Disrupting Automotive: Using AR to Pick Your Next Ride

Nissan’s teamed up with the versatile and endlessly-surprising Kinect to enable people to check out its 2013 Pathfinder, inside and outside, from all angles, with a natural series of gestures. And it’s pretty specific, lending you a sense of proportion for the trunk space and even indicating where your head falls in the driver’s seat.

The idea is to give you enough sensory information via augmented reality (AR) to make an informed decision about whether the Pathfinder is right for you. (It was certainly right for my parents at least three times in their car-buying history.)

Question is, how many cars have been sold by new car smell alone? Somebody better be pumping that in from someplace.

Scared, Netflix? Amazon Prime is on Xbox 360

The dominant console in US homes already has Netflix. Now, it has Amazon Prime too. This means 17,000 films and TV series, including Downton Abbey, Mad Men and Mission Impossible 4 (Amazon calls it MI:3 in the press release ha ha!), all available through your M$oft console, with fancy Kinect menu scrolling if you like. One feature we like: WhisperSync. Like with Kindle books, you can stop a film on one device and pick up from the same point on another (eg. Kindle Fire or your laptop PC).

The cost: $80 (€65) a year, plus an Xbox Live membership ($50, but you’ve probably got that already if you’ve got an Xbox). Netflix’s streaming offer starts at $8/month, so, as our US homies would say, “do the math.”

Is this the end of Netflix’s dominance, or just the start of Amazon’s streaming adventure? We gather the Kindle Fire, the first device to feature Prime streaming, isn’t doing so well: so we’ll opt for the latter for now. Especially given the above so-keen-it’s-nearly-desperate video. Still, a space to be watched, if ever there was one.

Source: Engadget

Leap: Minority Report, now?

Ok, one sees headlines like that quite often. But this is utterly amazeballs. Leap is a computer accessory that can apparently track all of your fingers in three dimensions. Which means you can use it for navigating, shooting, driving, Angry Birding: anything apparently, as long as you use the right hand movements.

Now, our experience teaches us to be wary: you’d never out your hands as close to the screen as in this demo; and most of what Kinect was made for - games - are rubbish. So as ever, success will depend on real usefulness, i.e. applications. But still: WOW!

The best bit last: you can pre-order Leap now, for just $70. And its manufacturer promises it’s 100 times more accurate than anything else out there.

We give you GrabMagic!, a Kinect hack made with the express purpose of bringing magic to the multi-screen experience, developed by Aral Balkan at MIPCube last weekend.

See the other projects from the boat hack at MIPCube.