January 24, 2012, SPIE Electronic Imaging Conference, Burlingame, CA—Pete Bradshaw and Debargha Mukherjee from Google describe their efforts in promoting 3-D videos. The first issue facing adoption of 3-D is that there is very little content available. Some of the first 3-D videos took a lot of work just to get the two cameras set [...]

 January 24, 2012, SPIE, Electronic Imaging Conference, Burlingame, CA—William Freeman from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology talked about computational photography. Today’s digital cameras have only replaced the imaging system, using a semiconductor imager versus film. Most of the camera functions are still analog. In computational photography the user can modify any or all of the [...]

 January 24, 2012, SPIE Electronic Imaging Conference, Burlingame, CA—two technical teams presented the issues and suggested solutions for cinematic to television conversion for good 3-D. The complementary talks described the basic technology and specific techniques for the conversion processes. Didier Doyen noted that the problems are due to the changes in size and viewing distance [...]

 We talked with Venkat Mattela from Redpine Signals about their new WiFi module. The company has been developing various wireless components and systems for over 10 years and now is offering a self-contained WiFi module. Figure 1 – WiSeConnect Block Diagram   This self-contained device is targeting the Internet of things through low-power design, and [...]

 January 22, 2012, SPIE BiOS Conference, San Francisco—The BiOS conference had number of sessions that highlighted technologies that may be transferable to areas outside of formal medicine. Most of the sessions were about specific applications of optical and photonic in formal medicine and biological research. Topics included photonic therapeutics and diagnostics; clinical technologies and systems; [...]

 January 17, 2012, Real-Time & Embedded Computing Conference, Santa Clara, CA—Michael Anderson from The PTR Group described the “Internet of Things- living in a connected world” in the keynote address. The Internet has evolved beyond its creators wildest dreams. What started as the Arpanet for government contractors seemed to be more than able to handle [...]

 January 17, 2012, Medical Electronic Device Solutions Conference, Santa Clara, CA—The FDA described the latest guidelines for mobile medical devices. Bakul Patel, a policy advisor for the FDA, provided a general overview of the thought processes going into policy guidance issues. The technology world is changing very rapidly and now consumer devices are moving into [...]

 January 17, 2012, Medical Electronic Device Solutions Conference, Santa Clara, CA—Alan Boucher from Care Innovations, an Intel-GE joint venture, opened the conference with the question, what can medical device technology learn form the mobile revolution? The wireless world is growing and driving the scaling of technology across all mobile platforms. These devices expose consumers to [...]

 January 11,2012, CES, Las Vegas—Bang & Olufsen presented an outline for the company for the next five years and introduced new products. The company is looking to reinvigorate itself after a few years in the doldrums. They stated that sales were up 22 percent in the past year to $500M. Some company changes included a [...]

 January 10, 2012, CES, Las Vegas—VESA previewed the Mobility DisplayPort standard. They also showed off products that include the features of V1.2. the organization considers DisplayPort to be the main, next-generation display interface. The various standards for interfaces include DisplayPort v1.2 a high-performance, external interface for displays, embedded DisplayPort v1.3 designed for embedded display applications [...]