As any attendee of Bay Area's Maker Faire can attest, jaw-dropping projects can be found in almost every nook and cranny of the San Mateo Fairgrounds where "burning man for nerds" has mades its home for the past eight years. That was absolutely true this year: tucked away in the corner of the darkened Fiesta Hall (where the Tesla coils and EL-wire projects typically live), and far away from the main Expo pavilion, was the booth of small startup Technical Illusions. You may not have heard about this company before, but its founders' former employer was Valve Software, and its team is composed of ex-engineers from Valve's disbanded hardware initiative. Jeri Ellsworth and Rick Johnson--with the blessing of Valve--were able to take the project they were working on and continue developing it as a commercial product. That project, augmented reality glasses called castAR, made its public debut this past weekend at Maker Faire, and we were able to test them out in early demos.

We spoke to both Jeri and Rick on camera about the development and their hopes for castAR, and will have that video on the site this week. But here's a quick explanation of how it works, what the experience is like, and why it's nothing at all like the Oculus Rift.

castAR is a pair of active shutter glasses, much like the stereoscopic 3D glasses that were popular before the passive polarized glasses used for most 3D TVs today. Each lens flickers at 120Hz, but instead of showing a 3D image that's displayed on a static TV or monitor, they're made to view images projected from the very glasses themselves, bouncing back toward the lenses from a special reflective surface. Two tiny pico-projectors sit on top of each lens to display left and right images, which are aligned so that you're always seeing a 3D image as long as you're looking at the reflective table surface--there's no framing around the image as there would be around a TV. That means no matter how you move your head around, you'll always see the "screen" since the projectors are moving along with your head.

But the special sauce that makes castAR work is head tracking.

The Google Maps update announced at this week's Google I/O Conference integrates the satellite view of Google Earth. It's 3D! It looks great! Of course, if you look closely, Google Maps' images will still have plenty of imperfections. At the street view level, photos are often blurry or awkwardly stitched together. That's the price we pay for total coverage, and the good news is that quality is constantly improving.

Making smarter maps, with more usable data, is Google's primary goal. The mission of another mapping service, named MapBox, is something very different. MapBox wants to make their maps gorgeous. The best looking on the web. And they're doing a pretty damn good job.

Image credit: Mapbox

Wired recently wrote a behind-the-scenes look at MapBox, a small team of about 30 using open mapping data to build a prettier, if not better, map. Their service is currently used on Foursquare and Evernote, and they've had other partners in the past. While MapBox isn't as big as Google Maps or Nokia Maps, they're gaining a foothold, and their use of totally open data allows for a lot of flexibility. The best part of the story is how they're getting that data, and what they're doing with it, which is where MapBox really differs from Google Maps.

MapBox's satellite imagery comes from NASA's LANCE-MODIS system, which is public domain. Here's challenge one, as Wired explains:

“ 'For the new release we’re processing two years of imagery, captured from January 1, 2011 through December 31, 2012,' says [MapBox's Charlie] Loyd, 'this amounts to over 339,000 16-megapixel+ satellite images, totaling more than 5,687,476,224,000 pixels. We boil these down to a mere 5 billion or so.'

"The first problem is even getting the data. It’s all available in the public domain, but just transferring it over to MapBox’s servers was a major task because of the volume. To do this render, they needed to download two thirds of a terabyte of compressed data. 'We’ve got 30 to 40 servers pulling down data from NASA,' says [data analyst] Herwig. 'We called them up and said, ‘hey we’re going to hit you hard, what’s the best way we can do it for you?' "

Dealing with a mere five billion pixels sounds like a huge challenge, but of course that's nothing new to companies that have mapped the entire Earth. Typically, the satellite imagery would be scanned, and the brightest, least-cloudy images would be chosen because they give the clearest view of a region. There's an obvious issue with this technique: images won't match up. Two locations side-by-side could be represented by photographs taken months or seasons apart.

MapBox wants a seamless, beautiful map. That takes a different approach.

Back in 2011, we wrote about why you should and shouldn't be excited for quantum computers, extremely complex computers that can handle algorithms traditional transistor-based computers aren't capable of. Here's another reason to be excited for quantum computing: Google and NASA have partnered up to run a laboratory studying artificial intelligence that will use a quantum computer.

"The Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab, as the entity is called, will focus on machine learning, which is the way computers take note of patterns of information to improve their output," writes The New York Times. "Personalized Internet search and predictions of traffic congestion based on GPS data are examples of machine learning. The field is particularly important for things like facial or voice recognition, biological behavior, or the management of very large and complex systems."

Photo credit: D-Wave

The Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab will open in the fall of this year with a quantum computer from D-Wave. Commercial quantum computing is a brand new field--D-Wave just sold its first quantum computer to Lockheed this year--and we could see some amazing results from quantum computing power in the next few years.

Tests last year found that a D-Wave quantum computer was 3600 times faster than a supercomputer. What does that mean, exactly? The Times does a good job of breaking down why quantum computers are so effective:

The meter sneers back at you, its bar only halfway filled. The red text is half warning, half condemnation. Password strength: Weak. What do you do? Maybe you delete your clearly unworthy password--a password you may have used on other sites. Or maybe you just go with it--what does that meter know, anyway?

According to a new scientific study written up on Ars Technica, password meters do actually have a positive effect on some people as they set up their passwords online. What's interesting is when password strength meters have a positive influence. When users are setting up passwords for new accounts, the meters don't really affect them, because they're most likely to just default to a password they've previously used. But when users are changing existing passwords on high-value accounts to improve their security, the strength meter encourages them to pick a password that earns a strong rating.

Photo credit: Flickr user formalfallacy via Creative Commons.

Even better: After two weeks, the study's participants who changed their passwords to be longer and more complex had no more trouble remembering them. Unfortunately, a couple negative statistics weigh down the findings. For one, meters appear rarely on pages for changing an existing password. And even worse, while the meters demonstrably do cause Internet users to aim for safer passwords, the rating system behind those meters isn't the best benchmark for security.

"the widely used zero-order entropy rating system is a poor metric for measuring the strength of passwords," writes Ars Technica. "The strength of the passcodes "Pa$$word1" and "$ecretPa$$word1" (minus the quotes) is 59.1bits and 98.5bits respectively. That's much higher than many passwords offer. What the scoring system fails to account for is that both passwords are so widely used that they're inevitably included in wordlists used in cracking attacks. These are among the first passwords to fall in typical cracking attacks. By contrast, the password "lkx8q2pe0" is considerably stronger because it would require time-consuming brute-force techniques to crack it, and yet it offers just 46.5 bits."

Ars goes into greater detail about the methodology of the test--check it out, and remember to enable two-factor authentication on your accounts when possible.

I like to build PCs. Not as much as our resident PC columnist, maybe, but I still get a real kick out of ordering a bunch of components and spending an afternoon putting a PC together. I think that earns me a little nerd cred. But you know what earns you a LOT of nerd cred? Building a fully functioning PC—in Minecraft.

My favorite thing about projects like these are that not only are they an incredible example of the maker spirit, they’re a great teaching tool for something a lot of people don’t understand—how, at a deep level, the computer they use every day actually works. Today, we're going to look at some of the crazy things people build in Minecraft and other video games, and how they explain some of the most fundamental lessons of computer science.

The Basics of Turing Machines

If you spend very long hanging out in the sorts of seedy places people where gather to discuss building virtual computers, you’re going to hear the term “Turing Machine” thrown around. For instance, you might have seen that somebody built a Turing Machine in Dwarf Fortress but I’ll be damned if you’re going to be able to figure out what that thing does just from looking at the diagram.

So let’s talk a bit about Turing Machines. It’s a complicated topic, but also a tenant of modern computer science—so if you can pick this up, consider your daily enrichment quota fulfilled.

Photo credit: Flickr user maria_keays via Creative Commons.

A Turing Machine is a conceptual machine composed of four parts:

Everyone who can use a computer is familiar with the QWERTY keyboard layout. After all, it was the typewriter QWERTY layout before it made the jump to computer keyboards. Most people have probably heard the story of why the QWERTY layout came to be, too--supposedly, when keys were first arranged alphabetically on a 19th century typewriter, the most commonly used letter combinations would create some problems. This is the story Wikipedia tells: "characters were mounted on metal arms or typebars, which would clash and jam if neighboring arms were pressed at the same time or in rapid succession." Thus the keyboard layout was carefully arranged to minimize problematic arrangements and keep typewriters functioning without nasty jams.

But that might not be the truth. Smithsonian Mag has taken an interesting dive into the history of the typewriter and the QWERTY layout, and there are some flaws in the old story. For example: why are E and R adjacent, when "ER" is one of the most commonly used letter combinations in the English language? Smithsonian Mag turned up a lot more in their research.

Photo credit: Flickr user theloushe via Creative Commons

One theory is that the keyboard layout was influenced by Morse code. "Kyoto University Researchers Koichi Yasuoka and Motoko Yasuoka...tracked the evolution of the typewriter keyboard alongside a record of its early professional users," writes Smithsonian. "They conclude that the mechanics of the typewriter did not influence the keyboard design."

Here's what the researchers had to say about QWERTY:

Combining the Oculus Rift with an omni-directional treadmill is the closest approximation of the Holodeck the technology community has been able to whip up so far. It's still not quite so immersive as Star Trek: The Next Generation's impossibly perfect simulator, but it's not a bad first step. But it's hard to say if we'll ever reach that goal. As Valve discussed at this year's Game Developers Conference, virtual reality technology still has a long way to go on technical challenges like latency and resolution. And a recent study from io9 highlights an entirely different challenge that stands between VR and the holodeck: thoroughly fooling the brain's sense of "place."

The study focused on the brain's hippocampus, which includes cells referred to as "place cells." Another study io9 referenced explains their importance: "More than three decades of research have demonstrated a role for hippocampal place cells in representation of the spatial environment in the brain. New studies have shown that place cells are part of a broader circuit for dynamic representation of self-location...place cells and grid cells may form the basis for quantitative spatiotemporal representation of places, routes, and associated experiences during behavior and in memory."

To test out how the brain deals with its spatial environment, scientists started with rats in a maze. When rats are first dropped into a maze, their place cells light up as they map out their new surroundings. The rats seemed to do this quickly and easily, so the scientists conducted an experiment: Could the rats just as easily map their surroundings in a virtual environment? Writes io9:

For the study, the researchers tried to create two apparently identical worlds, one real (RW) and one virtual (VR). Each environment consisted of a linear track in the center of a square room with distinct visual cues on each of the four walls. These cues were nearly identical in both environments, but the rats' bodies were fixed in VR — thus minimizing (or even eliminating) other important spatial cues, like balance. So, the only incoming environmental data during VR exposure were the visual cues and self-motion.

The study's results showed a big gap between how rats perceived the real world and the virtual world. Here are a couple excerpts that are pretty easy to understand:

Web security experts have said many times that a longer password is better security--so long as you're using different passwords on different sites. Imayankeedoodledandy would be harder to crack than yank33, even without numbers or symbols. But sometimes we can't make longer passwords because, with little explanation, different websites have different restrictions in place that govern what can and can't go into a password. Ars Technica asked a few such companies to explain their password policies, and the answers they got aren't especially appeasing.

Some sites support passwords up to 64 characters with few descriptions. Evernote, for example, allows 64 character passwords and all symbols, but not spaces. And their explanation for this held up pretty well. Ars writes:

" 'Software needs to precisely determine how to treat leading and trailing spaces,' Dave Engberg, Evernote’s CTO, told Ars. 'Some UI frameworks and third-party applications would unreliably trim spaces, others would not.'

Adding support for spaces only in the middle of the password would make the regular expression defining them three times longer, Engberg said. And for that extra effort, the entropy (uncertainty of what character holds any given position in the password) would increase by only 1.5 percent.

One explanation is that phishing, malware, and password reuse are far bigger problems than password length.

Restrictions from other companies make less sense. Microsoft allows numbers, letters and symbols, but passwords have to be between 8 and 16 characters. AT&T allows between 8 and 24 characters, but only the symbols _ and - because "customers did not like typing them when using mobile phones." And Ars discovered that banking company Charles Schwab, which probably deals with the most vital information of the sites listed here, requires that passwords be between 6 and 8 characters. No explanation was given.

Microsoft's explanation was that phishing, malware, and password reuse are far bigger problems than password length. And that's probably true, but responsible passworders are only hampered by upper limit restrictions, especially when those limits are as small as 8 characters. Read the rest of the Ars Technica story for some reasons why short password restrictions can imply greater security issues, like companies storing passwords themselves, potentially leaving them vulnerable to hacking.

Last week, sci-fi author William Gibson made a special appearance at the New York Public Library to talk for an hour and a half about writing, his life, and science fiction. Gibson wasn't there to promote a new book--his next novel, tentatively titled The Periphery--so the talk ranges from one interesting subject to another. The first 40 minutes of Gibson's discussion with the NYPL host often mirror the personal essays in his nonfiction collection Distrust That Personal Flavor--growing up disassociated from the culture of Virginia he grew up in, reading William S. Burroughs, and the "literary DNA" that informed his life and writing.

Around the 40 minute mark the subject moves towards how Gibson developed his concept of cyberspace. He talks about how, as he began writing, he knew he didn't want his sci-fi to follow the same path of the science fiction he'd been reading as a kid, with a focus on space travel. His observations of the world around him--arcades, Apple II computers, and how people interacted with those things--led him to imagine a more immersive virtual space. Cyberspace, as he'd go on to name it.

Photo credit: Flickr user Gilly Youner.

Gibson also talked about how music and rock musicians gave a "voice" to his protagonists and writing.

"I came to science fiction as to an abandoned but handsome municipal building, and going, 'Huh, this could be a nightclub,' " he said. "Really, in the late 70s, I hadn't been reading science fiction except for a few favorites who I felt transcended it...and when I thought, maybe I should try writing science fiction, I went and bought a bunch of contemporary science fiction. I felt like somebody who'd grown up on Texas swing discovering Nashville country. I was going, damn, this used to be a viable pop form, you could kick ass with this stuff in the 1960s. What the hell happened? And I thought, well, it's an opportunity...But then when I started trying to put my own science fiction together, it wasn't as though these characters were springing fully-formed from my brow. I couldn't even figure out how to do characters. But Springsteen, who's a superb writer of fiction as a lyricist, and an absolute master of terse but intense characterization, gave me that. Lou Reed as well. And David Bowie's album Diamond Dogs."

At around 75 minutes, Gibson revealed that he's about "a third of the way through a novel that's probably called The Peripheral. He broke from his tradition of secrecy while working on new books to not only talk about The Peripheral, but to read from it. The concept sounds as ambitiously layered, if not moreso, than Gibson's previous novels: Gibson recently tweeted that the novel is about "drones, outsourcing, telepresence, trailer parks, kleptocracy, fabbing...New novel's an sf turducken: it's got sf *inside* its sf, and arguably a loosey-goosey science-fantasy core."

Skip to about 77 minutes in Gibson's talk at the New York Public Library to hear a passage from the new book. Gibson will alternate between two "voices" in the book--two different central protagonists--which is a common narrative structure in his books. But here's something different: while one character will be set in a world about 30 years ahead of our own, the second character is set far further in the future, which Gibson says is much harder to write. We can't wait to read it.

Mobile carriers like Verizon and AT&T hand out free cellphones like candy. Even a perfectly decent smartphone like the iPhone 4 costs a fat 0 dollars--so long as you're willing to pay for a two year contract to the tune of at least $80 per month, that is. In China, a free phone is something different altogether. On his blog, inventor and hardware expert Bunnie Huang (who's previously written about Chinese manufacturing) asks "how cheap can you make a phone?" Then he answers his own question: less than 10 bucks.

Photo credit: Bunnie Huang

"Recently, I paid $12 at Mingtong Digital Mall for a complete phone, featuring quad-band GSM, Bluetooth, MP3 playback, and an OLED display plus keypad for the UI," Huang writes. The tiny phone is aesthetically rooted in the 90s--it's cast from green, translucent plastic and has fat, gel-looking buttons below its tiny screen--but it's still far more compact (and much faster) than any cellphone sold in the Nokia age.

It's an unbelievable deal. For $12, Huang got an unlocked, contract free phone in a box with a charger, cable and protective sleeve. How can it be so cheap? Huang writes that he's not sure yet, but he's piecing the answer together. For one thing, there's almost no wiring in the phone. "Everything from the display to the battery is soldered directly to the board," he writes. "The electronics consists of just two major ICs: the Mediatek MT6250DA, and a Vanchip VC5276...The MT6250 is rumored to sell in volume for under $2." The phone's plastic case is also designed to simply snap together, with no screws needed to hold it in place.

For $12, Huang got an unlocked, contract free phone in a box with a charger, cable and protective sleeve.

Huang compared the $12 phone to a $29 Arduino, noting that the phone has a 260 MHz, 32-bit CPU compared to the Arduino Uno's 16MHz, 8-bit processor. It has 8MB of RAM compared to the Arduino's 2.5 kilobytes. It has a battery and a two-color display. Obviously the two devices serve very different purposes, but the phone is an amazing piece of engineering for its price.

The blog post concludes by discussing the gongkai, or "open," ecosystem in China, comparing it to the unique and independent ecosystem of the Galapagos Islands. It's an interesting perspective on the technological progress being made in China's open source market. "Gongkai isn’t a totally lawless free-for-all. It’s a network of ideas, spread peer-to-peer, with certain rules to enforce sharing and to prevent leeching," he writes. "It’s very different from Western IP concepts, but I’m trying to have an open mind about it."

What would Toy Story have looked like if it was made in 1980? A vision of Buzz and Woody generated in 1980s-caliber 3D graphics may come to mind as you read Pixar co-founder Alvy Ray Smith's new Wired column How Pixar Used Moore's Law to Predict the Future. Smith writes about how human progress is tied to the concept of Moore's Law, and how Pixar's founders knew they wanted to make computer-generated movies as far back at the 1970s. The technology simply wasn't ready, at the time. So they waited.

"As early as the late 1970s, one of our colleagues Lance Williams proposed a computer-animated story starring a robot named ipso facto," he writes. "But Ed [Catmull, now president of Walt Disney Animation Studios] and I whipped out the proverbial envelope and did some calculations: given the computation rates of the time, we figured it would take billions of dollars and years of time to make the movie." Billions of dollars.

Pixar won a Best Animated Short Oscar for the computer-animated Tin Toy in 1988.

Smith writes that they weren't able to extrapolate how long it would take to make their movies, despite knowing Moore's Law would see transistor density double every 18 months. They didn't know enough about about making movies or about the technology they'd need--only that it wouldn't exist for a long time.

They tried again in the 1980s, but again, computers weren't ready for what Pixar had in mind.

"When the group moved to California to become part of Lucasfilm, we got close to making a computer-animated movie again in the mid-1980s — this time about a monkey with godlike powers but a missing prefrontal cortex. We had a sponsor, a story treatment, and a marketing survey. We were prepared to make a screen test: Our hot young animator John Lasseter had sketched numerous studies of the hero monkey and had the sponsor salivating over a glass-dragon protagonist.

But when it came time to harden the deal and run the numbers for the contracts, I discovered to my dismay that computers were still too slow: The projected production cost was too high and the computation time way too long. We had to back out of the deal. This time, we did know enough detail to correctly apply Moore’s Law — and it told us that we had to wait another five years to start making the first movie."

That movie would eventually become Toy Story, and the rest is successful Pixar history. Smith's post goes on to talk about the philosophy behind Moore's Law; he argues that it's a limitation of imagination, rather than a physical barrier, that stands between inventors and each new generation of technology.

As an idea, self-driving cars perform a rare balancing act, like a stunt car staying up on two wheels; they immediately conjure up slick science fiction like I, Robot and Minority Report, which we associate with cool, but they also make us think of safety, as fleets of autonomous cars would cut down on accidents caused by driver error. Google proudly proclaims that its self-driving cars have traveled more than 300,000 miles without incident. It's incredible technology, but self-driving cars will still need years and probably decades of fine-tuning, and much more sophisticated artificial intelligence, to truly replace human drivers' ability to react to the unexpected.

While we're eagerly awaiting self-driving cars, automakers are busy working smaller automation systems into their newest cars. And as a detailed article on Technology Review points out, this transitionary period between relatively little automation and full automation will especially dangerous and challenging.

Photo credit: Google

Technology Review's Will Knight writes: How to make sure autonomy meshes with human behavior is a topic that Don Norman, a cognitive scientist and product design consultant, explores in depth in his 2007 book The Design of Future Things. Norman foresees many potential problems with more autonomous cars; in fact, he points out, some have already cropped up. He describes how he worked with automakers whose adaptive cruise control systems would automatically speed a car up as a driver entered an off-ramp, because the ramp was free of traffic; or they would suddenly slow a car down if the driver pulled in close behind another car while changing lanes, thereby forcing the car behind to brake suddenly as well. 'Fully automatic control will be safer,' he writes. 'The difficulty lies in the transition toward full automation, when only some things will be automated.'

Knight touches on several examples of autonomous controls in cars today. The Ford Fusion, for example, uses adaptive cruise control to keep pace with the car in front of it, so long as that car doesn't exceed a set speed, and it uses a Lane-Keeping System to show the driver where the car is situated in the lane. If the car drifts too far towards the edge of its lane, the steering wheel will move of its own volition, gently nudging the car back towards the center.

These are examples of good features--features that make driving easier and safer--but getting them just right is obviously challenging, as Don Norman mentioned above. And autonomous systems can lead to another problem: Inattentive drivers. Studies have shown that too many distractions are dangerous when driving (a fact which surprises no one), but too few things to pay attention to will also leave drivers unprepared to respond quickly.

Too few things to pay attention to will also leave drivers unprepared to respond quickly.

Knight references a 2011 Federal Aviation Administration report that "suggested that overreliance on automation may have contributed to several recent crashes involving pilot error." Could the same thing happen to drivers? Probably. At the very least, autonomous systems will have to be better at taking human capabilities and shortcomings into account. Here's Knight describing the experience of using an automated parallel parking system:

"The system identifies a suitable spot and then executes a near-perfect reversing maneuver while the driver operates the brake. It was unnerving, at first, to see the steering wheel spin violently as the car backed into an empty spot, but I also marveled at how flawlessly it worked.

This experience also hinted at the biggest challenge for increased vehicle automation: how to merge human and machine abilities effectively.

Airplane security revolves around preventing hijackers from commandeering planes with weapons or explosives. But a recent presentation from the Hack in the Box conference in Amsterdam makes us wonder if another type of hijacking altogether poses a threat to airplane security. At the conference, security consultant Hugo Teso claimed to be able to hack into the Flight Management System computers of certain aircraft with two tools he's written. Teso demonstrated being able to take control of virtual aircraft with his exploit framework SIMON and Android app PlaneSploit.

Here's a disturbing image, if ever there was one: someone casually pulls out their Android phone on a flight, takes control of the plane with a simple app, and sends it crashing to the ground with a few taps.

Photo credit: Flickr user sebastiansuk via Creative Commons.

Now for the obvious question: Is this even possible? Is Teso completely exaggerating the real-world applications of hacking Flight Management Systems? The Android app PlaneSploit is only an easy-to-use front end for SIMON, Teso's exploit. It's hard to know exactly how something in the virtual world applies to the physical.

Net-Security.org writes "Teso developed the SIMON framework that is deliberately made only to work in a virtual environment and cannot be used on real-life aircrafts. His testing laboratory consists of a series of software and hardware products, but the connection and communication methods, as well as ways of exploitation, are absolutely the same as they would be in an actual real-world scenario.

Since it's nearly impossible to detect the framework once deployed on the Flight Management System, there is no need to disguise it like a rootkit. By using SIMON, the attacker can upload a specific payload to the remote FMS, upload flight plans, detailed commands or even custom plugins that could be developed for the framework."

Image credit: Hugo Teso

The slides from Teso's presentation are available online. The presentation includes a couple worrisome statements--specifically, that ADS-B, the automatic dependent surveillance broadcast system, and ACARS, the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, have no security. Hacking into those systems could grant someone access to flight report data, interfere with communication between air traffic control and the airplane, or spoofing plane instruments.

And this isn't the first time someone has written about exploiting ADS-B.

Watch your back, Siri--the Department of Engineering at Cambridge is coming for you. University researchers working in collaboration with Toshiba published a story on Tuesday about Zoe, the "face of the future." Zoe is a disembodied talking head--she might bring to mind Mario's cheery mug from the title screen of Mario 64--but the big breakthrough with Zoe is how many emotions she can subtly and not-so-subtly express. The Cambridge team claim she's the most expressive system designed for human-machine interaction, and their eventual goal is to use Zoe's technology to turn anyone's face and voice into a disembodied digital avatar.

To create Zoe, the team enlisted the help of U.K. actress Zoë Lister. She recorded several thousand sentences while expressing six unique emotions--happy, sad, angry, tender, afraid, and neutral. They also used face tracking and computer vision to scan Zoë's face while she talked, then used that data to pair visible emotions with the audio tracks. The resulting computer program can do more than express six emotions--those emotions can be combined to create more nuanced tones, like hurried or nervous.

Given her range, it's easy to see Zoe replacing other voice-based interfaces. She still speaks with a noticeable computerized affectation, but it's also easy to detect emotional shifts in her voice. Zoe's developers say her program is only 10s of megabytes in size, and their true goal is making it possible for users to create avatars of themselves with the same expressiveness:

“It took us days to create Zoe, because we had to start from scratch and teach the system to understand language and expression, [said Professor Roberto Cipolla]. "Now that it already understands those things, it shouldn’t be too hard to transfer the same blueprint to a different voice and face.”

...The framework behind “Zoe” is also a template that, before long, could enable people to upload their own faces and voices - but in a matter of seconds, rather than days. That means that in the future, users will be able to customise and personalise their own, emotionally realistic, digital assistants.

We're likely still a long ways off from being able to capture Zoe's range of emotion from a few self-shot photographs and self-recorded voice clips, but the team's success so far is impressive. One of the suggested applications--helping deaf and autistic children read lips and emotions--could be a wonderful use of this technology beyond the cool-but-unnecessary realm of smartphone assistants.

Check out the engineering department's video below to get a look at Zoe's real face--it's not nearly as creepy as her wireframe model--and learn more about how the project came together.

A new body-based authentication system from a company called Microchip Technology could be used to secure--and to some degree personalize--personal possessions like guns and smartphones. The system uses the human body as a conductor of electricity between a unique device like a handgun and a keyfob in the owner's pocket. Think of it as a wireless communication system that accomplishes the same goal as James Bond's palmprint smart gun in Skyfall or Judge Dredd's Lawgiver, but minus the movie slickness.

As reported by Technology Review, the technology's called BodyCom. It's built to be cheaper and simpler than other similar authentication technologies, and obviously it lacks the sophistication of palm-coded sci-fi weapons. Safety goes out the window as soon as the wrong person gets ahold of the fob, since the technology doesn't distinguish between people.

But at a time when gun security is a hot topic, that simplicity could give BodyCom a leg up over other smart guns. The rest of the field hasn't caught up with James Bond's technology, either--rather than reading palms, they typically rely on a magnetic ring worn by the gun owner. A newer design requires users to type a pin code into a watch before firing.

BodyCom works with capacitive technology a bit like the smartphone screens we tap and swipe every day. When you touch a base unit--that would be a gun, in our earlier example--it sends a 125 kilohertz signal through your body to the fob presumably located in your pocket. That device then responds with an 8MHz signal that gives the all-clear.

There's no reason the technology needs to be used just for guns.

The real appeal of BodyCom is its flexibility. There's no reason the technology needs to be used for guns, necessarily. As Microchip Technology points out, it could be used to unlock your front door by touch, arm or disarm a security system, or grant access to dangerous power tools. They claim it would cost only $3-4 to add to existing devices, and they're selling dev kits for only $150.

And one of the existing implementation of BodyCom is actually pretty cool.

It's 2009, and the Blu-ray Disc Association has a problem. Hollywood is gaga over 3D. Coraline and Monsters vs. Aliens try to sell families on 3D early in the year, while My Bloody Valentine 3D and The Final Destination grab the teenage market. And then in December, James Cameron's Avatar becomes the box office phenomenon Hollywood expected it to be. Thanks to 3D ticket premiums, the movie goes on to earn $2.7 billion worldwide. But Blu-ray doesn't do 3D...yet. So the Blu-ray Disc Association set out to update the specification for an install base of 10 million households.

"Blu-ray is unique in that it's the first package media format I've worked with--and I've worked with every one since LaserDisc back in 1980s--it's the first one we've had with an adaptable format," says Andy Parsons, a Blu-ray Disc Association spokesperson and Senior VP at Pioneer. "No one changed the CD spec to add functionality. No one changed DVD spec to add functionality. When 3D came along, we said 'we'd like to add 3D. Is it technologically feasible, is it possible?' "

Indeed it was. On December 17, 2009, the day before Avatar opened in the United States, the Blu-ray Disc Association announced it had finalized a specification for Blu-ray 3D. The Disc Association went from investigating the possibility of 3D Blu-ray to releasing that specification in eight months. "That was a world record, I think," adds Parsons. He's proud, and with good reason--it took less than a year to add a new dimension to Blu-rays, something that had never been done with CD or DVD or VHS or LaserDisc.

But now it's three years later, and 3D is still a divisive medium. It no longer has the easy selling power to guarantee a movie like My Bloody Valentine 3D a $100 million box office. On December 12, 2012, Peter Jackson's The Hobbit hit the silver screen, bringing with it the most significant technological advance since Avatar sold the world on 3D. The film was shot and released at 48 frames per second, double the traditional frame rate of a century of cinema.

But this time, there's no new Blu-ray spec waiting to usher in a generation of high frame rate films. And despite the proliferation of 4K TVs at this year's Consumer Electronics Show, there's no specification for 4K Blu-ray, either. There's no doubt that Blu-ray will evolve again to keep up with Hollywood's next big thing. But will it be 4K? Or HFR? Or H.265?

As Parsons explains, adding any of those features to Blu-ray will be a whole lot of work.

Where's my 48 fps Hobbit Blu-ray?

Avatar was huge for 3D, but Cameron didn't have to justify 3D all by his lonesome. In ushering in a new frame rate, The Hobbit doesn't have the same pull that 3D did. A relatively small percentage of theaters actually showed the film at 48 fps, and many viewers had trouble adapting to high frame rate footage (but that's another story). It's not too surprising, then, that we won't be seeing The Hobbit on Blu-ray at 48 fps--at least, not anytime soon.

"If you go in and add something like HFR to the spec, you want to make sure it works," says Parsons." That responsibility lies with the "format extension study task force," which the Blu-ray Disc Association established in 2012. It's a new group, but they're doing the same work that the BDA had to do back in 2009, when it weighed the prospect of 3D Blu-ray: Studying "technical feasibility, market demand evaluation, and impact on the install base." 50 million US households are now equipped with Blu-ray players.

Market demand evaluation is an easy one to figure out, here: One movie won't cut it. But what about technical feasibility? Trickier to diagnose.

HDMI doesn't support 48 fps, and TVs would need a firmware update to properly process the signal anyway.

"[We were able to] make [Blu-ray 3D] in such a way, that it...could play like a 2D disc in a 2D player," Parsons says. "If they had a 2D player it would turn out 2D, if you had a 3D player it would play in 3D...Perhaps we could do something like that with HFR." But, he adds, "Not all studios made 3D discs work that way." Some movie studios--Disney, for example--choose to release their films in combo packs, and those 3D versions won't play on 2D disc players.

If possible, the BDA wants to avoid adding features that will only work on certain players. 3D is, for the most part, backwards compatible. But HFR isn't just a problem for the Blu-ray Disc Association to solve. The current HDMI spec doesn't specify support for 48 fps (it can do 50, which isn't quite the same), and TVs would, best case scenario, need a firmware update to properly process the signal. In other words, even if you got a 48 fps Blu-ray, you might not be able to watch it.

The Oculus Rift bears a heavy burden of expectation. After a strong showing at E3 2012, the developer prototype VR helmet raked in $2.5 million in Kickstarter funding. Suddenly, the 80s dream of fully immersive virtual reality with head tracking and high definition displays seems within our grasp. And it's actually affordable. But will it be good enough?

In 1990, a VR setup far inferior to the Oculus Rift would've cost tens of thousands of dollars. Oculus Rift brings us so much closer to feasible virtual reality that the shortcomings of the technology will become glaringly apparent. It's sort of like the ninety-ninety rule: Finishing the last 10 percent of a project can take just as long as the first 90 percent. For virtual reality, overcoming latency will be that final challenge.

Photo Credit: NASA.

Valve's Michael Abrash posted a detailed blog in December about the challenges of latency in virtual reality. Just as our brains react differently to different framerates in film, they react differently to regular computer displays and virtual reality setups that encompass our full vision.

"When it comes to VR and AR, latency is fundamental – if you don’t have low enough latency, it’s impossible to deliver good experiences, by which I mean virtual objects that your eyes and brain accept as real," writes Abrash. "By 'real,' I don’t mean that you can’t tell they’re virtual by looking at them, but rather that your perception of them as part of the world as you move your eyes, head, and body is indistinguishable from your perception of real objects. The key to this is that virtual objects have to stay in very nearly the same perceived real-world locations as you move; that is, they have to register as being in almost exactly the right position all the time. Being right 99 percent of the time is no good, because the occasional mis-registration is precisely the sort of thing your visual system is designed to detect, and will stick out like a sore thumb."

Abrash says that most games operate fine with 50ms or more of lag between the movement of a mouse and action happening on screen. But when you throw in head tracking and screens that totally blot out the world, our visual expectations change. 50ms won't cut it.

"With AR/VR, all the [brain] processing power that originally served to detect anomalies that might indicate the approach of a predator or the availability of prey is brought to bear on bringing virtual images that are wrong by more than a tiny bit to your attention. That includes images that shift when you move, rather than staying where they’re supposed to be – and that’s exactly the effect that latency has.

"Suppose you rotate your head at 60 degrees/second. That sounds fast, but in fact it’s just a slow turn; you are capable of moving your head at hundreds of degrees/second. Also suppose that latency is 50 ms and resolution is 1K x 1K over a 100-degree FOV. Then as your head turns, the virtual images being displayed are based on 50 ms-old data, which means that their positions are off by three degrees, which is wider than your thumb held at arm’s length. Put another way, the object positions are wrong by 30 pixels. Either way, the error is very noticeable."

Predictive head tracking offers a solution--pre-rendering the image for where players will look before they turn their heads--but it's extremely difficult for interactive games. Players may move unpredictably, and it's hard to know when they'll stop moving. Inaccurate prediction is worse than none at all.

So where does that leave the Oculus Rift?

10,000 license plates per day: That's about how many IDs the Long Beach Police Department's new Automatic License Plate Recognition technology can make in a single shift, when a police car is driven through highly trafficked areas. A video from PIPS Technology details the system, which multiple police departments are implementing in their fleets of police cars.

The ALPR systems runs on four cameras which are constantly recording, and a computer system in the car runs optical character recognition on each recorded plate to identify the license. That data is then run against multiple databases: stolen vehicles, wanted felony vehicles, and so on.

For comparison, the Long Beach PD says an officer driving around and manually inputting plates into a computer system could identify only 150-200 plates per day. ALPR ups that number to between 5,000 and 10,000. The city of Claremont, California has also set up some ALPR systems in static locations to keep an eye on highly traveled roads.

It's cool technology, but also a little unnerving. Maker sure not to rack up too many unpaid parking tickets: If a Long Beach PD car scans your plate and finds you've neglected to pay five tickets, they'll tow your car and make you pay up.