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I think the PC name for that game is Little People's Fortress.

Only if it's made by Fisher-Price.

The basic principles are sound, at least for static display: the venerable View-Master had that working and cheap enough for sale as a toy sometime before WWII, with assorted stereoscopic viewer gadgets of varying levels of refinement going back another century or so.

Where life gets difficult is if you want the images on your stereoscopic viewer to be 'VR' without making the user revisit their last meal. Humans turn out to be moderately demanding when it comes to agreement between their own inertial sensors and their visual perception of movement.

I'd be downright impressed if Google's little toy passes the 'VR' test for more than very brief and very lightweight use; but as a stereoscope where the images have the option of moving, not a problem.

OK. I know nothing about 3D scanners but the subject of TFA and the others mentioned here all seem to be just stereo image capture. These might be useful for something but certainly not for duplicating the object in a 3D printer.
To me, real 3D captures an object from all sides... a 360 degree sphere. These 3D cameras just capture one side view and try to calculate depth of that side from stereopsis.
So... beyond making slides for my View-Master, what good it this?
http://www.fisher-price.com/en...

http://www.fisher-price.com/en_US/brands/laughandlearn/products/38776
You're welcome.

No word on whether the Indian firm is mostly a thin shell of management and a few field engineers who exist to look over the shoulders of the Chinese sub-subcontractors to keep them from swapping in cheaper parts when nobody is looking...

At $35 for a 7" touchscreen tablet, how much cheaper can you get on parts? A Fisher-Price "tablet" (no touch screen, no shift key, has a "10" key instead of a "0," but it does have a light-up LCD screen that changes color) costs $25, and even then consumers in the two-to-five-year-old bracket are refusing to use it because they keys are too cheaply made. What "cheaper parts" could the sub-subcontractors possibly swap in? Horse meat? Melamine?

I can see the reviews now: "Bought these for my kids, but they leak some kind of liquid. Kids won't touch them, but the cat loved it. The cat's dead now, vet said his kidneys failed, so at least I'm saving money on cat food."

Fischer-Price

Fisher-Price

...only cheaper: http://www.fisher-price.com/en_US/brands/powerwheels/Products/ProductDetailPage.html?pid=49932&st=7935&pcat=pwheels_all-terrain&e=product

George Costanza says... Hey Cary: the jerk store called, and they're running out of you!"

Friend, you had one strange See 'n Say.

Only little people are capable of error

Mitigation: Quit buying Fisher-Price toys.

Mitigation 2: Don't hire people of short stature. Not advisable due to disability discrimination laws targeted at conditions such as heightism.

Adobe Molehill...

really?

I've tried out WebGL several times now and I can tell you it's disgusting.

what you mean is: "I don't understand GL"

JavaScript is a terrible language....

what you mean is: "I don't undrestand prototype based OOP and first class functions"

...no way to efficiently debug....

what you mean is: "I don't know how to use firebug, opera firefly or google to find a better debugging tool"

...somehow getting it to pass data efficiently with AJAX....

what you mean is: "I'dont know how XHR works and have never heard of JSON or XML"

I think you did approach web development a but too fast. You should better tak a step or two back and look again at what you have done there, how much you understand of it and focus on developing your skills first before starting developing another web application. Why don't you start with something basic and then go up the ladder?

With all this controversy about 3-D and vision, what about kids growing up watching stories on their View-Masters?

I bet one of these are cheaper and probaly do a better job for kids. OK, so its static images, but the concept isn't new.

Not to be confused with the Microsoft Smart Technology-powered Fisher-Price Intelli-Table.

It has even been done by Fisher-Price.

Assuming that the problem is reading the images in the future as opposed to the media itself, why not just drop in a complete but simple digital camera (no moving parts), an AC adaptor, and leave the pictures on a big SD card?

Will the media survive 25 years? Likely.
Will they have a machine that can read the media? Yes.
Will they be able to power the machine? Surely AC power will still be around.

And if that doesn't work turn them all into Viewmaster slides.... those things never die.

I do not even know the total any more.

There are eight planets and four dwarf planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, (Ceres), Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, (Pluto), (Eris), (Makemake). (Dwarf planets in quotes.) Ceres used to be called an asteroid because it's in the asteroid belt, but it's really too big for that. The others have been there all along, but they're way out there, so it takes a while to figure out if they qualify as a planet. If you're really trying to keep up, you might want to make some notes about Quaoar and Sedna which might wind up on the list.

On the bright side, at least you don't have Fisher Price's problem. They've got a toy line called Planet Heroes and their designer apparently hasn't been keeping up on his email. They were two planets down when the line came out and they just fell further behind by one more, but the kids are being taught with more current material.

My seven-year-old was telling a friend all about Planet Heroes when my friend, just to be funny, asked him about Ceres. My son gave him a disgusted look and said, in the tone of someone pointing out the obvious, "That's in the asteroid belt."

I almost fell out of my chair laughing.

You are remiss in your child's education: Phone

Anybody else think that the Luna theme looks like it came from the Fisher-Price toy factory?

I grew up watching my parents playing Pacman and Asteroids on the venerable 2600, and got my first chops on a computer by making levels for Lode Runner with my dad. My childhood's filled with those kinds of memories, along with the fishing trips and the amusement parks and all the other usual stuff. So it's no wonder that my son's growing up dancing along to Guitar Hero, rolling around the pretty shiny ball in Metroid, and learning his alphabet by playing online games (Fisher-Price and Starfall are his favorites)

I do all the usual Dad stuff with him too; we throw the ball around, I read books to him, we push around toy cars (Vrrooms, as he calls them), we hang out the park on weekends. But it's the digital age, and the generation that grew up with the Video game industry is going to incorporate it into their children's lives just as our parents grew up in front of the TV. The interactivity of video gaming just makes it a much better bonding experience -- it's something we do together actively, not passively.

Sadly, the Magna Doodle has gone the way of the Dodo. Fisher-Price now manufactures an "improved" version called the Doodle Pro. http://www.fisher-price.com/us/products/product.as p?id=28861

> I would rather see voting platforms built on microsoft trustworthy computing platforms

Here you are. Point the arrow at your candidate and pull the handle.

Ummm, actually I don't believe that you would buy one immediately. Why would I question your statement? Because there are already companies that make electric cars and yet you complain that there aren't any.

I could also go into the economics of why one person saying they would buy an electric car doesn't help a society that works off of the principles of mass production, but I would just bore myself to sleep. Rather, I suggest that you (and all of these other people who would like, totally get an electric car, fer sure! could - and I'm just putting it out there - buy an electric car.

Or maybe you want to buy one in a different store, like Wal Mart? In which case, I can highly recommend this high-tech model.

Can you imagine what a Tickle Me Elmo would go for today (ex if it had happend in 2006 vs 1996), give then hype that surrounded it back then combined with the insane market that is ebay?

Gave my kid a talking winnie-the-pool doll for christmas. It comes with personalization software and hooks up to the PC via a USB cable. You put in your kids name, birthday, their favorite colors, foods, etc, and it gives the appearance that it really knows its owner. So it's possible that the video is genuine.

there's a market for [actual doll houses]?

Mattel seems to think so: see its Loving Family and Barbie product lines.

XP is becoming bad publicity for Fisher-Price.

Let's look at a Fisher-Price product. It was probably designed by actual industrial designers. It features:
- decent color scheme
- smooth surfaces, with multiple handles
- user-friendly interface: just point
- never seen one crash yet

Really, comparing Windows XP to Fisher-Price is an insult to the company that made many of the great toys of my youth.

(Come to think of it, maybe Microsoft should hire some designers from Fisher-Price to work on Longhorn...)

The collective voices of thousands of "Little People"(tm) made a differance on a huge company.

What the heck do Fisher-Price toys and midgets have to do with anything?

a large company careing about their customers

In corporatese, "caring about their customers" means only "not bleeding all the goodwill out of their trademarks".

I believe that Fisher-Price has a soluiton to the problem. Just need to get users to start off with something simple until they can train into the more advanced version once they've learned the basics.

People will still recognize rotary phones as long as we keep giving toys like the Fisher Price Chatter Phone to our kids. Who can forget that red, white, and blue phone with the googly eyes that moved as it was pulled.

I remember it when I was a kid. I just noticed one in our house, so someone must have bought one for my kids. It would surprise me if it is the only rotary phone my kids have ever seen.

Either Fisher-Price's Little People or Playskool's Weebles, and I'm almost leaning toward Weebles given that the MSN Messenger guy has no legs.

FYI, they're called "View-Master," and apparently they're no longer available in the vertical-wheel red/orange style I had as a kid.

You just needed to poke around that link a little deeper, and you'd find a model aimed at the nostalgia audience, for the reasonable suggested retail price of $20.

65 Years Through the Eyes of View-Master® Anniversary Collector Set

FYI, they're called "View-Master," and apparently they're no longer available in the vertical-wheel red/orange style I had as a kid.

• Viewmaster
  
• Rockem Sockem Robots
  
• Barrel of Monkeys
  
• Hot Wheels
  
• Etch-A-Sketch
  

...It's called a "pop-up book."

Because children's books have enjoyed most of these book-related innovations, it's easy to overlook the evolution of "book technology" and the ways in which we're bridging the gap between digital media and the printed page.

Nevertheless, BlackMagic still looks like a View-Master, which will prevent some people from seeing it as a serious innovation. I wonder what it will take for this or (more likely) a different technology to be accepted eventually as a hardware standard by textbook publishers, fine art books, etc.

To put this into a broader context, we've already seen numerous proprietary technologies for making children's books interactive; we also have companion CD-ROMs, online rich media supplements, audiobook alternatives for an increasing number of titles, books bundled with audio recordings, and telephone book reading services offered by libraries. Most of these technologies "liberate" the text by adding sound, while only the multimedia supplements liberate illustrations. Therefore I appreciate BlackMagic's achievement, which, like LeapFrog's LeapPad, localizes the enhancements--as opposed to the CD-ROM (et al) that are inherently detached from the book itself.

Many people believe (and I know there are a vocal minority on slashdot that don't) that it looks good. That is, it looks good when you take it out of your pocket, it looks good to wear with a suit and it looks as if it really was worth the money you paid for it.

In short, it doesn't look like some cheapo moulded black plastic toy that Fisher Price produce for children.

I know that a lot of slashdotters (and some people) are prepared to put up with something that is clunky, heavy and butt ugly if it has tonnes of neat features - but the rest of the world has shown that it doesn't think in that way.

The antiques might work well if you print your images side-by-side.

It's like a high-tech Power Wheel[fisher-price.com]

You make some good points. However, I still disagree in many respects. First off is this "high quality" Sony stuff you refer to. I once bought into this argument and had it backfire big time. 5-6 years ago I bought a VAIO laptop that cost me a pretty penny. 1 month out of the year long warranty it took a shit bigger than its intestines and died forever.

I did the same thing and thought buying Sony meant getting a product where quality mattered. Not with my Sony 15SF it didn't. Colour divergence between the red and blue signals in the top left corner was about 1.5mm. About 2 pixels or so at the resolution I was running it at. Now, as I bought it for my Powermac 6600 and that's where the Apple menu lived at the time, it jarred on a daily basis.

I sent the monitor back 3 times and each time they returned it and said the lack of convergence was "within factory tolerances". Well, since then Sony have pretty much been "outside Gary's tolerances" and they haven't exactly been the beneficiaries of any of my spending sprees. Plus, I'm still so bitter about Sony's bloody awful quality control (and getting burned 350GBP of my own earned money when a student) that I'm still ranting about it in public a decade later.

In contrast, my Iiyama Vision Master Pro 510 bought to replace it has been nothing but a delight (except when I have to lift the 25kg mofo).

The guy you quoted said:

They have the clout to create a defacto standard, and they're gonna do it.

They thought they had a lock on the VCR market - they had the machines, the patents, and the best picture quality but by reserving the right to determine what could be published on their media (refusing to allow material like pornography) destroyed Betamax's acceptance in the marketplace. Can you imagine George Lucas having to phone up Sony and ask if it's alright to bring out his movie on video tape? "Hmmm... Nope. Sorry, George but those Trade Federation guys really pissed us off in Japan. Maybe you should consider publishing on another format like, say, View-Master?"

It's exactly the same mistake they're making with the MiniDisc and they're going to make with their TVs, dictating what can and can't be stored on what they see as their media (even if you've done something insignificant, like pay for it). Thinking about it, if you consider the frame-buffers in their TVs to be short-term storage solutions, then dictating what can and can't be written to it is pretty much Sony's speed. Cue big black screen when you put in a DVD from 20th Century Fox: Sony Consumer Electronics does not grant you the right to store this information in our photon-emitting storage array.

Sounds fucking stupid, doesn't it? But do you want to bet multiple thousands of dollars buying their TV hoping Sony won't brain damage it? That you won't have to break the law in order to get it modded to play unsigned content? With SCE that is a sucker bet.

Altough intended for kids, they usually have got huge, colourful buttons. I don't think this one has got a display, but at least it hasn't got tiny buttons. Good luck!

Compare it to say, the h2210.

Maybe Linux PDA users aren't fashion conscious, but if i've paid a small fortune for a PDA, it would be nice if it didn't look like something by Fisher Price.

Now if only they could get one to automatically play a real F

Maybe you should consider PRACTICING a little bit instead of looking to technology to make you a rock star.

If automation is really the way you want to go, there are even better guitars out there with your name on them. They don't stop at a mere F chord, they'll play the whole damn song for you! Rock star in a box!

But really, is an F honestly that hard to play? ;-)

My sister was offended that I would send her little kids Thomas The Tank Engine chocolate lollipops for Xmas stocking stuffers. She said they didn't support Disney because Disney supports gay rights.

Similar story: This Christmas, my in-laws gave my brother-in-law's daughter a Fisher-Price Little People Noah's Ark. As we're sitting around playing with the little plastic animals, my brother-in-law noticed the flag for the top of the ark. Visibly furious, he turned to me and hissed, "Why is there a rainbow on this flag?" Now, I'm not a religious guy, but I managed to recall a rainbow at the end of Noah's story in the Bible. He disagreed with my reasoning and insisted that this, like all rainbows, was a pro-gay-rights symbol.

If a rainbow sticker (with the colors in the wrong order for a rainbow, no less) on a child's toy and a lollipop shaped like a cartoon train can offend, then I'm sure folks will manage to find the "three daemons raise a pitchfork" image offensive.

Thanks for the link. They look a lot like the Fisher-Price Little People line of toys. The grandparents bought him a truckload of those for Yule and his birthday.

What about using Power Wheels instead of a Segway? Hell, they can hold 130 pounds and move 5 mph. That's a machine gun and plenty of ammo.

Plus, I imagine Fisher Price makes much sturdier equipment than most military contractors anyway.

Phear Children.

The reason other manufacturers of HD based players don't get it is because they think they can compete and win on price and features. Which is true, they can do pretty well - but in their desire to push the price down lower than an iPod they end up using cheaper materials which means that what they end up with:

1. Looks cheap and nasty
2. Feels cheap and nasty

For many people, if you're going to pony up several hunded quid for a HD based MP3 player - it better not look like something made by Fischer Price.

However, there is light at the end of the tunnel, Toshiba might come up with the goods (and also Panasonic, but I can't find the product I was thinking of) ...

No, you're thinking Windows XP and this. No thanks necessary, love to help.

You guys wouldn't know a decent OS if it ran up and bit you in the ass. OpenSSH is a SERVICE in your Win-babble. It's not even loaded by the kernel and it's certainly not required software to run Linux. So why don't you keep quiet and go back to Kazaa'ing or surfing porn or whatever it is you do on your Fisher-Price OS.

ASIMO is way smarter than a spokesperson. And I bet he dances better too. You could replace most spokespeople with this.

Here is a shot straight for the UI testing lab for Office 12

Or at least it could be considering how pre-schoolish UI's are getting these days.