Monday 31 August 2015

HTC Vive Launches This Year, but the Bulk will be Released in 2016


HTC_Vive

HTC has announced its plans to provide a limited release of its much-waited virtual reality headset named Vive this year. HTC will be launching its devices in limited quantity later this year followed by a large-scale massive launch in the first half of 2016. It has kept both the dates of launches under wrap for the time being but the virtual reality segment is already buzzing with this promising announcement. HTC Vive headset provides much freedom of movement to the users by allowing them to walk freely which helps in adding extra depth to the wholesome gaming experience. On the other hand, the available virtual reality sets just let the users move them within a restricted space.

How virtual reality headsets work? 

Virtual reality headsets are basically worn by the users on their eyes and headsets happens to provide one a kind full 3D virtual environment to the gamers to explore. In order to enhance the gaming experience an additional connected controller is provided. Virtual reality sphere is mainly used for gaming sector and virtual devices are gradually increasing their support for several popular titles.

Market analysts are predicting that the virtual reality can even make foray in the film industry with time and popularity. In the recent times, few filmmakers had utilized this technology to understand its potential in the entertainment industry.

HTC gives a major preference to Vibe 

HTC is a trusted name in the field of Smartphones but over the years, it has received serious competition from the Smartphone majors- Apple and Samsung. HTC had made its foray in the virtual reality sector in order to give a boot to its business operations. Earlier HTC had developed a remarkable Steam online gaming platform in collaboration with Valve. Now it is relying on its partner to launch the virtual reality device called Vive on full scale in first quarter of 2016.

HTC to get stiff competition in 2016 

HTC’s Vive will get some stiff competition from other upcoming virtual devices namely Facebook’s Occult Rift and Sony’s Project Morpheus, which are expected to be launched in 2016. Therefore it is quite unclear why HTC decided to go for only a limited in 2015 rather than going with wider launch in 2015 and getting a huge share of virtual reality market. HTC must be trying to get few people used to its Vive then build a demand for this remarkable when it opens up for wider scale launch in first half of 2016. With all these marvelous projections, expectations and launches 2016 certainly will be a decisive year for the virtual reality devices.

Future prospects of HTC Vive 

HTC understands the importance of 2016 when a large number of virtual reality devices will be rolling out to appease the customers and it is hoping to grab a bigger pie of the market by building a demand with limited launch this year. The head of marketing executive for HTC Jeff Gattis had predicted selling of virtual devices anywhere between 2-3 million next year.

Saturday 29 August 2015

A Little Light Interaction Leaves Quantum Physicists Beaming


Light
A remarkable research conducted by a group of physicists had brought insightful revelations where it is possible to make building block of the quantum computer with the use of pure light. This team of physicists comes from University of Toronto and they had successfully published their paper in the Nature Physics on ‘logic gateway’ an essential segment of computer circuitry.

What are logic gate? 

Logic gates segments are designed to execute operations on the input data in order to create outputs. In the earlier times during the phase of classical computers, the diodes or transistors formed the logic gates but with the advancement of quantum computer component it is now comprised of both the individual atoms as well as subatomic particles. Processing of information as per the laws of the quantum physics usually takes place when these particles interact with each other.

In the quantum computing the light particles are known as ‘photos’ and offers various advantages but it is extremely difficult to invoke interaction among them in a profitable manner. The research conducted by the physicist from University of Toronto is centered on finding successful ways of creating such interactions.

Researchers are upbeat with their experiment results

One of the paper’s authors Aephraim Steinberg had shed some amazing insight on the experiment results. Physicists at the University Of Toronto had studied the effect of photon on an optical beam but they had advanced their experiment in a wholesome fashion. In usual conditions, light beam passes through each other without causing change on effect on the other. In order to effectively develop technologies such as optical quantum computers it is necessary to make beams interact with one another. But no one had achieved feat with using just single photon.

How this experiment was conducted? 

The researchers had conducted this experiment of creating light beams interaction in a delicate process of two steps. A shot of single photon was forced at the rubidium atoms so that it iced to a millionth of a degree above absolute zero. Later on the photons become intertwined with the atoms and this resulted in rubidium interaction to another optical beam. The photon started changing the atom’s refractive index which brought a minute but calculable “phase shift” in the beam. This method used in the experiment can be actively brought into use in the optical quantum logic gate, which will facilitate input-output and information-processing.

Where this experiment can be applied? 

The best place to use this experiment in wholesome application is in the quantum logic gates. This advanced process will help in seeing the interactions in a new manner and in the study of optics a new filed will be revealed. Currently the researchers are working further to answer two important questions i.e. what happens when dealing with one particle of light at time and how differently the light beams will interact with other. Researchers are hopeful of finding these essential questions answers soon with continuous research and experimentations.

Gmail to Auto-Sync Events to Google Calendar


Google_Calendar
Google is all set to bring productivity and efficient management of precious time by collaborating its two prominent app in one of kind auto sync crossover. It had brought new feature auto sync the two major apps i.e. Gmail and Google Calendar in order to make personal life, business, travel and event management a breeze. In upcoming days when you receive the Gmail notification for any booking of flight, restaurant, hotel or other event information then its details will be automatically added to the Google Calendar. This crossover will laminate the need of typing or adding those details back in the Calendar as a reminder for later on.

Who will benefit from this crossover? 

People who engage in lot of travel related to work or happen to go on long drives, vacations or just wishes to get better management over these activities will benefit from this new feature. This new feature will get automatically enabled by default for all the people using theses Google Apps regardless of their mobile OS. With this feature Gmail will be able to auto-populate the Google Calendar in a timely fashion with information even related to the delay in the fights, check-in times, flight number and much more. This feature will work efficiently along all the mobile platforms such as Android, iOS and other along with the desktops.

Google has high hopes with this integration

Google is hopeful that this new feature of auto sync will help in providing better ways to the users for saving time and engaging with one another in a productive manner.

Another new feature has been integrated which brings an ability to reuse the old posts. This feature remains enabled by default on both the devices i.e. mobile Calendar and desktop but users can easily turn off or delete the events as per their need. In the educational field this feature can be used to form new announcements by simply tweaking the old posts rather than going through the trouble writing new post from the scratch.

Privacy will be maintained with this new feature

Google had given a huge emphasis upon the privacy and had ensured that the events and plans are broadcasted to the public in any case. The events added in the Calendar from the Gmail will only be made visible to the calendar owner. In the visibility section users can even adjust the visibility criteria along with deleting the unwanted items which might get added to the Calendar.

In order to activate this beneficial program Google Calendar will sent a one-time email notification which will give all the essential details regarding the settings as well the sharing details. Google will be releasing this new feature of auto syncing among the Gmail and Calendar apps by the end of September. This update is expected to bring a new level of productivity among the users and a lot of time will be saved which usually gets wasted in creating events based on the information received via Gmail regarding the work, personal events and tour and programs.

Thursday 27 August 2015

Ten of the Best Football Apps and Games



Football_Apps
This upcoming new season of football can be enjoyed in a much better on the tablet and smartphone by using some smart football apps. Here are some smart football apps which offer more than just checking scores and reading recent news.

Flick Click Football Free on iOS & Android

This football game is all centered on scoring goals by just flicking the fingers on the screen and avoiding the alert defenders and goalkeepers. The response for touches is highly improvised and offers highly tuned flicking mechanics for perfect gaming experience. This game brings a variety of modes from just hitting the bulls-eye targets to scoring as much as you can within a set time limit. This game is loaded with in-app purchases, which offer to increase the intensity of the game and improve the skills of the users.

Stats Zone by FourFourTwo Free on iOS & Android

This game is seen as a spin-off from FourFourTwo magazine, which in the past has brought some smart statistics in its pages, which offered new insight in the football dynamics. This football app is great at bringing smart statistics ion form of graphs and numbers on the screen carefully managing different leagues and teams. It taps the Opta database in order to retrieve match statistics therefore its able to provide intense and in-depth data related to player performance and gaming attributes rather just checking scores.

Corner Available Free on iOS & Android

Corner is a football app, which offers an incredible help in locating the nearby pub in UK, which showcases the football matches on the TV. It offers fast and easy way of choosing the match and sees which nearby pubs are showing it in their premises along with other details like the kind of foods being served, WiFi connectivity as well as beer gardens.

Ultimate Fan Live Free on iOS & Android

Most of the people use a wide number of fantasy football tournament ranging from the Telegraph fantasy tournament to official Premier League game. Ultimate Fan Live brings an interesting spin on this format by bringing the best experiences by just signing up and creating a new league with your friends. It is a live form of fantasy tournament wherein users can choose just two players before the match and points are earned later on by performing all the action s in the game, which helps in boosting up the total.

OneFootball Free on iOS, Android and Windows

It is a highly popular football app, which offers a great avenue to look out for news, statistics and scores for the fans. It offers some popular features like push notifications, minute-by-minute commentaries, one-to-one and group messaging service and others. The app design is neat and carefully organized to display results in a friendly manner. It is available for free on three popular mobile based OS namely iOS, Android and Windows and is filled with in app purchases to enhance its usability and utility.

Metamaterial wormhole Teleports Magnetic Fields across Space


Wormhole
Metamaterials are the stuff futurists dream of: painstakingly engineered materials of conventional origin (plastics, metal, etc.) that display properties not found in nature, enabling things like invisibility (also sometimes called ‘cloaking’), imaging beyond the diffraction limit of light and dissipating seismic waves.

Metamaterials differ with conventional materials

In that they display significant interaction with the magnetic component of electromagnetic waves. It is this property that has been exploited by Alvaro Sanchez et al. at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Autonomous University of Barcelona), in Spain, who claim to have built the world’s first magnetic wormhole. Unlike the wormhole of the popular lexicon however, this is no portal in space-time that allows travelling over great distances almost instantaneously; it is simply a device that allows a magnetic field originating in one region to emerge elsewhere, the device itself remaining magnetically undetectable. Simply put: an invisible (so to speak) device that absorbs a magnetic field at one end and emits the field, unchanged, at the other, much like an invisible garden hose that apparently causes water to vanish at the tap and spontaneously rematerialize at the other end.

This “pipe of magnetism” seems fairly insignificant at first glance, until you consider that when a magnetic field disappears at a point, it effectively is a magnetic monopole.

More about the idea

The idea was first put forth in a 2008 paper “Electromagnetic wormholes and virtual magnetic monopoles” by Allan Greenleaf et al. According to Matti Lassas at the Helsinki University of Technology in Finland, co-author of the 2008 paper, some clever manipulations of the mathematical constructs in that paper, by the scientists at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, have enabled the “wormhole device” to finally fall within the scope of present engineering techniques.

The device has at its core a magnetised nickel-iron tube, coated with “metasurfaces” that actually transmits the magnetic field. It is surrounded by a spherical mesh of superconducting alloy (made of yttrium barium copper oxide) that helps with both repelling the field inside the tube as well as protecting it from distortion due to incoming external fields. Now to completely make the arrangement magnetically undetectable, the sphere is further enclosed in a ferromagnetic metal array that disguises the superconductor’s magnetic signature. The entire arrangement is dipped in liquid nitrogen to bring the temperature down to where the yttrium barium alloy becomes superconducting.

The result is simply that a magnetic field disappears into one end of the apparatus and appears out the other end. No field is detected between the two ends. This is effectively a pair of monopoles, one at each end of the device.

This ‘cloaking’ of magnetic fields as they travel has significant advantages, the most obvious of which, at least at the present, is in the field of medicine. The MRI machine has revolutionised medical care by providing doctors the ability to fully image the entire human body, a very tedious and slow process with x-rays, which also posed the risk of radiation overexposure, in very little time. With this device multiple imagers could work simultaneously without mutual distortion. The ‘cloaking’ effect could also be implemented in that it would be possible to use metal implements, viz. surgical equipment, in the vicinity of an MRI machine. Presently, the strong fields emanated by an MRI machine can cause unsecured metal to fly across the room. Metal also interferes with the imaging.

Another scenario is one in which the patient does not have to lie inside a loud claustrophobic machine for a scan; the fields generated by the actual machine could simply be “teleported” around the patient.

Most of all though, this device actually presents us with a functional magnetic monopole, the likes of which have eluded us, despite theoretical evidence, for decades. New research will definitely open avenues to as-of-yet unknown applications for the magnetic wormhole.

Assuming this holds up to third-party confirmation and is peer reviewed for accuracy, it really might be a real game changer.

Next stop, real matter?