Browsing Category: interests

In my latest post for GeekBeat.TV I rounded up five robots that are changing the world of therapy as we know it today. It’s been documented by numerous credible sources that individuals dealing with social disorders, Alzheimer’s, Autism and Dementia have been known to make gains using social-companion robots like Nao, Paro, Keepon and Popchilla.
The thought is this..
If a person finds social interaction with humans too overwhelming, a “social” robot specifically programmed to do so, could act as a less obtrusive point of interaction capable of teaching the user through emotional expressions, colour, facial expressions, gestures and so on. The robots are of course accompanied by a professional therapist, in some instances with the robot being controlled remotely by the therapist.
When you think ‘robot’ an image of a metal-Bender-like character probably comes to mind but social robots used in therapy often resemble a stuffed animal making them also a substitute for animal therapy.
Here’s the full article with video..
Five Therapy Robots Helping With Alzheimer’s, Autism & Cancer… Continue Reading

This is our crappy mock-up of diminished reality, not a working app.
I’m not a skilled video editor but it seems that removing objects from video would be a laborious task. I asked an editor friend of mine to quickly explain how he’d go about removing an object/person from a scene. It went something like this..
Cut out the object, fill the background ( with some sort of cloning tool I assume), motion tracking (apply motion to the object to fill in the missing object frame by frame ), he then went on and on with additional tweaks.. but I thought I’d spare you the details.
Bottom line it sounded painstaking. So, software that could do it for you by simply circling the object would be a godsend? I asked. The answer was “hells yeah”
The virtual worlds department at German University Ilmenau may have simplified the entire process for editors– and it works in real-time — they’re calling it Diminished Reality being the opposite of augmented reality, a technology that basically brings the ‘occurrence’ of objects by overlaying information-objects in real-time.
While this is bound to cut down some time for editors, on the other hand, revolutionary tools like this one may limit the work you get — its becoming rapidly easier for newbies to produce slick professional looking content, just look at some of the new tools in iMovie11.… Continue Reading
So you’ve probably already heard that shooting video using the iPhone 4 is brilliant, sexy and gives a new meaning to the term mobile-movie-making. This fangirl isn’t going to bore you gushing about the unbelievable quality of the footage I’ve taken or the ability to shoot 720p, 30fps on the rear/front facing cam. I just wanted to share with you a little footage I’ve taken so far, additionally pointing out some questionable differences with the uploading quality when doing it directly from the iPhone.… Continue Reading
There has been an incredible amount of innovation and emerging development directly sparked from powerful mobile devices like the iPhone4 — the business of movie-making being one of them.
With its’ remarkable capability to shoot high-definition video 720p at 30fps, devices like the iPhone 4 are quickly eliminating the need to purchase an additional device like a Flip Cam and best of all, it supports an app ecosystem full of multitouch supported video editing apps for editing on the go.… Continue Reading










