Apple fans were probably nailed to their PC’s last night to see what Apple’s software guys have been brewing for the last year. The anticipation was more than usual this year – iOS’s development leadership structure had a reshuffle a few months ago, and Jony Ive has taken over the design of the new iOS7.

A New Look.

Jony Ive is the guy responsible for Apple’s hardware design until now. His work until now gives you an idea where his preferences lies. Simplicity and well thought out “golden rule” approaches can be found all over the new iOS7. App icons are all redesigned (after 5 years of very subtle changes) using a grid like design within the icon. All the 3D looking gradients of past icons are gone. Simple flat icons might take some getting used though.

(more…)

Cloud storage has taken the world by storm, and most people have taken to it in one form or another. There certainly is an abundance of cloud storage services these days and they all try to differentiate themselves by offering unique services. Dropbox is one of the most popular cloud storage services, and it wants to grow the capabilities of its offering. (more…)

Since the dawn of competitive and professional online gaming the “sport” has been plagued with cheating. To prevent this type of behaviour, players join professional E-Sports leagues like the E-sports Entertainment Association (ESEA). To join the ESEA a player must install their proprietary software. This software prevents players from cheating in popular competitive titles like Counter-Strike and League of Legends. So technically the ESEA acts as cyber referees within these popular sporting competitions. But who looks after the referees? What if some rogue ESEA employee uses their position for their own gain? (more…)

While 3D graphics in video games continues to advance, looking more realistic over time, the one element it seems that has not quite been perfected is that of water, with it not looking much like the real thing.

Well, that is all about to change with the development of a new fluid simulation algorithm called “Position Based Fluids” (PBD).

NVIDIA’s Miles Macklin and Matthias Müller-Fischer explain ”In fluid simulation, enforcing incompressibility is crucial for realism; it is also computationally expensive. (…) By formulating and solving a set of positional constraints that enforce constant density, our method allows similar incompressibility and convergence to modern smoothed particle hydrodynamic (SPH) solvers, but inherits the stability of the geometric, position based dynamics method, allowing large time steps suitable for real-time applications.”

(more…)

Metaio has announced the opening of an all-new office in Dallas, Texas as part of a company-wide initiative to invest resources into research and development of Augmented Reality (AR) core technologies.

At this year’s Mobile World Congress, Metaio announced the AREngine, the first-ever hardware IP dedicated to accelerating new Augmented Reality hardware interfaces, such as Google Glass.

Metaio and its network of clients and developers already benefit from an award-winning R&D team in its headquarters in Munich, Germany. As an expansion to the existing research efforts, the opening of the brand-new office in Dallas, Texas, will focus entirely on advancements and platform research in order to engineer the next generation of Augmented Reality software and devices.

“Optimizing the software helps, but it’s not enough,” said Metaio CTO Peter Meier. “In order to enable the kind of ‘Always On, Always Augmented’ future that every popular representation of Augmented Reality from Iron Man to Google Glass promises, the devices themselves need to be optimized at the chipset level.”

HP today announced it was selected by DreamWorks Animation to deliver the technology behind “The Croods,” pushing the boundaries of modern imagery for this prehistoric animated adventure that is anything but primitive. Building on a relationship that began in 2001, DreamWorks Animation relied on HP for nearly every facet of technology animation in the production of “The Croods.”

DreamWorks Animation leveraged technical resources throughout HP to create the most advanced graphics to date for the family comedy, which made its debut in South African theatres last Friday. HP Converged Infrastructure, comprising servers, storage, networking, services, management software and workstations, as well as HP printers and digital rendering, provided the seamless, high-performance foundation needed to meet the studio’s artistic demands.

“Cutting-edge digital manufacturing requires a huge amount of compute power and orchestrated collaboration across our studios,” said Derek Chan, head, Global Technology Operations, DreamWorks Animation. “HP Converged Infrastructure ensures that our filmmakers have the technical resources they require to bring their creative vision to life and deliver amazing films to our audiences.”

Servers meet massive compute demands (more…)

An early version of Windows Blue has recently become available online and The Verge has had the opportunity to test it out, taking a look at some of its new features.

We first reported on Windows Blue, when a source revealed to ZD Net that ‘Blue’ would be the codename for Microsoft’s next version of Windows.

The upgrade sees improvements to built-in apps and most noticeably to the user interface. Also included are updates to Mail, Calendar, and People to the level of 1.0.

Blue is likely to be released later this year.

(more…)

This is the truto one, introduced at the recent 2013 CeBIT International Trade Show that took place in Hannover, Germany. Developed by Cape Town based Bottomline Interactive and Human Interactive Technology, the truto one is the world’s first fully transparent display, capable of emitting full colour holographic images.

While transparent displays have been around for years, having been attempted by other companies, one colour had always been sacrificed to achieve the effect of transparency. Until now, one could never truly achieve a full colour display as the production of white and black was difficult because of the way the design employed technology.

The truto one changes that as the first completely transparent display with the ability to display rich, vivid and realistic colour. The truto one can also be combined with either touch or gesture based controls to interact with three holographic images.

(more…)