HTML5

Spanish start-up Aisoy Robotics is marketing a new robot that, while it may look similar to the famous Furby, is actually a fully programmable research and development platform. The Aisoy1 II robot comes with a variety of sensors (touch, light, position, temperature, and camera), microphone and speaker, a 70 mini-LED matrix display (for animated lips) and includes a dialogue system for speech recognition and synthesis, as well as computer vision software for face and object recognition, all running on the Linux operating system.  Read More

Along with the various new features to individual applications that mark any full revision to Adobe’s Creative Suite, this year’s CS6 release saw the introduction of a new subscription model called Adobe Creative Cloud. We recently had a chance to chat with Adobe Creative guru Michael Stoddart who walked us through some of the new changes implemented in CS6.  Read More

This year marks the 40th anniversary of Atari releasing its first arcade game. The name of that game was Pong, and although the gameplay consisted of nothing more than two paddles moved up and down to deflect a ball to the other side of the screen, it heralded the beginnings of a huge mainstream industry. What better way to celebrate that anniversary and the birth of the modern video game industry than by playing some Pong - and Missile Command, Centipede, and others - directly in your web browser thanks to Atari. With a little help from Microsoft.  Read More

A combined effort between researchers at the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and Google provides users with easy access to 13 years of NASA Landsat imagery of the Earth’s surface. The new capability within Google Earth Engine lets users zoom in and out on any spot on the globe, moving back and forth in time between 1999 and 2011.  Read More

Canada's QNX Software Systems wants to turn your car into the ultimate mobile device, complete with apps, infotainment, access to all your media and - of course - control of the car itself. To show how this concept might take shape, QNX put together a reference vehicle to demonstrate its "CAR 2" platform at the recent Telematics Detroit Conference.  Read More

Who says you need to now how to write code in order to create and sell your own iOS game? iStencyl is a program designed to allow you to create your web and iOS games without having any coding experience. The system lets you develop entire games using its block builder rather than code, however, it does support Objective-C for those who are code-savvy.  Read More

In April 2010, Steve Jobs’ outlined why Flash would not be permitted on iOS devices in his “Thoughts on Flash” open letter. While Jobs made some valid points in terms of Flash’s proprietary nature, security concerns, and the fact it drains the batteries of mobile devices, the popularity of the Skyfire 2.0 mobile web browser and standalone VideoQ Flash video player showed that there were still plenty of iOS users keen to Flash video on their mobile devices. Now Adobe has finally come to the party with its own solution that will allow Flash video content to be viewed directly within Safari on iOS devices. Because Adobe will use a similar technique to that of Skyfire, users of Android and Playbook mobile devices will also benefit in terms of battery life.  Read More

I'd forgive you for thinking that a 1993-era first-person shooter running in a web browser is not particularly worthy of Gizmag's attention, with the browser-based Quake Arena having been online since 2009. What makes this noteworthy is that while Quake Arena runs as compiled x86 code and a browser plugin, this Doom port relies solely on web standards like HTML5's Canvas element and Javascript. That sound you hear is an infinite number of high-school IT teachers groaning.  Read More

For the past couple of years, people wishing to create ultra-high-resolution panoramic photographs have been able to do so, using their own digital camera and a GigaPan robotic tripod. The device slowly pans the camera back and forth across a user-determined vista, triggering it to take up to several hundred shots in the process. The included software then stitches all the photos together – side-to-side and top-to-bottom – creating one big panorama, which retains its resolution even when details are zoomed in on, much like Google Earth. So, what could top that? Time-lapse videos created using GigaPan Time Machine software, as it turns out.  Read More