Posts Tagged Qualcomm
Upcoming Qualcomm Developer Challenge
Posted by Tom Carpenter in AR Games, augmented reality on September 8, 2010
This fall, Qualcomm is going to host a $200,000 Augmented Reality Developer Challenge. The details for the challenge haven’t been released yet, but the total amount of prize money should have would-be developers planning their products as we speak. The challenge will start when they release the Qualcomm AR SDK. More details can be found here.
ANTICIPATED TIMELINE
- Fall 2010 – AR SDK available for download. Challenge commences.
- Early November, 2010 – Submission site opens. Developers may submit apps.
- January 7, 2011 – Submission site closes.
- Mobile World Congress 2011 – Winners announced and showcased at Qualcomm events.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Nexus One Will Take Augmented Reality To The Next Level
Posted by Tom Carpenter in augmented reality on December 15, 2009
The details about the recently “dogfooded” smartphone from Google called the Nexus One have been surfacing more rapidly than a fart in the bathtub. For most the buzz centers around the Nexus One’s rumoured untethered bachelor lifestyle or potential $99 price, but I found the more interesting nugget of information to be the Snapdragon processor from Qualcomm.
The Snapdragon processor has 1GHz processor and onboard graphics and claims to produce 22 million triangles per second. Compare this to the iPhone which only produces 7 million triangles per second (see this comparison chart for more details.) Now we’re still way outside the realms of the desktop processors which light up screens at 60 million to 300 million triangles per second, but we’ve passed the old GameCube which ran at 12 million triangles per second
The Nexus One will also sport a 5 Megapixel flash camera with 720p HD recording possible. With the Android OS2.1 open API access to video, augmented reality will look better on the Nexus One than the sorry old iPhone and do so without all the annoying limitations from the Apple app store.
While the Nexus One is still a smartphone and limited by its small screen (aka “Magic Lens”); its better graphics, higher processing speeds, open OS and improved camera will make augmented reality work and look better. The real breakthroughs will come with a cheap HMD, but until then I think the Nexus One with the Snapdragon processor will help augmented reality take another step toward wide usage.
Popularity: 28% [?]
Facial Recognition is the Future of Social Search
Posted by Tom Carpenter in Uncategorized on November 24, 2009
Nokia’s concept video shows what they think mobile computing will be in 2015. The list rounds out the usual suspects of future-tech: cloud computing, geolocative services, service-anywhere and facial recognition, to name a few. The last one tweaks my concerns about data harvesting and social stalking as presented the last two days (Thoughts on the OGI and Surveillance Society). Seems like this is privacy week at the Future Digital Life.
Nokia isn’t the only one delving into this aspect of computer vision as Qualcomm gave a sneak peak into their future products and facial recongition tied to social networking is one of them. Ben Sillis from Electricpig reports what the Qualcomm European president presented:
the company’s European president, Andrew Gilbert, showed how you would soon be able to point your phone’s camera at a person, then instantly bring up their Facebook and Twitter profiles, along with recent updates and all the details said victim (Karmen, in the above picture) has chosen to make public about themselves.
Gilbert admitted that the possibility raised serious privacy issues – you could theoretically pull up a person’s home address through automatic whois requests – but ethics aside, it’s an interesting next step for augmented reality apps, which layer data over the surroundings and have started to take off in a big way over the last year. As phones get faster and more powerful, what’s to stop people integrating this form of search?
Gilbert described a future where the “handheld device becomes the remote control of your life”. If you ask us, we’ve already reached that stage – would you take it to the next level like this?
Personally, I wouldn’t mind facial recognition tied to my social services as long as I controlled who had access to my face data. Things get tricky when you have access to search anyone in your viewing distance. Either way, facial recognition is sure to be part of the future of social search.
Popularity: 21% [?]
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