Ratchet Up

Way Big "Last Supper"

There's a huge new reproduction of "The Last Supper" on line, another bookmark for your "pixels vs. print" folder:

"At 16 billion pixels, the image is 1,600 times stronger than those produced by a typical 10 million pixel digital camera.

The high-resolution allows art lovers to view details of the 15th century painting as though they were centimetres away from the work.

Details of the painting that can now been seen include traces of drawings Leonardo put down before the painting.

The move will no doubt spark excitement among conspiracy theorists, who have long debated the content of the Last Supper.

In July, an Italian amateur scholar claimed the painting contained a hidden image of a woman holding a child.

The figure, he said, appeared when the fresco was superimposed with its mirror image and both were made partially transparent." [Telegraph]

Nokia's “Point And Find”

You may have come across the notion of shooting a picture of a visual bar-code like object which in turn triggers a web page or some other action. I'm thinking here of something like a QR Code.

Well, Nokia is about to offer something similar, but without the code. Which is a great idea, since who really wants a world with QR tags stuck all over it?

As revealed at their current The Way We Live Next convening, it's in the works.

Nokia's Point & Find lets people point a camera phone at an object or picture and find out more about it or buy it just by clicking once when its name comes up on the screen.

It works by linking a set of image properties with a URL for information about what's in the image. When a user points the phone's camera at something, the system compares what the viewfinder sees with sets of image properties in a database. Also taking into consideration the user's location, it then delivers useful information about what the user is looking at.

For example, pointing the phone at a movie poster and pressing a key could make a page pop up that offers an ad for the movie and a way to buy a ticket at the theater nearest the user.

Pointing the phone at the street might bring up a contact page for a local cab company. The system could give retailers, transit agencies, manufacturers, and others the chance to reach consumers while making it easier and more intuitive for consumers to find things.“ [Pondering Primate]

Eye In The Sky: Police Use Drone To Spy

British police used a remote-controlled spy drone to watch crowds as an outdoor festival this month. It was the first deployment for such a device in public.

The 70cm-wide flying surveillance device, fitted with high-resolution still and colour video cameras as well as infrared night vision capability, was used to keep tabs on people thought to be acting suspiciously in car parks and to gather intelligence on individuals in the crowd. [...]

The battery-operated drone's four carbon-fibre rotors are so quiet they cannot be heard from the ground once it is higher than 50 metres, and at 100 metres up it cannot be seen with the naked eye. It can fly 500 metres high, but the Civil Aviation Authority has set an operating limit of 120 metres. The vehicle, which takes off vertically, can be flown even when out of sight, because it beams images back to video goggles worn by the operator. [...]

One tactic is to fly the drone over groups of young people causing a nuisance in parks. The force has also used it for covert surveillance. [...]

The Metropolitan police is interested in using drones to police the Olympics. Firearms officers also believe they could be useful in a standoff with armed criminals

MW Power, the company that distributes the technology in the UK, plans to improve the drone's capability by adding a so-called “smart water” spray - a liquid infused with unique artificial DNA sequences which can be squirted on to a suspect from above. It infuses their clothes and skin and the DNA code can be used later to identify them.

There is no legal barrier preventing a private security firm or a paparazzo photographer from using the technology, but MW Power said that it was only licensing the vehicle to customers from the military or emergency services. It costs less than £1,000 a month to lease - an amount that would buy less than an hour's use of a conventional helicopter.

Some experts fear it represents an unwarranted intrusion of privacy.“ [Source]

Ending Visual Clutter

The danger of clutter--especially on a visual screen--is that it causes confusion that affects how well we perform tasks. To that end, visual clutter is a challenge for fighter pilots picking out a target, for people seeking important information in a user interface, and for web site and map designers, among others.

Now, a team of MIT scientists has identified a way to measure visual clutter. Their research, published Aug. 16 in the Journal of Vision, could lead to more user-friendly displays and maps, as well as tips for designers seeking to add an attention-grabbing element to a display. [...]

The fact that one person's clutter is the next person's organized workspace makes it hard to come up with a universal measure of clutter. Rosenholtz and colleagues modeled what makes items in a display harder or easier to pick out. They used this model, which incorporates data on color, contrast and orientation, to come up with a software tool to measure visual clutter. [...]

... [the] clutter detector correlates well with human subjective judgments of clutter. In that case, the team asked 20 people to rank 25 maps of the United States and San Francisco in order from most cluttered to least cluttered. The maps ranged from a gray and green map of the 50 states to a San Francisco Bay area map overlaid with lines, words and colors.

Although there was a fair bit of disagreement among the people being tested about what constituted clutter, when the researchers compared results from their clutter measure to those of their human subjects, they found a good correlation. [...]

Rosenholtz next plans to offer this visual clutter tool, as well as other tools developed in her lab, to designers as part of a user study. She hopes to learn what insights designers get from knowledge of how a user will likely perceive their designs, and how best to present this information to the designers. [...]

...free software written in MATLAB to anyone interested in generating color and contrast “clutter maps” to gauge the clutter level of a display. The tool is available at hdl.handle.net/1721.1/37593.“ [MIT via Boing Boing]