We've got something like that at MIT... They've done some pretty cool stuff as well, its not a senior thing though.. just a normal class. The voice controlled chess is pretty cool though.
http://web.mit.edu/6.111/www/f2008/index.html
I've had the chance to play with this thing. It is indeed, very cool. Also the API is very good. I know I have several projects going on right now that will benefit from it. They have less to do with video and more to do with audio. Combining this with a WFS or ambisonic array of speakers could be absolutely amazing because audio can be truly 3-dimensional where video at that resolution is currently limited to screens or 3d via glasses.
Some of the best mastering houses in the world will take your digital masters and print them to tape before working on them using an entirely analog rig. Then they'll print them back to a digital format for pressing onto a redbook CD.
Mixing digital and analog gear often gets you the best results because each excels at different things. If I am taking 0.13 dB off at 4k, then I'll do it digitally. However, actually shaping a track sounds terrible in the digital domain and you can't even find a digital processor that will sound warmer than a professional tube limiter.
One more thing that's really cool.
http://www.media.mit.edu/research/2356
Ramesh Raskar designs cameras that take coded photos which don't need to be focused or exposed correctly in order to get perfectly crisp images. He has photos of taxis taken from the top of a nearby hotel that are just a long smear of light in their raw form. However, after running them through matlab, you can read the license plate numbers. Its a very cool application of transparent LCDs and custom lens filters.
There's some really cool stuff happening at the MIT Media Lab. For example, Ed Boyden is working on curing Parkinson's and schizophrenia by modifying neurons so they fire in the presence of yellow light. He has some really interesting thoughts on creativity, expectation and placebo.
The personal robots group is also doing some pretty amazing things with teddy bears and some other cool platforms. Some of their prototypes are really freaky but awesome at the same time. (Depending on your opinion of scary toys taking over the world..)
The smart cities group is working on a new form of car where the wheels contain all the drive and steering equipment. You can essentially snap them onto anything and use it. They've got plans for a car that will fold up and stack while charging, and they're working on deploying a similar scooter based system in Paris.
I use http://www.seeqpod.com/ to find a lot of music.
It's a search engine for music files with a flash player built-in. Really cool... it wouldn't surprise me to see google buy these guys in the future.
It's totally legal, and you can find just about anything you want.
Ben
Hi!
You are correct. I think the special thing about the OLPC is that it is able to share a wireless connection wirelessly. I'll do some snooping tonight to see if it actually has two wifi devices or is using a special card to tune multiple 802.11g channels at the same time.
I do know that the mesh is not a standard ad-hoc wireless network. From my macbook, I can see the olpc-mesh, and I can join it, but I cannot intercept packets and the OLPC doesn't get internet from my laptop. I think the whole network topolgy is fundamentally different for the mesh stuff. It's cool to have a bunch of them in a room though. They all see each-other immediately (must be some form of multicast DNS) and you can play games and share activities between the machines.
The keyboard is TERRIBLE. Still, it's probably easier for someone with little fingers to use, and I just use a USB keboard and mouse when I'm developing or doing keyboard-intensive stuff (i.e. not games). Apparently the machine runs in a shallow pool of water because the keys are sealed so well. I'm not eager to try that out though!
I'll let you know what I find out....
Ben
I'm lucky enough to have been given a production prototype model for the past couple weeks to play around with as part of a freshman program at the Media Lab.
The mesh networking works between machines whether or not there is an OLPC "school server". The machine also seems to be capable of connecting to multiple networks (one standard and one mesh). This allows it to share a standard wifi connection to other OLPCs over the mesh. Still, I don't think there are mesh drivers yet for windows or OS X. The routing is handeled (so I am told by Walter Bender) by a chipset on the wifi card itself, so the machine can go into a very low power state and still act as a mesh repeater.
The OS is based on Fedora, so I would assume mesh drivers exist for that OS. It runs the Sugar UI, which is PyGTK based. Interestingly, there is no root password initially. Also, sshd is enabled.
Once some friends and I wanted to watch a movie, so we ended up tripple stacking projectors (2100 lumens each) and using a two fairly large JBL VerTec Line Arrays (we had one on each side of the house) and four 18" subs for a nice low end. We had originally setup the system for a touring group in my high school's auditorium, and it was mostly made up of rental equipment (we nabbed the projectors from classrooms). It wouldn't be a very big system outdoors, but our highschool has a small 700 seat auditorium, so it was "full" sounding. Heheh..
All together we estimated the system cost to be about $300,000, and the full rated power of all the amps was close to 40,000 watts. The screen was 70 ft. diagonal... It was a nice "home theatre" setup...
Slashdot Mirror
We've got something like that at MIT... They've done some pretty cool stuff as well, its not a senior thing though.. just a normal class. The voice controlled chess is pretty cool though. http://web.mit.edu/6.111/www/f2008/index.html
I've had the chance to play with this thing. It is indeed, very cool. Also the API is very good. I know I have several projects going on right now that will benefit from it. They have less to do with video and more to do with audio. Combining this with a WFS or ambisonic array of speakers could be absolutely amazing because audio can be truly 3-dimensional where video at that resolution is currently limited to screens or 3d via glasses.
Some of the best mastering houses in the world will take your digital masters and print them to tape before working on them using an entirely analog rig. Then they'll print them back to a digital format for pressing onto a redbook CD.
Mixing digital and analog gear often gets you the best results because each excels at different things. If I am taking 0.13 dB off at 4k, then I'll do it digitally. However, actually shaping a track sounds terrible in the digital domain and you can't even find a digital processor that will sound warmer than a professional tube limiter.
http://www.media.mit.edu/research/2356
Ramesh Raskar designs cameras that take coded photos which don't need to be focused or exposed correctly in order to get perfectly crisp images. He has photos of taxis taken from the top of a nearby hotel that are just a long smear of light in their raw form. However, after running them through matlab, you can read the license plate numbers. Its a very cool application of transparent LCDs and custom lens filters.
There's some really cool stuff happening at the MIT Media Lab. For example, Ed Boyden is working on curing Parkinson's and schizophrenia by modifying neurons so they fire in the presence of yellow light. He has some really interesting thoughts on creativity, expectation and placebo.
The personal robots group is also doing some pretty amazing things with teddy bears and some other cool platforms. Some of their prototypes are really freaky but awesome at the same time. (Depending on your opinion of scary toys taking over the world..)
The smart cities group is working on a new form of car where the wheels contain all the drive and steering equipment. You can essentially snap them onto anything and use it. They've got plans for a car that will fold up and stack while charging, and they're working on deploying a similar scooter based system in Paris.
Here's some cool links:
http://cities.media.mit.edu/
http://www.media.mit.edu/research/
http://neuro.media.mit.edu/
http://robotic.media.mit.edu/
***Disclaimer: I work there. I think its freaking awesome.
I use http://www.seeqpod.com/ to find a lot of music. It's a search engine for music files with a flash player built-in. Really cool... it wouldn't surprise me to see google buy these guys in the future. It's totally legal, and you can find just about anything you want. Ben
Hi! You are correct. I think the special thing about the OLPC is that it is able to share a wireless connection wirelessly. I'll do some snooping tonight to see if it actually has two wifi devices or is using a special card to tune multiple 802.11g channels at the same time. I do know that the mesh is not a standard ad-hoc wireless network. From my macbook, I can see the olpc-mesh, and I can join it, but I cannot intercept packets and the OLPC doesn't get internet from my laptop. I think the whole network topolgy is fundamentally different for the mesh stuff. It's cool to have a bunch of them in a room though. They all see each-other immediately (must be some form of multicast DNS) and you can play games and share activities between the machines. The keyboard is TERRIBLE. Still, it's probably easier for someone with little fingers to use, and I just use a USB keboard and mouse when I'm developing or doing keyboard-intensive stuff (i.e. not games). Apparently the machine runs in a shallow pool of water because the keys are sealed so well. I'm not eager to try that out though! I'll let you know what I find out.... Ben
I'm lucky enough to have been given a production prototype model for the past couple weeks to play around with as part of a freshman program at the Media Lab.
The mesh networking works between machines whether or not there is an OLPC "school server". The machine also seems to be capable of connecting to multiple networks (one standard and one mesh). This allows it to share a standard wifi connection to other OLPCs over the mesh. Still, I don't think there are mesh drivers yet for windows or OS X. The routing is handeled (so I am told by Walter Bender) by a chipset on the wifi card itself, so the machine can go into a very low power state and still act as a mesh repeater.
The OS is based on Fedora, so I would assume mesh drivers exist for that OS. It runs the Sugar UI, which is PyGTK based. Interestingly, there is no root password initially. Also, sshd is enabled.
My $0.02
Once some friends and I wanted to watch a movie, so we ended up tripple stacking projectors (2100 lumens each) and using a two fairly large JBL VerTec Line Arrays (we had one on each side of the house) and four 18" subs for a nice low end. We had originally setup the system for a touring group in my high school's auditorium, and it was mostly made up of rental equipment (we nabbed the projectors from classrooms). It wouldn't be a very big system outdoors, but our highschool has a small 700 seat auditorium, so it was "full" sounding. Heheh..
All together we estimated the system cost to be about $300,000, and the full rated power of all the amps was close to 40,000 watts. The screen was 70 ft. diagonal... It was a nice "home theatre" setup...