Jürgen Wagner says he got Inventor running on his Asus Eee 4G. He replaced Linux with XP, and then installed just Inventor (no Design Review, samples files, etc), which takes up 1.04GB on the 4GB solidstate drive; XP takes up another 1GB.
His Weblog Autodesk Inventor auf dem Asus Eee PC (German only) also contains a video of Inventor running on the mini-noteook's 7" screen.
nVidia's market value dropped $2.6 billion overnight after it admitted it has a big problem with faulty GPUs used in some notebook computers -- as well as weaker demand for its products and downward pressure on prices from archrival ATI.
After making $1.15 billion in Q1, the graphics board maker is expecting Q2 revenues to drop to $875-$950 million. In sympathy, its share price fell 30%. Larry Dignan of CNET reports:
Nvidia said that it will take a $150 million to $200 million charge in the quarter for warranty, repair, return and replacement costs for high failure rates for its previous generation chips. Nvidia blamed the faulty chips on “weak die/packaging material set in certain versions of its previous generation GPU and MCP products used in notebook systems.” These graphic chips are failing in systems already in the field.
We don't know yet which notebook computers are affected.
Life for computer nerds used to be easy. In terms of Intel CPUs, there was the 8088, followed by the 80286, followed by the 30836.
When Intel added complexity, we could still cope: the little-used 8086, the required-for-AutoCAD 8087 math chip, the DX and SX flavours of the 386, and then the Pentium, III, III, and 4. It was around the time of the Pentium 4 that I build my last computer, because that 2.4GHz one is the one I still run today, 7 years later.
Since then, Intel and AMD have thoroughly confused the market with Celeron this and Amperon that. I have little idea what kind of CPUs are in the current crop of 5 notebook computers in our household, other than that most of them sport an AMD sticker.
Engaget has pictures of a 30-monitor display, 3 tall by 10 wide. Ideal for civil engineers who design roads -- which tends to involve very long and narrow drawings. Each screen can be up to 32" in size.
Link: 9XMedia shoots for multi-monitor crown with 30 LCD monster
CNET's Stephen Shankland describes an experimental camera lens for taking 3D pictures.
Fife's 3-megapixel sensor prototype breaks the scene up into many small, slightly overlapping 16x16-pixel patches called subarrays... After a photo is taken, image-processing software then analyzes the slight location differences for the same element appearing in different patches--for example, where a spot on a subject's shirt is relative to the wallpaper behind it. These differences from one subarray to the next can be used to deduce the distance of the shirt and the wall.
The next breakthrough in digital photography will come when a sensor is applied to every pixel. This would allow the 3D photography described above, as well as eliminating the problem of extreme contrast, such as when a person is backlit by the sun.
Yet another mouse design....
Aving is showing many large photos of the Korean-designed ‘Wow-Pen Joy’ mouse that you hold like-- well, like your hand around a fat rope or a pound of butter or something like that. Apparently $30.
Nothing about this at Wow Technology's Web site yet, but you can still get a look at their similarly-designed Wow-Pen.
Sandio has a mouse that handles 2D and 3D. Think of combining the shape of a regular mouse with the functions of a 3dconnexion "space" mouse.
The Sandio works by having sliding buttons on the top and sides. Depending on how you move the buttons, you can tilt, twist, and zoom in 3D. The video at sandiotech.com shows how it works (click on English). Just $80.
Tip o' the hat to Don Beaton.
Elliptic Labs have designed a touchless 3D user interface: it detects finger movement in 3D without you touching the screen.
While the hows and whys are not explained, there seems to be a black pyramid that I am guessing does some sort of radar-like tracking of the finger tip. I wonder if we'd have to paint our fingernail?
In any case, the concpet suffers the same problem of all touch (or touchless, in this case) interfaces: the need to have your hand in the air, which gets tiring. There's a reason the keyboard and mouse remain popular -- gravity. (Probably the same reason TabletPCs are never popular.)
Moldable Mice
Meanwhile, Engaget reports on two new designs of mice:
-- Lite-On's Moldable Mouse takes whatever shape you want. I'd like that, because I find all mice to be too narrow for my liking. It uses lightweight modeling clay covered by nylon-polyurethane fabric.
-- Jelly Click is an inflatable mouse. Deflated, it's flat for travel; inflate it for use.
TurboCAD users can now employ 3Dconnexion's line of 3Dmice with the budget-priced CAD software:
-- TurboSketch Studio ($99; includes SketchUp)
-- TurboCAD Deluxe 14 ($149)
-- TurboCAD Pro 14 ($1,295)
... can work with...
-- SpaceNavigator Personal Edition ($59)
-- SpaceNavigator Standard Edition ($99)
-- SpaceTraveler ($199)
-- SpaceExplorer ($299)
-- SpacePilot ($399)
The Australian Centre for Visual Technologies has worked out a way to generate 3D models from multiple frames in a video.
The user interacts with VideoTrace by tracing the shape of the object to be modelled over one or more frames of the video. By interpreting the sketch drawn by the user in light of 3D information obtained from computer vision techniques, a small number of simple 2D interactions can be used to generate a realistic 3D model.
Makes sense to me. As the video camera moves around an object, it captures the object from many viewpoints in 2D. The tricky part is combining many 2D views into a single 3D model -- although it seems to me that this technology is not particularly new.
What might be new is how compact the hardware could be. 3D capture hardware has tended to be bulky. But now even my less-than-1"-thick Samsung digital camera could be used (through its 30fps 720 video mode).
VideoTrace is in the prototype stage. The center is looking for employees, as well as applications for industry. Contact them by email here.
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