May 26th, 2009

Toshiba Corp has introduced a system that is capable to recognize which area a car driver is looking at, and to be used as a warning for the car driver of negligent driving or to operate car navigation system by combining the eye direction and manually-operated switches.

Toshiba had demonstrated this system - which detects the face and eye directions of the driver using images shot with a camera - at Automotive Engineering Exposition 2009, that was held at the Pacifico Yokohama, Kanagawa Prefecture (Japan) from May 20 to 22.

It works by, having  the driver’s full face and his/her face looking at the center of the car navigation system are shot with the camera. The former is used to adjust the shape of the face and the positions of the eyes, etc, while the latter is for adjusting the relationship between the eye direction and the orientation of the face
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If these settings are done, the system starts recognizing the driver’s face, and the section that the driver is looking at is indicated with a yellow frame.

The system used in the demonstration recognized which of eight areas was being looked at by the driver. The eight areas are the left, center and right areas of the windshield, the left mirror, the right mirror, the meters, the car navigation system and the audio system. The system can also be used to alert the driver to drowsy driving by detecting blinks in the future, Toshiba said.

The company used a PC in the demonstration. It said that real time processing is possible with the computational performance of a typical notebook PC.

Toshiba is considering reducing the volume of computation for embedded CPUs by, for example, decreasing the number of points of a wire frame model used to recognize a face, when commercializing the system.

Polaroid’s instant film is likely to revive as a small number of Dutch scientists and one unmanageable Austrian salesman in Enschede (the Netherlands) have devoted themselves to efforts of reinventing this spectacular invention of the 20th century.

Polaroid has stopped making the film since last year as digital cameras are found everywhere because they are cheap and simple to use, so the Enschede group’s efforts are likely to be nostalgic.

Yet it seems that the  group’s move is really retrograde. They only long for the revival of an out-of-date production process in an unused Polaroid factory for they hope that some people still have desire for retro photography that avoids airbrush or Photoshop.

This project is a matter of building a very attractive business to last for at least another decade, and this is about the importance of analog aspects in a more and more digital world”

All of them said that it would not be easy because chemical processes and the chemicals themselves must be reinvented in a factory that, though littered with Polaroid detritus of yore, lacks the necessary materials to restart production. Crucial equipment nearly landed in a Dutch dump. But the group got a break when prosecutors in the United States arrested the private equity investor who owned Polaroid’s assets.

The group wishes to begin production later this year for distribution in the United States, Europe and Asia and is convinced there is still an eager market for Polaroid film packs.

It is estimated that the number of Polaroid instant cameras in circulation at one billion. That number may be fantastic, or at the very least includes a lot of cameras in the back of closets. But the fact is that 30 million film packs in 2007, and 24 million in the first half of 2008 were produced at the Enschede factory for sale worldwide.

Intel is changing in delicate ways while trying to expand beyond the personal computer chip business, after working hard and spending much money for the years to shape the company’s image.

Its long software developers, more than 3,000 of them, have for the first time stolen some of the spotlight from its hardware engineers. These programmers find themselves at the center of Intel’s sudden raid into areas like mobile phones and video games.

On of the most attention-grabbing elements of Intel’s software push is a version of the open-source Linux operating system (OS) called Moblin. It represents a direct assault on the Windows franchise of Microsoft, Intel’s longtime partner.

Moblin is like Windows or Apple’s Mac OS X to an extent, handling the basic functions of running a computer. But it has a few twists as well that Intel says make it better suited for small mobile devices. For example, it fires up and reaches the Internet in about seven seconds, then displays a novel type of start-up screen.

People will find their appointments listed on one side of the screen, along with their favorite programs. But the bulk of the screen is taken up by cartoonish icons that show things like social networking updates from friends, photos and recently used documents.

With animated icons and other quirky bits and pieces, Moblin looks like a fresh take on the operating system. Some companies hope it will give Microsoft a strong challenge in the market for the small, cheap laptops commonly known as netbooks. A polished second version of the software, which is in trials, should start appearing on a variety of netbooks this summer.

While Moblin fits netbooks well today, it was built with smartphones in mind. Those smartphones explain why Intel was willing to needle Microsoft. Intel has previously tried and failed to carve out a prominent stake in the market for chips used in smaller computing devices like phones.

But the company says one of its newer chips, called Atom, will solve this riddle and help it compete against the likes of Texas Instruments and Qualcomm. This low-power, low-cost Atom chip sits inside most of the netbooks sold today, and smartphones using the chip could start arriving in the next couple of years.

To make Atom a success, Intel plans to use software for leverage. Its needs Moblin because most of the cellphone software available today runs on chips whose architecture is different from Atom’s. To make Atom a worthwhile choice for phone makers, there must be a supply of good software that runs on it.