You’ve probably wandered through a graveyard and noticed that some older inscriptions are so worn that they’re illegible. Perhaps you’ve even wondered about the stories behind them,whose bones are lying there. Thanks to a new project you might be able to find out one day. Scientists at the Ambient Intelligence Lab atCarnegie Mellon Cylab have developed a way to take hi-res scans of the tombstones that can reveal the carving. After that, the scans are matched against a database of carvings to show the words. To date, the most advanced technique has been hand-tracing by archaeologists, which is hardly hi-tech. “We have designed special filters of 3D data that can detect curvature orlinear features on a surface," Dr. Yung Cai, director of the AI Lab, told the BBC. "This is similar to the human visual experience – we usually see thegazed area in high resolution but the peripheral area in a blurred vision." Researchers have been refining their technique at the graveyard at Old St. Luke’s Church in Pittsburgh. Dr. Cai anticipates that the technology could be used to help unmanned vehicles map ruins, as well as aid doctors with tongue inspections, or possibly even predict tsunamis by examining oceansurface patterns.
Tag Archive: Cai
What Does That Gravestone Say?
Social Networking a Boon to Online Video
A new study from Parks Associates finds that folks who are active on social networking sites like MySpace also like to dip into online video, with some 55 percent streaming video and 21 percent downloading long-form videos at least once a month. According to the findings, folks who visit a social networking site a least once a week are about six times more likely to download long-form videos, and one and a half times more likely to view streaming Internet video than folks who don’t visit social networking sites.
Survey Reveals Segmented U.S. Gamer Market
A new survey from Parks Associates finds that video game developers and publishers may be ignoring major portions of the U.S. gamer market by focussing on two gaming audiences—casual gamers and so-called hardcore gamers. Instead, the survey finds the U.S. gamer market consists of some six segments, each with different gaming behaviors, motivations, and (ch-ching!) spending patterns.
The survey of 2,000 U.S. online gamers found gamers broke down into the following categories:
- Power gamers, accounting for 11 percent of the market but almost a third of retail and online game spending;
California Trio Charged with Xbox Tampering
Two owners of a Los Angeles game store and a third man have been charged with felony violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for modifying original Xbox gaming consoles to copy pirated games onto the machines for future play. If convicted, the trio face up to five years in prison.
