THE TECH-LICIOUS

Broken phone signed by Rihanna fetches $66,500 on eBay

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<a href="http://i-cdn.phonearena.com/images/article/56218-image/Broken-phone-signed-by-Rihanna-fetches-66500-on-eBay.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="Broken phone signed by Rihanna fetches $66,500 on eBay" border="0" height="320" src="http://i-cdn.phonearena.com/images/article/56218-image/Broken-phone-signed-by-Rihanna-fetches-66500-on-eBay.jpg" width="320" /></a><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 21px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Talk about making lemonade out of lemons. Pop star Rihanna was attending an NBA Playoff game between the Clippers and the Thunder last week in L.A., when the person in the seat next to her asked if she would mind taking a selfie with him. Perhaps Rihanna was nervous about the game, or maybe she had too much popcorn butter residue on her hands. Regardless of the reason, she dropped the phone.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><br style="background-color: white; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 21px;">As it turned out, the person sitting next to Rihanna whose phone she broke, was L.A. Police Commission President Steve Soboroff. The law enforcement official decided to make the best out of the situation by having Rihanna sign the back of the phone. And then Soboroff did what any red-blooded person would do. He auctioned the phone on eBay.</span><br style="background-color: white; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" /><br style="background-color: white; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 21px;">The phone, which did work although it was sporting the cracked screen, sold for an incredible $66,500. Soboroff donated the entire amount to the LAPD Cadet program, and Rihanna even added an additional $25,000 of her own money. Overall, it was a great day for the LAPD.</span></span><br style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;" /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 21px;">Amazing how some ink can turn a $200 handset into such a valuable property.</span></div>

Broken phone signed by Rihanna fetches $66,500 on eBay

Talk about making lemonade out of lemons. Pop star Rihanna was attending an NBA Playoff game between the Clippers and the Thunder last week...

Your Cellphone Could Be a Sonar Device

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<img alt="echolocation, sonar, ultrasonic, technology, invention, innovation, smart phones, mobile phones" height="425" src="http://i.livescience.com/images/i/000/053/869/i02/shutterstock_sonar.jpg?1371497853" width="640" /></h1>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Submarines have used sonar for decades. Bats and dolphins have used it for millions of years. And thanks to a little math, humans could soon be echolocating with their <span class="itxtrst itxtrstspan itxtnowrap" id="itxthook0p" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; bottom: auto; display: inline !important; float: none !important; font-size: inherit; height: auto; left: auto; line-height: normal; margin: 0px !important; padding: 0px !important; position: static; right: auto; top: auto; white-space: nowrap !important;"><span class="itxtrst itxtrstspan itxtnowrap itxtnewhookspan" id="itxthook0w" style="background-color: transparent; border-color: transparent transparent rgb(0, 204, 0); border-style: none none solid; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; bottom: auto; color: #009900; display: inline; float: none; height: auto; left: auto; margin: 0px !important; padding: 0px 0px 1px !important; position: static; right: auto; text-decoration: underline !important; top: auto; white-space: normal;">mobile</span><img class="itxtrst itxtrstimg itxthookicon" id="itxthook0icon" src="http://images.intellitxt.com/ast/adTypes/icon1.png" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px !important; bottom: auto; display: inline !important; float: none !important; height: auto !important; left: auto; margin: 0px !important; max-height: none; max-width: none !important; padding: 0px 0px 0px 4px !important; position: static; right: auto; top: auto; vertical-align: baseline !important; white-space: normal; width: auto !important;" /></span> phones.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">At the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), in Switzerland, experts in signal processing discovered a mathematical technique that allows ordinary microphones to "see" the shape of a room by picking up ultrasonic pulses as they bounce off the walls. The work was published in this week's edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Microphone echolocation is harder than it sounds. Ambient noise in any room interferes with the sounds used to locate the walls, and the echoes sometimes bounce more than once. There is also the added challenge of figuring out which echoes are bouncing off which wall. [See also: "How Bats Stay on Target: Bio Sonar"]</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Bats have had millions of years to evolve specialized neural circuits to fine-tune their echolocation abilities, said Ivan Dokmanic, a doctoral researcher and lead author of the PNAS paper. He added that humans can echolocate too, though not as precisely. (Some blind people have demonstrated this ability.)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">One reason echolocation is <span class="itxtrst itxtrstspan itxtnowrap" id="itxthook1p" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; bottom: auto; display: inline !important; float: none !important; font-size: inherit; height: auto; left: auto; line-height: normal; margin: 0px !important; padding: 0px !important; position: static; right: auto; top: auto; white-space: nowrap !important;"><span class="itxtrst itxtrstspan itxtnowrap itxtnewhookspan" id="itxthook1w" style="background-color: transparent; border-color: transparent transparent rgb(0, 204, 0); border-style: none none solid; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; bottom: auto; color: #009900; display: inline; float: none; height: auto; left: auto; margin: 0px !important; padding: 0px 0px 1px !important; position: static; right: auto; text-decoration: underline !important; top: auto; white-space: normal;">easier</span><img class="itxtrst itxtrstimg itxthookicon" id="itxthook1icon" src="http://images.intellitxt.com/ast/adTypes/icon1.png" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px !important; bottom: auto; display: inline !important; float: none !important; height: auto !important; left: auto; margin: 0px !important; max-height: none; max-width: none !important; padding: 0px 0px 0px 4px !important; position: static; right: auto; top: auto; vertical-align: baseline !important; white-space: normal; width: auto !important;" /></span> for bats and humans than it is for<span class="itxtrst itxtrstspan itxtnowrap" id="itxthook2p" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; bottom: auto; display: inline !important; float: none !important; font-size: inherit; height: auto; left: auto; line-height: normal; margin: 0px !important; padding: 0px !important; position: static; right: auto; top: auto; white-space: nowrap !important;"><span class="itxtrst itxtrstspan itxtnowrap itxtnewhookspan" id="itxthook2w" style="background-color: transparent; border-color: transparent transparent rgb(0, 204, 0); border-style: none none solid; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; bottom: auto; color: #009900; display: inline; float: none; height: auto; left: auto; margin: 0px !important; padding: 0px 0px 1px !important; position: static; right: auto; text-decoration: underline !important; top: auto; white-space: normal;">computers</span><img class="itxtrst itxtrstimg itxthookicon" id="itxthook2icon" src="http://images.intellitxt.com/ast/adTypes/icon1.png" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px !important; bottom: auto; display: inline !important; float: none !important; height: auto !important; left: auto; margin: 0px !important; max-height: none; max-width: none !important; padding: 0px 0px 0px 4px !important; position: static; right: auto; top: auto; vertical-align: baseline !important; white-space: normal; width: auto !important;" /></span> is that bats and humans have skulls that filter the sound. Tracking where a sound originates is easier for humans because people's two ears hear slightly different things. This allows humans to pinpoint the origin of a sound.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">To enable echolocation in mobile devices, Dokmanic investigated the math behind echolocation. What he found was that it's possible to treat the echoes of sounds emitted by a speaker as sources, rather than as waves bouncing off of something.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It's kind of like what happens when you look into mirror: Your eyes see a reflection, but there's the illusion that there's another person who looks just like you standing at precisely the same distance from the mirror.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">That's what Dokmanic did with sound. He assumed that each echo was a source, and created a kind of grid, called a matrix, of distances. Using some advanced math, he was then able to create an algorithm that could group the echoes in the correct way to deduce the shape of a room.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">First, the team experimented with an ordinary room at the EPFL, using a set of microphones and a laptop <span class="itxtrst itxtrstspan itxtnowrap" id="itxthook3p" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; bottom: auto; display: inline !important; float: none !important; font-size: inherit; height: auto; left: auto; line-height: normal; margin: 0px !important; padding: 0px !important; position: static; right: auto; top: auto; white-space: nowrap !important;"><span class="itxtrst itxtrstspan itxtnowrap itxtnewhookspan" id="itxthook3w" style="background-color: transparent; border-color: transparent transparent rgb(0, 204, 0); border-style: none none solid; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; bottom: auto; color: #009900; display: inline; float: none; height: auto; left: auto; margin: 0px !important; padding: 0px 0px 1px !important; position: static; right: auto; text-decoration: underline !important; top: auto; white-space: normal;">computer</span><img class="itxtrst itxtrstimg itxthookicon" id="itxthook3icon" src="http://images.intellitxt.com/ast/adTypes/icon1.png" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px !important; bottom: auto; display: inline !important; float: none !important; height: auto !important; left: auto; margin: 0px !important; max-height: none; max-width: none !important; padding: 0px 0px 0px 4px !important; position: static; right: auto; top: auto; vertical-align: baseline !important; white-space: normal; width: auto !important;" /></span> to test whether the algorithm worked. It did, and their next step was to test their program in the real world. So they went to a cathedral and tested it there.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">"It was really the opposite environment," Dokmanic said, adding that unlike a controlled lab setting, a cathedral has a lot of ambient noise and the space isn't perfectly square.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The algorithm worked there too, showing that the echolocationscheme could detect the cathedral's walls.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">"The innovation is in the way that they process the signal to calculate the shape of the room," said Tommaso Melodia, an associate professor of electrical engineering at the University at Buffalo who was not involved in the study.  </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Martin Vetterli, professor of communications systems at EPFL and a co-author of the paper, said that mobile phones could be used to locate people more precisely. One problem with getting anyone's precise location on the phone is that only certain frequencies penetrate building walls, so GPS signals are sometimes useless.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Moreover, GPS is not always precise — if there's a lot of interference,it's not uncommon for a phone to say it can't locate you more precisely than within a half mile. Wi-Fi could work, but it depends on the existence of a local network.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Echolocation partly solves that problem, because it can measure the distance from where a user is standing to the walls of an individual room, and send that more precise information to tell the network exactly where that person is located. Instead of knowing where someone is within a city block, you'd be able to see that he or she is inside a room of a certain size or is surrounded by walls that give an intersection a certain shape.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">One other issue is the distance between two microphones on a<span class="itxtrst itxtrstspan itxtnowrap" id="itxthook4p" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px; bottom: auto; display: inline !important; float: none !important; font-size: inherit; height: auto; left: auto; line-height: normal; margin: 0px !important; padding: 0px !important; position: static; right: auto; top: auto; white-space: nowrap !important;"><span class="itxtrst itxtrstspan itxtnowrap itxtnewhookspan" id="itxthook4w" style="background-color: transparent; border-color: transparent transparent rgb(0, 204, 0); border-style: none none solid; border-width: 0px 0px 1px; bottom: auto; color: #009900; display: inline; float: none; height: auto; left: auto; margin: 0px !important; padding: 0px 0px 1px !important; position: static; right: auto; text-decoration: underline !important; top: auto; white-space: normal;">mobile phone</span><img class="itxtrst itxtrstimg itxthookicon" id="itxthook4icon" src="http://images.intellitxt.com/ast/adTypes/icon1.png" style="background-color: transparent; border: 0px !important; bottom: auto; display: inline !important; float: none !important; height: auto !important; left: auto; margin: 0px !important; max-height: none; max-width: none !important; padding: 0px 0px 0px 4px !important; position: static; right: auto; top: auto; vertical-align: baseline !important; white-space: normal; width: auto !important;" /></span>. Many mobile phones have two mics —the directional mic is used when it's pressed to your head while you're on a phone call, and the other is used for canceling out the ambient noise.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">The two microphones on a phone calculate the distance by triangulating – measuring the small gap between when an echo reaches each microphone. The distance between the microphones is the base of a triangle, and the time difference between echoes' time of arrival tells you the length of the other two sides.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">But these two microphones usually aren't very far apart on phones, so calculating the distance to a source that's far away is harder to do.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">One solution, Vetterli said, might be to use people's tendency to walk with their phones in order to help echolocate walls more accurately.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Since you can't make phones much bigger, it is simpler to have the phone take measurements from more than one spot as the user walks with it, so the base of the triangle is longer, he said.</span></div>
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Your Cellphone Could Be a Sonar Device

Submarines have used sonar for decades. Bats and dolphins have used it for millions of years. And thanks to a little math, humans could ...

A next level gaming machine

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<span style="background-color: white; color: #1b1b1b; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 20px;">Thermaltake has crafted a special edition Level 10 gaming station entirely from titanium to make you forget games co</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #1b1b1b; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 20px;">nsoles ever existed</span></h4>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>PC manufacturer Thermaltake has announced a special edition version of its Level 10 Gaming Station model. If you're not familiar with the brand, they first came to market in 2009 as part of a collaboration with BMW Group DesignWorksUSA.</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Here in 2014 though, this latest gaming station is so special that Thermaltake is only planning to release 500 of them.</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>We're about to throw some serious specs your way because, aside from looking awesome, this gaming station can run any game under the sun without breaking a sweat.</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>The revamped special-edition model proves to be a big leap forward from Level 10 that preceeded it. Level 10 Titanium has been upgraded to six EasySwap HDD bays, to meet the expectations of high-end enthusiasts.</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Other features include four advanced USB 3.0 ports that are compatible with all devices e.g. high-performance gaming mice, super fast hard drives, headsets ect.</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Also, its asymmetric arrangements and horizontally facing componants prevent it from overeating, allowing you to play it for longer.</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>There's a lot riding on this gaming machine as its predecessors in the Level 10 Series have won awards aplenty. But, the firm claims that the special edition Titanium model can take the series to a new peak.</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Thermaltake will celebrate its world premier at Computex in Taipei on June 3, but will be available for pre-order from July prior to its official launch in September.</b></span></div>
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A next level gaming machine

Thermaltake has crafted a special edition Level 10 gaming station entirely from titanium to make you forget games co nsoles ever existed ...

iPhone 6 could come with super-Retina screen

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<span style="background-color: white; color: #1b1b1b; font-weight: bold; line-height: 20px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Apple is testing a new, higher resolution display for its upcoming iPhone 6 in order to complete with the flagship Android handsets.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>The <a href="http://www.t3.com/news/iphone-6-release-date-rumours-features-and-news" style="color: #1b1b1b; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">iPhone 6</a> could come with a resolution of 1704 x 960 if the report is accurate. That resolution would allow <a href="http://www.t3.com/apple" style="color: #1b1b1b; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Apple</a> to increase the pixels per square inch, while retaining the current 16:9 aspect of the<a href="http://www.t3.com/reviews/iphone-5-review" style="color: #1b1b1b; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">iPhone 5</a> and <a href="http://www.t3.com/reviews/iphone-5s-review" style="color: #1b1b1b; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">iPhone 5S</a>.</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>It is unclear if both of the rumoured iPhone 6 models will receive the new, higher resolution – or just the larger <a href="http://www.t3.com/news/iphone-6-release-date-rumours-features-and-news" style="color: #1b1b1b; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">5.5-inch iPhone 6</a>. If that is the case, it may be 2015 before the higher resolution makes it to phones.</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>The report adds that the increase in resolution is unlikely to see the size and positioning of icons change. However, it will add more screen space, meaning that we could see another column and row of apps added to the home screen – especially on the larger iPhone 6.</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>Apple is known for testing out several different resolutions before settling on one. As such, we’ll take this news with a pinch of salt until Apple announces anything.</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><b>It’s likely we’ll get a hint of what Apple has in store next month at WWDC. It’s highly likely that Apple will give developers the heads up a resolution change is coming – if it does, that will be the first solid signal a higher resolution iPhone 6 is inbound.</b></span></div>
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iPhone 6 could come with super-Retina screen

Apple is testing a new, higher resolution display for its upcoming iPhone 6 in order to complete with the flagship Android handsets. T...

Oculus Rift, three Kinects effectively bring an entire human body into a virtual world

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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Ever wanted to put yourself inside of a video game? It’s now possible to dynamically represent your entire body inside of a virtual world, and this monumental task can be accomplished with off-the-shelf hardware. With three first-gen Kinects and an Oculus Rift dev kit, a developer by the name of Oliver Kreylos has hacked together a true VR prototype that actually makes you feel like you’re in a computer-generated world.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">By placing three <a href="http://www.extremetech.com/tag/kinect" style="color: #b1700a; text-decoration: none;">Kinect</a> sensors in an equilateral triangle around his room, Kreylos is able to generate a live 3D model of his body from the raw video data. By sidestepping the Kinect’s processor-intensive skeletal reconstruction, this visual representation is extremely low-latency. When you put on your <a href="http://www.extremetech.com/tag/oculus-rift" style="color: #b1700a; text-decoration: none;">Oculus Rift</a> and hold your hand to your face, Kreylos claims that your brain immediately registers the limb as your own.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In the video embedded above, you can see this system for yourself. The 3D projection of Kreylos in the virtual world is blurry and covered in visual artifacts, but that apparently doesn’t break the illusion. While he hasn’t done exhaustive research regarding the neurological aspects of this system, Kreylos theorizes that the low-latency motion capture achieved with the Kinect cameras helps the brain effectively jump over the <a href="http://www.extremetech.com/tag/uncanny-valley" style="color: #b1700a; text-decoration: none;">uncanny valley</a>. Regardless of the visual fidelity of the virtual world, it seems that lag is what really makes or breaks the illusion.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Keep in mind, all of this is being done with relatively modest gear. In a post on his blog, the developer explains that this entire demo is <a href="http://doc-ok.org/?p=965" style="color: #b1700a; text-decoration: none;">running on a Linux box</a> with a 3.5GHz Intel Core i7 CPU, 8GB of RAM, and an Nvidia Geforce GTX 770 GPU. He’s also using the low-res Kinect cameras from the last generation, so imagine how much better this could look with the newest model. With three HD cameras and a few months of polish, this could potentially mean big things for affordable VR training, improved teleconferencing, and immersive games.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It’s easy to shrug off this three-camera rig as an impractical solution, but this is a really solid first step towards solving the problem of full-body VR. The Oculus Rift and <a href="http://www.extremetech.com/tag/project-morpheus" style="color: #b1700a; text-decoration: none;">Project Morpheus</a> are impressive prototypes, but they’re far from complete packages. If we want full-fledged <a href="http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/181454-virtually-perfect-the-promise-of-virtual-reality" style="color: #b1700a; text-decoration: none;">virtual reality in our future</a>, we’re going to need to account for a lot more than just neck movement in our simulations. We need to think bigger than just head-mounted displays.</span></div>
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Oculus Rift, three Kinects effectively bring an entire human body into a virtual world

Ever wanted to put yourself inside of a video game? It’s now possible to dynamically represent your entire body inside of a virtual worl...

ATM’s Could Soon Spray Thieves With Hot Liquid Chemicals

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It seems like I’ve seen a lot of news items lately regarding ATM’s getting robbed all over the world. While they may seem like a pretty tempting target for criminals since they don’t fight back or give them any “real” trouble, ATM’s might not be so simple to break into in the future. It turns out that ETH Zurich out of Switzerland has been coming up with some pretty unique methods to stop ATM’s from getting broken into. In short, they want the machines to fight back.</div>
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And just where did they look for their inspiration? From nature of course. More specifically, they looked at bombardier beetles, which are able to cause a small gas explosion when it thinks a predator is closing in. They thought, “Why can’t we do that same thing when an ATM feels threatened?” And so, that’s what they’re trying to do. They’ve created a certain kind of film layer that when it gets broken releases hydrogen peroxide and manganese dioxide. And, when those two chemicals mix together, they would be sprayed at a temperature of around 80 degrees onto the face of the unsuspecting criminal.</div>
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Along with getting a bit of a burn to the face, any of the money that was stolen would also be dyed by the chemicals. The chemicals would also be able to be tracked thanks to nanoparticles found on the dyed money.</div>
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Who knows if and when we will ever see this technology implemented all over the world, but if it ever does happen, I can imagine the number of ATM thefts dropping drastically.</div>
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I don’t know how you feel about this type of defense measure, but I think it’s a pretty genius idea. Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below!</div>
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ATM’s Could Soon Spray Thieves With Hot Liquid Chemicals

It seems like I’ve seen a lot of news items lately regarding ATM’s getting robbed all over the world. While they may seem like a pretty te...