform to try it on,'" Cooliris' executive VP of products Michele Turner told CNET. "This new application takes structured data--in this case Wikipedia, as the starting point. We've then created a templatized starting page and structured data from Wikipedia to let users navigate the depths of Wikipedia in a beautiful and efficient way."

The end result is a Wikipedia with larger text that can be read like an e-book, and photos that can be thumbed through and scaled up to the iPad's full resolution. The app also takes advantage of orientation to reposition, or expand or consolidate the data it's showing. Along the way, Cooliris serves up advertisements, which is where it can make some of its money given the app's free price tag.

But why Wikipedia, and not a larger chunk of the Internet, as something like the recently popular Flipboard has done with RSS feeds? The short answer is that it's not there yet, but it will be soon. Turner and company do, in fact, envision Discover as a platform for various data feeds from around the Web. "We have over 100 content partners in the mainstream Cooliris product," Turner said. "The longer term opportunity is to work with the content partners to flow into this application, but that's kind of down the line."

Eventually the company plans to bring it to other platforms, including Android tablets. In making the iPad iteration of Discover, the company even built one for the iPhone, though Turner says it didn't feel quite right given the smaller form factor.

More pics of Discover can be seen after the break.… Read more

White hat hacker Maiffret returns to eEye

Security researcher and former Microsoft gadfly Marc Maiffret has returned to the company he started when he was a teenager, eEye Digital Security.

Maiffret had been serving as chief security architect at antimalware firm FireEye since December and will remain on the company's technical advisory board, Maiffret said in an interview on Monday.

"I'm coming back to eEye as chief technology officer to lead the overall technology vision and be involved in day-to-day stuff on the research front," he said.

Asked why he was returning to the company he started in 1998 when he was a … Read more

Boeing taps hydrogen for Phantom Eye UAV

Boeing on Monday unveiled a potential new eye in the sky, this one powered by hydrogen fuel.

The Phantom Eye, an unmanned aerial vehicle from the company's Phantom Works division, is expected to make its first flight early next year. Boeing is pitching the demonstrator UAV as a "first of its kind" aircraft that "could open up a whole new market in collecting data and communications."

A decade into the 21st century, surveillance drones are nothing new considering the now long-running successes of aircraft such as the Predator and the Global Hawk. What sets the … Read more

On Facebook, don't panic!

In 2008, the Loaded crew took a road trip to interview Janis Wolak at the University of New Hampshire's Crimes against Children Research Center. Wolak, a UNH professor, co-authored a study about "Internet predators," which showed that they do not fit the stereotype of thuggish basement-dweller using force, abduction, or deception to lure young teens into sexual relationships.

On the contrary, research shows that Internet sex offenders coax teens into relationships slowly, gaining their trust over time. Once the relationships become obviously inappropriate, teens feel that they have been complicit and are therefore less likely to report … Read more

Eye exams using a mobile phone

Researchers at the school for really smart people, MIT, have come up with a novel way to conduct eye exams--looking into your mobile phone screen. With some custom software and a small plastic device, this can be done very inexpensively, making it possible for people in poverty-stricken countries to get prescriptions quickly.

According to MIT News, the system could be implemented like this:

In its simplest form, the test can be carried out using a small, plastic device clipped onto the front of a cell phone's screen.

The patient looks into a small lens, and presses the phone's … Read more

Microsoft's Natal/Kinect problem: Who wants to play these games?

LOS ANGELES--Having just returned from the Microsoft world premiere event showing off the newly named Kinect camera for Xbox 360 (formerly known as Project Natal), we're left with a burning question. The games demoed at the event ran the gamut from titles that let you drive a car, boat, and mine cart--all with graphics that would make a Nintendo Wii blush. But cool hardware aside, who's going to want to play these games?

Behind the pomp and circumstance of packing a college arena with white-robed journalists and an entire troop of Cirque du Soleil dancers, the real stars of the evening were the Kinect camera and games. About half a dozen were demoed by a collection of faux families, some suspended upside down or in mid-air, but all the footage shown was clearly pretaped, and not an actual live use of the Kinect camera (which we admit would have been difficult with the light show and acrobatics going on at the same time).

However, as impressive as the event itself was, the first round of Kinect games demoed seemed, well, exactly like first-generation games. There were several variations on using your hands and body movements to drive a vehicle, from a car to a raft to a kind of mine cart (with your avatar body on top, contorting to grab icons).

More promising was a yoga app, as well as a virtual pet. At the event, we actually snagged a tiny stuffed animal, which included a scannable code--we assume it would then place that particular animal in the game (which is called Kinanimals). Somewhat more strained was a follow-the-moves dance game, but given the success of television programs such as "So You Think You Can Dance," we may be on the wrong side of the cultural zeitgeist on that one.

But after all those game presentations, we're struck by how similar they are to games we've already seem for platforms including the PlayStation EyeToy (which originated on the PS2 in 2004) and Nintendo Wii. The EyeToy is a particularly apt comparison as it also used only hand and body movements, not a control stick like the Wii or upcoming PlayStation Move. … Read more

Geotag your photos without wires--or fuss

In just a few weeks it will be the beginning of summer, and with the change in season comes a rise in the number of photographs you're bound to take. Yahoo-owned photo site Flickr, for instance, gets an average of 4 million photos uploaded a day during the summer months, which amounts to a 30 percent increase versus the rest of the year.

Summer shooters are also likely to be taking these photos while out and about, be it a weekend trip or a vacation. And if that's the case, the argument for geotagging is becoming increasingly strong.

Why geotag? For one, it makes your photos easier to organize in software like Google's Picasa, Adobe's Lightroom, and Apple's Aperture 3 and iPhoto software. More importantly, it can add an extra level of interactivity to your photos once they're hosted on photo-sharing sites like Smugmug, Flickr, and Picasa that group together user-shared shots on a map.

The sad truth though is that unless you're snapping photos with your smartphone's camera, you're not going to be getting that sweet, sweet GPS data appended to your shots. But fear not, there are plenty of solutions out there, and they're getting cheaper and more plentiful. One of the ones I tried out this past weekend proved to be remarkably simple and effective. Best of all, it will work with just about any camera--past, present, and likely those from the future.

What I chose to use was an Eye-Fi X2 Explorer SD card, a $99 Wi-Fi-enabled Secure Digital memory card with a built-in 802.11n Wi-Fi antenna and embedded software that can add GPS data to your photos as soon as you've taken them. The one prerequisite is that you need a Wi-Fi connection for the Eye-Fi to figure out where you are. I solved this by linking the card up wirelessly to my Android smartphone (a Nexus One) that was running Android 2.2 (aka "Froyo")--the latest version of the operating system that lets users turn their phone into a wireless Wi-Fi hotspot.

This combination works in perfect harmony; as I took photos with my digital camera, it ping-ed my phone's Wi-Fi signal to grab GPS data. These coordinates are not from your phone's GPS signal, but from your location as guesstimated by the embedded technology from Skyhook Wireless. This is the same company that furnishes the location estimator for Apple's iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad, as well as for third-party Web sites that use the company's "find me" button to let visitors share their location. It may not have the extreme accuracy of "real" GPS, but it's almost instantaneous, works indoors, and is accurate to around 20-30 meters.

Getting rid of more wires, middleware, and proprietary hardware

Beyond adding simple geotags, the Eye-Fi card can also be set to beam photos up to places like Facebook and Flickr, as soon as they're taken. This cuts out the need to haul around a computer with you if you're on vacation, since you can make edits later on down the line. The company's Explore X2 and Pro X2 cards are also able to automatically hop on to AT&T Wi-Fi hotspots.

All in all, this is a particularly more convenient system than what was previously possible on mobile phones that didn't have a Wi-Fi tethering mode. I, as well as my CNET colleague Stephen Shankland, had explored using an alternate geotagging method using an Android application called My Tracks. With it you could set your phone to record your GPS location as you moved around; it, in turn, would spit out a log of your whereabouts.

Software like Apple's Aperture 3 had a handy feature that would let you drag and drop the GPS log from My Tracks into its library to have it map out that particular trip, then link it up to a "roll" of photos you had taken. Apple's implementation of it was not automated though; you still had to tell it where you started taking photos, and pick that particular shot. From there, it would assign GPS coordinates to the rest of the photos in that roll based on when you took the shots. … Read more

EyeTV HD rips to Mac, streams to iPad

There are a handful of ways to record TV to your computer using an external video card or over-the-air tuner. Only one method, however, promises HD-quality recording and an iPad-compatible app for streaming your recordings over the air. It's called the Elgato EyeTV HD, it's Mac-only, and it's available now for $199.

The sandwich-size hardware isn't much to look at, but put it between your Mac and your cable/satellite box and you've got a powerful tool for capturing the TV you're already paying for. The box sports component and S-Video inputs capable of … Read more