Researchers at the University of Washington's Graphics and Imaging Laboratory, which crunched a lot of the code behind the original Photosynth, have devised new algorithms that scale the photo-cloud-to-3D-model concept way, way up:

The key difference is that Photosynth was aimed at doing a single monument or landmark, which meant that it was scaled to a couple hundred or a thousand photographs, after which it became too slow. We can now process truly huge data sets — the big breakthrough here was being able to match the images fast.

To these lab-sheltered folks, fast means "about a day," in which time they were able to render all manner of scenes, from the Trevi Fountain and the Colosseum in Rome, and the entire Old City in Dubrovnik, video'd above.

The best thing about this is that the U of W team doesn't have to worry about anything beyond their algorithms—once they've perfected the software that can recognize and arrange these images, they can slap together a 3D rendering of pretty much any location that Flickr users have taken a few thousand pictures of. [PopSci]

Not to be confused with Sony's giant actual zoetrope, Adobe's Zoetrope, which was co-developed by people at the University of Washington, is more of a metaphorical movie maker, says Technology Review: You load a web page then drag a slider from present into the past. As you use Zoetrope with, say, a major news site, it changes—dates go backwards, the price of oil goes up (then back down again), George Bush looks younger and more confident, etc.

My favorite aspect is the "time lens," which lets you time-shift just a portion of the webpage. A great example would be the price of a TV or Blu-ray player on Amazon.com. As you slide, you see the price go up and up. Tracking price changes is a big part of this technology.

But for brainier people, there's a whole lot more you can do, since the tool also allows two web pages to be tracked at the same time. For instance, you can open a weather page and a traffic page, and scroll backwards, watching how traffic patterns are affected by variations in the weather. You can also tie the oil-price page with an international news page, and see if there's any correlation between peaks of strife in the Middle East, and peaks of oil prices in the days following them.

When tracking numerical values such as pricing, the Zoetrope tool is capable of generating graphs of the data, so if you want to know when to buy a TV, you can look at a graf of historical data to show trends, much like how investors today use stock charts.

The software is still in the early stages, so don't expect a browser plug-in anytime soon. Also, if you're wondering how they're going to index the entire world wide web for this, the answer is, they aren't even going to try. They're going to focus on sites in categories like those above. After all, if you need a time machine to watch the Gizmodo home page zip by, you are doing too much of one thing, and not enough of another.

Be sure to check out TR's video, for a vivid demonstration of Zoetrope's capabilities. [Technology Review via Kurzweil AI]

Morgansen designed the robofish to explore the deepest depths of the ocean, as well as seek out other locations where the environment is deadly to human beings. They'll do this all without any intervention from people, other robots or even satellites. The group would perform just like an organic fish and form a school, with dominant personalities leading the way even if certain robofish received incomplete or garbled instructions.

"In schooling and herding animals, you can get much more efficient maneuvers and smoother behaviors than what we can do in engineering right now," Morgansen said. "The idea of these experiments [with schools of live fish] is to ask, 'How are they doing it?' and see if we can come up with some ideas."

Schooling also helps fight the effects of water on wireless communication. Optimal underwater data transfer rates are approximately 80 bytes, or about 32 numbers, per second, but the robofishes' simple two-command memory structure (swimming in the same direction or swimming in different directions) mean tasks get done anyway. The robots use fins and a tail, instead of a propeller, because they're more maneuverable and create lower drag. [University of Washington]

"Never in your life have you ever swallowed anything and it's still sticking out of your mouth, but once you do it, it's easy," he said of the device. It consists of seven fiber optic cables in a capsule about the size of a painkiller, with a 1.4-mm tether that allows the doctor to move the camera around and pull it back up once the exploration is finished.

Testing starts at the Seattle Veterans' Administration hospital next year. Once given the thumbs-up, the reusable gadget (disinfect, rinse, repeat, I guess) is expected to be used in the fight against oesophagal cancer. Normal endoscopes are considerably bigger and can only be swallowed after the patient has been sedated (and liberally greased up, probably).

[CNN]

• Full PDF support
• Apple claims most sites are already formated for the iPhone
• Max page size is 10mb
• Javascript runtime limited to 5 seconds & 10mb
• Only 8 documents can load at once
• Links to movies will automatically switch the iPhone into full-screen playback
•Best video aspect ration is 480x360
• No streaming video support from streaming media servers. Media must be installed on servers.

But what if you don't want to modify your site at all? What will the iPhone be able to do on your site then?

-double tap for zoom in - one finger as a mouse used to pan page - press and hold to display the information bubble - two fingers as a mouse used to - pinch content to shrink - zoom out - pan page - scroll wheel events - new telephone links allows you to integrate phone calls directly from your webpage. Remember this is only on Safari. - built in Google maps client for integrated mapping from your website

Hit the link for the video demonstration. Now we just need scientists to hone the "don't blow my head off with that laser" command and we'll be all set. – Mark Wilson

Human Thoughts Control New Robot [livescience]
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