Virgin America’s in-flight perks are getting even perkier. This week, the domestic carrier announced that it’s bringing Gogo’s ATG-4 service aboard its fleet of aircraft, in a move that promises to enhance in-flight WiFi capacity by a factor of four.
The upgrade is slated to roll out during the first half of 2012, when the company will begin outfitting its planes with Gogo’s directional antenna, dual-modem and EV-DO Rev. B technologies.
But VA isn’t the only airline getting in on the Gogo game, as the in-flight entertainment company announced this week that it’s expanding its new video streaming service to American Airlines, as well.
American, as you may recall, became the first airline to test the Gogo Vision service back in August, aboard its fleet of 15 Boeing 767-200 planes. Now, the streaming product is slated to expand to a full 400 of AA’s aircraft, bringing about 200 movies and TV shows to entertainment-starved passengers. Read the rest of this entry »
Create custom DVD presentations from the videos stored on your computer. Burn to DVD or even CD, and watch all your videos on any TV in the house.
Converts videos on your computer to formats compatible with all mobile devices, including iPhone, Blackberry, Android, Palm Pre, AppleTV, PSP, even non-Smartphones. Read the rest of this entry »
SpaceX promised something big, and it’s now delivered. The company today revealed its plans for the Falcon Heavy, which promises to be the “world’s most powerful rocket.”
Just how powerful is that? SpaceX says the 22-story rocket will be able to carry satellites or spacecraft weighing over 53 metric tons (or 117,000 pounds) into low earth orbit, which is nearly twice what the Space Shuttle is able to carry.
What’s more, this isn’t just a far off promise. SpaceX says the rocket will be “ready” sometime next year, and the first test flight is planned for 2013.
The rocket’s sheer size isn’t it’s only selling point, though — it also promises to drastically reduce the cost of sending things into space, with each launch expected to cost “only” $100 million. Head on past the break for a taste of what’s in store. Read the rest of this entry »
Your standard mouse may do it on the table, but 3D mice do it with extra dimension — some of the time, anyway. Quit 3ds Max and suddenly you have one axis too many on your hands.
After all, the vast majority of applications are 2D to match mice that may exist in a 3D reality but are limited to a decidedly dual-dimensional existence.
No more. 3Dconnexion, makers of a couple different controllers with depth, has released 3DxWare, a Mac or Windows driver that enables exciting 3D mice to work with boring 2D apps.
The first video after the break shows some one-handed zooming and browsing, while the second has you cutting and mixing in Final Cut Pro — again with nary a keyboard or controller in sight. Read the rest of this entry »
Display companies like Mitsubishi still don’t make a big-screen OLED we can buy, yet look at this, a curved display created by the company that looks to be about four feet tall and maybe 10 feet around.
Okay, so a 3mm pixel pitch wouldn’t look too great standing anywhere within about 20 feet of the thing, but that’s why it’s designed for malls and big stores, places where its 1,200 nit brightness can shrug off ambient light.
It was unveiled at ISE 2011 and there’s a video of it doing its thing after the break, but surely it won’t be long before they’re all over Las Vegas. Read the rest of this entry »
We get it AT&T, your iPhone can do voice and data at the same time, and Verizon’s can’t.
Big Red’s Test Man proved that calls aren’t always doomed to drop on the iPhone, but AT&T’s firing right back and saying how you could be doomed in certain social situations, like forgetting to make a dinner reservation on your anniversary.
Props for creativity here, but now that both sides have fired a shot across the other’s bow, can’t we all just get along? Yeah, probably not.
You may have recently seen telepresence robots played for laughs on The Big Bang Theory, but they do also have quite a few practical purposes, and high school student Lyndon Baty from Knox City, Texas is now using one to particularly great effect.
He has a weakened immune system that prevents him from actually attending school, so he’s using a remotely-controlled Vgo telepresence “robot” that allows him to move from class to class and interact with teachers and other students using nothing more than his laptop and webcam at home.
The bot itself is four-feet tall, self-balancing, and simply packs a basic video conferencing system up top that allows its operator to interact with their surroundings — at $5,000, it’s also considerably cheaper than some other similar options.
As Popular Science notes, however, this isn’t the first time that a telepresence bot has gone to school — a student in Russia suffering from leukemia has also been using a similar bot since September of last year as part of a pilot project from the robot’s designers.
Sadists at the German Aerospace Center’s (DLR) Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics are showing off their latest development in anthropomorphic appendages: a robotic hand that can take a beating from a baseball bat and still give you the middle finger (or a thumbs-up, we suppose).
Researchers apparently designed the limb to function like only a human hand can, and it seems they’ve done a decent job: it’s got five independently functioning fingers, sports 19 degrees of freedom (one less than the real deal), and can even snap them phalanges — oh no they didn’t! It’s also got the ability to exert a force of 30 newtons from its fingertips.
So what makes it so resilient? The robo-hand has a built-in web of 38 tendons, which allow it to adapt its stiffness under different circumstances: a step away, its creators say, from rigid appendages of the past.
There’s a video of the hand taking a beating after the jump, but honestly, we’d prefer to see what happens when the hand fights back. Read the rest of this entry »
This one’s only a concept so don’t get your hopes up, but we’re loving the design here, called the Flip from designer Kristian Ulrich Larsen.
It’s a triple-display handset running stock Android that pops out like a tent, collapses into a standard (if curved) slate, and even folds out like a little book. Each screen is said to be Super AMOLED hiding behind Gorilla Glass, with steel mesh acting as hinges — and there’s a full QWERTY keyboard somewhere in there too. Is it magic?
No, it’s just a render, but we’re hoping that something like this becomes rather more physical in the not too distant future. Until then, enjoy the dreamy video after the break. Read the rest of this entry »
When first we saw Fujisoft’s PALRO robot doing its thing we were charmed but, as it didn’t speak English, we had to adore it from afar. No longer.
The little critter has obviously mastered our language quite quickly and can be seen below chatting with an even more robotic humanoid about such idle things as the weather, career aspirations, and just how great PALRO is.
How great is PALRO? PALRO is really great — but humble. Inside that barrel chest is a full-fledged PC with an Atom Z530 processor, 4GB of flash storage, and an Ubuntu kernel keeping everything in check.
It’s available as ever for educational and research institutions for about $3,600, but we’re trying to get one ourselves. If we can get it to type prepare yourselves for many more posts about software based on real Japanese cutting-edge technology. Read the rest of this entry »
