Next Best Thing

Seemingly bored with its quest for total domination of the personal computer and smartphone, Google just announced its new and upcoming service called Google TV. Television is a huge ad market with 4 billion users around the globe using it actively and Google plans to revolutionize it. The concept behind Google TV is to merge the web with your TV so you can enjoy all those videos available online on the largest and best screen in your home – the one of your TV set. Google have partnered with Sony and Logitech on this one. Sony have prepared the world’s first Google TV lineup. That should hit the US market this fall. The lineup includes both a standalone TV model and set top box-type unit incorporating a Blu-ray Disc drive. Google’s other partners Logitech have been working on a companion box that brings Google TV to existing HDTV home entertainment systems. It should be compatible with any brand of HDTV currently available. The final notable member at the Google party is Intel, who wil...

Geeks have a soft spot for technical specifications – and now revealed for the first time, the Microsoft Kinect tech specs are bound for some geeky attention. A quick fact, the Kinect controller will be able to track you when you’re between 1.2 and 3.5 meters away from it. How’s that for starters? Interestingly, the two cameras on the Kinect have surprisingly low resolution – two video streams with 640×480 pixels resolution at 30 frames per second. I thought they would need higher resolution to do their tracking magic, but it seems they can do it with just VGA. Kinect’s horizontal field of view is 57 degrees. Additionally, the Kinect has a motor that can tilt it 27 degrees each way to track you, which expands the field of view. The vertical field of view is 43 degrees. The Kinect does all the tracking computation on its own, so it’s compatible with all Xbox 360 consoles. It has its limitations though – it can track 6 people at once, but only two of them are ‘active players’. However, i...