Photo

The folks over at GigaPan Systems, a collaboration between Google, Carnegie Mellon University and the NASA Ames Intelligent Robotics Group, have finally released to the public a new and very special toy. The GigaPan Epic mount is a robotic tripod for a standard digital camera that has the ability to create large panoramas and pictures with many magnitudes more detail than the average camera could take on its own. It works by positioning the camera automatically and taking potentially hundreds of photos. Specially designed software will then stitch the pictures together to create a seamless panorama which can be navigated and zoomed in on in the style of Google Earth, which has itself been upgraded to incorporate uploaded panorama’s into a layer that can be viewed in the mapping software. Read More

Samsung Electronics seem to be busy beavers of late, with new products landing on the shelves all over the place. The latest releases, just in time for PMA09, are the TL320 and HZ15W, the former featuring a hi-tech, hi-res three-inch AMOLED screen and the latter, a class beating 10x optical zoom. Read More

Air Photo is a new iPhone app that is sure to be handy for the multitude of iPhone users who use their device for taking photos. The app lets users browse through their photos and cuts out the Mac or PC middleman, enabling printing of photos directly from the iPhone. Simply install the Air Photo Server app onto your Mac or PC and the Air Photo app onto your iPhone and you’re ready to go. Read More

The PlayStation 3 Firmware 2.60 has been released, adding DivX 3.11 playback, a new photo gallery feature, and allowing guests without PlayStation Network accounts to access the PlayStation Store. Read More

Google has become by default the gatekeeper of global information for this generation, and the company frequently takes great pains to demonstrate how seriously it takes this responsibility. In the latest of a series of moves to catalogue and present the vast amount of human knowledge and achievement it doesn't already index, Google has harnessed some wonderful technology to present some of Europe's greatest artworks in 14 thousand-megapixel resolution. Using Google Earth, you can now browse through some of the finest works in Madrid's Prado museum in detail so fine that you can see every crack in the paint and almost smell the canvas. Read More

Good news if you're frustrated by iPhoto's limitations - Google Labs has just released a 'beta' version of its Picasa photo management system for the Apple OSX platform. Picasa will import a copy of the contents of the iPhoto library and offer an alternative management tool that includes the ability to manage and synchronise selected photos, with their comments and tags, with an online Picasa Web Albums photo gallery. The original iPhoto data is left alone, so you can try out the Picasa beta without fear of losing or modifying their original image files. Read More