The Xbox One! It looks terrific, assuming you're into turning your home entertainment system into a motion-and-voice-controlled dictatorship. And while the devices won't be shipping until the "end of the year" (read: in time for the holidays), you can go ahead and preorder yours right now.
You've got two preorder options, according to Xbox guru Larry Hryb (better known as Major Nelson): You can go to Amazon or the Microsoft Store online. Going with the latter will get you a $10 store credit, while it's doesn't seem that Amazon is offering the same incentive.
Have at it! And yes, just to be clear, this is the preorder for the preorder. [Twitter]
May 22, 2013 ? Dinosaurs are often thought of as large, fierce animals, but new research highlights a previously overlooked diversity of small dinosaurs. In the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, a team of paleontologists from the University of Toronto, Royal Ontario Museum, Cleveland Museum of Natural History and University of Calgary have described a new dinosaur, the smallest plant-eating dinosaur species known from Canada. Albertadromeus syntarsus was identified from a partial hind leg, and other skeletal elements, that indicate it was a speedy runner. Approximately 1.6 m (5 ft) long, it weighed about 16 kg (30 lbs), comparable to a large turkey.
Albertadromeus lived in what is now southern Alberta in the Late Cretaceous, about 77 million years ago. Albertadromeus syntarsus means "Alberta runner with fused foot bones." Unlike its much larger ornithopod cousins, the duckbilled dinosaurs, its two fused lower leg bones would have made it a fast, agile two-legged runner. This animal is the smallest known plant-eating dinosaur in its ecosystem, and researchers hypothesize that it used its speed to avoid predation by the many species of meat-eating dinosaurs that lived at the same time.
Albertadromeus was discovered in 2009 by study co-author David Evans of the Royal Ontario Museum as part an on-going collaboration with Michael Ryan of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History to investigate the evolution of dinosaurs in the Late Cretaceous of North America. The known dinosaur diversity of this time period is dominated by large bodied plant-eating dinosaurs.
Why are so few small-bodied dinosaurs known from North America some 77 million years ago? Smaller animals are less likely to be preserved than larger ones, because their bones are more delicate and are often destroyed before being fossilized. "We know from our previous research that there are preservational biases against the bones of these small dinosaurs," said Caleb Brown of the University of Toronto, lead author of the study. "We are now starting to uncover this hidden diversity, and although skeletons of these small ornithopods are both rare and fragmentary, our study shows that these dinosaurs were more abundant in their ecosystems than previously thought."
The reason for our relatively poor understanding of these small dinosaurs is a combination of the taphonomic processes (those related to decay and preservation) described above, and biases in the way that material has been collected. Small skeletons are more prone to destruction by carnivores, scavengers and weathering processes, so fewer small animals are available to become fossils and smaller animals are often more difficult to find and identify than those of larger animals.
"Albertadromeus may have been close to the bottom of the dinosaur food chain but without dinosaurs like it you'd not have giants like T. rex," said Michael Ryan. "Our understanding of the structure of dinosaur ecosystems is dependent on the fossils that have been preserved. Fragmentary, but important, specimens like that of Albertadromeus suggest that we are only beginning to understand the shape of dinosaur diversity and the structure of their communities."
"You can imagine such small dinosaurs filling the niche of animals such as rabbits and being major, but relatively inconspicuous, members of their ecological community" said Anthony Russell of the University of Calgary.
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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.
Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.
Journal Reference:
Caleb Marshall Brown, David C. Evans, Michael J. Ryan, Anthony P. Russell. New data on the diversity and abundance of small-bodied ornithopods (Dinosauria, Ornithischia) from the Belly River Group (Campanian) of Alberta. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 2013; 33 (3): 495 DOI: 10.1080/02724634.2013.746229
Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.
Wall Street Journal reports that, in a push to broaden its user base, the music streaming service is sharing the data?and the music to match. The top-50 lists will be embeddable and entirely free to listen to, so even non-subscribers will be able to listen to the songs that are currently topping interent playlists around the world. The service?called Charts?is already live. [Spotify via Wall Street Journal]
Boost Mobile launched a Mobile Wallet app and service today at CTIA 2013 with an interesting twist in that it is tied to a Visa Prepaid card. Boost Mobile customers simply hit up a store to get signed up, download an app onto their handset and once funds are added to their account can use them in a wide variety of ways. From sending money via the app to people in 135 other countries, the ability to pay more than 3,500 billers nationwide, top up your prepaid account and using the included Visa debit card any money in your account can be accessed via that card as well. The app also makes use of your handset's camera with its Quick Check feature -- which is coming soon -- allowing an account holder to snap a photo of a check and submit it using the app to have the check's value added to your mobile wallet once approved -- which is nifty, if you don't use a bank we suppose. There are no month-to-month fees for the service but each bill you pay will cost some $2 and climbs depending on how quickly you need the payment made against the account. The service launches in Los Angeles, San Diego and parts of New Jersey today with rollout to all markets expected by the end of the year.
You might say the week is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workweek, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Weekly Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past seven days -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
I need a single-frame cartoon drawn up of three birds sitting in a grape vine, having a conversation. The style can be a simple line drawing and be in B+W, but I'd need high-res jpeg or vector files supplied.
Exact details of the cartoon and conversation between the characters will be supplied to shortlisted proposals.
The winning bidder will also need to supply a quick concept sketch of their drawing for approval before working on and delivering the finished file.
I'd suggest the sketch would take half an hour, and the finished work and file deliverables would be a further two hours' work.
Please give a full cost estimate of the job in your proposal.
Any questions, just ask! Good luck.
Disney researchers develop fast, economical method for high-definition video compositingPublic release date: 20-May-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Jennifer Liu jennifer.c.liu@disney.com 818-544-6130 Disney Research
DuctTake system combines multiple takes into single video
ZURICH - Video compositing to create special effects, replace backgrounds or combine multiple takes of an actor's performance is an integral, but highly labor-intensive, part of modern film making. Researchers at Disney Research, Zrich, however, have found an innovative way to create these composite videos that is simple, fast, and easy to use.
Rather than perform a painstaking segmentation of elements that are to be added or subtracted from a video, the Disney system, called DuctTake, uses computer algorithms to find a spatiotemporal "seam" through the video frame that enables two or more videos to be joined together.
These seams can be highly irregular, following the contours of people, furniture and other objects that are common in each take of the scene. Because it can only combine scenes that have overlapping content, DuctTake isn't useful for combining arbitrary video clips. But it works like a charm when combining multiple takes of the same shot.
The Disney Research, Zrich researchers showed the technique can be used across a wide range of video composites. For example, it can combine the best performances by actors from several different takes into a single seamless output, reducing the number of on-set takes that are required to be filmed. Furthermore, the same technique can be used to make a cut seamless, allowing the first half of one take to be combined into a second take. In another case, the researchers eliminated unwanted cars from a street scene by offsetting the vehicle with empty street imagery from the same video take. Hard-to-shoot scenes involving animals, they demonstrated, become a bit easier when an animal trainer can be easily removed from the shot, or other actors can be added at the moment of time when the animal does the right thing.
"The most delicate component is alignment," said Oliver Wang, post doctoral researcher at Disney Research, Zrich. "But given properly aligned views, we can almost always generate good composites with minimal work."
The findings by Wang and his Disney Research, Zrich team of Jan Regg, Aljoscha Smolic and Markus Gross were presented at Eurographics 2013, the European Association for Computer Graphics conference. More information and a video demonstration is available online at http://www.disneyresearch.com/project/ducttake/.
Most video compositing is accomplished now by the digital equivalent of "cut-and-paste." Rotoscoping is the process by which elements can be added by drawing segmentation outlines. Chroma-keying, familiar to viewers of TV weathercasts in which news announcers appear to stand in front of large, animated maps, separates actors from backgrounds based on color hues; it's cheap and robust, but restricts filming to studio environments, and can require challenging color balancing in post-production.
"Our approach solves a simpler problem," Gross acknowledged, "but as a result it is robust, fast to compute and easy for artists to use, enabling compositing techniques to be used on lower budget shots and productions."
A DuctTake user can combine two videos by making a few quick brush strokes to indicate which parts of the video to keep in each take. An algorithm developed by the Disney Research, Zrich team then computes an optimal seam and merges the two videos together.
DuctTake also includes a number of tools necessary to create a composite that looks realistic, such as adjusting the seam between frames to compensate for camera movement or content movement. Other tools adjust for differences in brightness, contrast and hue between takes, blend images along seams that are visible in a common background, and increase the blurriness in some video to match blurring that occurs in the video with which it is being combined.
###
About Disney Research
Disney Research is a network of research laboratories supporting The Walt Disney Company. Its purpose is to pursue scientific and technological innovation to advance the company's broad media and entertainment efforts. Disney Research is managed by an internal Disney Research Council co-chaired by Disney-Pixar's Ed Catmull and Walt Disney Imagineering's Bruce Vaughn, and including the directors of the individual labs. It has facilities in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Boston and Zrich. Research topics include computer graphics, video processing, computer vision, robotics, radio and antennas, wireless communications, human-computer interaction, displays, data mining, machine learning and behavioral sciences.
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Disney researchers develop fast, economical method for high-definition video compositingPublic release date: 20-May-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Jennifer Liu jennifer.c.liu@disney.com 818-544-6130 Disney Research
DuctTake system combines multiple takes into single video
ZURICH - Video compositing to create special effects, replace backgrounds or combine multiple takes of an actor's performance is an integral, but highly labor-intensive, part of modern film making. Researchers at Disney Research, Zrich, however, have found an innovative way to create these composite videos that is simple, fast, and easy to use.
Rather than perform a painstaking segmentation of elements that are to be added or subtracted from a video, the Disney system, called DuctTake, uses computer algorithms to find a spatiotemporal "seam" through the video frame that enables two or more videos to be joined together.
These seams can be highly irregular, following the contours of people, furniture and other objects that are common in each take of the scene. Because it can only combine scenes that have overlapping content, DuctTake isn't useful for combining arbitrary video clips. But it works like a charm when combining multiple takes of the same shot.
The Disney Research, Zrich researchers showed the technique can be used across a wide range of video composites. For example, it can combine the best performances by actors from several different takes into a single seamless output, reducing the number of on-set takes that are required to be filmed. Furthermore, the same technique can be used to make a cut seamless, allowing the first half of one take to be combined into a second take. In another case, the researchers eliminated unwanted cars from a street scene by offsetting the vehicle with empty street imagery from the same video take. Hard-to-shoot scenes involving animals, they demonstrated, become a bit easier when an animal trainer can be easily removed from the shot, or other actors can be added at the moment of time when the animal does the right thing.
"The most delicate component is alignment," said Oliver Wang, post doctoral researcher at Disney Research, Zrich. "But given properly aligned views, we can almost always generate good composites with minimal work."
The findings by Wang and his Disney Research, Zrich team of Jan Regg, Aljoscha Smolic and Markus Gross were presented at Eurographics 2013, the European Association for Computer Graphics conference. More information and a video demonstration is available online at http://www.disneyresearch.com/project/ducttake/.
Most video compositing is accomplished now by the digital equivalent of "cut-and-paste." Rotoscoping is the process by which elements can be added by drawing segmentation outlines. Chroma-keying, familiar to viewers of TV weathercasts in which news announcers appear to stand in front of large, animated maps, separates actors from backgrounds based on color hues; it's cheap and robust, but restricts filming to studio environments, and can require challenging color balancing in post-production.
"Our approach solves a simpler problem," Gross acknowledged, "but as a result it is robust, fast to compute and easy for artists to use, enabling compositing techniques to be used on lower budget shots and productions."
A DuctTake user can combine two videos by making a few quick brush strokes to indicate which parts of the video to keep in each take. An algorithm developed by the Disney Research, Zrich team then computes an optimal seam and merges the two videos together.
DuctTake also includes a number of tools necessary to create a composite that looks realistic, such as adjusting the seam between frames to compensate for camera movement or content movement. Other tools adjust for differences in brightness, contrast and hue between takes, blend images along seams that are visible in a common background, and increase the blurriness in some video to match blurring that occurs in the video with which it is being combined.
###
About Disney Research
Disney Research is a network of research laboratories supporting The Walt Disney Company. Its purpose is to pursue scientific and technological innovation to advance the company's broad media and entertainment efforts. Disney Research is managed by an internal Disney Research Council co-chaired by Disney-Pixar's Ed Catmull and Walt Disney Imagineering's Bruce Vaughn, and including the directors of the individual labs. It has facilities in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Boston and Zrich. Research topics include computer graphics, video processing, computer vision, robotics, radio and antennas, wireless communications, human-computer interaction, displays, data mining, machine learning and behavioral sciences.
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
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Public release date: 20-May-2013
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