lopensaste:

Recuerda que si tú caes yo caeré…

(via niurkamariee)

(via thisistheverge)

ricardocamargo:

Splay Launcher, interesante forma de Navegar por tu Dispositivo Android

Droid-Life :

Interesting Way of Navigating Your Android Device

We came across a new launcher today titled, Splay Launcher. It is still in beta, but the app does seem very polished and could interest some folks who are tired of the same ol’ look on their smartphone. 

Navigation throughout your device is handled with a swipe down of your finger on the homescreen, allowing you to access apps through parent shortcuts labeled Phone, Diary (email, texts, calendar), Media, and Apps. Each parent label, once hovered over, gives birth to smaller labels which act as shortcuts to apps and device functions.

Below I give it a whirl on the Galaxy S4, so check it out and let us know what you think. Keep in mind it is beta, but it is nice. Although, if you are a widget lover, you might as well keep on moving.

…Keep Reading »

Hands-on: Splay Launcher Overview

WWWhatsnew :

Splay Launcher, un toque totalmente diferente para la interfaz de Android

Una de las ventajas de los móviles táctiles, entre otras muchísimas, es el hecho de poder manipular toda la pantalla y acceder a todos los menús utilizando una sola mano, mientras con la otra podemos llevar una bolsa, tenerla en el bolsillo o agarrarnos a la barra del metro. Pero ha llegado un punto en el que, teniendo móviles con pantallas tan enormes, se escapan del alcance de nuestros dedos muchas opciones y menús que impiden el acceso a los que tenemos las manos más pequeñas.

Por ello se desarrolla una nueva interfaz para Android, aplicación llamada Splay Launcher, que reemplaza la pantalla principal por un menú con forma de “pastel redondo” o ruleta, que podremos mover arriba y abajo para acceder a las distintas funciones y siendo cada parte menú un fragmento triangular. Tendremos acceso a los menús principales y algunos submenús dentro de éstos simplemente deslizando el dedo hacia la izquierda cuando se ilumine la sección en la que queremos entrar. Parece muy raro este nuevo enfoque en Android y cuesta de imaginar, pero es sorprendente lo bien que se integra la aplicación con menús de Android como las canciones, el registro de llamadas, la galería o los mensajes.

…Seguir Leyendo »

[via] Droid-Life (Tim-o-tato) | WWWhatsnew (Rebeca Polo) | Download Link: Splay Launcher (beta) Google Play | 

neuromorphogenesis:

Here’s the Real Reason Why Virtual Reality Doesn’t Work Yet

It’s another blow for immersive virtual reality. University of California researchers have shown that even people with perfect eyesight navigate the world by relying on a lot more than what they see. Here’s why VR won’t really work until we go beyond visual cues and fancy treadmills.

Inside our brain’s hippocampus we have what are called place cells. These specialized cells help us build a “cognitive map” of our surroundings — mental representations which allow us to orientate ourselves in our spatial environment.

These neurons have been observed to fire like crazy whenever a rat has to go about the task of figuring out where it is in the world. And if the rat in an entirely new location altogether, it has to create a new cognitive map from scratch.

But once this map has been created, rats can quickly figure out where they are should they return to that location.

Scientists have theorized that rats don’t require much sensory information to build these maps, figuring that distant visual images, the ability to move themselves around, and maybe some proprioceptive orientation is all that’s required to do the trick. But as the new study by Pascal Ravassard and colleagues has shown, that’s not enough — and not enough by a mile.

To reach this conclusion, Pascal Ravassard and colleagues experimented with rats placed in a virtual reality environment. Indeed, VR is becoming a popular tool amongst some scientists. For example, researchers have interacted with rats by becoming virtual rats themselves, and they’ve gotten monkeys to feel virtual objects by using a brain implant.

But as this experiment showed, getting a rat’s brain to respond to a VR environment in the same way it responds to the real world is not so easy.

For the study, the researchers tried to create two apparently identical worlds, one real (RW) and one virtual (VR). Each environment consisted of a linear track in the center of a square room with distinct visual cues on each of the four walls. These cues were nearly identical in both environments, but the rats’ bodies were fixed in VR — thus minimizing (or even eliminating) other important spatial cues, like balance. So, the only incoming environmental data during VR exposure were the visual cues and self-motion.

After attaching tetrodes to measure the neural activity of six rats, the researchers had them run the track in both the RW and VR environments. When looking at the results, it was clear that the VR environment was not exciting the place cells as per usual. In VR, place cells showed 20% activity as compared to 45% in RW — more than twice as much.

So, vision and self-motion will spark a little bit of place cell activity, but balance and other sensory cues are what’s fully required to properly encode a rat’s — and likely a human’s — position. Moreover, the researchers speculate that other cues — like smell, sound, and textures — are what’s needed to help the rats properly self-locate themselves. But looking at the scans, the researchers realized that the only spatial encoding that was being done in VR was distance.

It’s clear from the study, therefore, that a variety of sensory clues must interact and compete in the brain for us to construct a robust cognitive map.

(via wildcat2030)

Todo mi amor solo para ti cinthia ♥

thisistheverge:

Xbox Live Arcade hit ‘Fez’ finally arrives on PC for $9.99

Phil Fish’s Fez launched just over a year ago on Xbox Live Arcade, where it’s managed to sell over 200,000 copies. But now the puzzle / platformer indie hit is finally moving beyond Microsoft’s platform; the long-awaited PC version of Fez was released today. 

C ♥ H

(via eldarberserker)

smarterplanet:

New Plasma Device Considered The ‘Holy Grail’ Of Energy Generation And Storage

Scientists at the University of Missouri have devised a new way to create and control plasma that could transform American energy generation and storage.

Randy Curry, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Missouri’s College of Engineering, and his team developed a device that launches a ring of plasma at distances of up to two feet. Although the plasma reaches a temperature hotter than the surface of the sun, it doesn’t emit radiation and is completely safe in proximity to humans.

While most of us are familiar with three states of matter – liquid, gas and solid – there is also a fourth state known as plasma, which includes things such as fire and lightning. Life on Earth depends on the energy emitted by plasma produced during fusion reactions within the sun.

The secret to Curry’s success was developing a way to make plasma form its own self-magnetic field, which holds it together as it travels through the air.

“Launching plasma in open air is the ‘Holy Grail’ in the field of physics,” said Curry.

more

smarterplanet:

A Big Step Toward a Silicon Quantum Computer

Quantum computers could more easily become a reality if they incorporated the silicon semiconductor processing used by the modern electronics industry. Physicists in Australia have recently taken a new step toward that vision by reading and writing the nuclear spin state of a single phosphorus atom implanted in silicon.

In a breakthrough reported in the 18 April edition of the journal Nature, physicists have finally achieved an idea first proposed in 1998 by Bruce Kane, a physicist at the University of Maryland, in College Park. Such success could lead to quantum computers based on the same silicon-processing technology used for computer chips.

“What we are trying to do is demonstrate that there is a viable way to take the same physical platform and fabrication technology used to make any computer and mobile phone in the world, and twist it into a technology for quantum information processing,” says Andrea Morello, a quantum physicist at the University of New South Wales, in Australia.

Scientists envision quantum computers as the ideal devices for cracking modern encryption codes, searching through huge databases, and understanding the biological interactions of molecules and drugs. Quantum computing’s potential comes from harnessing the laws of quantum physics that allow the spin state of an electron or an atom’s nucleus to achieve “superposition”—existing in more than one state at a time. A classical computer bit can exist either as a 1 or a 0, but a quantum bit, or qubit, is capable of existing in multiple states at the same time.

With other quantum computing approaches, researchers have tried trapping and isolating atoms by using electromagnetic fields or superconductor materials. By comparison, Kane suggested harnessing the nuclear spin of phosphorus atoms embedded in a silicon crystal as a qubit.

Silicon-based quantum computing also offers long coherence times for electron and nuclear spins, Kane says. That means the electron spin states and nuclear spin states acting as qubits could hold on to their information for long periods of time, something that other quantum computing schemes have struggled with.

Read more.

smartercities:

Earth Day Collaboration Aims to Harness Energy of 2000 Suns | Building a Smarter Planet

It would take only two percent of the Sahara Desert’s land area to supply the world’s electricity needs. Unfortunately, current solar technologies are too expensive and slow to produce, require rare Earth minerals and lack the efficiency to make such massive installations practical. To address this, scientists at Airlight Energy have teamed up with IBM and Swiss university partners to develop an affordable photovoltaic system that is capable of concentrating, on average, the power of 2,000 suns, onto hundreds of 1×1 cm chips.

(via smarterplanet)