Visual Technology

Senteo interactive response system – new for June 2007

Posted on April 25th, 2007 by Marcela.
Categories: Products, useful technology.

The Senteo interactive response system provides a direct connection between you and your students. The system includes a remote for each student in your class and a central receiver that allows you to quiz and survey students, and receive instant feedback.

With Senteo, you no longer have to wonder if students understand what you’ve taught them. They can tell you with the click of a button.

Senteo will begin shipping in June 2007.

Highlights
Flexible quiz and assessment options
Senteo is an assessment tool designed to enhance learning. It facilitates summative and formative assessment by allowing you to pose a question before, during or after a lesson to find out if students are on track. You can use the feedback to help shape the rest of your lesson.

Once you’ve finished the lesson, you can create a quiz with Senteo to evaluate learning more formally. You can feel secure in summative assessments because students can verify and change their self-paced responses directly on the remote.

It’s easy to add creativity to questions
Combine words with images to make questions more dynamic. Senteo comes with Notebook collaborative learning software and offers 6,000 learning objects that can be easily added to quizzes. You can write and edit notes in digital ink, import or export PowerPoint presentations, and incorporate multimedia content.

Instant feedback enhances interactivity
The Senteo interactive response system increases one-to-one interaction by allowing you to survey and engage students and collect responses. You can use student feedback to plan lessons and personalize the learning environment.

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AMX UNVEILS INDUSTRY’S FIRST CAMERA CONTROLLER WITH WIDESCREEN VIDEO PREVIEW

Posted on April 24th, 2007 by Marcela.
Categories: new, Products.

Today at NAB 2007, AMX® unveiled the industry’s first camera controller with widescreen video preview. The next-generation NXP-PLV Modero PosiTrack Pilot Camera Controller adds Ethernet connectivity and a 7” Modero® Widescreen Touch Panel, making it ideal for any live or recorded broadcast event, including religious services; local, state and federal government proceedings; classroom lectures and complex video conferences. AMX is demonstrating the NXP-PLV in its booth, C11109, April 16 – 19.

Using the graphical interface on the NXP-PLV’s integrated Modero Widescreen Touch Panel, the operator can select cameras, visually track and change their movement, store and recall presets and adjust each camera’s settings. The controller also includes a proportional pan/tilt/zoom joystick and controls for focus, iris and speed. With the right hand on the soft wrist pad, the operator can also intuitively guide the camera and twist the joystick to zoom the lens in and out. Simultaneously, a quick spin of the side-mounted control knobs fine-tunes focus, iris and speed.

The NXP-PLV supports up to six cameras and is an ideal controller for AMX’s Ethernet-based PTE-300 PosiTrack Pan/Tilt Head. It will be available within 90 days.

About AMX
AMX hardware and software solutions simplify the way people interact with technology. With the increasing number of technologies and operating platforms at work and home, AMX solves the complexity of managing this technology with reliable, consistent and scalable systems. Our award-winning products span control and automation, switching, distributed audio and video, and technology management. They are implemented worldwide in conference rooms, homes, classrooms, network operation / command centers, hotels, entertainment venues, broadcast facilities, among others.

AMX was founded in 1982 and is a subsidiary of Duchossois Industries, Inc. For more information, visit www.amx.com.

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Intel restyles laptop as wireless fashion accessory

Posted on April 19th, 2007 by Marcela.
Categories: Products, useful technology.

Intel’s latest portable PC concept: the “metro notebook”, an ultra-thin, ultra-light laptop for the ladies. Designed to be carried over the shoulder, the sub-0.7in thick, 1kg device sports an always-on secondary display for fast info updates.

The Core 2 Duo-based machine’s small screen is a colour non-volatile e-ink display that continues to show content - email, calendar entries, eBooks, etc - even when the power’s cut. The e-ink screen is mounted on a leather wrap-around cover which connects to the laptop through a dock connector that’s also capable of hosting USB traffic.

The unit’s primarily designed for entirely wireless communications with reconfigurable antennae able to switch between the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and WiMAX links the laptop’s envisaged to maintain.

Intel also said it envisages the machine shipping with a inductive connection-less charging pad, allowing the batteries of phones and PDAs to be recharged just by placing them on the notebook.

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Lasers transform light engines

Posted on April 11th, 2007 by Marcela.
Categories: Products, dlp, l c d.

At the heart of all microdisplay-based projection systems is the light engine—the most common are branded under the DLP™ or 3LCD™ categories, and several LCOS varieties are also becoming popular. This engine is the set of optics and electronics that illuminates and projects red, green and blue (RGB) light onto the screen.

Necsel simplifies all types of light engine configurations, reducing system cost. It allows smaller light engines, shrinking overall unit size. And it enhances performance, enabling a brighter, more colorful, more efficient display product.

3LCD WITH LAMP
A 3LCD™ engine homogenizes and splits white light from a UHP lamp into the three RGB primaries using dichroic filters. It then generates images from three transmissive high-temperature polysilicon (3LCD) panels, one for each of the red, green, and blue. These images are recombined and projected onto the screen.

3LCD WITH NECSEL
A Necsel 3LCD light engine is a simple combination of single red, green, and blue lasers that project high-power homogenized light directly onto the three LCD panels. Necsel eliminates the need for polarizers, polarization recovery, color filters, turning mirrors, UV and IR filters, fly’s-eye lenses and several field lenses.

DLP WITH LAMP
In a DLP™ system, light from a UHP arc lamp is passed through a filter wheel in rapid sequence to transmit red, green and blue primaries. This RGB light passes into a light tunnel for homogenization and then onto the microdisplay.

DLP WITH NECSEL
In a Necsel-based DLP system, the light engine is a combination of a red, a green, and a blue laser that projects high-power light directly onto the microdisplay. Necsel technology eliminates the need for a color wheel, light tunnel, UV and IR filters, and relay optics.

http://www.novalux.com/display/

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The Multi-Touch Screen

Posted on April 2nd, 2007 by Marcela.
Categories: new, Products, Screens.

Today, a few more notes from my visit two weeks ago to the TED conference…

Apple garnered many oohs and ahhs when it demonstrated the touch-screen interface of its new iPhone cellphone/iPod, which is scheduled for release in June. This “multi-touch” screen, Apple says, breaks new ground by permitting more than one finger to touch the screen simultaneously.

Now, the truth is, the maximum number of fingers that the iPhone recognizes is exactly 2. And even then, you use this feature in only one instance: to enlarge or reduce a photo, Web page or e-mail message on the screen; it’s not like there are all kinds of multi-touch gestures to learn. So “multi-touch interface” might be stretching it a bit.

Even so, as soon as I saw Steve Jobs demonstrate this feature at the Macworld Expo in January, I immediately had a sense of déjà vu. This was a miniature version of NYU researcher Jeff Han’s own multi-touch interface, which I wrote about in this blog last year. You can see a video of last year’s software here.

After the Jobs demo, I called Jeff Han, fully expecting to hear how angry he was that Apple had stolen his idea without permission or consultation (it’s happened before).

Instead, he knew all about Apple’s project. He didn’t say that Apple bought his technology, nor that Apple stole it—only that he’d known what had happened, and that there was a lot he wasn’t allowed to say.
Anyway, he returned to TED this year for a new presentation, showing how far the multi-touch technology had progressed (hint: a lot). He also set up his eight-foot touch screens in the TED common area, so anyone could try it.

You can see Jeff Han narrating this demo in this video, although with bad camerawork. Or you can see Han’s official, wordless demo here.

In any case, I spent quite awhile trying it out, and it’s spectacular. The visual response to your touch is immediate and satisfying, and there are lots of multi-touch gestures that work. One of the sample programs featured an ever-expanding “family tree” of every known species in nature, complete with photos; by dragging and expanding, you could zoom in infinitely to the branch of this massive tree that you were interested in. The photo-manipulation and mapping modules were also amazing.

I suspect you’ll be hearing a lot more about Jeff Han, Apple and multi-touch interfaces in the next couple of years.

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