Earth’s Universe

Posted on August 27th, 2007 in Next Gen Tech, Innovation by Puneet Sarda

Jonathan Harris has done some pretty innovative stuff. He was the person behind Yahoo Timecapsule, he did the “We feel fine” project in collaboration with Lovelines and how he’s done Universe. I was watching his video on TED when I found about his Universe project.

It’s a beautiful idea to present all the things happening around in the world as a huge universe of information and then give the user control over how they want to explore it. And the best part being that the representation is not the usual web interface we are all used to but a good inspiration of how the universe looks to us from earth. Check out his talk below and make sure you visit the universe website.


A new desktop metaphor

Posted on June 6th, 2007 in Next Gen Tech by Puneet Sarda

Or maybe an old one. Bumptop’a Ananda Agarwala was not happy with the way computers emulate the desktop metaphor and he thought it was time to go back to the basics. An by that I mean revisit the office desktop, see how things are there and then apply some physics to it…ya you read it right I said Physics. He gave a wonderful presentation at TED 2007 and he also has a video on Youtube explaining his ideas.


Microsoft Photosynth

Posted on June 5th, 2007 in Microsoft, Next Gen Tech by Puneet Sarda
Photosynth is a Microsoft Research project thats now made it to the real world and is on Live Labs. The idea is to look at digital photos in a whole new way and when I say whole new way, I really mean it. The idea is to be able to connect various photos of a particular location to be able to build a complete model of the place which you can now navigate around via zooming, flying and plain old clicking…all in the digital world. It connects pictures taken from various devices…cell phone cameras, digital camera, slr cameras etc… and forms a complete view of the obj in context which can be explored in all possible ways. This, I guess, gives a whole new meaning to “connecting the dots”. Watch the video below to see it in action.

Download Link: Photosynth

Blaise Aguera y Arcas , the lead behind Photosynth, gave an excellent demo at TED and you can see how the audience cannot stop saying WOW!! :)

Microsoft 10 points to BBC which has released 6 new collections to be viewed using photosynth.

I installed it and here is one of the screenshots as I played with it. (Click to enlarge)

Photosynth

iPhone: Coming June 29

Posted on June 4th, 2007 in Next Gen Tech by Puneet Sarda

Apple just released 3 ads of the iPhone… looks like its coming on June 29…too bad I am not getting one :(

Microsoft Surface

Posted on May 31st, 2007 in Microsoft, Next Gen Tech by Puneet Sarda

We are all used to manipulating computers using keyboards and mice. To play games you might use joysticks or game controllers. But if you look at the way we deal with computers when we are discussing something we usually point or touch the screen, move our hands around to show where something should be or express an idea. However if you really want to do it, you have to go back to the mouse or the keyboard and then do the actual action.

Not any more!!! Microsoft just released a new piece of technology “Microsoft Surface” which allows you to play with computers using your bare hands, pointers and actual devices like cell phones and cameras. This is way more than what we have seen a touchscreen can do but instead of explaining what it is about I might as well show it to you. Check out the video below:


Check out the videos on the Microsoft site as well. Jeff Hann featured in the above video gave a multi touch demo at TED. Check that out here:


P.S.: I was so excited about this and wanted to blog it that I found a plugin to embed video just for this post :)