Tag: gadgets

Frickin’ Lasers! (and Pico Projectors)

Posted on by lhl

Until this weekend, my interest wasn’t very piqued by the whole pico projector trend. They’ve been pretty low-res, low-light, and limited battery-life affairs. Even as a super-heavy traveller, I’ve rarely felt the need to project from my phone or even my laptop w/ a pocketable projector. The space has been heating up recently (720P? >10 Lumens? 2-4hr battery life?), but what really caught my attention was seeing that Microvision was finally releasing a real product using their laser-based projection technology.

Although I’ve never bought a product from Microvision, I feel like I have a bit of a history with them: one where they’ve constantly disappointed by having incredibly cool technology that never made its way into my grubby little hands. Back in the early 2000’s I went through a huge AR nerd period. At the time, with academia failing to pull through with gear, I started looking at what was commercially available, and found the Microvision Nomad – a $4-6K system that had a red laser pointed at your eyeball running Windows CE (breathtaking I know – I decided to wait for the next generation). Unfortunately, after hitting some financial difficulties, Microvision all but abandoned their AR displays, and no one else (Olympus, Brother, Sony, or Microvision themselves) has released any commercial AR overlay displays since (there appears to be a booming military market for these, however)…

Which leads us to Microvision’s recent focus on pico projectors. While this may have been the right financial decision to make, it was always for me, a pretty boring path, both in comparison to the AR products and also when considering the limitations of the projectors themselves. The Microvision SHOW WX at version glance doesn’t seem to be all that great – it’s only 10 lumens, battery life of 1.5-2 hours, and a WVGA resolution. (Oh, and it’s about 50% overpriced compared to its competition.)

That being said, one thing did catch my eye. Because of their projector is laser-based, it has infinite focus. That is exactly what you think it is – multi-planar (and non-planar) projection is automatically focused, no mathematical tricks required.

Which isn’t to say that there isn’t awesome math that can’t still be applied. Check out these vids on using structured light and pixel shaders to do some astounding color and geometric correction on arbitrary surfaces:

Of course, there’s even more fun stuff that can be done, with structured light (such an awesome term) like Johnny Lee’s work on projector based tracking:

In the same way that AR on simple magnetometer/accelerometer equipped cell phones (no IMUs or HUDs ma!) proved to have surprisingly useful (well, at least interesting) applications, so will, I suspect, these pico-projectors. Assuming there are some fast GPUs w/ flexible shader pipelines available in portable form… – well, even without that, there should be lots of interesting visual applications…

Kindle: One Year Report

Posted on by lhl

Last year, I bought a Kindle before heading out to Boston to work on the Obama campaign. Since I gave +1 week report, I thought I’d give a one year report as well.

Overall, I’ve remained relatively happy with the Kindle – I continue to carry it around with me pretty much anytime I’m traveling (bus, train, or plane) and the day to day experience, remains largely the same. This sums up both the pros and cons – it’s useful enough to be probably my most used device after my computers and cell phone because it just works – it takes only a few seconds to wake up before you’re up and reading, and only requires a few minutes of charging every few days (whenever I get around to it). On the flip side, there haven’t been (m)any major software updates. The listing screen remains as useless for managing a larger number of books, and the browser, which I use a fair amount for reading longer articles remains as weak as the day I got it.

As for the deletions, post-hoc edits, and other issues… it’s certainly remains problematic – hopefully the high profile of these occurrences force more people to think about its implications and consequences (as I did when I bought my Kindle, I’ll point out Mark Pilgrim’s essay – in light of what has happened, those that attacked the essay as polemic or hyperbolic might reconsider these dangers as quite real, and without the proper checks and balances, inevitable). That being said, in practice, my personal usage hasn’t been impacted much. I’ll probably feel differently when I decide to switch reading devices.

When I got my Kindle, I started keeping tracks of my purchases in a spreadsheet. Some details:

  • I’ve bought about two dozen books on the Kindle this past year. Lower than I would have thought, but I’ve been pretty busy this past year…
  • About 3/4 of these books are Mobi vs Topaz formatted. While there are tools for decoding your mobi books, there are none for Topaz books
  • Over 3/4 of the books are also non-fiction, for whatever reason
  • I didn’t keep track of the samples I’ve downloaded and while you can see your order history on Amazon’s site, they don’t display your sample downloads (I can’t imagine Amazon not actively crunching those numbers internally)
  • I marked down the price on Amazon when buying the Kindle books, my overall savings rate vs the Amazon price for the physical book was 39.07% or $157.84, (nowhere near the cost of the device).

On that last point though, even beyond factoring in the convenience factor, I guess that’s not quite a complete picture. I’ve also read about about the same amount of books from ManyBooks.net and other sources. And I’ve sent myself lots of documents (it seems that Amazon only started charging the delivery fee recently), and I’ve also read a few hundred articles via the browser (primarily using pushpopurl) – in fact, my default behavior for longer online articles is now to save them for reading online later. It’s not perfect – the Kindle browser really sucks, has not control over font size or line-height, and often has strange spacing issues, but even with those drawbacks, the reflective e-ink screen is so much easier on the eyes that it’s still worth it.

Nicholson Baker recently wrote a long article in the New Yorker which was pretty negative about Kindle (which I read on the Kindle, of course), and while many of his complaints are valid, I think he misses some of the point – while the E-Ink screen might not be as good as paper, for reading big chunks of text, it’s a huge improvement over a monitor. If you travel or are in the habit of reading multiple things at at once… well, you just can’t do that with physical books. He ends up recommending the iPod Touch for reading, but that doesn’t work very well outdoors or in sit-down transit (I’ll agree the iPhone is much more convenient in the subway). That he talks about the bright glow and the pleasant experience of night-time reading though seems to tell me that he doesn’t spend nearly as much time staring at screens as I do. Lastly, I’ve found that none of the other alternatives (even the iPhone) are as slick as the Kindle for personal documents. Emailing yourself a wide range of formats and getting it converted and delivered via 3G and having it pop up at the top of your reading list is just a very pleasant experience.

My major frustrations really revolve around form factor (well, being able to reasonably read A4/Letter sized two-column technical papers) and that I’m not able to better track my reading activity – not that I’d want a third party to have that information necessarily, but the types of self-instrumentation and tracking for reading patterns and the like is… exciting to me.

My next report will probably be in a year, or maybe a bit earlier if there’s a compelling alternative (the Plastic Logic reader form factor and feature set look great, however the performance might be a bit of an issue – having already gone through one horrible reader, I don’t think I’d be willing to compromise much on power management, wake-up and page turning performance).