Gearfuse

Today, Sony announced its new breakthrough in cellphone cameras with a camera that’s as powerful, if not more, than my handheld Canon. It’s managed to shrink the size of the sensor down so much, that a 12.25-megapixel, 28mm equivalent CMOS camera can now fit within a cellphone.

On top of image quality and detail comparable to most point and shoot cameras, this newly developed lens will also be capable of shooting 1080p video at up to 27 frames per second. With video quality that superb, you’ll certainly need to upgrade that beat up Sandisk SD card of yours if you want to hold any video of decent length.

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Anyone with a Mac knows how much fun Photo Booth can be. Distort your face with your friend, get a good laugh and throw it up on Facebook. But what if you went on a vacation and wanted to bring the fun of Photo Booth with you without the need for a laptop?

Enter the Iomo Split Cam. This camera will let you block light from hitting the upper or lower portion of your photo. This means you can take a picture of your friend, block out their head and add in a statue’s head for good times. It’s a simple gimmick that will bring a lot of fun to your photos and for $20, you’d be insane to pass this camera up. Check out the Flickr gallery of Split Cam photos to get an idea of what this camera can do.

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A company named Electrolux has come up with a concept scanner that is supposed to hook up to your toaster via USB. You pop in a design, scan it and then “print out” toast with your design on it, without the need for a breadboard. Before you totally dismiss the idea, realize that you would have the ability to print out a loaf of Mother Teresa toast that would sell for plenty on eBay. If you’re not a scam artist, you could just scan your dick and give your girl dick toast for breakfast. Problems of the world: Solved.

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For those not familiar with the Dead Sea Scrolls, they are the only known surviving copies of Biblical documents made before 100 AD. So, it’d be nice to try and preserve them in any way possible. What better way to insure its longevity than the immortal internet? Now, not only is the oldest Hebrew record of the Old Testament discovered to date, it’s now the first ever to be put on public display on the Internet.

“The project will involve the documentation of all of the thousands of Dead Sea Scrolls fragments belonging to about 900 manuscripts, and placing them in an Internet databank that will be available to the public,” the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) said.

On top of that, infrared and color imaging scientists will help improve the quality and restore worn down fragments that have broken off from the original piece. Let’s hear it for the preservation of the Jewish faith. Thanks JDate! Erm… I mean, thanks Israel Antiquities Authority!

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Holographic images are no longer exclusive to science fiction films thanks to the ICT Graphics Lab at USC.  Three-Dimensional displays have proven to be quite difficult to emulate, suffering from problems such as small viewing areas and high costs.  Using spinning mirrors, high-speed DLP projections and very precise mathematics, the crew at USC are able to display nearly 5,000 individual images reflected every second which come together to create a real-space three-dimensional object. In this case, they’ve displayed a Star Wars imperial tie-fighter.

They’ve also created a formula that renders specific projections at different heights and traces each projected beam back to the display. This way, the projection always finds the correct position of the viewer. So regardless of where you’re standing, the tie-fighter will always be a tie-fighter.  This is a huge breakthrough in three-dimensional holographs that could eventually lead to Cortana-like women everywhere.

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