The Mirage Solo will be the first standalone headset to join the Google Daydream platform Lenovo was one of many companies to reveal new VR offerings at CES 2018, announcing the Lenovo Mirage Solo, what it describes as, “the first standalone Google Daydream VR headset”. The Mirage Solo offers users an untethered VR experience, i.e. it doesn’t need to be … Read more
How many are there? 21 quadrillion pixels An old friend asked me, Hey Jon, how many pixels do you think there are in the world? TV’s, PC’s, smart phones, tablets. It’s going to be a lot! But how many? Twenty-one quadrillion, six hundred and thirty-four trillion pixels in use today: 21,634,876,802,016,700.00 To start the analysis, I started with what was … Read more
AMD brings in some industry heavyweights AMD has announced the addition of two computer industry veterans to its Radeon Technologies Group (RTG) and to its executive team: Mike Reyfield from Micron Technology and David Wang from Synaptics. AMD will support Wang and Reyfield with dedicated engineering and business teams within RTG. AMD’s C-suite t’s a new arrangement in that the … Read more
VR & AR with realistic images coming soon People have described ray tracing as the holy grail of computer imaging. RT generates (if done properly) a physically accurate representation of an imagined or reconstructed scene. The number of variables are bewildering, from location and number of light sources combined with the style of each individual light (point source, diffused, flickering … Read more
The Local Motors concept has borne fruit with several vehicles and a very active community of inventors, and designers. The founding idea of Local Motors when it started in 2007 was to break the mold of the automotive industry, which relies on long design cycles, standardized models for mass manufacture. The idea was to bring production closer to the customer, … Read more
Our friends at Ceva kicked off CES this year with the launch of a new product aimed explicitly at acceleration of neural networks, along with a nifty new name and logo to help tell their story. The NeuPro IP core consists of a new ‘VPU’ (Ceva is using the acronym to mean Vector Processing Unit, not to be confused with … Read more
Epic’s acquisition of Datasmith reveals ongoing problem of data conversion The rise in the use of game engines to create content and applications has emphasized a long-time challenge of putting CAD data to work: how to port heavy CAD data for use in other mediums such as animation, interior design, analysis, and now VR app development. As the technology du … Read more
The demarcation between 2017 and 2018 is nothing but an imaginative fabrication that doesn’t link, or sync up with any natural occurrence or historical event, and is merely a counting convenience. Julius Caesar’s calendar, established in AUC 708 (1 January 45 BC) is an arbitrary mess that we struggle with through with a mnemonic poem (30 days hath September,…). Think … Read more
At the close of 2017, Apple is battling a scandal over its decision to throttle batteries rather than risk sudden shutdowns as older phones’ batteries decline. There are rumors that the iPhone X, the newest, biggest, baddest iPhone is actually just a big bad flop. Lawsuits are popping up, but Tim Cook and his band of barely shaven, cranky men … Read more
The Khronos Group has just released a new standard format for moving neural networks among frameworks and between frameworks and inference engines. The new standard is the Neural Network Exchange Format (NNEF); it has been in design for over a year and was released as a provisional specification on December 20th. Khronos is seeking feedback before issuing the final specification, … Read more
It’s a game changer whatever you call it. In December 2016, at WinHEC in Shenzhen, Qualcomm announced that they were collaborating with Microsoft to enable Windows 10 on mobile computing devices powered by the next-generation Snapdragon. And although both parties said it would enable a mobile power efficient, always-connected cellular PC, and supporting full compatibility with the Windows 10 ecosystem, … Read more
10nm plus architectural improvements packs more performance in smaller package using less power Rumored since mid-year, Qualcomm has taken some of the wraps off its new flagship SoC, the Snapdragon 845, and although it won’t actually be available in phones till second half 2018, it will definitely be worth waiting for. The 845 is more than an upgrade or just … Read more
