3d illusion arts: Walyou

Walyou

iPad Air 2 Images Leak Ahead of Apple’s October Event
New Smartwatch Projects Skin Buttons Instead of Using Physical Ones
Radiooooo is the Perfect Musical Time Wasting Site

iPad Air 2 Images Leak Ahead of Apple’s October Event

Posted: 15 Oct 2014 05:00 AM PDT

After missing Apple’s earlier press conference in September, the company has now set a date for their next iPad reveal – October 16th.

September was an incredibly big month for Apple. When they weren’t laughing and dancing in the streets over the staggeringly high amount of iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus sales (the two phones sold 10 million units between them in 3 days) the company was hampered with dipping share prices as customers were introduced to iPhone 6 Plus Bendgate.

Bendgate has certainly been the talk of the town these past few weeks with plenty of memes being made about Apple’s ‘bendy’ phones but bubbling under the surface, many have also been speculating about the next iPad. It’s been a year since we saw a new version of Apple’s tablet but with leaked images and a date pencilled in for later this week, we now have a slightly better idea of what to expect.

Leaked from Vietnam, the leaked images you see above are said to be of the next iPad. Specifically, the latest Apple tablet will be called the iPad Air 2 and will be the successor of last year’s iPad Air, which brought with it an incredibly slim body that was so thin that the device could be hidden behind a pencil. The ‘iPad’ in the images is actually a dummy uses to make cases and it suggests that they’ll be similar in design to the first iPad Air. All that appears to be different is that the iPad Air 2 will have ion-strengthened glass just like the iPhone 6 and that Home button clearly sports a ring around it. Does that mean that the iPad will feature TouchID for the very first time? Probably, and the timing makes sense too as Apple Pay is scheduled to be launched later this year.

What is a concern about the iPad Air 2 (provided that these images are legitimate) is that while the design is the same as the first iPad Air, the iPad Air 2 is slightly thinner. It’s only thinner by 0.5mm but if that’s a big enough change for Apple to design then it’s a big enough one to make a difference. As seen with the iPhone 6 Plus, thinner does not always equal better and the large, thin body also led to that bending that we’ve all recoiled in horror at.

Whether or not Apple has fixed these problems with the iPad Air 2 is unclear (keep in mind that the company is still denying that there’s even a widespread problem on the iPhone 6 Plus) but we’ll know more following Apple’s iPad press conference later this week.

Source: GSM Arena, Tinhte

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New Smartwatch Projects Skin Buttons Instead of Using Physical Ones

Posted: 14 Oct 2014 01:38 PM PDT

For some people, letting go of hardware buttons in smartphones and wearables is pretty difficult. The one’s who don’t think touchscreens are that appealing should give laser skin buttons a try.

The problem with wearables is that they really don’t have enough room for physical buttons. Apple claims to have found a solution to displaying images and other things on tiny displays, in the form of the digital crown that enables zooming in and out. Still, maybe people are looking for more functionality in a smartwatch, not just to zoom and scroll. For example, since these wearables are designed to display notifications, among many other things, maybe it would be useful if one button was used for cutting some text, and another one for pasting it somewhere else. Getting one button for each function is not exactly desirable in this day and age, and creating shortcuts by pushing multiple buttons at once would actually defeat the purpose of a variable. What if there was a way to project buttons on the skin, and this way assign their functions depending on the app that’s currently running? That’s pretty much what Carnegie Mellon’s Future Interfaces Group did with the ‘skin buttons‘.

The skin buttons, which are quite thoroughly documented in the accompanying research paper, are currently but a proof of concept. Four micro lasers are used for projecting icon shapes on the skin. It’s possible to display any button with any functionality, supposing that everything is linked to the smartwatch’s software.

If there had been only the four lasers, it wouldn’t have been possible for you to trigger any actions when touching a skin button. However, there also are infrared sensors that can detect when you’re tapping on the skin. The concept used here is very similar to the one that made projected keyboards functional.

There’s plenty of room for improvement, and the researchers who developed skin buttons are well aware of that. The buttons could be assigned various colors, in order to help users differentiate them. On top of that, there’s work to do on the software side of things. I think that skin buttons could become particularly useful for games on smartwatches and other wearables. Now I wonder if any of the tech giants will pick up this idea and implement it in the Android Wear smartwatches.

Be social! Follow Walyou on Facebook and Twitter, and read more related stories about the Wristify personal cooling and heating bracelet, and the TomTom Golfer smartwatch.

Radiooooo is the Perfect Musical Time Wasting Site

Posted: 14 Oct 2014 11:43 AM PDT

Every now and then someone comes along and puts a new twist on random musical streaming. Often it’s simply the same thing in different styling. But with Radioooo, there’s really something innovative about the way you can browse through time and space in search for some good tunes.

The idea? The map of the world is standing in front of you with tabs of all the decades since the beginning of the 20th century. If you want to dive into an era in any country in the world (that someone has uploaded music from), just click on the country and the time frame. You can also play around with the styling between weird, slow and fast.

So while I’m writing this I’m listening to some hard-to-describe alternative music from Brazil in the 1970′s, and I’ll probably jump to some Australian rock (hopefully) in the 1990′s.

The site is still in Beta, and it began as an Indiegogo project nearly a year ago. I’m pretty sure that you might be able to steer clear of Justin Bieber if you don’t click ‘Canada’ and ‘Now’ at the same time.

However, if you want people in the future to know just how dumb music could be during the 2010′s, it’s a good thing someone uploaded his music.