Aurasma brings static objects and images to life (podcast)
Imagine aiming a smartphone or a tablet at a cereal box and, instead of seeing the static image printed on the box, you see an animated feature appear as if it's playing on the front of the box. The same technology could be used to turn a picture in a printed newspaper into a video or--if pointed toward a product--it could launch a game featuring animated characters interacting with that product.That's the aim of a new technology being introduced by Autonomy, the London-based company best known for its enterprise software.Aurasma, which is a core technology designed to power apps for the iPhone, Android, and other smartphone and tablet devices, is capable of recognizing images and objects and enhancing them not just by replacing them with video but by allowing virtual objects to interact with real ones, such as a cartoon character walking through he door of a real building.A prototype of the software is remarkably easy to use and surprisingly robust. During a preview event in San Francisco, journalists were given the opportunity to aim an iPad 2 camera at a newspaper, a cereal box, a Harry Potter poster, and a picture of the Mona Lisa, and then watch as the images transformed from static to moving. I expected the demonstration to work with the reproduction of the Mona Lisa supplied by the company, but was surprised to get the same result when I pointed the iPad toward my Android phone after downloading a different and much smaller rendering of the same image.Autonomy will license the technology to publishers, consumer product makers, and others who want to use it to "augment reality." A print newspaper, for example, could use the technology to enhance its advertisements so that readers could point their devices at the paper to get a richer experience than they could by simply looking at an ad. That's sometimes done now by printing bar codes (or QR codes) in the ad, but this technology would simply recognize the image itself.Aurasma could also be used by product manufacturers to provide additional information. Visitors to a car show, for example, could point their phone toward the grill of any car to get a video or perhaps a game that lets you virtually drive the car. A travel magazine could not only bring its pages to life but could offer virtual tours of cities triggered when people point their phone toward a building. Someone could write an app that, when pointed at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., could get the late president to get up from his chair and give a speech.The software does require that someone code information about objects. If you point it at a house, it might know it's a house, but it won't know whose house it is unless that information has been entered. It can, however, read text.Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch said that while it can be configured to recognize pictures of certain people, it's not that good at recognizing actual people or animals. He said that if you point it at a dog, it might recognize that it's a dog but would have a hard time figuring out the breed. "It's designed for man-made objects, rather than things of nature," he said.The technology is based on what Lynch refers to Bayesian inference, named for an 18th-century English mathematician and minister. "People like to think that the way in which you would solve these problems is to take lots measurements of all these things and puts lots of rules into a computer and it would then execute these rules and make decisions," Lynch said. "But it turns out that it's very hard to make that work." Instead, the algorithms behind Aurasma "are based on probability theory," which he says "[harkens] back to an amazing piece of work by an English country vicar called Thomas Bayes."For more about Aurasma, listen to my 12-minute podcast interview with Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch.Listen nowYour browser does not support the audio element.Subscribe now:iTunes (audio) |RSS (audio)
Options for checking free hard-drive space in OS X
Options for checking free hard-drive space in OS X
To keep your system from running out of space, the easiest thing to do is simply monitor your hard drive; however, Apple keeps this detail relatively hidden from you with the default configuration of OS X. Even so, there are options you can use to keep an eye on the free space available in your system.The first is to use the System Information utility, which can be accessed by choosing "About this Mac" from the Apple menu, and then clicking More Info. In the panel that appears, you can click the Storage section to see a calculation of the free space and types of files on any locally mounted volume.While this offers a user-friendly graphic of your drive's space, keep in mind that the sizes reported are based on the system's Spotlight index. This means that if there is an indexing problem, it may show incorrect sizes in the About this Mac window.The Finder's Status bar will show you an ongoing view of the free disk space.Screenshot by Topher Kessler/CNETYou can always force OS X to reindex the drive to clear such problems, but this can be time-consuming. Therefore, if you need to check your drive's space used, more appropriate tools to use are Disk Utility and the Finder's Information window, both of which will show you the exact amount of storage used on your drive. Apple makes these tools convenient, but they will require you to either launch an application, or invoke the information window specifically using the contextual menu or the Command-i hot key.If you wish to have a more readily available view of the free space on your system, then instead of using tools and information windows that require a few steps to invoke, simply enable the Finder's status bar, which will appear below each Finder window and will display not only the number of files in the current folder, but the amount of free space remaining on the drive. This feature is great for giving you an ongoing glimpse of your drive's status, and can easily be enabled by pressing Command-/ (forward slash), or by choosing the option in the View menu.These commands (outlined in blue) will each show the free disk space, located in their output indicated by the arrows (click for larger view).Screenshot by Topher Kessler/CNETFinally, if you are a Terminal user, you have several commands at your fingertips that can give you disk usage information. The first is the classic "df" command, which will output a small table of details about your drive, including the number of blocks, those used, and those available. You can output this in a more readable format (gigabytes, megabytes, and kilobytes), by using the "-H" flag in the following way:df -HIn addition to "df," you can use Apple's provided "diskutil" command, which is a command-line version of Apple's Disk Utility program. This command offers the ability to look up disk information, which you can do for your boot drive by running the following command:diskutil info /One of the lines of output from this command will be "Volume Free Space:" which will show in bytes how much space is free. To make this easier to read, you can filter the output to only show free space, by piping it through "grep" in the following way:diskutil info / | grep "Free Space"Questions? Comments? Have a fix? Post them below or e-mail us!Be sure to check us out on Twitter and the CNET Mac forums.
To keep your system from running out of space, the easiest thing to do is simply monitor your hard drive; however, Apple keeps this detail relatively hidden from you with the default configuration of OS X. Even so, there are options you can use to keep an eye on the free space available in your system.The first is to use the System Information utility, which can be accessed by choosing "About this Mac" from the Apple menu, and then clicking More Info. In the panel that appears, you can click the Storage section to see a calculation of the free space and types of files on any locally mounted volume.While this offers a user-friendly graphic of your drive's space, keep in mind that the sizes reported are based on the system's Spotlight index. This means that if there is an indexing problem, it may show incorrect sizes in the About this Mac window.The Finder's Status bar will show you an ongoing view of the free disk space.Screenshot by Topher Kessler/CNETYou can always force OS X to reindex the drive to clear such problems, but this can be time-consuming. Therefore, if you need to check your drive's space used, more appropriate tools to use are Disk Utility and the Finder's Information window, both of which will show you the exact amount of storage used on your drive. Apple makes these tools convenient, but they will require you to either launch an application, or invoke the information window specifically using the contextual menu or the Command-i hot key.If you wish to have a more readily available view of the free space on your system, then instead of using tools and information windows that require a few steps to invoke, simply enable the Finder's status bar, which will appear below each Finder window and will display not only the number of files in the current folder, but the amount of free space remaining on the drive. This feature is great for giving you an ongoing glimpse of your drive's status, and can easily be enabled by pressing Command-/ (forward slash), or by choosing the option in the View menu.These commands (outlined in blue) will each show the free disk space, located in their output indicated by the arrows (click for larger view).Screenshot by Topher Kessler/CNETFinally, if you are a Terminal user, you have several commands at your fingertips that can give you disk usage information. The first is the classic "df" command, which will output a small table of details about your drive, including the number of blocks, those used, and those available. You can output this in a more readable format (gigabytes, megabytes, and kilobytes), by using the "-H" flag in the following way:df -HIn addition to "df," you can use Apple's provided "diskutil" command, which is a command-line version of Apple's Disk Utility program. This command offers the ability to look up disk information, which you can do for your boot drive by running the following command:diskutil info /One of the lines of output from this command will be "Volume Free Space:" which will show in bytes how much space is free. To make this easier to read, you can filter the output to only show free space, by piping it through "grep" in the following way:diskutil info / | grep "Free Space"Questions? Comments? Have a fix? Post them below or e-mail us!Be sure to check us out on Twitter and the CNET Mac forums.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)