Slashdot Mirror
Apple's All-Seeing Screen
Based on a recent patent we may be seeing a new kind of display coming from the Apple store in the near future, one that can capture images as well as display them. From the article: "The clever idea is to insert thousands of microscopic image sensors in-between the liquid crystal display cells in the screen. Each sensor captures its own small image, but software stitches these together to create a single, larger picture."
Now I know which monitor to recommend to that cute neighbor next door. "Sure, I would be happy to help you set up your new monitor and wireless router!" Which reminds me, which wireless router would be the best for streaming video?
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
So, what you're telling me is that Apple is NOT really the enemy of Big Brother, but Big Brother in disguise? I'm so confused. How can there be so many truths? The Ministry is supposed to protect us against such confusion by telling us ONLY the truth! If you'll excuse me, I think I need to go watch my telescreen now. Perhaps the truth is there.
Down with Goldstein!
(For those lacking context: Commercial | 1984)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
i need one of these all-seeing screens i guess
will something like this be used in the rumored touch-screen ipod? most likely down the road?
"A large LCD screen filled with image sensors would be ideal for videoconferencing..."
Or telescreens. I suddenly want to dig out the 1984 commercial again.
Paraphrasing from memory, and no, I didn't bother to actually look up the quote on the web even though I know it exists: And the telescreen didn't only recieve, but also transmitted, so that anything within the view of the telescreen was being watched. Not all the time, but you never quite knew when a watcher would tune in to your screen.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Now the monitors at work will have who knows what stuck to them. Face prints and oil from people scanning in their stupid looking faces (like being pressed against a window)....or worse *shiver*
Apple was the company that spoofed Orwell's 1984, and it looks like this technology is a mirror image of his "telescreens". Let's just hope that they aren't used for the purposes Orwell envisioned.
"It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself -- anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called."
Found it here: http://www.newspeakdictionary.com/ns-dict.html
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Cue Big Brother Posts in 5 . . . 4 . . . 3 . . . err wait, this is Apple, "Apple is Good"(tm) right?
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
I dont think i want that. Wont it see me stroking my orangutan? - that's a baboon, you, chimp!
You can't handle the truth.
TFA doesn't give any details, lol. if the sensors are sandwiched between the regular image-producing liquid crystals that should put an upper bound on their density, killing the resolution. not to mention that an image "stitched together" from thousands of tiny (but physically spread out) sensors, has got to look like it is on drugs.
Jesus said to his disciples: "If you don't have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one" - Luke 22:36
I cant help but thing how scary this thing would be from a privacy angle, while at the same time how cool and interesting this idea actually is
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Now we won't be able to tell the classic "Blonde holding the page up to her monitor and pressing the 'PrintScreen' key" joke anymore...
Kodak's patent mentions previous research suggesting a correlation between age and the way pupils react to light. As a person gets older, their pupils have greater difficulty widening to cope with dim light, it says. The company suggests that an age-verification system could take mug shots of a person from a set distance in controlled lighting, using a flash. Software would then measure the size of their red-eye dots to determine how wide their pupils are and make an estimate of their age.
I wonder if a picture of an older person with the red eyes in would fool such a sampling.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
This would enable you to maintain eye-contact with your counterpart in video over IP.
Telescreens are here.
Seriously, put one of these up and *everyone* will give you a nice mug-shot when they look it.
Maybe I should invest in a company that makes Guy Faulks masks.
With Apple, monitor watches you!
<Cue chirping crickets>
Strike while the irony is hot! -- The Freethinker
Come on people, it's been minutes and no-one has said the obvious yet:
In Soviet Cupertino, the LCD watches you!
An array of up to a hundred mini-antennae would be built into a soft, breast-shaped sensing device. Each antenna would emit a very short burst of microwave energy, rapidly scanning across several frequencies, at just one-hundredth of the power output of an ordinary cellphone.
If only you could vary the strength, you could have a dual purpose home mammogram/coffee warmer machine! Though mixing up the settings might not be so good.
so does this mean those old email jokes that "took a picture of you magically through your monitor" might actually end up showing an ugly nerd instead of a monkey?
Look on the bright side...at least they got it before Microsoft did.
So it really turns out there is some truth to online palm readings after all.
Any of you guys see those sites that tell you to smuge your face to the screen and click a button, then on the next page says you're an idiot? I guess now you won't have to feel so stupid.
screen looks at you!
Face recognition anybody?
Windows has more viruses because linux has more virus coders.
It'll nicely eliminate the classic webcam-looking-down-on-you situation, but it makes covert spying by nasty software a very real possibility. Not to mention that technology like this will end up in screens in stores, on streets, and eventually even in your television. It's the ultimate hidden camera - hidden in plain sight! Abuse is a given.
Sure, eventually we'll all adapt to the idea that screens could be watching us in the same way we are watching them - but that's going to take a long, long time to really sink in...
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
The result of this second "innovation"? iSight video confernces looked significantly more natural and more natural than web conferences hosted using Logitech and other web cams that (typically) sat to the bottom right or left of the computer monitor (or awkwardly on top) and, hence, gave participants really skewed views of each others' faces.
The innovation described in TFA is the logical next step of this eminently sensible design decision that Apple has been promoting for years.
(Side note: the reason why the iSight demos in Apple keynote addresses look so darn good is that the participants are looking at the iSight camera, and not at the actual screen when they're doing the demo. It's a very subtle shift, but it still matters. Kind of a clever, sneaky way to make the product look even better than it actually does.)
Any standard monitor can already do this, in fact this technology has been available for several years on monitorcamera.com.
just how expensive would a display like this cost? if the whole display is comprised of a few thousand microsensors which can only pick up a grid of a few pixels each (i assume, correct me if i'm wrong), you'd need over 10000 to get a decent sized image. If all you can get is 640x480 for example, i'd pick a normal webcam over this anyday.
the monitor watches you!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Unless they've also inserted thousands of tiny lenses the device is just a cute hack to create a no-moving-parts contact scanner. Put the thing you want scanned up to the screen and illuminate it with the screen's light. (You can get color by having the sensors sensitive to all the colors of the screen and flashing the screen in each color.)
With lenses they could make it an insect-style compound eye. But the focus would probably be pretty rotten due to diffraction limits from the small size of the lenses. (You might be able to post-process some of that out, though.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The the iSaruman?
Muahahahahaha!
I find laziness to be an excellent motivator.
An array of up to a hundred mini-antennae would be built into a soft, breast-shaped sensing device. I actually already possess two highly effective breast-sensing devices.
Limina.Log
I was wondering when someone would solve that. As small a thing as it may seem, I think the main problem with video chat is that you can't look into the other person's eyes. Even with the iChat built into the bezel on the new macs, there's still this disconcerting thing about a person looking at your neck while you talk. It's probably hard coded in our brain to be suspicous of such folks.
Cheers.
My iMac has a freaking camera in it too, and i'm not stocking up on canned goods in fear of the inevitable war with Eurasia.
I mean, it contains similarities to a fictional device...and you're acting like the only use is in the same sci-fi scenario.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
The Apple iPod telescreen ...
... just smile into the face of the iPod.
To raise or lower volume - just twist your finger in the air above your iPod.
To select a song - just snap your fingers in the air above your iPod.
To tell Steve Jobs you love him
It's bigger than that. Imagine these screen used in clothing stores to capture your body image, and then replace the clothes with the newest fashions, as you turn and lean to see if they fit you.
Imagine walking past a downtown store and seeing and advertisment, with you inserted right into the ad!
Imagine this in a TV, and video conferencing where you can actually see someone eye to eye. You whole family can sit and talk to Grandma on the big TV, and she can talk to you on her big TV. Just like looking through a window.
There is really a lot more to this patent than just a computer monitor improvement / big brother is watching you.
...is that covered under the warranty?
congratulations, you've invented the mirror.
My name is coaxeus, and I approve this message. In fact, I think it is awesome.
Are you people that seriously freaked out by this?
Have any of you heard of something called a (forgive the technical jargon) "Web Cam"?
What are you people smoking?
There is nothing new here except combining 2 existing and widely used technologies.
How will this detract from your privacy in ways that cant be done now? You think that somehow your boss will sneak this new monitor in without you knowing? Well Ive got news for you: If you really think he might do that, then he probably already has a much cheaper web cam hidden in your cube and right this very moment hes watching you blather on Slashdot and laughing his a$$ off.
Get a grip.
Is Apple going to call this new monitor Big Brother @ home ?
Faceconferencing doubleplusgood.
... Facebook will be worth another couple hundred million once this technology comes out.
For over 30 years, Barry Fox has trawled through the world's weird and wonderful patent applications, uncovering the most exciting, bizarre or even terrifying new ideas.
too bad he still can't tell the difference between a patent and a patent application. you'd think he'd get that after 30 years.
---
Is this the MPAA? Is this the RIAA? Is this the DMCA? I thought it was the USA!
What I see is Apple's lawyers descending on Slashdot for revealing their latest "Trade Secret".
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I don't get the idea, or are they just trying to be clever? What's wrong with a regular digital camera or web cam? I'm sure a miniture spy camera would be adequate. Do Apple think because it's technically clever that it will sell, even though it provides no real advantage over other older technology and will cost way more?
Soon every bedroom will have an iMirror! You can decide if you look good and get a second opinion from your computer!
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Incorporating sensing elements within the display will permit sensing multiple simultaneous points of contact of arbitrary size/shape in a tablet form-factor. Neat!
Apple's been patenting lots of touch-interface concepts recently, too. Vide.
This patent is probably more about touch-screens than screen as scanner (that'd be a neat trick too, but probably would require too much resolution) or camera (would require a different but perfectly calibrated refractive element at each sensor - probably impractical).
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
This would be perfect for touch screens since the software would be able to tell where the center was. Even though your finger may be very large, it approaches a specific point as you touch the screen. So you might 'touch' several on-screen buttons, but the mac would know (or at least have a better idea) which one you were trying for. It could also let you move things without actually touching the screen, so dragging wouldn't need constant pressure.
"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen, when Skynet achieved consciousness."
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
I guess now, on the Internet they will know you're a dog.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
In Captialist America, the monitor monitors you!
(Sorry, someone had to say it.)
...the chick would still run up to the screen and throw the sledgehammer only this time it would bounce off of the telescreen leaving only a pristine, perfectly cropped image of a sledgehammer on her desktop. Then she would be executed.
How is this any diffrent from a web cam except that it is embedded in a screen?
As small a thing as it may seem, I think the main problem with video chat is that you can't look into the other person's eyes.
I think you're right. I got a set of D-Link videophones for us and my parents (they sit on top of the TV) and my 2-year old daughter is always trying to show her grandparents her latest tricks. She sees them on the screen, so she puts herself right where this new kind of display would work, a few feet from the screen. She doesn't get that the camera has a limited field of view and that it's shooting straight over her head to the couch where it's normally aimed.
I find how 2-year olds expect technology to work is a good indication of how it really ought to work.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
...everyone seems to focus (well, in addition to paranoia), on video conferencing, but it seems like, with the right software, this would enable some interesting UI advances, with interfaces that respond to gestures. I wonder how much each of those individual sensors is going to pick up? Presumably its more than one pixel, otherwise (as others have suggested) you've just got a contact scanner. If each is in effect a mini-digital-pinhole camera, it seems like it could have 3D imaging capability, which could be really interesting.
And I'm not referring to the On-Line Dating sites.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I am not sure I *want* my screen seeing what I do in front of it.
There are 10 types of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.
FAP FAP
Uh, the monitor does WHAT?!?!?
I'd think the software interpolating the final image would have to correct for the differences in angles from each image sensor to produce a flat 2-D image...
Which would imply if you shut it off, you'd be taking fairly detailed 3-D images (left/right view 3-D limits the viewer to a single viewing angle, but if you were taking 1600 images from left to right, you'd have a LOT more image data to produce a truer 3-D model)
Interesting...
I mean, it contains similarities to a fictional device...and you're acting like the only use is in the same sci-fi scenario.
Let me guess - you have a girlfriend? Let's extrapolate that to the fifty 1984 references littering the commentspace. 'nuff said.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
This is innocently devoid of Big BrotherTM paranoia, but nevertheless...
Once the normally one-way device called the monitor has a feedback loop installed, think of the optical possibilities. Ever look into a mirror opposite to a another mirror and see way, way, way, way into it/them/whatever? Small imperfections are revealed as shape and color aberrations. Could this Apple monitor give us a new window (pun not indended) into the digital essence behind a computer?
and it stared right back.
(Apologies to Nietzsche, but it had to be said)
At Soviet Apple, your screen watches you!
Flying is easy, just throw yourself at the ground and miss. -Douglas Adams
Monitor, monitor on the wall,
show me, who has been to this stall?
P.S. Personally, I will think twice about going to those washrooms that have advertising screens in front of you. Or will I? tan tan tan...
I'd love to just point and speak to my computer, and where convenient use a tablet or glove or whatever comes most natural.
Reminds me of Sun's vision of the future. What was that video called? Starlight?
I think, therefore I am...I think.
this is going to combine online sex with more realist facials... i'm guessing these things will have no secondhand market.
Wouldn't it be cheaper/easier to put 4 (or more) small cameras in each corner of the monitor and use them to extrapolate a view from the center of the screen?
You could even include an app that lets you offset the 'center' for situations where the monitor isn't directly facing the user.
(Is the monitor cable two way?)
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Number one, iSight cameras aren't even remotely as popular as all the PC USB-based webcams; they're EVERYWHERE, and ISPs for years have been giving them away as freebies. Number two, the iSight wasn't distinctive because of its interface; webcams have been available for years with USB2. I strongly suspect it was firewire because most people NEED their USB ports for keyboards and mice, but don't really use their firewire port except for occasional camcorder use, if at all.
The iSight was distinctive because:
The mounting devices just make it slightly more convenient to attach the camera, particularly if you had an Apple LCD. It's a problem solved with a little bit of tape, by the way.
Another "by the way"- the iSight cameras in the Macbook and iMac absolutely SUCK. They're basically cellphone cameras; microscopic lens and CCD, no autofocus. No privacy shutter. The picture is very noisy and low resolution, the colors are funky...
Please help metamoderate.
And that explains the need for a Core Duo[tm] processor at minimum. One core to write to the screen, and the other to read from the screen and assemble the image. Putting thousands of pieces together properly will not be a minor task.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
When does a camscreen become mandatory?
I'm not kidding here. After all, if I'd told you ten years ago that by 2005, all cell phones would have a mandatory GPS tracker broadcasting your location to the phone company as you move about, with a nominal abilty to be switched off (ha), would you have believed me?
I see no outrage over Homeland Security, your phone company, Scientology, and any random corporation with a legal staff being capable of tracking your movements for the rest of your lives. Where is the outrage?
I see no problem with camscreens becoming mandatory in the next 15 years. Even the techiest of the techies have no problem with the tracking devices in their phones, cameras on the streets, and eventually mandatory trackers in our cars, so letting Mr. X watch you as you all watch your computer screens is not a biggie. I can see an infinite number of excuses to make it required by law. Hell, even the emergency health care bit that they used for the cell phones could be re-rigged for this one.
And the generation of kids coming up through school have been seen drug tests, dog searches, RFID trackers, and lie detectors. They've been told they have no rights as minors, and I doubt they'll be any more rebellious as adults. They're also convinced they are surrounded by enemies wanting the kill them in their schoolbuses and office buildings, so the fear excuse is a big Go.
Such a neat device, a camscreen. Here's what I'd like: separate power circuits for the screen and the camera element array. So I *know* that the thing cannot operate without my permission. But I wanted that for my cell phone's tracking device, and so far the phone salesmen look at me like I'm bin Laden or a specially-abled adult who left his house without his nurse. (big thought: look overseas for a phone capable of giving me the option of being untracked, import the damned thing. Maybe I am a little slow).
I know somebody with a MacBook Pro, and when I video chat with her, it looks like she's looking into the camera, when she's actually not. That's probably caused by the camera being so close to the screen. I have a 24" TFT with an iSight on top of it, and the illusion isn't there.
doesn't that remind you to george orwells "1984"? the televisors?
big steve jobs is watching you, eh?
it had to be saied...
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
do this? Wow that book just keeps getting more and more true as time goes on.
i remember the old sony picturebooks had a swivel camera on top of the screen.
Put this on a flexible OLED display and you're once step away from thermoptic camouflage.
Ha! i think maybe you mean highly affective. which, for better or worse, works against effectiveness.
With that in mind, I'd be interested in knowing how such a microsensor would work without a focusing element...
Remember when Apple released a new version of the "1984" commercial, but they roto'd in an iPod onto the female hammer-thrower?
New version coming soon with an edited last line:
"You'll see why 2007 will be just like '1984.' "
Where the guy tells IT he can't fax a document and it turns out he's been holding it up to the screen. Now it will work!
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
Another "by the way"- the iSight cameras in the Macbook and iMac absolutely SUCK. [...deleted...] the colors are funky...
They Sure Are!
Actually, I think the iSight in my iMac G5 (final) isn't bad. I don't use it much, but it's serviceable. The main problem is it isn't aimable.
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
Actually the firewire was a big deal. This is because USB sucks complete donkey ass. Hmm, that's redundant if you read it a certain way... But anyway, USB is craptacular and if you need decent bandwidth then USB1 is not an option. USB2 at the time was damn near as expensive (to apple anyway) as firewire and meanwhile, USB sucks up your CPU even though it supposedly uses DMA just like everyone else. 1394 doesn't have this problem.
It's also not the first monitor that mounted that way. Hell, I've got a stinkpad from 2002 and formerly had a stinkpad power series 850 (RS/6k laptop) and both of them have special connectors for webcams at the top edge of the LCD. On the PS850 I think it was actually a component video input, or maybe just composite, but that machine actually had video input. I can't be sure what it is on my A21p, because it has a super shitload of pins. Personally I'd have put USB up there and let it go at that, but who knows what IBM will do.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Somehow I missed the Microsoft scanning story. What this on slashdot or elsewhere?
"09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0"
did anyone read the article?!?!
:D
if anyone did, I am suprised there aren't any rants about the red-eye based age detector that is covered in it. it's a pretty cool idea. although i don't see it ever used for anything really
Before Microsft makes something similiar and takes credit for it, and then proceeds to patent it.
with slight modification to how the final image is extrapolated from all the mini-cameras spread across the screen, it could be a good way of building a 3D image of something close enough to the screen.
I can just see it now though, the cam just keeps returning the image that's on the screen. After a month of checking for crossed wires, they realise they put the cameras in the wrong way!!!
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
Now just combine this technology with a very flexible lightweight display technology and you can get very close to and invisibility suit or atleast really great camouflage.
Yes Mr Jackson, unfortunately it will.
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
It's probably the svideo connection (if it's yellow). I had a manager the other day trying to plug a fucking PS2 mouse into his t42. He came and asked me if there was a new PS/2 port on the thinkpads now.
It took everything I had not to slap him and tell him to get out of the tech industry. At least he's not my manager.
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
Make make a cube of these and have the senors in one screen fed the opposite screen. If they could get it to work with epaper then all the better.
Yes I know it wouldn't be perfect but it could be very cool.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
There's a demo available.
-g.
I'll also point out a relative of mine had this happen to her. She's a pretty, vivacious, young woman, married, was then working in a public relations firm. The IT fellow was always a little too attentive for her comfort, to the degree she actively avoided calling him for issues.
Eventually she needed her speakers for a project, but rather then call in creepy IT guy she asked office clever guy to take a look, it was probably just a loose wire or something. That was indeed the issue, however he also discovered an additional cable, running to a camera, mounted under her desk staring into her crotch, feeding into a nearby cabinet with a VCR.
Much hullaballoo ensued, everyone in the building heard of it within a few minutes, much to the ire of the police. There were fingerprints, and all of the fellas in the office but for creepy IT guy offered theirs for comparison. none of the supplied prints matched, IT guy quit, relative had her desk replaced with a table.
That's who you sound like when you post stuff like that.
The good news is Steve Jobs has been here before. I remember NeXT bringing around one of their boxes to demo at my local http://www.acm.org/">ACM chapter. It came with a nifty built-in microphone, to which someone immediately noted "great for spying!" The NeXT rep gave a smile and pointed to the red LED next to the microphone, hardwired to light up whenever the microphone was active.
This practice continues to this day at Apple, putting in hardwired signal LEDs to indicate when a camera is active. My expectation is that this will continue. Indeed I wouldn't be surprised if Apple were to even include a camera-active screen mode to brighten it for a better picture when the camera is active, possibly swapping in a white background.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Finally, I will no longer have to work so hard to suspend disbelief when a captian on Star Trek talks to the big screen as if the guy on the other side can see him. Whew! Thanks Apple!
"09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0"
20$ says this is for the video ipod.
Well, the laptop does have an s-video output on the back, but I'm talking about this special port on the top of the LCD panel, like if you have the laptop open, and the screen is perpendicular to the table, then you will see this thing if you look down at the edge of the panel. It's got eight pins, then a space, then five more pins. S-Video has five pins, if you count ground, so that could be the five on the right, and the eight on the left could be component video, with each signal having a separate ground. But that wouldn't leave anything for power, so I rate it as unlikely.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
(Side note: the reason why the iSight demos in Apple keynote addresses look so darn good is that the participants are looking at the iSight camera, and not at the actual screen when they're doing the demo. It's a very subtle shift, but it still matters. Kind of a clever, sneaky way to make the product look even better than it actually does.)
Could be they're using a SightFlex to position the camera better.
Slashdot user Isaac mentions the idea of using this for a touch sensitive display. I couldn't find this mentioned in the patent application, so the race is on to file a follow-on patent!
But you wouldn't actually have to touch the screen. Years ago, MIT built a user interface called "put that there" that did gaze tracking and voice recognition, so that the "mouse pointer" was pointing at whatever object you happened to be looking at on the display. No need to touch a mouse, you just use your gaze. That might be possible with this technology. It could also be used to interpret hand gestures and facial expressions, and use them as input.
I personally think it would be cool to build a software-programmable mirror. Think of a bathroom mirror with zoom functionality, image enhancement functions, etc. The extra functions are activated by hand gestures, and face recognition is used to determine the centre of zoom (because in a bathroom, you normally want to zoom in on your face).
Doug Moen
I have written a truly remarkable program which this sig is too small to contain.
Will it be called iTelescreen, ship with drivers version 1.9.84 and a manual titled "The Principles of Ingsoc"? Will play content that's not region-coded to Oceania?
But most importantly, will it run Linux? It would be doubleplusungood if it does not!!!
If it's anything like this, it'll be simply revolutionary.
Big brother comments aside, I would welcome a computer that could read my facial expressions, track my eyes, and interact more on a non-verbal, non-keyboard level. This could be a big boon to education. I'd love to have something like this to accelerate student learning: The computer uses software analogous to programmed instruction married to Lozanov's suggestopedia, and when the monitor neural net detects the optimal moment of attention/relaxation, it presents the material to be learned....
Whoops, that DOES sound like brain-washing, but it's more effective than the current school system....http://www.johntaylorgatto.com./
Mike
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
wouldn't the light coming from pixels placed near to the sensors interfere with the reception of the light coming from the subject?
"Words of wisdom: drop that zero and get with the hero" -- Vanilla Ice
Then if they're talking a 1:1 ratio between image sensors & pixels then that would give a 20" screen 1.76MP, a 23" screen 2.3MP, and a 30" screen 4.1MP. That's a huge improvement over iSight which is .3MP. I don't think anyone except people on a dedicated LAN could really teleconfrence at those resolutions though, so I don't really see much benefit. Maybe there are enough vain Mac users' that would buy the screen just to take pictures of themselves.
I love the idea for PDAs/mobilephones. I haven't seen a camera phone or PDA that wasn't a horrible monstrosity. Though you'd need a much better sensor ratio than 1:1 in a PDA screen to get a good picture.
Unless you want to just take pictures of yourself, the design would have to look like a window, with one side of the screen capturing light and the other side acting as a view finder. Sounds sexy eh ... we can only hope Apple will release an iPhone or iPDA that does something like this.
Totally useless idea, but neat nonetheless.
Enough with the story, share the video already!
So me mastabating in front of the computer would now be considered a sex crime?
Many of you think this is a Camera feature. But I read this as a screen cap feature. The tiny sensor's could detect a pixel on-screen and save those pixels to a single large image. Some (Blu-RAY / HD DVD) devices or applications may not allow direct capture of their images or at least are harder than others to capture. I think this might be useful in saving those moments while bypassing the use restrictions.
The Next Big Thing: music players and cellphones that get lost instantly.
Found it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_UltraPort
Looks like it was for a variety of peripherals.
Had to download the A21 User's Guide but when I saw reference to an UltraPort for webcams, I googled that and hit the Wikipedia entry.
ThinkWiki has an entry with pics:
http://thinkwiki.org/wiki/UltraPort
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
Very nice. I was wondering where that second USB port was located, and I figured it was up there, but I wasn't exactly sure. I know that it wasn't USB on the RS/6k, because it didn't have any USB :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
...to Knowledge Navigator, where the screen was also a scanner. Interesting.
...the Apple stares back at you
I would have done an upskirt on someone else if I had known.
"Another "by the way"- the iSight cameras in the Macbook and iMac absolutely SUCK. They're basically cellphone cameras; microscopic lens and CCD, no autofocus. No privacy shutter. The picture is very noisy and low resolution, the colors are funky..."
You just described 95% of the Web Cams in the home, only these are built into the top case of a laptop. The cam built into my MacBook pro is far better than my friend's laptop model in image/frame rate. Everything's relative I suppose.
Of the few other laptops with built in Web cams, the MacBook pro solution is elegant (duh) and use it all the time when on trips to talk to my wife via AIM (she uses a Sony DV cam plugged in via FireWire on her MDD dual 1.42 and I use my built in iSight with no set-up whatsoever via iChat). And to add, I have never seen a cell phone camera look as good as my MacBook Pro iSight camera. Not even close. Use PhotoBooth (not iChat which carries bandwidth limits I believe for res).
"The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance - it is the illusion of knowledge." - Daniel Boorstin
I knew Apple was into aesthetics, but this plan for a mirror is just too much.
Hell the new pSeries' have USB and it's still shite. No support for USB mass storage which is what I freaking need. I don't think it even supports USB cdrom (not that I need it).
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
Assuming Apple gains significant market share in corporate America (and the world), the following scenarios are possible:
1. Your boss can actually watch you pick your nose and possibly see what you do with the booger. Options include wiping it on something, flicking it somewhere in your office/cubicle, eating it.
2. Your boss can view your facial expression to determine if you enjoy your job, enjoy your current task, day dreaming, sleeping on the job, or in general wasting time.
3. Your boss can see what you're eating/drinking while at work.
4. Your boss can see your facial expressions and behavior while looking at members of the same/opposite gender.
5. Your boss can see with whom you socialize and network while in front of your computer.
6. With regard to unauthorized employee monitoring, this technology could possibly be defeated with a semi-transparent mirror.
Fellow Slashdotters, please reply with ideas that I've missed/omitted!
Fortunately, time passes and people forget these things- except me. It was a lesson well learned to treat women not as objects but as intelligent people.
The most obvious application of this to me is the video-phone. Interestingly, this could be the culmination of a pretty long technological road for this concept. According to my mother, her father (long dead now) was an inventor/tinkerer who especially liked photographic technologies. Once, he took her on a "field trip" in the 1950s to AT&T's laboratory in Houston (where they lived). There, she saw an early attempt at the video phone that is more closely related to the web-cam two-way set ups of today than the Star Trek-style video communication of sci-fi. I can easily imagine a future version that is coupled with a dedicated processor intended to hang freely on a wall to be used as a telephone (with, say, video display options, or whatever).
I would very much like to see this kind of technology perfected (so to speak). I'm interested in how this will relate to phone-tapping laws, etc. Also, I wonder if a "passive" reception would be integrated at some point into this kind of display, and what that might mean for surveillance.
(In case you missed the link above, check out the video phone write-up at http://www.att.com/attlabs/reputation/timeline/70p icture.html.)
First I get in trouble for looking at pr0n at work. Now I'm going to get in trouble for masturbating, too?
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
I used to be a Mac Genius, and the answer is.......maybe, if you're cute!
With the first link, the chain is forged.
... killing the online porn industry. Well sure people could still download it, but that'll fall off as people dare not risk the all-seeing monitor watching. Ha, 'fall off'.
Yes, we understand these tags always apply: fud, dupe, typo, slashdotted, topic name
From the little a gained from the article, the screen seems like a giant compound eye. I wonder how much each sensor will overlap with others. Combining them into a single montage could be complicated.
Anyone remember the old tech support call where the user asks why her scanner isn't working, and it turns out she was trying to hold the document up to the screen?
It seems the idea wasn't so stupid after all!!!
If a pion (n-) collides with a proton in the woods & noone is there to hear it, does lamdba decay into the source pa
Of course it would be nice to be able to place a camera inside the LCD screen so that the image is captured from the same position as where the teleconferencing partner is being displayed. But Apple has done none of the hard technical work to actually make this work well in real life--they have simply patented the concept--a concept obvious to anybody skilled in the art. So, people who actually do the hard and clever work to make this work will now have to contend with Apple's patent.
This particular patent is not likely ever going to be important, since there are already several ways in which video conferencing systems can achieve eye contact. But the patent illustrates the kind of bullshit that the USPTO approves. While not a panacea, if the USPTO required demonstrably working implementations of a patent, patent abuse like this would be cut down.
Microsoft, in contrast, has actually demonstrated a working system for maintaining eye contact during video conferencing that actually has real, novel technology in it.
(Microsoft does real research but their software sucks, while Apple does good design but their research sucks. Go figure.)
No they don't. They sound like 13 year old males trying to make a joke. No more/no less.
Your story has some holes about 1 mile wide in it, but I'll let that rest.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Ok now I am scared. Hold me.
"It was a lesson well learned to treat women not as objects but as intelligent people."
great, so NOW we have to assume all women are intelligent? No. Bear in mind I don't assume all men are intelligent either.
As someone who has had the privilidge to be around women, they treat men like objects to.
Guess what? the human mind is designed that way.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
That's a good idea, but it's actually non-trivial to do this well for a variety of reasons. Microsoft has a technical report on how they do it; there are other approaches possible.
...until pirates get ahold of one of these. Whatever DRM is employed, as long as the video shows up on the screen, it can be captured and encoded.
Of course; IBM's pserver division has always made computers marketed at tech professionals from 10 years ago.
Note to IBM: Don't make me pull my terminal out of the closet when I need to access the machine physically. People stopped using these years ago for a reason. Just use VGA, unless you think it will make the mainframe dorks stop respecting you.
The NeXT rep gave a smile and pointed to the red LED next to the microphone, hardwired to light up whenever the microphone was active.
A good feature, sure, but also one that can be pretty well neutralized with 1 cent worth of electrical tape.
"he also discovered an additional cable, running to a camera, mounted under her desk staring into her crotch, feeding into a nearby cabinet with a VCR."
That was just his way of saying that he liked her. Everyone has different ways of showing æffection...
Seriously though, if thats true thats some ballsey shit. Id buy someone a beer for attempting to do that its so crazy out there. who would not notice a camera under their desk, and who would go to all the trouble when there SO MUCH porn out there already. its a pity you dont have to back anything up on the internets. and by pity i mean virtue. kudos!
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
Side note: the reason why the iSight demos in Apple keynote addresses look so darn good is that the participants are looking at the iSight camera, and not at the actual screen when they're doing the demo. It's a very subtle shift, but it still matters. Kind of a clever, sneaky way to make the product look even better than it actually does
Actually, I do that too. It makes presentation of myself look much better. And to make it easy, I move the other participant's window up as far as I can on the screen, positioned directly below the iSite. That way I don't feel TOO awkward looking at the camera, and not the screen.
I'm not convinced that iSight or web cams have much value other than just for novelty. I could use iChat, but I don't because I don't know many Mac users, and even if I did, I don't think the visual helps. Just pick up the phone and make a call.
You can not give Apple credit for camera placement. That's pushing things. Anybody can stick their webcam anywhere they'd like. Most of them come with either a way to stick them to something or clamp them on. Even my 6 year old Intel camera has a removable foot that has a sticky pad on the bottom in addition to its industry standard camera mounting bolt in the center bottom.
Apple's biggest innovation over any of the other technology companies is that they hired an advertising company that's worth a damn.
And yes, I dig that the iSight is firewire. But what I really want is a firewire keyboard that has a built in charging cradle for a wireless Mighty Mouse. There's no sense in a wireless keyboard, and there's no sense in replacing batteries.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Dear god, that's an awful story!! She must have felt so violated. Dirty. Cheapened. Oooh yeah, what a dirty little girl she is. A bad, dirty girl in need of a spanking... Just kidding, of course. BTW, uhh, just out of curiosity, could you ask your relative if she perchance kept a schematic of that setup that she'd be willing to share?
Man that is scary...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
First, it connected via FireWire.
People have been using USB because it has been sufficiently fast, cheaper, and universally available. Firewire is an Apple idiosyncracy.
Second, it came with mounting brackets (included, for free in the iSight box) to attach the camera securely to the top center of Apple's LCD monitors and laptop screens.
Are you really so naive to believe that it has occurred to nobody else before that that's a good place to put a video camera? In fact, for as long as there have been desktop video cameras (hint: Apple didn't invent them either), that's where most people have been putting them, and cameras have generally included mounting options for that. And Sony and other manufacturers have been putting video cameras at the top center of laptops for many years.
As far as mounting options go, iSight is actuall poor--it fails to attach to many non-Apple monitors. I had to use duct tape to stick it to my monitor (but I used a designer color!). If the choices of video conferencing cameras for Mac weren't so darned limited, I'd happily toss out the iSight.
...shit I'd get bored with that one angle fixed shot camera after only two days of watching...
...sorry male sarcasim.
Apple did not develop podcasting, and they only integrated podcasts into iTunes six or seven months after it became popular. Also, internet radio has been around long before podcasting.
With its success, Apple has implemented some questionable policies. I think that the MacIntel architecture complies with the TPM, and I think they implemented some DRM features enabled by the TPM. Also, they have stopped releasing the source code to some key components of the x86 port of Darwin, such as XNU, the microkernel. There was also the debugging debacle, which is apparently trivial to rectify, but it still reflects a worrying trend.
---- "XML is like violence. If it doesn't fix the problem, you aren't using enough."
You could use the same screen they are putting on jackets and shirts and stuff to make a bendable cloak, suit, or vehicle cover. Then simply have the pixels on the one side display the images seen from the other side. The only problem then would be computing the different viewable angles and deciding what to display where, but it would still be better than standard camouflage.
--- Nothing is secure.
when you face two of the monitors towards each other?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Its there, but we are a small minority now. Most of america is made up of sheep, manipulated by the mass media.
Our founding fathers must be spinning in their graves now. So much of what is happening they warned us about. ( no, not the technology of course, but the concept of the erosion of freedom.. )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The answer is simple, you can point the iSight away from you, or unplug the damned thing and be certain it's not still filming you. Not so if the "camera" is built in between every pixel and is always potentially looking at you.
Cue up the Scooby Do music and the moving eyeballs in the family portrait if you will, but I gotta say, this camera-in-the-monitor thing spooks me due to simple potential for abuse.
...that I've ever heard of! It's probably about as reliable as predicting next week's weather using tea leaves.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
But what if I want to turn the camera down to show the viewer what my new puppy is doing on the floor, will I need to slide the monitor to the edge of the desk and point it downward?
Come now, I don't even own an apple and I prefer to use firewire whenever theres the option. Theres no processor overhead to it (comparitively), gives a much smoother experience when large chunks of data are being moved through it, and it charges just like USB. Hell, its easier/nicer to plug in than USB.
Now the real question: Is the patent for a future technology... or is it already implemented?
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
I have to agree. I mean ever just stared at a girls crotch at work? No? Me neither because it's not that interesting. If she wore a skirt maybe you'd see her panties move every 20 years. WHeee.
I don't know any women who dislike Slashdot.
OTOH, I don't know any women.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
OMG! No!!! It's going to achieve self-consciousness! Don't do a screenshot! Don't do a sc.*.n..o....
NO CARRIER
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
I hope Homeland Security doesn't get wind of this. The patriot act allows covert surveillance where they law forces companies to remain silent about what they turn over. I wonder if there's a provision in it (it's so huge I haven't had time to read it, like many of the lawmakers who hurredly passed it into law) to allow the government to force companies to put backdoors into their products for this type of thing without telling consumers. Closer and closer to 1984... Trust the little LED all you want, I won't be buying one of these.
This technology presents interesting ideas...
None of your ideas were interesting.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
I would say the large CCD was very important to the superiority of the iSight to other contenders. So far as I can tell, the iSight had a better resolution than near every web cam on the market (and the FireWire interface to support the larger data stream).
the iSight cameras in the Macbook and iMac absolutely SUCK
One part of this might be the fact these internal cams are USB. So they do not have the same quality of service guarantees built into the FireWire standard (which was specifically designed with A/V in mind). I have used the MacBook Pro's built-in iSight for still pictures and not found it too lacking but have yet to try it for video (not my laptop or I'd try it right now). I wonder if having other USB devices (or Bluetooth turned on) at the same time would affect the built-in iSights?
That was a long way to go just to show off the fact that you have a 24" monitor. ;)
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
This is a well known trick used in the TV industry for years. If you look just slightly below the camera lens, it's almost impossible to tell you're not looking straight at it.
This is how autocue used to work, before reflective systems became popular, with a pane of glass at 45 degrees right in front of the lens that appears invisible to the camera.
Your story has some holes about 1 mile wide in it, but I'll let that rest.
Probably just because it's a summary. I'd say every two months I see a similar story on the local news, and I don't watch much local news at all. (Just happen to be in the same room with it when my wife is channel surfing.)
I doubt they're all fake, and I doubt they all make it to the news, either. This stuff happens. It's not just a CSI story.
Do you work for Apple, or do you just write press-copy for a living and it leaked out? ;-)
Second, it came with mounting brackets (included, for free in the iSight box) to attach the camera securely to the top center of Apple's LCD monitors and laptop screens. The result of this second "innovation"?
That's a bit revisionist. The IBM T22 laptop I'm typing this on, out before the iSight, has a dedicated port on the top of the LCD display. Remove the rubber cover and attach the webcam they sell. I also owned a webcam before this whose stand was designed to be desk mounted or laptop lid mounted.
While we're talking screen enhancments, what I think is really clever is the little LED downlighter on the screen of this laptop. Just enough light to illuminate the keyboard on overnight flights.
would have been "Apple's New All-Seeing 'i'".
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
well after all they do call it a "monitor", how else could they monitor what we are doing...
Which is apparent to anyone who has ever done video-conferencing. Everyone is always looking down, not making eye contact! The built-in iSight helps matters, because it's very close to the screen, but it's still unsettling. The only way for both parties to make "eye contact" would be having some sort of bulky teleprompter-like device, or if the screen you were looking at were also the camera.
I wonder how the focus on this thing works...
You drank my drink, you drunk!
two words:
automatically illuminating backlit keyboards
or
Yep
"With its success, Apple has implemented some questionable policies."
Only on slashdot would protecting your hard work be seen as "questionable".
Dude, your counting skills suck...
No. All you have to do is treat everyone with respect (whether you think they deserve it or not). The golden rule is not gender specific.
As someone who has had the privilidge to be around women, they treat men like objects to.
True (sometimes), but irrelevant. You can be a decent human being, even if other people aren't.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
I remember seeing an Apple produced video about future computer concepts, probably produced in the late 80's. In part of the video, a guy was talking to his tablet, and it was teaching him to read. He held the newspaper up to the tablet screen so it could scan the paper and help him with a word he couldn't figure out.
They've had this idea for a long time.
plus-good, double-plus-good
Even if those things were true (which they are not), they wouldn't matter: even USB 1 was more than fast enough for the video conference cameras of the day, and USB 2 is plenty fast for today's video conferencing.
Read TFP (The Patent): "As a result, the integrated sensing device can not only output images (e.g., as a display) but also input images (e.g., as a camera)."
"Guess what? the human mind is designed that way."
It's also designed for mass murdering as well. Guess it must be OK, since it's "natural" human behaviour.
Jokes on you.
Seen http://www.apple.com/imac/isight.html?
LED.
"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
-E. W. Dijkstra
Apple neither invented the FireWire-connected webcam (you could always get them), nor did they invent mounting on top of the monitor (Logitech), nor did they invent putting a camera above the screen in a laptop (Sony had that years before the MacBook).
What do you meen they're not true. With USB the computer has to control the data through the connection and on the device itself - far more overhead than is justifiable. Firewire is jsut a transport bus, no control (well, minimal..requests for data and so forth) over the data retrieval.
http://www.usb-ware.com/firewire-vs-usb.htm
I wasn't saying that you needed firewire for a webcam, but rather firewire is, for my purposes, preferable to USB2.
See the lines:
and ?Just cause there's not a big LED sticking out from the bezel doesn't mean it's not there, and is glowing through when the camera is active. This is Apple after all, a manufacturer that makes sure all of their "throbbing" LEDs are synchronized on both Mac & monitor, and that their iMac's "sleeping" throbber is appropriately dimmed at night. They're not going to ruin their clean lines with an LED sticking out, they'll just make sure it shows up when needed.
Guess the joke is really on you, and whomever modded your misinformation as "informative".
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Apple Marketing dude: "We will call it... iSauron!"
I agree that the iMacs that didn't have an integrated camera had no LED either. And as far as I know, the audio in the new ones may still be recording without an evident sign.
BUT
The iMacs with iSights (G5 and Intel) DO have a LED. You can see it here.
Yes, that's true.
On the other hand, a square of electrical tape over the security LED may well be a small, yet perhaps significant, indication that something is amiss.
Even if this device was in some way better than the current iSight + display scheme, it would be WAY to expensive to be of any practical use to Apple.
The bits on the bus go on and off... on and off... on and off...
I thought it was simpler than that:
15 years ago I saw a technology short by Apple showing a kid placing a sheet of paper on a tablet PC. The image was then transferred to the screen. Then she continued on with here homework.
They've had this vision for a LONG time.
REPORTS
Move over, Big Brother
Dec 2nd 2004
From The Economist print edition
Security: Privacy advocates have long warned of states spying on citizens. But technology is, in fact, democratising surveillance
[IMAGE]
LIVING without privacy, even in his bedroom, was no problem for Louis XIV. In fact, it was a way for the French king to demonstrate his absolute authority over even the most powerful members of the aristocracy. Each morning, they gathered to see the Sun King get up, pray, perform his bodily functions, choose his wig and so on. One reported in 1667 that there “is no finer sight in the world than the court at the lever of the King. When I attended it yesterday, there were three rooms full of people of quality, such a crowd that you would not believe how difficult it was to get into His Majesty’s bedchamber.”
Will this past—life without privacy—be our future? Many futurists, science-fiction writers and privacy advocates believe so. Big Brother, they have long warned, is watching. Closed-circuit television cameras, which are proliferating around the world, often track your moves; your mobile phone reveals your location; your transit pass and credit cards leave digital trails. “Light is going to shine into nearly every corner of our lives,” wrote David Brin in his 1998 book “The Transparent Society”. The issue, he argued, is no longer how to prevent the spread of surveillance technology, but how to live in a world in which there is always the possibility that citizens are being watched.
But in the past few years, something strange has happened. Thanks to the spread of mobile phones, digital cameras and the internet, surveillance technology that was once mostly the province of the state has become far more widely available. “A lot has been written about the dangers of increased government surveillance, but we also need to be aware of the potential for more pedestrian forms of surveillance,” notes Bruce Schneier, a security guru. He argues that a combination of forces—the miniaturisation of surveillance technologies, the falling price of digital storage and ever more sophisticated systems able to sort through large amounts of information—means that “surveillance abilities that used to be limited to governments are now, or soon will be, in the hands of everyone.”
Digital technologies, such as camera phones and the internet, are very different from their analogue counterparts. A digital image, unlike a conventional photograph, can be quickly and easily copied and distributed around the world. (Indeed, it is easier to e-mail a digital image than it is to print one.) Another important difference is that digital devices are far more widespread. Few people carry film cameras with them at all times. But it is now quite difficult to buy a mobile phone without a built-in camera—and most people take their phones with them everywhere. According to IDC, a market-research firm, 186m camera-phones will be sold this year, far more than film-based cameras (47m units) or digital cameras (69m units) combined.
The speed and ubiquity of digital cameras lets them do things that film-based cameras could not. In October, for example, the victim of a robbery in Nashville, Tennessee, used his camera-phone to take pictures of the thief and his getaway vehicle. The images were shown to the police, who broadcast descriptions of the man and his truck, leading to his arrest ten minutes later. Other similar stories abound: in Italy, a shopkeeper sent a picture of two men who were acting suspiciously to the police, who identified them as wanted men and arrested them soon afterwards, while in Sweden, a teenager was photographed while holding up a corner shop, and was apprehended within an hour.
Watching your every
There's no sense in a wireless keyboard
My mini is across the room, hooked up to my TV. There is no sense in a wired keyboard for me.
Just demonstrating that one man's trash is another man's treasure.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
In US, Internet surfs you!.
I seriously consider it one of the failures of modern civilization that it is so difficult to find places to covertly have sex outdoors.
Go backpacking in hawaii. I recommend Halape Beach and Waimanu Valley. Bring a girlfriend. Plenty of room for outdoor semi-tropical sex, and its fabulous.
(Posting Anon in case I ever run for president.)
After integrating cameras into the MacBooks, I didn't think Apple could do anything else to drive away government customers. Looks like I was wrong..
yeah, not much details about the creation of the image (made from a compound eye camera) on this link: a picture but still, I wouldn't say it's great quality. I imagine quality will be the biggest problem with this tech.
"---- Booth was a patriot ----"
Enjoy your visit with the Secret Service. Maggot.
Seen the latest iMac? Camera. Microphone. No LED.
That's not true. I'm using an Intel iMac right now and there is a green LED to the right of the camera. It's behind the white plastic so you can only see it when it's on.
Is it okay to cry "Movie!" in a crowded firehouse? --Steve Martin
>This practice continues to this day at Apple, putting in hardwired signal LEDs to indicate when a camera is active.
Jokes on you.
Seen the latest iMac?
Camera.
Microphone.
No LED.
So are you saying you are colorblind?
http://www.apple.com/imac/isight.html
And in case you were wondering:
http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/isight.html
The real news on that link was the microwave breast scanner.
I wonder how many minutes it takes to defrost?
You know, this finally makes it possible for people who, after getting the error message "Cannot find the printer", turn their monitor screen to 'look' at the printer beside the monitor...
Wouldn't an interface similar to the minority report be possible with the screen about to see in front of it? I've seen some video clips of using both hands to manipulate on-screen objects.
On another note, what if it could track your eyes and highlight what you are looking at on the screen. Forget click... try blink! Oh yeah. I'm gonna buy stock in Visine.
...back in the 1990s, I was helping someone who was involved with a technology called the optical waveguide display, developed in part by Imperial College, London. This had the ability to emit and receive light. As part of my work I was doing some research and came across a patent by AT&T that described a system similar to Apple's. Of course, it is possible AT&T's patent expired and/or Apple are doing something different. Either way, the privacy issues are interesting as it will not be possible to include a physical 'lens cap' for peace of mind. Also, this would be ideal for an 'instant' scanner. IE, lay item to be scanned on your display, and it's 'scanned' in a flash. No more moving scan head! Forget 30fps video, we could be talking 30fps scanning! (Using a commercial application of the technology.) The LCD photocopier? Ooh!
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
Whether Firewire or USB have processor overhead, how fast they are, etc. depends on the interface chip, the drivers, etc. It's impossible to make a generic statement that Firewire is faster than USB beyond the basic bit rates and protocol-intrinsic overhead.
As for the claims on that site, they are a textbook example of how not to conduct and report benchmark measurements, and they are meaningless as reported.
We have always said "Freedom is Slavery" first.
Please repeat as necessary until you reach the correct conclusion.
Oh my oh my...
;-)
And nobody knows Apple has been using these screens for the past couple of years already!
Suddenly an explanation for all that strange network traffic....
There's a research project here where they set up 100 cheap-o webcams in just such an array. (I assume Stanford can handle a light slashdotting...)
The video demonstrating its capabilities is quite something :)
Seriously you lot - take a look - as a long time lurker on /. I created an account just to share this :D
(umm.. *nervously looks around* -=FIRST POST w000t!=- *ducks behind monitor*)
In Soviet Russia, Monitor Watches YOU!
Wow, no wonder the guy was filming then ! O.O
I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry...
Ouch.. Apple's All-Seeing Screen - A.S.S?
That's easily fixed. Simply drill a 1" hole in the centre of your 24" monitor, and mount the isight in the hole.
Now you should have no problem getting pictures of people looking at the screen. Apple support engineers transfixed in horror, for example.
Does an anime series that uses the concept count as prior art? The anime Mezzo: Danger Service Agency has this in it. There is even an episode featuring the way it functions.
Reminds me of the Knowledge Navigator video that Apple produced during the Scully era. The video showed a number of futuristic scenarios involving computers that you could talk to and they would understand you: avatars could carry on a conversation with you to determine what information you needed, then could go out on the internet and find it. It also featured various portable devices, and more.
At one point, the video shows a man sitting on a park bench reading the newspaper. He finds something he wants to keep, so he opens his laptop and holds the newspaper up to the screen - and the screen scans the newspaper. This bit got the most oohs and aahs of any scene in the video (I saw it at an Apple World Wide Developer Conference).
Looks like someone at Apple remembered Knowledge Navigator and decided to make part of it happen.
No sig? Sigh...
Anybody can stick their webcam anywhere they'd like.
Except for the fact that it would be obscuring the view if placed in the midle of your screen. This way you can look into the camera and look at the screen at the same time. As pointed out earlier, this is an advantage, especially with big screens
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
I'd have to ask her to move the camera. I hate it when they look in my eyes... throws off my rhythm.
Wow, you almost sound like you've got some sort of, eh, social skills or something! :-)
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
Now You can REALLY talk to your TV
"The clever idea is to insert thousands of microscopic image sensors in-between the liquid crystal display cells in the screen. Each sensor captures its own small image, but software stitches these together to create a single, larger picture."
... So because it could be used to break copyright protection the patent is already illegal! Excellent!!!
It sounds like an easier implementation of this technology would be to use it to make highly accurate copies of what is displaying on the screen. This would make it easy to make great copies of digitally protected movies.
Oh. How I wish I had mod points for such posts like the parent. :-)
(For those that didn't quite get the parent: Consider that sin(0)^2 = 0 and cos(0)^2 = 1.
even for a slashdotter.
Just like in Soviet Rusia!!
The TV sees YOU!!!
Didn't the TVs in 1984 did it already? Can this count as prior art? Oh, they must have filled a patent..right..
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Questions are usually the ones designated with a "question mark" (?), while answers normally are not followed by a "question mark".
eh? my bad.
My barber has a new iMac in his office, and I didn't see the LED, I guess he didn't demonstrate the camera in all that.
I still run a dual G5 PM off an old CRT, with no camera.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Serving cell is chosen based on the highest signal level. Working from geographical location would be inferior, and hugely overcomplicated. What if you're obstructed from the nearest cell tower?
Triangulation!? Do you think the cellphone calculates the bearing of each signal? They have multiple real-time radio direction finders and a knowledge of the cell tower locations? Don't make this shit up if you're not going to think it through.
Imagine if, instead of glass and mirrors you had an opaque set of monitors that was providing images of what is all around your car: drive-by-wire, as it were... Of course, the safety-minded wouldn't like the fact that, if in a system failure, you were travelling at N mph in a ton or so of metal that you can't see to control... maybe, by then the cars will drive themselves, and the viewport is just for recreation purposes.
It happened to her 10 years ago, in Toronto, at a PR firm. Her PC speakers were on the fritz for a few months, she asked a coworker to check her speaker cables for her as she was wearing a skirt that day. He found the speaker cables had indeed come unplugged, and there was a camera mounted below her desk staring directly up her skirt. The camera cable, along with a mass of others, snaked along the wall, with that particular one disappearing into a filing cabinet which was discovered to have a VCR in the bottom of it.
Much ruckus was made, everyone was appalled, and word quickly spread throughout the building. The police were called, they dusted for finger prints, and almost every man in the office volunteered theirs for comparison. The one who didn't, and everyone's immediate suspect, was creepy overly-friendly IT guy who no woman was comfortable with and was well known to be unhealthily interested in my relative, and he declined to offer his fingerprints. Everyone else was cleared, IT guy quit, she had her desk replaced with a table she could easily see under.
I only know the story as it came up over a Pad Thai dinner in Toronto's gay neighborhood, where she was asking my lover and I about friends of ours who are in the porn industry. Two had stopped by our table, and afterwards their professions had come up, and after that topic had run it's course she noted how she had once been covertly filmed and how the experience deeply disturbed her. There aren't a lot more details in respect of her privacy, and it was only a minute or two discussion anyway, we'd soon moved on to the topic of good dessert places nearby.
My point is that all of the "I'd use a camera to sneakily check out chicks" crap is skeevy. It's not just that they're puerile and juvenile, it's a pervasive attitude on many tech sites, and Slashdot in general, that those sorts of comments are acceptable. They're not; they're not funny, they're not even clever, they're only profoundly disturbing in how they view women, and yes, this sort of tacitly approved attitude does drive women away.
There are lots of healthy adult men who are on Slashdot. There is also a huge adolescent, either chronologically or emotionally, crowd, and they're modding up disturbing things as "funny". So spying on female "friends" and coworkers is entertaining, titillating, acceptable? Are these fellas so stunted that they have no real female "friends" and family that they would be outraged if this happened to, have they no empathy of what a traumatizing violation this would be?
"I'd buy him a beer", "what a boring single view", "its another way of showing affection" etc. - I just read those and wonder what sort of dysfunctional freaks these are. These aren't people I ever want to associate with; professionally, intellectually, absolutely not socially. They're contemptible, and apparently not even aware of that. And everyone who ignores, or even mods that sort of stuff up, is participating in the hostile atmosphere.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Heres one problem, the guy that didnt give his fingerprints wasnt arrested. The cops EASILY could have gotten them. The fact that he wasnt arrested shows this is a b.s. story.
This seems like it'd be more useful as a way to implement touch-sensitivity on an all-screen iPod. The camera elements could be monochrome, which would probably let them be smaller than if they were color. Focus wouldn't be an issue, because they'd just have to sense the location of your finger - the big dark spot. Resolution could be pretty low.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
We both know the answer to your rhetorical question... Though some of them are 43-year-old fathers of three with profoundly disturbing internal lives, I suspect.
Hey, though, it's not just Slashdot. Salon's new letters section gets a handful of truly persistent trolls. Take a look in the "Broadsheet" area for anything posted by "BrightStar65" sometime. Yesterday in response to the story of a high school "top 25" list of girls (including detailed [vulgar] physical descriptions), BrightStar told us the girls were partly at fault for judging themselves in ways to do with their appearances. That's in the avowedly feminist area of a liberal site.
There's something about the anonymity of Web "handles" that brings out skeeviness. Our local paper requires actual names on its bulletin boards, and you get the political flames but nothing quite like Slashdot's "geeks are boys" feel.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
One of the more successful: "Please don't make me use this gun."
No, it doesn't. You don't know how long ago this story happened (or what part of the country it was in - some parts are more backward than others). I think you younguns have NO idea what things used to be like, in terms of sexual harrassment that women had to put up with in the workplace. This guy went far enough that he wouldn't be welcome in his job anymore but it was by NO means a foregone conclusion, back in the day, that he would be prosecuted. Much more likely now - that stuff is much more out in the open too. The woman herself probably wanted to put it behind her too. I don't think you have any idea what it's like to have something like that happen to you until it does.
It would be seriously cool if they could use this to periodically take a picture from the back of the monitor and use that as the background image and have transparent windows over it.
The chipset for USB is usually quite a bit cheaper because the USB standard offloads a lot of processing to the CPU that Firewire dictates be done by the chipset. So you CAN say that USB is going to use your CPU more heavily than Firewire, because that's what the respective standards demand. I suppose you could have a Firewire driver that's so badly written that it uses more CPU overhead, but then you should really get a better driver.
Transfer is similar. The Firewire protocol handles greater sustained data transfer rates than USB 2.0. I guess if your chipset is really, really broken that might not be true, but it is of any correctly implemented Firewire chipset, and every one that I can remember seeing benchmarks done on.
So I guess technically you're right -- you can't make a blanket statement that Firewire is faster or has less CPU overhead than USB because you could, if you had the resources, knowledge and will, cook up a Firewire chipset/driver combination that was so badly implemented it would be slower. Technically you could make a 3 GHz Athlon that was slower than a 386 too, I guess.
Track Anyone With a Cell1 0vgnvcm1000004eecbccdrcrd.html
.com, one for the phone and one for the person tracking it. In each account, add the other as a "friend."
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/how20/f88b973910a9a0
Cue the Mission Impossible theme. I'm working a top-secret operation, and my support team is monitoring my every movement. OK, so I'm just going to the hardware store, but my girlfriend, Jen, is tracking me. Using a $100 kit from Mologogo (with a $6-a-month data plan), I've turned a prepaid cellphone into a GPS tracking device. Every few minutes, the phone transmits my location within 100 meters to mologogo.com, which posts it to a Google map that Jen can access from any computer. She can view my most recent spot or my past 100 recorded locations as little pushpins stamped with date and time.
The key to this project is the government's Enhanced 911 program, which will soon require all cellphones to transmit a GPS signal so that police can locate callers in need. So far, only Nextel, Boost Mobile and BlackBerry allow third-party companies to build software that uses that signal, but other carriers will follow suit this year.
Since Mologogo launched in October, its 1,000-plus members have found plenty of uses for it: following marathon runners, keeping track of the kids, planting a phone in the car in case it's stolen, watching a boyfriend's every move . . . Uh-oh.
1. Go to mologogo.com and order a starter kit, which includes a phone preloaded with the tracking application, as well as two chargers, a USB cable and $10 in prepaid credit--nearly enough for the first two months of data service. Activate the phone following the included instructions. Make sure you choose the Mobile Data plan.
2. Create two accounts at mologogo
3. Set up the Mologogo software on your phone at Main Menu> Java> Apps> More> Mologogo. Enter the account information you got from the Mologogo site.
4. Give the phone to someone. Sign on to the site and see where they are.