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Techradar |
- Review: Avanquest Web Easy Professional 8
- Lowepro introduces compact system camera bags
- Tutorial: How to maximise your PC processor's efficiency
- Review: Xara Web Designer 7 Premium
- Review: Spin Clean Record-washing system
- Tutorial: How to hack Kinect for new functionality
- Review: Milty Permaclean kit
- In Depth: The future of 3D internet and computer interfaces
| Review: Avanquest Web Easy Professional 8 Posted: 15 Aug 2011 02:30 AM PDT With a name like Web Easy Professional, it's no surprise to find that the focus of this software is on simplicity. A balance between simplicity and versatility is essential for website creation software, and we found that Web Easy Professional 8 didn't quite get that crucial balance right. Almost all of the templates included with Web Easy Professional 8 look tacky and outdated. When selecting a template, we were shown a small thumbnail of what the website would look like, which was too small to accurately see what the result would be. For a better look, we had to skip through a number of steps in the website creation walkthrough. If we weren't happy with the template (and we frequently weren't thanks to some poor designs), we had to start the walkthrough all over again. This is a good example of how Web Easy Professional 8's vaunted simplicity ends up causing more work for the user. One of the steps asks you to replace the stock images with photos from your PC. This strangely convoluted process involves browsing your computer for photos and adding them to a list, then selecting an image from the list and pressing an arrow icon for the photo to be inserted. You can only see which photo will be replaced by peering at the small thumbnail, making it difficult to see how your changes are affecting the website. You can also enter text in fields during the walkthrough to populate the website, but once again we felt that instead of making things simpler, it in fact made things more complicated, because you can't be sure where the fields will appear in the final website. The process of adding e-commerce components is also tricky, and we had to go through a number of steps and menus before we could add PayPal. With Web Easy Professional 8 it's possible to make a working website and publish it to the internet in about an hour, but we found that we wasted time struggling against some counter-intuitive design decisions and the results were far from great. 
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| Lowepro introduces compact system camera bags Posted: 15 Aug 2011 02:29 AM PDT Lowepro has introduced a new Compact Courier series to tailor to compact system camera users, such as the Sony NEX system which the Compact Courier 80 is specifically designed for. Other compact systems can be fitted in the bag, with room for an 18-55mm lens attached, plus an extra pancake (16mm) lens in the main compartment. The bag can be made smaller by removing the built-in Mini Quick case, to allow the camera to be carried with the pancake/16mm lens attached. The Mini Quick Case also includes a leash that tethers to a camera strap, securing the case to the camera while wearing and shooting. Designed to be lightweight and slim in profile, the bag can be worn either over the shoulder, across the body or attached to a belt. SlimlineThe Compact Courier 70 has been designed to fit a selection of compact system cameras with an 18-55mm lens attached. If you need to carry more, you can attach the extra lens pouch to the shoulder strap, which is included and fits a pancake lens. Finally, the StreamLine 100 fits a camera with an attached 18-55mm lens, an extra lens and a few small personal items. All models feature padded interiors with a brushed tricot lining, a built-in memory card pocket, a built-in microfibre cleaning cloth, an extra-wide opening for easy access to the main compartment, an adjustable should strap and durable, water-resistant materials. The Compact Courier 80 and 70 are available in Black with Red piping and Grey with Arctic Blue piping. The Streamline 100 is available in Black/Grey and Red/Black. Pricing for the bags has yet to be announced. 
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| Tutorial: How to maximise your PC processor's efficiency Posted: 14 Aug 2011 05:00 AM PDT Windows is very democratic in its allocation of CPU time - just about any program you run gets full access to every processor core by default. This sounds like a good idea at first, but it isn't. Yes, some of the programs you run need to consume all the CPU power you have available, but there are plenty of others that are less important. Many of those system tray icons represent tools that you need to run, but aren't exactly critical. There's no need for them to have the same level of access to your CPU as, say, that game you're going to play next. Many PC users don't realise that there are several ways to make this happen. You don't have to put up with the standard Windows CPU scheduling strategy - you can easily change it, ensuring less important programs make less use of your resources and leaving more power available for the applications that matter. Any resulting speed boost will be small - it's more likely to be 5 per cent than 50 per cent - but it can still help your system run more smoothly. The techniques involved are so simple and easy to apply, they're well worth the effort. Follow our instructions, and in just an hour or two, Windows will be making optimum use of your processor. Process affinity
Windows normally allows any process to run multiple threads on any of your CPU cores. This is great for letting processes run at their maximum speed, but it also means that a poorly behaved program can hog CPU time to the detriment of everything else unless you do something about it. The solution is surprisingly simple. If you have a program that tends to use more CPU time than you'd like, all you have to do is tell Windows to run it on a specific CPU core, rather than all of them. This is called the process affinity. You can set the affinity from the Task Manager in Windows Vista and 7, which is often a good idea if a runaway process has grabbed 100 per cent of your CPU time. Press [Ctrl]+[Shift]+[Esc] to launch Task Manager, click the 'Processes' tab, then find and right-click the troublesome process. Select 'Set affinity' and you'll see a list of your cores, each represented by a single checkbox. Clear all but 'CPU 0', then click 'OK'. That process is now able to run on your first CPU core only. All the other cores will become available to other applications, which should make your system more responsive instantly. The affinity setting isn't just for controlling rogue processes. You could also use it to move all non-essential background programs on your PC to CPU 0, for example. These programs will become slower because they'll be fighting for CPU time, but you'll have freed up the other cores for your more important applications, which may become a little faster. This wouldn't be practical if you had to tweak Task Manager manually for every single process, but if you know that you want to use affinity in advance, there are easier options available. The Windows Start tool is normally used to launch a program or command in a separate window, but it can also launch your application with a specific affinity setting. This makes it very easy to restrict your less important applications. Take Notepad for example. click 'Start | All Programs | Accessories', right-click 'Notepad' and select 'Properties'. The 'Target' box will read something like '%windir%\system32\ notepad.exe'. Make a note of this, and change it to "c:\windows\system32\cmd.exe" /C start /affinity 1 %windir%\system32\notepad.exe. Change 'c:\windows' to the path of the Windows folder on your PC if it's different. Start command
This shortcut will now launch a command shell, which runs the 'Start' command. This accepts the /affinity switch, which tells it to run on the first processor (which is the same as 'CPU 0' in Task Manager), and finally points Windows at the program we want to launch: Notepad. Click 'OK' to save the new shortcut, then use it to launch Notepad. There won't be any visible difference, so to see what's changed, launch Task Manager, click the 'Processes' tab, right-click 'Notepad.exe' and select 'Set affinity'. Now you should see that only CPU 0 is checked - the process can't run on any other cores. If not, check the shortcut properties, and ensure you launch Notepad from the shortcut, not a pinned taskbar icon, or by double-clicking a text file. Once you've got this working then you could transplant the idea to any other shortcut; just check the properties, and add "c:\ windows\system32\cmd.exe" /C start /affinity 1 in front of whatever's already in the 'Target' box (making sure there's a space after '/affinity 1'). But don't start yet - there's an even easier option. RunWithAffinity
RunWithAffinity is an easy to use tool that will quickly create the shortcuts you need to run particular applications on a single CPU core. To begin, create a folder for the program - C:\Program Files\RunWithAffinity will be fine - then copy the executable file there from the SuperDisc, or download it from the author's site. Next, double-click the file 'RunWithAffinity.exe' to launch the program, click the 'Browse' button (labelled '…' at the top right) and choose an application that you'd like to run on a single core. If you're unsure, just browse to the \Windows folder and select 'Notepad.exe', as before. The RunWithAffinity dialog should be populated with information from the program you've chosen, including its name, description, size and so on. All you have to do is choose the core you'd like the program to use. In the 'Select affinity' box, pick '#1' for the time being. Click the 'Browse' button next to 'ShortCut folder', and choose where you'd like the shortcut to be saved. The desktop will be fine for now. Now click 'Create shortcut' and you'll have a desktop shortcut that launches your chosen application, but also restricts it to a single processor core. Repeat this with other applications that don't need your CPU's full attention and it will be very easy to run them in future. You can drag and drop shortcuts elsewhere if you like - perhaps your 'Startup' folder, or some other part of the Start menu. Process affinity is probably the most effective way to control how much access a program has to your CPU, but there are other options. The most significant of these is the process priority. Priority programsYou may have 30, 40, 50 or more processes running on your PC at one time, and deciding which one gets the CPU's attention next is a complicated business. Windows could divide available processor time up evenly, but as we've pointed out already, that's a bad idea: some programs are much more important than others and therefore need more CPU time. To solve the problem, every running process has a priority assigned to it (Low, Below Normal, Normal, Above Normal, High, or Realtime). When processes all want to run simultaneously, the one with the highest priority is more likely to get the next slice of CPU time. Most processes are given the Normal priority by default, but you can change this yourself. This works in a very similar way to affinity. You could change a priority from Task Manager, for instance: press [Ctrl]+[Shift]+ [Esc], click the 'Processes' tab, right-click a process you'd like to change, and select a new priority. Choose 'Below normal' or 'Low' to ensure a background program gets less CPU attention, or select 'Above normal' if you'd like a process to have more CPU time. Don't choose either 'High' or 'Realtime', or you may block system processes from running, which can crash your PC. This is easy enough, but suffers from the same problem as setting affinity this way: you have to do it manually every time you run a particular application. Fortunately there's an easy solution, which is based on the same command line tool that helped us out with the /affinity switch: start. To try this, right-click the shortcut to Notepad again, select 'Properties' and make a note of the contents of the 'Target' box, before changing them to "c:\windows\system32\ cmd.exe" /C start /belownormal /affinity 1 %windir%\system32\ notepad.exe or "c:\windows\system32\cmd.exe" /C start/ abovenormal %windir%\ system32\notepad.exe. The first uses an 'affinity' switch and a '/belownormal' switch, which tells Windows to run Notepad at a lower priority. You don't have to combine affinity and priority settings, as the second option shows. If this application is something that needs more CPU time - a game, for example - then you can simply launch it with the /abovenormal switch, and Windows should allocate it more resources. Don't try to tweak every application to run with a certain affinity or priority, otherwise Windows will have very little CPU scheduling freedom and your PC's performance may suffer. Apply these tweaks to as few programs as you can for the best results. If you're cautious though, there's little to worry about. Customising the priority and affinity is an easy way to reallocate CPU resources as you'd like, and in just a couple of hours you can ensure that your applications make the best possible use of your system. 
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| Review: Xara Web Designer 7 Premium Posted: 14 Aug 2011 03:30 AM PDT Xara is one of the UK's oldest software developers, and since 1981 it has been associated more with drawing and illustration software than web design. Regardless of this, its Web Designer software is now in its seventh version, and the experience the company has accrued over the years is readily evident, from its accomplished interface to the versatile tools contained within – some taken straight from Xara's excellent design software. Double-clicking a template from the Design Gallery gave us a ready-made website that just needed us to replace the placeholder text and images. If you simply want to get a website up and running quickly, this is all you need to do. There are quite a few templates to choose from, and they range from the insipid to the moderately attractive, and while they err more towards bland than mind-blowing, they offer a good base to begin designing a website. Xara Web Designer 7 Premium offers plenty of scope for configuring templates to make eye-catching and unique sites that fit your vision. We particularly liked the fact that that when we changed the basic colours of the template, our website reflected the changes in real time. Each template comes complete with a number of web pages that can be easily arranged and edited, with links in your site's navigation updating automatically. This let us concentrate on editing the layout and adding essential features rather than having to fiddle with the often frustrating details of website creation. There's also a handy tool that optimises all images on your website for use online. Advanced features like embedded videos and Google Maps can be dragged and dropped onto a website, and the range of included ecommerce widgets – including PayPal and Google Checkout tools – is good, though in practise they just take you to a website where you download the HTML to insert yourself. Nevertheless, with Xara's robust range of tools at our disposal, we were able to make an attractive and fully functioning ecommerce site in just over an hour. 
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| Review: Spin Clean Record-washing system Posted: 14 Aug 2011 03:00 AM PDT Apparently the USA-made Spin-Clean record washing system has been around since 1975, so it's clearly a case of better late than never, with Henley Designs having just signed up as UK distributor. Supplied in an appealingly small and light box (vacuum-type record cleaners are large and heavy), it's basically a plastic bath in which you quite literally wash LPs. A pair of velvet pads apply light pressure to opposite sides of the disc, while you rotate it by hand through the cleaning fluid. The clever feature, which we really liked, is that disc immersion depth is set by a pair of rollers, which can be put in position to cater to 12-inch, 10-inch or 7-inch discs – this saves the bother of fitting a centre spindle and clamp, as is done with the Knosti disc cleaner, a conceptually similar device. Spin-Clean supplies a small bottle of cleaning fluid with the kit, which is claimed to be good for up to 700 discs – a four-times-larger top-up bottle costs £20 so running costs are minimal. This fluid is some sort of detergent, added to water (tap, or ideally distilled) and lifts dirt which simply settles at the bottom of the bath. Records are dried after cleaning with the supplied lint-free drying cloths. It's simple and quick to use and results are excellent, among the best we've encountered from any LP cleaner. The fluid is safe on all discs except cut lacquers (including 78s) and really the only drawback is the need for manual drying. 
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| Tutorial: How to hack Kinect for new functionality Posted: 14 Aug 2011 03:00 AM PDT When you break it down into its basic components, Kinect isn't actually particularly revolutionary. It contains a motorised webcam, a microphone array, a depth sensor and an infrared camera - pretty straightforward enthusiast tinkering kit. But put all these elements together and you've got something that does a good job of approximating the way we're all going to interact with our computers in the future, if science fiction ideals are to be believed. Forget keyboards and mice - waving your arms around like Tom Cruise is the new thing. What's great about Kinect is its price. You can easily pick one up for under £100, and there are standard webcams already scraping that price point. OK, its output isn't superb - the camera is a little grainy, and it has a limited resolution - but those combined sensors mean it can do some pretty special things. It can pull out people from complex backgrounds with only the tiniest bit of calibration. With the right software it can track the bare bones, if you'll pardon the pun, of a human skeleton. It can follow you around the room and see in the dark. Kinect is significant. Set yourself up
Sadly, at the time of writing, Kinect isn't officially supported on the PC. Microsoft is getting there with its own SDK - but for now it's (technically) meant to be an Xbox peripheral only. Thankfully, some enterprising hackers, boosted by the promise of cash rewards and worldwide fame, crowbarred their way into the device shortly after its launch late last year. Since then, thanks to a number of open frameworks and existing projects that just happened to be suitable for repurposing, Kinect has grown into a fledgling PC peripheral. It's even nearing usefulness. We say 'nearing' because it still has some way to go. Full functionality doesn't seem to be quite there yet, which the Microsoft SDK will surely help upon its release. This means you shouldn't expect absolute perfection; even in its console incarnation, Kinect is rather finicky about positioning and lighting. Be prepared to shuffle a few things around. To get the full experience you'll need space in which to move - 10-12ft seems to be the norm - and avoid direct sunlight if you can. Install the driversSince there's no official driver, you'll need to start by installing a suite of third party software that looks after the task of recognising and interacting with the Kinect sensor. There are a few options, but we're going to start by downloading the latest unstable release of the OpenNI framework. OpenNI, which is short for Open Natural Interaction, is a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to improving support for natural interaction devices like Kinect, applications that use them, and the middleware that goes between the two. The OpenNI framework is the bit that does the real donkey work, interpreting your hand gestures and tracking your body motion. Most Kinect-compatible apps call upon it at this point. Start by running through the installer to get it on to your system. During the installation, you'll be asked if you want to install a driver from PrimeSense. This is the company which made the Kinect sensor for Microsoft, which works in conjunction with OpenNI, so it's safe to do so. PrimeSense's driver isn't Kinect specific, though. For proper compatibility you'll need the SensorKinect mod, developed by a studious hacker who goes by the name Avin2. Once the OpenNI installation is complete, grab the latest binary from Avin2's site and install it. The final node in the Kinect trifecta is Nite, which also comes from OpenNI. It's the middleware component that provides the various handy gesture interaction tools used by most Kinect-compatible apps. Download the latest unstable binary from here. You'll need to enter a free license key before you can use it with Kinect: it's 0KOIk2JeIBYClPWVnMoRKn5cdY4=. In the interests of avoiding mistakes, the potentially confusing characters are, in this order: zero, upper case 'o'. upper case 'i', upper case 'i', lower case 'L', lower case 'o'. Restart your machine and plug the Kinect unit in, and it should be detected and installed without any issues. An actual appWhen it comes to testing Kinect's functionality, Nicolas Burrus' Kinect RGB demo should be your first port of call. It does an excellent job of demonstrating the device's impressive capabilities. Extract the folder from the archive you've downloaded and check inside; you should see a series of excecutable files. Forget the ones that are marked 'Calibration' for now (you don't need to calibrate the device in order to use it) and head for 'RGBD-viewer.exe'. When you first run the app, you'll see a message in a command prompt window saying that the camera has been set to VGA resolution; the Xbox only uses QVGA, so you've already extracted more from your Kinect than console users can. It can go even further - if you run the viewer from a command prompt with '-highres' appended after it, you can extract a full 1,280 x 1,024 from the camera, albeit at a somewhat lower frame rate. The main screen of the app displays a depth-seperated image in the main body, with a view from the webcam in a separate box at the top right. The technicolour look of the main image represents different depths; hover your mouse over a particular pixel to see how far it is from the Kinect sensor. That's not the best way to represent Kinect's depth-sensing abilities, though. Use the menu in 'Show | Filters' to switch on edge detection (tick the box marked 'Edges'). Close the window, then click 'Show | 3D view' to bring up a window that mixes the depth and webcam sensors together; click and drag to move the eerie three-dimensional view of what Kinect can see. By default, this is in the form of a point cloud view - click 'Triangles' to fill the space between the points with polygons for a more solid look. Click 'SaveMesh' to output the 3D view to a PLY file, suitable for use with MeshLab or Blender. RGBD is a decent demonstration of Kinect's powers, but it's time to put the sensor to work. To do this we'll use FAAST, the Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit. Developed by a team at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies, FAAST came to public attention earlier this year when it was used to turn Google's 'gesture controlled Gmail' April Fool's prank into a reality; by using OpenNI and Nite to read your skeleton, FAAST can make a decent stab of translating your movements into keyboard inputs. Start, predictably, by downloading the latest version of the FAAST toolkit, unzipping it and running the single executable inside. If you've already installed the latest versions of OpenNI and NITE, it should run without problems. Make sure you have your Kinect sensor plugged in, select 'Upper body' under 'Skeleton mode' (we assume you're sitting down; if not, select 'Full body'), set 'Smoothing' to 0.4, then click 'Connect' to fire it up. FAAST will start up a network server, then attempt to pick up a body. Wave at the sensor and you should be able to see your outline in the window. Now it's time for a calibration gesture to give FAAST an idea of your skeletal proportions. In this case you'll need to perform a classic body-building pose - arms bent at the elbows, out to your sides, hands in fists pointing skyward. After a couple of seconds FAAST should work out your frame and display a simple wireframe skeleton over the top. Movements translatedBy default, FAAST is set to translate the leaning of your body into presses of the [W], [A], [S] and [D] keys - click 'Start emulator' to enable this mode and feel free to test it out in your favourite first-person game. You'll probably find it doesn't translate particularly well, but it's a proof of concept. For better results, try closing and re-opening the application, then adjusting the smoothness value on the first tab - it ranges between 0 and 1, so use 0.x - any positive value greater than 1 will cause FAAST to stall. You'll want to experiment with this to find the perfect value for your distance from the camera and for the light level in the room. This is impressive, but FAAST can do a lot more if you set it up to do so. You can wave your left hand around and use it as a mouse, for instance. Stop the emulator, go to the 'Mouse' tab and click 'Enable' to set mouse control as active. Your personal settings will probably differ from ours, but we found it most comfortable to use Absolute control centred on the shoulder joint, set each of the bounds to a distance of 8-inches, and the movement threshold to 5. Start the emulator again and try it. As you move your left hand around, your mouse pointer should follow as if you're using the Force to control it. You'll notice you're a bit trapped, though - FAAST has effectively taken over your mouse, and since you haven't defined any mouse buttons, you can't click to stop the emulator. Hit [Space], and hopefully the start/stop toggle button will trip. Now go to the right-hand tab and enter a new gesture to bind to the left mouse button. We found something like 'left_arm_up 20 mouse_click left_button' worked a treat, although as with many things Kinect, it will increase the flailing of your arms and make you look even more like you're having a fit in front of your PC. Kinect is rather impractical, it's true, but with the FAAST toolkit you should be able to put it to work in any number of ways. Maximise KinectDo things you never thought possible 1. Learn to juggle
This neat program tracks the movement of your hands and attaches glowing orbs to them whenever they're hidden behind your back. Flick your hands and you'll lob the balls in that direction. if you're skilled enough you might manage a three-ball cascade, but don't count on it. 2. Shoot a fireball
Ever seen Dragon Ball Z, the slightly insane Japanese comic book and cartoon series? Run Kamehameha and you'll recognise its influence straight away: it gives you big, wobbly hair that stands on end, and lets you power up and release a world-destroying fireball if you get your poses right. 3. Render 3D objects
You'll need a Mac with Processing installed to use this hack (though if you're savvy enough, you might be able to fire it up in Windows). It uses your hand-waving to sculpt objects from a kind of 3D putty, Kinect input is unlikely to be as accurate as that of a mouse, but that's not the point, is it? 4. Play with physics
This demo uses the openFrameworks system instead of OpenNI, and lets you interact with gravity-centric boxes on screen. It's notable not because of the output, but because of the fact that the Kinect depth sensor removes the need for any kind of blank background. 5. Read your email
The clever minds behind FAAST developed SLOOW - Software Library Optimizing Obligatory Waving - as a response to Google's 'Gesture Gmail' April Fool's prank. No actual code has been released, but it's something you could develop yourself within the toolkit. It certainly looks like fun. 6. Kung Fu Tetris
Practical it isn't, but if you've cleared a big enough space in your front room you can use FAAST to have a go at a particularly physical form of Tetris. Front kicks rotate, side kicks move the pieces, and jumping straight up drops pieces quickly. Lanny Lin has kindly supplied his config file. 
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| Posted: 14 Aug 2011 02:30 AM PDT Most cleaners for LP are dedicated to that medium, ditto those for CD. The Milty Permaclean kit is eminently suitable for both, which in itself is something of a selling point. It's actually as simple as simple can be, consisting of a small aerosol can of solvent and a double-sided velvet pad. Spray some solvent on one side of a disc, then wipe it off complete with grease and grime. It takes a few seconds and while the last few traces of solvent evaporate you can move on to the other side. The same procedure works perfectly well on CDs, DVDs and so on, single-sided of course. The use of chemical solvents on LPs is always a cause for nervousness, but Milty claims that extensive tests have shown this one to have no effect on vinyl and we're happy to concur that we found none in our tests. Another possible drawback is dragging large particles of dirt round the grooves of an LP and causing more damage, but again we couldn't persuade ourselves that the soft velvet pad was doing anything of the kind. Indeed we found this a very quick and effective way of cleaning all kinds of discs. Fingerprinted CDs were returned to their original status as confirmed by a precision error-checking test and LPs came up nicely noise-free, on a par with those cleaned on a professional machine. The velvet pad can be brushed clean when dry and the aerosol treats up to 40 LPs. 
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| In Depth: The future of 3D internet and computer interfaces Posted: 14 Aug 2011 01:00 AM PDT When we talk about a 3D internet, we don't mean HTML web pages designed in 3D - designers are doing that already. Examples like White Void's portfolio add an eye-catching third dimension to an ordinary menu, the Dasai Creative Engineering website features core navigation options mapped onto a rotatable sphere, and the Swell 3D website is rendered in anaglyphic 3D and requires a set of red/cyan glasses to view properly. Whether this approach is effective is up for debate. The effects on the White Void and Dasai sites need a hefty dose of Flash to function. A 2D website wouldn't be as pretty, but it would load quicker and be much simpler to navigate. Augmented realityPerhaps the future of a 3D internet is augmented reality. AR is currently a novelty. It describes applications that use a device's built-in camera to calculate your location and augment what you see with relevant web data. In other words, it's a glimpse into an internet that overflows into the real world. AR applications deliver real place data in real time, tapping into existing databases and assets on the web. Wikitude and Cyclopedia, for example, let you see London Bridge through a camera and read the relevant Wikipedia entry onscreen. Star Walk annotates the night sky for you, while Quest Visual's Word Lens visually translates written languages as you watch, in a way that feels suspiciously like magic. "AR is nothing more than a user interface," says Octavio Good, founder of Quest Visual. "In the case of Word Lens, everything that's being done could be done with a dictionary if you had time, but Word Lens uses AR to make looking up words effortless and fun." Point a phone running the Acrossair browser at a high street, and it will show you the nearest restaurants and highlight those with the best reviews. It doesn't take much imagination to see where this technology is going. In the future, you might be able to see whether a shop has the product you want, or which pub your friends are in. Google GogglesIt's no surprise that Google has thrown its weight behind AR with its Goggles and Shopper apps. Snap a photo of a product or object, and Google Goggles will attempt to identify it and return relevant search results. Do the same in Google Shopper for a fast price comparison. The technology can be hit-and-miss. In fact, the process can often take longer than typing a query into a search box. Google Goggles is certainly handy for products, shops and some places, but it's unlikely to be useful if you want to find information about concepts or ideas. For example, how would you use augmented reality to search for information on augmented reality? While the technology is often used for visual searches, it's not a replacement for search. Instead, it can change the way we interact with real-world objects and places. "Augmented reality is a very natural user interface for some tasks," adds Octavio Good. "The next steps for AR will be to more seamlessly integrate the real word with information people care about." Autonomy's Aurasma project promises more integration of the real and digital worlds. If its YouTube promo is any indication, it will let you point your phone's camera at an advert or still image and see it come to life with an animation or a video. "The technology needed to make AR apps useful has arrived in the last year, in the form of capable smartphones," explains Octavio Good. "This year, phones will get dual-core CPUs, more powerful GPUs, and more capable sensors. AR apps can use these to make more creative apps and to improve the quality of existing ones." 3D controls
The way we interact with computers hasn't changed for almost 30 years. That's not to say that inventors haven't tried to revolutionise PC interaction. We've seen data gloves, VR helmets, 3D mice, trackballs, squeezable balls and even brainwave-powered headsets. Few devices have genuinely threatened the keyboard and mouse though, both of which are perfectly suited to today's 2D interfaces. But things are changing. The introduction of the touchscreen on mobile devices has given rise to new UIs that are almost invisible to users. "On a traditional desktop PC you move the mouse to move the pointer and highlight the photo you want to see," explains Gabriel White of specialist device user experience consultancy Small Surfaces. "With a natural user interface (like a touchscreen), the user simply reaches out and touches the photo they want." We're now seeing laptops and desktop PCs with touch-sensitive displays, and Windows 7 supports touch as standard. Microsoft has expanded the multi-touch idea with Surface, one of the world's most expensive coffee tables. Beyond touch, we need to look to games consoles to see the ideal controllers for future 3D interfaces. Thanks to the PlayStation Eyetoy and Move, Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Kinect, millions of people have been introduced to the concept of spatial or gesture-based control - and they like it. The advantage of the Wii's system is that it needs little explanation. You just swing an invisible tennis racket or chop with an imaginary sword. There are no complicated combos to learn, and the interface is practically invisible. We say 'practically' because current systems are still fiddly when using menus or entering data. Remember the slick, gesture-based interface in the film Minority Report? What Tom Cruise and a fat special effects budget faked, MIT scientists actually built with an Xbox 360 and a hacked Kinect camera. Gesture control seems the ideal replacement for the ageing mouse. As for the keyboard, whether the future is a physical peripheral or a virtual projection, there's life in QWERTY yet. 3D computer interfaces
Two-dimensional interfaces have proved their worth from the earliest punched cards through to the DOS prompt and the Windows desktop. 2D works - it's fast and effective. But it hasn't stopped the development of 3D UIs like Meego, SPBshell3D for Android and Bumptop, even though many are simply 2D systems with a 3D sheen. Is the next phase of UI development purely cosmetic? UI specialist Gabriel White doesn't think so. "As 3D interfaces evolve, there will be new paradigms for interaction," he says. "Once depth is represented in a UI, it's possible to do fascinating things: organising UI elements spatially (rather than in categories and lists), and tangible manipulation of objects allow us to continue to make user interface more natural (pushing and pulling objects, not just swiping and zooming)." Beyond the desktopWhile original filesystems used a tree-like organisational structure, we're now locked into the idea of a desktop with files organised visually on top of it. This setup feels familiar; it's a structured environment that we can identify with, because it resembles a real-world desk. But like any desk, a virtual desktop can get cluttered, which is why BumpTop introduced the idea of stacking files on top of one another to create a 3D desktop. Google bought the company in 2010, and has plans to incorporate parts of the 3D UI into Android 3.0. Again, do we actually need a 3D interface? If so, what do we need it for? There's an argument that a 3D UI would enable us to do things that aren't possible in 2D environments.
James McRae, an Autodesk researcher at the University of Toronto, points to large-scale data visualisation. "Across many disciplines, you have datasets emerging whose geometry is 3D by nature," he says. "Examples might be the solar system, or the human body." Windows 8With increased computer power, rendering a 3D display is easy, but interacting with it is hard. Rumours suggest that Windows 8 could have a 3D element - an optional graphical interface called Wind. It could include Kinect support for gesture tracking, or to enable logins via facial recognition. It might even feature colour-coded info-bubbles, which are scaled according to their importance. Microsoft's Chief Research and Strategy officer Craig Mundie showed off such a 3D concept UI earlier this year. Watch the video here. "There have been many failed attempts to bring the third dimension to UI experiences," says Gabriel White. "Think of the 1990s, when VRML was all the rage. What we learned from all this is that making 3D interfaces isn't about simulating the real world inside a PC. Rather it's about leveraging our real-world cognitive abilities to create compelling, natural and direct interactions that rely less on explicit reasoning and more on intuition and spatial memory." 
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