projects

The tablecloth was fresh, the juice was chilled. Francina Richardson and her family were ready for company. But instead of waiting for the doorbell to ring, this Sonoma, Calif., grandmother was listening for the distinctive trill of a Skype phone call. And her guests were joining her as part of a pioneering new initiative called the Virtual Dinner Guest Project.

Right on time, a group of youth in Cairo took a "seat" at the breakfast table. Introductions were made on both sides of the computer screen, and then, a natural conversation began. The young Egyptians, most of them … Read more

Sebastian Thrun of Google says that the company's Project Glass glasses are best doing what a smartphone does but in a hands-free way.

The company executive, who works on Project Glass at Google X Labs, wore a prototype of the now-famous glasses during an interview with Charlie Rose which went online today.

He showed how they are operated when he took a photo of Rose by pressing a button, then nodded his head to apparently share the photo with his friends on Google Plus. Two weeks ago, Google founder Sergey Brin was seen at a charity event sporting the … Read more

We here at Low Latency can barely walk and chew gum at the same time, so it should be no shock that we were a bit fearful for our immediate safety when Google's Project Glass video hit a few weeks ago.

The plan for Project Glass is to create a real-life head-up display for your face, allowing people to interact with the real world through the pervasive Google ecosystem. But it also got us thinking -- if we're so preoccupied with our texting, mapping, and other augmented reality antics, who's gonna make sure we're watching where we're going?

If you have an idea for another Project Glass test trial disaster, make sure to let us know in the comments section below.… Read more

LEDs, or "light-emitting diodes," have come a long way since they were introduced as red, green, and blue computer indicator lights.

These days, LEDs are available in endless shapes and sizes, a wide variety of colors and neutrals, and offer many benefits over traditional incandescent lights.

For starters, LEDs can potentially cut energy usage by 25% in the U.S. How? Here's the science, made simple: incandescent bulbs convert most electricity to heat, whereas LED lights convert most of the energy into light. That's why LEDs don't give off heat the way traditional … Read more

Great, now we have no excuse for taking horrible pictures on our aging digital cameras. Just take a look at some of the images shot by garbage collectors in Germany with dumpsters that have been converted into giant pinhole cameras.

Pictures for the Trashcam Project are created by hanging large sheets of Ilford photo paper (not film) inside a closed dumpster with a few holes drilled into the front. To create the eerie photographs you see here, the pinhole photographers line the "camera" up with their subjects and secure it in place -- by locking the wheels of the trash bins, we're guessing. Then they wait, for up to an hour, until an image is formed. … Read more

The other day I wrote an article titled "When should I upgrade my HDTV?" The general thought was that TV performance, while not exactly hitting a plateau, had slowed enough that TVs even a few years old perform pretty close to the new models.

In the world of front projection, though, it's an entirely different story. The level of performance you can get for very little money is incredible. What were once considered "budget level" projectors now easily outperform $10,000+ models from just a few years ago.

Time to upgrade? Perhaps.… Read more

Eight men have been arrested and charged with distributing more $1 million in LSD, ecstasy, and other narcotics through an online storefront that hid the identities of the service's users.

The online drug market -- known as "The Farmers Market" -- used the Tor Project to allow suppliers to anonymously sell their wares online to buyers in 35 countries, including the United States, according to a federal grand jury indictment unsealed today in Los Angeles. The store provided buyers with order forms, forums, and customer service, and accepted various forms of payment, including PayPal and Western Union, … Read more

The Defense Department has reportedly ordered augmented-reality displays from startup Innovega, only a week after Google disclosed its own augmented-reality project.

Bellevue, Wash.-based Innovega has signed a contract to supply the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) with a prototype of its iOptik spectacles and accompanying contact lenses, Innovega's CEO Steve Willey told the BBC. The augmented-reality system could improve the awareness of soldiers in the field, he said.

The contact lenses have a filter that allows a person to focus on images at a very close distance and focus on far-away objects at the same time. That … Read more