3D

Photosynth, a technology demo from Microsoft Live Labs, has graduated from its "ooh, that's pretty" status to being a viable Web service for consumers.

The technology, which takes a grouping of photographs and stitches them into a faux 3D environment, can now be implemented with photos you've taken on your digital camera or mobile phone, and converted right on your computer. Previously, the process of stitching these photos together took weeks of processing on specially configured server arrays. With its latest version, Microsoft has managed to shrink that into around the time it takes to upload … Read more

Fiber-optic technology has long helped doctors get at problems in a patient's body without having to resort to major surgery. But for all the technological wonder of being able to see deep inside the body through a tiny tube, the view has been largely limited to the typical two-dimensional rendering of a TV or computer screen.

Now, however, surgeons are able to make use of 3D imaging--best known as a sometime Hollywood special effect--for delicate procedures such as removing tumors from the brain. One such surgeon is Dr. Theodore Schwartz of the Weill-Cornell Medical Center in New York, … Read more

Samsung Electronics, an arm of the giant Korean company (second only to General Electric in annual revenue among conglomerates), held a press event in San Francisco last week to show off its products for the coming holiday season.

I'd been looking for an excuse to go up to the city, so off I went-- taking Caltrain rather than driving. Conveniently, the Samsung event was just a few blocks from the train station in San Francisco.

… Read more

No it won't run Crysis, but damn if the Avengina Project is not impressive. This Java-based graphics engine harnesses both the power of your Internet connection and your graphics card to run incredibly detailed 3D environments right inside the confines of your browser. It integrates lighting and graphics filters that can scale up depending on the hardware quality of your system.

Avengina's project page lets you take the engine for a run on your machine as long as you have a recent version of Java installed and meet the minimum hardware requirements. I found it to chug a … Read more

SanDisk sees flash memory maxing out during the next decade and believes 3D technology is the answer.

Flash memory disk supplier SanDisk said this week that it is looking beyond flash memory because of anticipated limitations. SanDisk intends to tap into 3D read-write memory technology it acquired with the purchase of Matrix Semiconductor back in 2005.

3D memory chips can store more data vertically, allowing greater densities. While conventional integrated circuits put all active circuitry on the silicon substrate, SanDisk's 3D architecture deposits multiple layers of active memory elements so that circuitry extends vertically as well.

Speaking at this week's second-quarter earnings conference call, Sanjay Mehrotra, SanDisk president and chief operating officer, said his company is "developing the 3D read/write memory that we believe will replace NAND flash sometime in the next decade when it can no longer be economically scaled."

This follows a Securities and Exchange Commission disclosure earlier in the quarter covering an agreement that SanDisk signed with Toshiba to collaborate on the development of rewriteable 3D memory. SanDisk and Toshiba "will jointly perform research and development" on 3D memory, the companies said in the disclosure.

SanDisk has made progress with the technology since it acquired Matrix, according to Chairman and CEO Eli Harari, speaking earlier this week duing the earnings conference call. "SanDisk has been making good, steady progress since our acquisition three years ago of Matrix Semiconductor...We currently have more than 200 issued patents that cover key elements of 3D rewritable memory technology," Harari said.

Based on these statements and its collaboration with Toshiba, SanDisk believes 3D memory, though challenging, is a viable successor to flash. Commercialization presents "significant challenges" but the "effort is worth the prize as 3D memory is a potential game changer," Harari said. The technology would "achieve the cost structure to disrupt hard disk drive in the coming decade," he said.… Read more

Oh man. Molly is out for one day and look what happens. Well the Monster story comes form the cable makers attempting to sue the makers of a deer salt lick. Seriously. And Iron Butt refers to a character from X-Men after we got schooled on Magneto by Craig from Omaha. And we talked about porn too. Listen now: Download today's podcast

Episode 771

TiVo and Amazon team up http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/22/technology/22tivo.html?_r=1&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&oref=slogin

What is Apple’s mystery product? http://blogs.eweek.com/applewatch/content/rumors/what_is_apples_mystery_product.html… Read more

A number of materials, including textbooks, videotapes, and software, teach sign language. But Hitachi researcher Hirohiko Sagawa and his cohorts see limitations with those methods. They have created a prototype model of a mobile phone that displays Japanese sign language movements via 3D animation. Users can shift the viewing angles and enlarge animated images to get a more well-rounded sense of what the gestures entail.

In the photo above, Sagawa shows off the prototype at the Japanese electronics giant's advanced technology fair in Tokyo on Thursday.

Google has quite a bit in common with British rock band Radiohead: both have reputations for shattering corporate and artistic boundaries, both make constant headlines in the tech press regardless of what they do, and both will likely be seen as icons of early-21st-century futurism for years to come. (And both likely have some beef with record label EMI: Radiohead ditched the label to embark upon the high-seas adventure that is In Rainbows; Google lost chief information officer Douglas Merrill to EMI earlier this year.)

But it's still a surprise that Google, long known for keeping its hands out … Read more

It sure looks like Google Earth, but it's not.

A company called Sentinel, funded by the U.S. Defense Department, has posted a demo of its client software on YouTube that shows the viewer flying through 3D cityscapes with live videos embedded in them.

A higher-quality version is on the Sentinel site.

The software, AVE Video Fusion, "combines Google Earth-like features with live camera videos projected on a 3D model" the video caption says. "This program is NOT Google Earth. It is written from scratch using C++ and OpenGL." It runs on PCs and requires … Read more