Minority Report interface with Kinect

A member of the research staff at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) has created a Minority Report interface using the Kinect 3D sensor and open source software. Not only does the device only cost $150, you can use it without any gloves. Garratt Gallagher, the interfaces’s creator, shows off some basic gesture controls in the video below.

Source: Singularity Hub.

Windows 7, Firefox and H.264/AVC

Microsoft will release a plugin that allows Firefox to tap into Windows 7′s native H.264 support for HTML5 video. This will hopefully help streamline things on the web and get us moving all towards one standard format. However it mightn’t bode well with fans who want to make the move away from H.264.

Source: Windows 7 News.

3D HD STB SoC Solution

Broadcom Corporation announced and is sampling a new dual high definition (HD) set-top box (STB) system-on-a-chip (SoC) video gateway solution with more than two times the performance over previous generations.

The BCM7422 is the industry's first SoC to combine a 1.3 GHz multi-threaded MIPS® processor with the latest transmission efficient H.264/MPEG Scalable Video Coding (SVC), and Multiview Video Coding(MVC) standards for enabling 1080p60/50 content distribution and full-resolution HD 3DTV.

Complementing this new level of application software and visual performance is a 1G pixel per second OpenGL® ES 2.0 3D GPU for advanced 3D graphics acceleration, as well as integrated whole-home connectivity functionality including MoCA® and DLNA® support.

Source: press release.

H.264/AVC surpasses MPEG-2

ABI research reports that H.264/MPEG-4 AVC set-top box shipments surpassed MPEG-2-only set-top box shipments for the first time in 2010, with about 53% H.264/AVC shipments worldwide. Despite the support for advanced encoding, however, pay-TV operators worldwide have been slow to support interactive features on set-top boxes.

3-D models from online photo databases

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Italy first to broadcast backwards compatible 3D

Italian viewers will be able to enjoy the free over-the-air content in 2D or 3D.  A new format created by a partnership of both private and public parties in Italy created a new format they're calling 3D Tile, which integrates a pair of 720p frames into a single 1080p frame, allowing reconstructed images to maintain their original resolution. More importantly, it lets viewers with traditional 2D televisions watch 3D content.

Source: High-Def Digest.

Fortune names Netflix CEO businessperson of the year

He beat out the likes of Apple’s Steve Jobs and Ford’s Alan Mulally. While Netflix is most famous for its DVDs-by-mail service, Reed Hastings has driven the company to new heights by charging hard into the streaming video space—“disrupting his own business before it gets disrupted,” writes Fortune. Netflix’s Watch Instantly service, which offers unlimited access to 17,000 movies and TV shows to Netfix’s 15 million subscribers, is already nearly ubiquitous, available anywhere from the browser to the Xbox to the iPhone. A recent study found that Netflix streaming accounts for 20% of peak Internet traffic.