MIT Researchers Working on 3D Data Capture/Gesture Interface for Cell Phones

3D data capture and gesture recognition are hot and that' what Vivek Goyal, the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering, and his group at MIT’s Research Lab of Electronics are working on. Two of his colleagues Kirmani and Colaco were selected as one of eight winners (out of 146 university applicants) of a $100,000 grant through its 2011 Innovation Fellowship program. The detail of how the sensors can be made small enough and cheap enough are worth reviewing if you want the gory details.

- MIT

Slightly Off Topic: When The Press Gets it Wrong

A few weeks back I reported that one well-known tech news outlet reported that the FCC would required GPS in phones in 2018. A commenter to this blog explained that was not the case. I found the citation in the Federal Register and updated the blog.

Then I contacted three organizations who reported that news. Here is how they responded (typically after several e-mail exchanges):

• one removed the story from the Web
• one rewrote the story and never indicated incorrect information had been reported
• one included a note above the article that corrections had been made

I will still be reading GCN, but the other two ... not so much.

Chinese Government to Track All via Cell Phones…to better Manage Traffic.

Platform for Citizen Movement Information is proposal by the Chinese government to better manage traffic. In reality it's real time tracking via cell phones. It's not clear to me what sort of ID information is shared back to the government. I could not find a translation of the official government statement and all the blogs point to one another and The Next Web Asia (where the editor I guess read the original in Chinese).

- Yahoo News

via @timorielly