Augmented reality and aerial drone. There's an app also for that.

Parrot has been demonstrating at the 2010 CES show in Las Vegas the AR.Drone, a Wi-Fi helicopter with dual cameras and augmented-reality video streaming, that you control using your iPhone or iPod Touch. The AR.Drone features four rotors and interchangeable hulls for flying both indoors and outside. Built-in flight stabilization technology keeps the drone steady while you use your iPhone’s motion sensors to steer it remotely over the craft’s Wi-Fi network.
Parrot spent four years developing the AR.Drone and creating an augmented reality gaming platform. Using its streaming video camera, the AR.Drone image processing can detect other drones or 3D targets. Several demo games are on display, but Parrot hopes that game developers will take advantage of their open API to develop more games and other applications for the AR.Drone.
To make the AR.Drone easy to fly, Parrot developed a microelectromechanical (MEMS) inertial guidance system that includes a three-axis accelerometer, a two-axis gyroscope, and a single-axis precision gyroscope for yaw. The flyer also includes an ultrasonic altimeter and a down-facing video camera for calculating speed and position. By tilting your iPhone or iPod Touch you can drive the drone. The built-in Wi-Fi network is used to establish the connection between the drone and the iPhone, then the video camera on the drone streams its feed directly to the screen on your iPhone. If you remove your finger from the iPhone, the AR.Drone’s autopilot keeps the drone hovering about a meter off the ground. If the network connection is lost, the autopilot will stabilize the drone and slowly lower it to the ground for a soft landing.
Parrot hopes to make the AR.Drone available in the second half of 2010. For more information visit ardrone.parrot.com. For details about the open API, visit projects.ardrone.org.




Thanks for reading :)

A new baby is born

Today I want to announce that a new blog is born: iPhone 4 Passion (yes I know, I had not to much fantasy ;) ). This is a specialized blog I decided to create only for iPhone/iPod Touch and Objective-C programming.

For now I migrated the two presentations that you can find also in this blog, but soon I intend to enrich the blog with code examples, better tips and tricks and other useful information on this awesome device.
So stay tuned and hope to hear soon your comments, impressions, suggestions and so on.

iPhone/iPod Tips & Tricks (...continue...)

Today I want to give you another Tips & Tricks for iPhone/iPod; this time regarding screen snapshots and a fast way to go at the top of a list.

Capture the screen
You can take a screenshot of any application you are using, simply pressing the Home button together to the Sleep/Wake button.
This snapshot will be saved into the 'Camera roll' of the iPhone or in 'Saved Images' for iPod.

Go to the Top
When you are reading a web page, an e-mail or a SMS, you can go to the beginning of the page simply tapping onto the status bar.

This is useful specially if you are navigating a web page and want to reach the head of the page in one tap or you are in the SMS application and want to call the sender of the message where the button to call is at the top of the page.

See the previous post on iPhone/iPod Tips & Tricks.

Thanks for reading :)

Social Sensor Network

Today I was attracted by two news:

1. Hardware add-on for iPhone-iPod: iCarte NFC/RFID Reader. This device allows iPhone/iPod users to be enabled for Near Field Communication (NFC) for contact-less payments and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID).
   
2. HP Labs with a project called CeNSE (Central Nervous System for the Earth) which use billions of tiny, cheap tough and exquisitely sensitive detectors.
   "... The technology behind this is based on nano-sensing research done by HP Labs. The sensors are similar to RFID chips, but in this case they are tiny accelerometers which detect motion and vibrations. The first CeNSE sensor to be put into the field by HP Labs is, according to the company, "about 1,000 times more sensitive than accelerometers used in a Wii, an iPhone or an automobile's airbag system." Other sensors planned in future include ones for light, temperature, barometric pressure, airflow and humidity."

I'm always fascinated by electronic devices and specially if they are used for solving people problems, making life better and/or safer for all.

A possible scenario as combination of both devices could be to built a map globally accessible with the results of signals detected by those sensors (for example the temperatures measured or motion detection for detecting earthquakes or other possible dangers). The role of iPhone could be to activate the read of the measure when it is near the sensor (by RFID activation) and send a tweet on a dedicated channel automatically or making a dedicated application that updates the global map via twitter.

Another possibility is to generate the sensing map as a Google Earth layer. The iPohne can then contribute to this map by uploading measure coming from its sensors, like magnetic field measurements (for 3Gs device) and level of noise with geo-referencing those measures before upload them to the Social Sensor Network on Google Earth.

Thanks for reading ;)

Objective-C for beginners

Today I want to present to you the second lesson I prepared for the University of Bologna with a friend of mine: Omar Cafini about the bases of Objective-C programming.

The presentation wants to give an overview of Objective-C code writing and bases on how to deal with applications present on the iPhone/iPod Touch such Addressbook and ImagePicker.

One note more is about the storage and data handling, touch and multi-touch events handling and SQLite interface.
For more, watch the slideshow and post your feedback:

Parte II Objective C

View more presentations from Paolo Quadrani.

The slideshow of the first lesson is available here.
Thanks for reading :-)

iPhone/iPod Tips & Tricks

Today I wanna start the first episode of a long series of Tips & Tricks for iPhone/iPod so to make better your iPhone/iPod life :)

In this first episode we will see how to make accented characters with the iPhone keyboard:

1. Open whatever app that show the keyboard like the Note app and start writing your text.
2. Now for writing the accented character (for example à) tap the 'a' character on the keyboard and take for one second your finger over the character. Will appear all the combination of accents available for that character.
3. Without releasing your finger from the screen simply go over the accented character you want to insert, then release the finger from the screen; the accented character will be inserted.

Thanks for reading and see you on next episode :-)

iPhone Development Tools

Today I want to share with you a slide show presenting the basics on iPhone development tools which a friend of mine made for the University of Bologna (Italy).

iPhone Development Tools

View more presentations from Omar Cafini.

On the next days I'll public the second episode.
Enjoy the show :-)

Augmented Reality on iPhone Apps

Today I want to talk about something popular in the iPhone golden world and is becoming a "must" for all the new cool applications: Augmented Reality.
Augmented Reality is a superimposing of a virtual objects generated from a computer with the real world captured from a camera. Synthetic object are placed into the real world by register them with the real space. A complete definition of Augmented Reality can be found in Wikipedia.
Who see the scene, perceive that the synthetic object is immersed into the real world.
Conventionally this technique is used to augment information given by the real world like for example superimposing a radiography or a tomography image of a patient over the real image of the patient itself.
This imply that your virtual world has to be registered with the real one by using drown patterns (like for example ARToolkit does) or marker placed on real world.
Recently, iPhone application shown this technique a bit altered (from the classical definition of AR) in my opinion. The synthetic elements shown in the device were not directly correlated to the images shown by the camera, but instead they were related with the position or orientation of the device.
I think that we are still far from having the "real" Augmented Reality on mobile devices with real-time rendering and high resolution that will do the user believe that what he is seeing is real.

Thanks for reading and feel free to leave a comment :-)