I just watched Google Wave Keynote video on Google I/O and I must say I was very impressed with pretty much everything mentioned in the video, the possibilities with Google Wave are enormous.
I'd like to ask if there are any projects using Google Wave already in beta (usable stage) and I would also like to know when is Google Wave supposed to be available for the rest of us who didn't attend Google I/O.
As great as the technology is. It is safe to say it will only be used to find more inventive ways for us to:
Not socialize in real-life
Make communications that would be ill-advised in real-life
Buy things we haven't seen in real life
Unlearn things that are useful in real life (like spelling)
Joking aside, you can signup for the sandbox (as I have) and play around with apps and robots and whatever. You can Sign up here for the developer preview and have a look at what is going on!
You could also run your own wave setup using the information here and experiment with the down-and-dirty!
You can request developer access to the wave sandbox at: https://services.google.com/fb/forms/wavesignupfordev/
It might take a few weeks.
Related
I just bought a Sony A7 and I am blown away with the incredible pictures it takes, but now I would like to interact and automate the use of this camera using the Sony Remote Camera API. I consider myself a maker and would like to do some fun stuff: add a laser trigger with Arduino, do some computer controlled light painting, and some long-term (on the order of weeks) time-lapse photography. One reason I purchased this Sony camera over other models from famous brands such as Canon, Nikon, or Samsung is because of the ingenious Sony Remote Camera API. However, after reading through the API reference it seems that many of the features cannot be accessed. Is this true? Does anyone know a work around?
Specifically, I am interested in changing a lot of the manual settings that you can change through the menu system on the camera such as ISO, shutter speed, and aperture. I am also interested in taking HDR images in a time-lapse manner and it would be nice to change this setting through the API as well. If anyone knows, why wasn't the API opened up to the whole menu system in the first place?
Finally, if any employee of Sony is reading this I would like to make this plea: PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE keep supporting the Remote Camera API and improve upon an already amazing idea! I think the more control you offer to makers and developers the more popular your cameras will become. I think you could create a cult following if you can manage to capture the imagination of makers across the world and get just one cool project to go viral on the internet. Using http and POST commands is super awesome, because it is OS agnostic and makes communication a breeze. Did I mention that is awesome?! Sony's cameras will nicely integrate themselves into the internet of things.
I think the Remote Camera API strategy is better than the strategies of Sony's competitors. Nikon and Canon have nothing comparable. The closest thing is Samsung gluing Android onto the Galaxy NX, but that is a completely unnecessary cost since most people already own a smart phone; all that needs to exist is a link that allows the camera to talk to the phone, like the Sony API. Sony gets it. Please don't abandon this direction you are taking or the Remote Camera API, because I love where it is heading.
Thanks!
New API features for the Lens Style Cameras DSC-QX100 and DSC-QX10 will be expanded during the spring of 2014. The shutter speed functionality, white balance, ISO settings and more will be included! Check out the official announcement here: https://developer.sony.com/2014/02/24/new-cameras-now-support-camera-remote-api-beta-new-api-features-coming-this-spring-to-selected-cameras/
Thanks a lot for your valuable feedback. Great to hear, that the APIs are used and we are looking forward nice implementations!
Peter
I want to embed a video stream into my web page, which is part of our own cloud based software. The video should be low-latency (like video conferencing), and it would be preferable, but not required, for it to include audio. I am comfortable serving streaming binary data from the server-side, and embedding it into the page using HTML5 video.
What I am not comfortable with is the ability to capture the video data to begin with. The client does not already have a solution in place, and is looking to us for assistance. The video would be routed through our server equipment, and not be an embedded peice that connects directly to the video source.
It is a known quantity for us to use a USB or built-in camera from the computer. What I would like more information is about stand-alone cameras.
Some models of cameras have their own API documentation (example). It would seem from what I am reading that a manufacturer would typically have their own API which they repeat on many or all of their models, and that each manufacturer would be different in their API. However, I have only done surface reading and hope to gain more knowledge from someone who has already researched this, or perhaps even had first hand experience.
Do stand-alone cameras generally include an API? (Wouldn't this is a common requirement, so that security software can use multiple lines of cameras?) Or if not an API, how is the data retrieved from the on-board webserver? Is it usually flash based? Perhaps there is a re-useable video stream I could capture from there? Or is the stream formatting usually diverse?
What would I run into when trying to get the server-side to capture that data?
How does latency on a stand-alone device compare with a USB camera solution?
Do you have tips on picking out a stand-alone camera that would be a good fit for streaming through a server?
I am experienced at using JavaScript (both HTML5 and Node.JS), Perl and Java.
Each camera manufacturer has their own take on this from the point of access points; generally you should be able to ask for a snapshot or a MJPEG stream, but it can vary. Take a look at this entry on CodeProject; it tackles two common methodologies. Here's another one targeted at Foscam specifically.
Get a good NAS, I suggest Synology, check out their long list of supported IP Web Cams. You can connect them with a hub or with a router or whatever you wish. It's not a "computer" as-in "tower", but it does many computer jobs, and it can stay on while your computer is off or away, and do thing like like video feeds, torrents, backups, etc.
I'm not an expert on all the features, so I don't know how to get it to broadcast without recording, but even if it does then at least it's separate. Synology is a popular brand and there are lot of authorized and un-authorized plugins for it. Check them out and see if one suits you.
Sorry if this is a repeat question, but I didn't see it anywhere.
I'm working on a Mac program that will take voice commands, and NSSpeechRecognizer isn't quite doing it for me.
I want something a little more dynamic so I can set alarms, make dates, give more natural commands, etc.
Every open source speech engine I've found is tailored toward iOS. Do openears/vocalkit etc. still work just as fine for Mac programs?
Speech recognition is exceptionally non-trivial. The engines that are free are free for a reason. If you expect dictation in any amount (like an alarm label), you're out of luck. There are reasons Siri requires an entire data center. The open source packages available won't get you much further than simple telephone auto-attendants.
Unless you have an extensive statistics background and free time, I'd recommend that you pursue licensing a commercial library or server implementation.
pocket sphinx from Carnegie Melon is about the only option
http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/
I'm working on a pretty complicated app right now, but I just got a really good, niche market idea for an AR game for iPhone. I would love to get some preliminary research done on whether or not it is worth the effort. I got a few (about 4 days) in which to code this. Is this a realistic timeline for what I'm trying to accomplish?
While I'm pretty familiar with the CMDeviceMotion, and can get location updates from GPS, there are 4 features that I think may take a colossal amount of work:
1) Working with camera in real time to draw augmented reality controls. Are there any good tutorials on how to overlay a view on top of a live camera feed?
2)Making the app work when GPS reception is spotty. It seems that some apps know how to keep updating the location based on accelerometer/gyroscope from the last known location. Where would I start on this front?
3)The networking component. I'm very new to multiplayer games. I got a website that can run PHP. Should I abandon my networking idea until I get a web server? Or is there some way I can run this in P2P over 3G without a base station?
4)Google maps integration for fast updates. Does this take a lot of effort?
I'm sorry if any of these questions are too broad and vague. I'm very excited about this idea, but would like to know what I'm dealing with before spending time on the app and realizing that I'm dealing with a monumental task!
I think you are dealing with a monumental task (especially the multiplayer part, where you'll encounter issues like lag/timing).
For the augmented reality part of your project, you can take a look at mixare augmented reality engine. It's free and open source software and the code is available on github: https://github.com/mixare/
Be aware that if you base your code upon mixare, you'll have to release your app under the same GPLv3 license as mixare.
Good luck for your project!
HTH,
Daniele
Is there any code out there, that I can use in Cocoa, to recognize text from photos? Let's say I snap a photo with my iPhone of a page of a book. I'd like to capture the text in it.
There is the Tesseract OCR toolkit that is an open source OCR engine, currently maintained by Google. "Olipion" created a cross compilation tutorial to get in on the iPhone. I would say that this is a good place to start.
However, there are reasons why you might not want to to OCR on the Phone even if you could. Some of these include:
Even the new iPhone 4's processor is not that fast and since you app can't really run in the background doing the processing, the user experience might not be optimal.
Running OCR on a mobile device would probably be a killer for battery life.
Every time you would want to update the OCR engine everybody who installed your app would have to upgrade.
For an always connected mobile device running the OCR on a server somewhere would be probably better. You could upgrade your OCR software easily, you could run much more powerful algorithms then a mobile device could handle and so on.
I am not so sure that you would be able to get good results from photos taken using a mobile camera -- accuracy of OCR systems goes way down with the kind of poorly lit, noisy, distorted images likely to be captured using a phone camera.
As far as commercial products out there, there is Evernote that gives you a OCR capability if you buy their premium service.
As an alternative to machine OCR, there is always Mechanical Turk, where you could pay people small amount to do the OCR for you. Would probably do better at transcription given the image source.