It's an experimental multimedia blog that I use to test software, mostly. If you're here, welcome. But don't expect much. This isn't really the sort of public site that's maintained with any regularity. Sorry.
Bob Dylan has just gifted us with a Christmas album. So how does it feeeeeeel?
The answer, my friend: it’s blowin’.
You might think a gravel-throated grinch like Dylan would be perfect for songs like “Little Drummer Boy” — just as, say, William Shatner totally nailed his rendition of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”
But the proof is in the figgy pudding, so hark to this sampling of three Dylanized carols we cobbled together:
You know how, in “The Terminator,” Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a cyborg from the future, and whenever he looks around, his eyeballs combine a camera-lens view of the world AND a computer display of graphics and statistics?
Well, now YOUR eyeballs can do the same thing with an iPhone.
It’s called “augmented reality.” It’s been used for years by the military, in museum exhibits — even football telecasts use it to superimpose that yellow first-down line on football fields.
And starting today, it’s a free app for iPhones called Layar.
Fast Company explains it this way:
Imagine your Web browser was a window onto the real world. Instead of seeing Web pages inside that browser window, you see the environment around you — except with an added layer of data on top of it. Layar’s AR (augmented reality) is a bit like that.
It works through your smartphone camera, where its on-screen viewfinder displays the camera view enhanced with extra information connected with exactly what you’re looking at, or the direction you’re looking in.
Layar’s trick is that all this augmented data is stacked up in layers, meaning you can choose different layers of information to view. Point your phone’s camera at a building, for example, and one layer will be about the architectural history, click to a different layer and you can access the menu for the restaurant inside the building.
In other words, you just stand somewhere, point your iPhone camera — and it’ll show you the nearest hospital. Or where to get pizza. Or the movie times for that theater over there.
Some are already calling it the iPhone’s killer app — a game-changer so huge it redefines the hardware.