Motion-sensing technology advances

In the movie “Minority Report,” Tom Cruise’s character manipulates virtual documents and zooms through images with a flurry of hand gestures and motions. The movie is set in 2054. But a number of companies already are creating products that mimic that experience, enabling people to interact with monitors and computers using a wave of their hand or a shift in their body position. Think of it as the next step after the Nintendo Wii — only you are the Wii controller.
Source: Ryan Kim, San Francisco Chronicle, January 21, 2008

Australian government revs up license plate cameras

CrimTrac, the Australian government’s criminal information and intelligence agency, is taking the first steps toward developing a nationwide automatic number plate recognition [ANPR] system to capture the vehicle details of suspects and citizens alike. Australia already has some ANPR systems fitted to existing road surveillance equipment, including speed cameras, to scan and read the license plates of passing vehicles at a rate of up to five or six cars a second.
Source: Marcus Browne, ZDNet Australia, January 21, 2008

Face recognition firm to launch Web service

Swedish start-up Polar Rose plans to make its face recognition service publicly available on the Web in the second quarter of 2008 as it tries to become a must-have tool for sorting visual content. The firm says its technology can pick out faces in the swelling crowd of images on the Internet, thereby making digital photos indexable just like text documents.
Source: Reuters, January 23, 2008

A Positioning System That Goes Where GPS Can’t

Global positioning system (GPS) technology has become increasingly popular over the past few years for tracking location. But it has its limits. Enter the indoor positioning system (IPS), a budding technology that IPS manufacturers envision as one day tracking the movement of firefighters battling blazes inside burning buildings, patients in hospitals and even retail merchandise swiped from store shelves. Although this has sparked invasion-of-privacy fears in some, the technology itself is designed to deliver useful locator services that pick up where GPS leaves off.
Source: Larry Greenemeier, Scientific American, January 23, 2008

‘Averaging’ faces could improve ID card security

Passport and ID card photos could be more effective if they were averages of several snapshots, say researchers who have shown that approach allows facial recognition software to spot familiar faces as well humans do. Psychologists Rob Jenkins and Mike Burton of the University of Glasgow, UK, [have] found humans are much better at recognizing averaged faces than if shown an individual photo. The duo argues that as we see a person from different angles and in varied lighting, we build a mental image of their face that averages out all those experiences.
Source: Mason Inman, New Scientist, January 24, 2008

Lasers to speed airport checks

Mark Rowe reports on the new technology hoping to improve safety and efficiency at our airports. Trials are under way of new security screening measures that could dramatically enhance safety and reduce queues at airports. A number of companies are developing “nanotechnology-based” scanners that improve the detection of explosives.
Source: Mark Rowe, The Telegraph, January 26, 2008

The New York Times Delivers News and Opinion Through Text Messages

By sending a text message with the appropriate keyword to 698698 (NYTNYT), users can receive the latest three articles from that given section or the most recent column from their favorite opinion, business, environmental, entertainment, health, metro, national, political, sports or technology columnist. Articles can be displayed on any type of cell phone or PDA.
Source: The New York Times Company Press Release, January 19, 2008

The coming wave of gadgets that listen and obey

Devices that incorporate speech recognition are starting to hit the mass market, giving users the ability to let their mouths do the walking — and the searching.
Source: Michael Fitzgerald, The New York Times, January 26, 2008