Google Goggles is now available for both the iPhone and Android-powered smartphones, as a feature of the latest version of the Google Mobile App. Expanding on the concept of Augmented Reality, Goggles is an innovative application that works in conjunction with the camera and GPS on your phone to help you discover more about the world around you.
When you’re plugged into your iPhone, you’re often plugged out of reality—traffic noise stops being a nuisance when that car horn actually saves your music-loving life. This new iPhone app will allow you to stay plugged in at decibel bursting volumes, but able to hear ‘important’ ambient sounds as well.
Building on their esteemed collection, innovative programming, and an already digitally-savvy approach, MoMA continues to position itself as a standard-bearing institution of the 21st century with today’s release of their free iPhone application. The mobile software integrates familiar features from the museum, like
Augmented reality (AR) is definitely where media and technology is heading towards; just look at the number of smartphone apps and media projects that boast AR features.
And now, National Geographic is getting in on the AR craze. The publication has come up with a simple and detailed image set showing just how the future will look like.
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In the early, chaotic, primordial years of the mobile phone era, you had to press real, actual “buttons” to get things done. Almost barbaric to think about now, isn’t it?
As society advanced and we gradually became a more civilized species, buttons gave way to touchscreens and voice control, mercifully giving the atrophied sausages we call “arms” and “fingers” a bit of respite every time we needed to surf through cyberspace, place a phone call, or send a text message. Now, it seems the evolution of Homo sapiens is reaching its inevitable final stage with the release of the PLX XWave, headgear that plugs into your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad and — after a bit of training — lets you control the device with your mind alone.
Forget digital. The future of cell phones may just be mechanical. As flat, touch screen slabs like the iPhone make our lives more virtual, a half-dozen guys from the luxury watch world are trying to drag mobile phones back onto the physical plane, in which every function would operate mechanically through human energy.
By Jonathan Snyder and Brian X. Chen
A software update for Apple’s mobile operating system is due for release next week, and Wired.com has had hands-on time with a major new feature of the OS: high-dynamic range photography.
HDR, an automated processing feature aiming to deliver a “dummy-proof” photography method, will be included with the camera app on all iPhones running iOS 4.1 when it ships next week. When you take a picture, HDR processes three versions of the image: an underexposed version, a normally exposed version, and an overexposed version. Then it combines these three images into one to increase the dynamic range (the intensity of the light) to give you a more accurate representation of the scene you’re shooting.
In iOS 4.1, when you launch your camera there will be an option to toggle HDR on or off. When toggled on, the iPhone will take a few seconds to process a photo in HDR after snapping it. By default, your iPhone will save both a normal, unedited version of your photograph along with an HDR-processed version. (You can tweak the save mode in your settings.)
I ventured outside with Wired.com photo editor Jon Snyder to put an iPhone 4 to the test with HDR photos, and the results were quite pleasing. At times some photos looked better without HDR-processing, but for the most part HDR improved images that were oversaturated with light or too dark with shadows.
This feature should come in handy for people who don’t want to spend too much aiming their camera in just the right place to get good lighting. Click through the gallery above to see some side-by-side comparisons of photos we snapped Thursday afternoon in San Francisco.
Via Wired Gadget Lab
Matt Forcey
Watch. Read. Repeat. 