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A brilliant place to test this new scanner is San Francisco. And that is precisely where SceneTap has introduced its newly launched app this weekend that will scan the faces of patrons in 25 bars across the city to determine their ages and genders.
Would-be customers can then check their smartphones for real-time updates on the crowd size, average age and men-to-women mix to decide whether the scene is to their liking.
SceneTap’s ability to guess how old people are and whether they’re men or women relies on advances in a field known as biometrics. A camera at the door snaps your picture, and software maps your features to a grid. By measuring distances such as the length between the nose and the eyes and the eyes and the ears, an algorithm matches your dimensions to a database of averages for age and gender.
Whether or not you think this is creepy, it portends a near future when any camera-equipped smartphone will have the ability to recognize faces with a click of the virtual shutter.
Already the iPhone’s camera app will highlight a person’s face on the screen with a green box before the picture is even snapped. And Apple’s iPhoto software will try to recognize the faces of the people in users’ pictures to categorize photos automatically by who’s in the shot.
Facebook also uses facial recognition software that tries to identify any friends in a photo a user uploads.
Along with the visual images being deleted nearly as soon as they’re snapped, SceneTap’s sensors aren’t sophisticated enough to recognize individual faces in any case. Detecting basic characteristics like gender and age takes much less digital work than identifying individuals.
SceneTap is already in use in six other cities across the country, including Chicago and several college towns.
READ MORE
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/20/scenetap-app-bar-scans-faces-of-b_n_1530850.html?ref=technology
Anaheim Convention Center, March 16th-18th 2012 is the Place. WonderCon is the deal. Started in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1987, Wondercon is part of the yearly staple of the “comic-con” world. Moving through several places in its existence, WonderCon has been significant for its early showings of movies like Spider-Man 2, Batman Begins, Fantastic Four, and Watchmen.
Looked at the biggest part of the ‘con by many was the “Amazing Spider-Man” panel with director Marc Webb, and actress Emma Stone. Director Webb went on to talk about the importance of the actors feeling “real”, and speaking on how his experience with the “big-budget” movie world: ”Doing a movie like this, it’s like a sonnet. There’s a form that you have to adhere to, to a certain degree, but there’s enormous flexibility within those barriers and within those restrictions.” He goes on to talk about the importance of Spider-Man’s costume in his reboot : ”He is, I think, one of the only superheroes whose whole body is covered, you know? You don’t see skin color, and that is — in one of the marketing meetings very early on, they said, ‘Spider-Man transcends all these different countries because everybody can see themselves in him.’”
On top of the Spider-Man discussion, the were other comic and entertainment greats like:
Mike Mignola (Hellboy, B.P.R,D,)
Joe Hill (Locke & Key)
Wil Wheaton (Star Trek: TNG, Stand By Me, Toy Soldiers, The Guild, Big Bang Theory)
J. Michael Straczynski (Superman: Earth One, Thor)
Jim Lee (Co-Publisher: DC Comics, Artist: Justice League, Batman: Hush)
Always a good time, the pop-culture convention circuit has the staying power and dedication on NASCAR, with a yearly visitor total that is on par with NASCAR’s per race totals. Check more out about the Comic-Cons here.
March 7th, 2012, San Francisco, California Held this year’s Apple press conference, and the rumors that were swirling for weeks prior again turned out to carry a lot of truth. The new iPad was introduced by CEO Tim Cook to the world today, with some expected changes/updates. The tride-and-true glass and aluminum housing with the 9.5 by 7.31 inch screen is still here, but now only 0.37 inches thick. To give you an idea of the thickness, it’s thinner than a compact disc case. All the buttons are where they have been, and still has the 30-pin connector on the bottom.
What really gives you an eye-gasm is the 2048 x 1536 Apple Retina display, which blasts away other tablet and laptop resolution to dust. (You may even be disappointed by your computer screen after a few minutes on the new iPad.) Bluetooth 4.0 with claims of one-touch pair and what’s been said to be battery improvements. The front-faced camera stays the same, and the rear camera steps up to 1080p video recording, and illumination.
A5X Processor now drives the iPad, bringing the faster dual-core to the wafer-thin tablet, and because of the crazy resolution of the Retina display, a quad-core graphics processor. What we’re looking at as the biggest update for the new Pad, is the 4G capability now for those specific models, which will be able to operate on the networks of Verizon Wireless, and/or AT&T. Yes, you heard me. That 21 MB per second HSDPA+ or LTE with Apple power.
Still no card storage, universal connection ports, and the still refusing decision to exclude Adobe Flash support are the dings against this new iPad, but it seems that Apple always tries to take attention away from the constants flubs with these things that every other company provides on their hardware. We understand Apple, that you want to set yourselves apart from the rest, but c’monnn. Here’s the price breakdown:
WI-FI only tablets
16GB/$499.00
32GB/$599.00
64GB/$699.00
WI-FI and 4G provided by Verizon or AT&T
16GB/$629.00
32GB/$729.00
64GB/$829.00
The new iPad come out on March 16th, 2012. Set up your tents.
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