Displair fog presents its multitouch screen

How far are we from achieving the advanced interfaces that can be seen in the movie Minority Report? Well, we are not very far indeed. The mist screens are not new, but Displair surprised us all two years ago when he unveiled a prototype fog screen with multitouch interface. But now the company has officially unveiled this technology and who have attended the 2013 CES will prove rotten.
This system, which is a little simpler than it appears, makes use of three things: the fog screen, a projector and an infrared camera.
Demonstrations have been held in the CES showed Displair screen with a projection of Windows 7 on it. A PlayStation Eye camera connected to the PC via USB is used to project an infrared light on the projection.
And we are almost ready. Now we just have to load an application like Google Earth or if we feel like we can give a little more realism to Fruit Ninja slicing fruits like they're in the air.

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Possible pyramids in Egypt discovered using images from Google Earth

Google Earth could be the tool of a new historical discovery. As a researcher, an expert in this type of satellite images, Google's service complexes show two unknown pyramids in Egypt.
The Internet giant images show several mounds whose form suggests that it could try to pyramids and were discovered by Angela Micol who has over 10 years doing archaeological research by satellite.
One of the sites shows a formation three times larger than the Great Pyramid of Giza with a width of about 189 meters, depending on the Discovery Channel website. Meanwhile, another resort is a little smaller but still significant at 76 meters, still on the Great Pyramid.
The researcher points out that these sites were found using satellite images of Google Earth and would not have been discovered so far by other researchers as expert Egyptologist and pyramid Nabil Selim. What is missing now is the next step obviously includes a field study of those places.
This is not the first time that archeology uses Google Earth to find new places. An example is the Australian scientist, David Kennedy, University of Western Australia, who identified 1977 sites as potential archaeological sites in Saudi Arabia through this tool.

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Google Earth now in 3D and iOS 5

 

The app of Google Earth for iPhone OS 5 has just received a great update. From now on, we can enjoy 3D buildings in the popular Google application. This new 3D buildings layer comes even before the release of IOS 6, where, as we all know, Apple has decided to include their own software 3D map and let go of Google Maps.
Apparently, the new Google Earth is so great as it will be the future Apple system maps, Flyover. Note that if you want to install the new update to the 3D layer edifcios need at least a 4S iPhone, iPad 2 or third-generation iPhone.

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Google Earth 3D comes to iOS : Viewer program gets update to the local mobile operating system

 

The Google on Thursday released an update of the program Google Earth to iOS, adding some interesting features like allowing the visualization of some world cities such as Rome and New York, in three dimensions.

The appeal must reach out to personal computers by the end of the year when the company expects to deliver new versions for Windows and Mac.

Another innovative feature is the application of the "tour guide", which indicates interesting towns to visit around the world and allows users to exploit through its visualization system with satellite photos. See the promotional video of the new app: 

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Forty years of satellite images of our planet

We are celebrating today the 40th anniversary of the Landsat satellite program . This program is the acquisition of satellite images of Earth with the longest continuous operation. Over the years, Landsat has collected petabytes of images, offering a historical perspective of change that our planet has undergone. This information can help researchers and independent nations, make informed decisions about their economic and environmental policies. In conjunction with the USGS and the Carnegie Mellon University , we are working to make parts of this huge collection of publicly available images form of sequential video (taken at time intervals) from the surface of the Earth . With them can travel through time, from 1999 to 2011 to see the transformation that has taken our planet. Will see changes such as deforestation of the Amazon, urban growth in Las Vegas or the difference between the snow country with the change of season. Below are some examples:

 

The sequential scan through the Amazon rain forest shows the spread of deforestation between 1999 (left) and 2011 (right). 

 

The rapid growth of Las Vegas, Nevada between 1999 (left) and 2011 (right) is visible on Landsat sequential scan. 

 

A seasonal sequence created using MODIS images , where each video frame represents one week, shows the differences between areas covered by snow in the U.S. between February and August 2002. 

We believe these are the largest video frames that have been created. If you could see the video in full resolution, a single frame would terapixeles 1.78, ie the equivalent of 18 football fields of screens placed edge to edge. In 2008 the USGS opened access to full Landsat archive for free . Google Earth Engine allows access to this information and makes it useful for scientists and people around the world. In the following video may learn more about the history of the Landsat program and how Google Earth Engine was used to process and analyze this huge archive of satellite images of the planet.

Landsat congratulate these 40 years. We are proud to make this coarse file available to the general public, and for deep analysis of scientists and policymakers around the world. Visit the site Google Earth Engine to experience all the interactive tours through the videos sequentially. By Eric Nguyen, a software engineer for Earth Engine, and Randy Sargent, a visiting researcher at Carnegie Mellon University

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