Optical-camouflage technology developed at the University of Tokyo
This seems perfectly believable when you're reading about a fictional world filled with witches, wizards and centuries-old magic; but in the real world, such a garment would be impossible, right? Not so fast. With optical-camouflage technology developed by scientists at the University of Tokyo, the invisibility cloak is already a reality.
Optical camouflage delivers a similar experience to Harry Potter's invisibility cloak, but using it requires a slightly more complicated arrangement. First, the person who wants to be invisible (let's call her Person A) dons a garment that resembles a hooded raincoat. The garment is made of a special material that we'll examine more closely in a moment. Next, an observer (Person B) stands before Person A at a specific location. At that location, instead of seeing Person A wearing a hooded raincoat, Person B sees right through the cloak, making Person A appear to be invisible. The photograph on the right below shows you what Person B would see. If Person B were viewing from a slightly different location, he would simply see Person A wearing a silver garment (left photograph below).
So What is Optical Camouflage?
Optical camouflage is a kind of active camouflage.
This idea is very simple. If you project background image onto the masked object, you can observe the masked object just as if it were virtually transparent.
This shows the principle of the optical camouflage using X'tal Vision. You can select camouflaged object to cover with retroreflector. Moreover, to project a stereoscopic image, the observer looks at the masking object more transparent.
Optical camouflage can be applied for a real scene. In the case of a real scene, a photograph of the scene is taken from the operatorfs viewpoint, and this photograph is projected to exactly the same place as the original. Actually, applying HMP-based optical camouflage to a real scene requires image-based rendering techniques.
though this technology appears as a remarkable invention this can easily misused.however we all are looking forward to buy this piece of clothing.......
regards.. ajay
Sunday, October 22, 2006
War ofWeb Browsers
By now, we know that many of you are au courant with the uber-browsers available. Which is the best beta browser to choose is still a question mark.
Version 7.0 of internet explorer has just been unveiled by Microsoft Corp. for Windows XP and boasts of enhanced security features, making everyday tasks easier.
Talking about IE 7, Dean Hachamovitch, general manager, Internet Explorer team, Microsoft, said, "We listened carefully to our customers, and are delivering a safer browser that makes the tasks they do every day much easier."
The security framework of the new explorer has been overhauled, and as a result of these enhancements, the browser will be a stand-alone application, rather than integrated with the Windows shell, and it will no longer be capable of acting as a file browser.
IE7 in Windows Vista contains additional security measures, most significantly ‘Protected Mode’, whereby the browser runs in a sandbox. As such, it can write to only the Temporary Internet Files folder and cannot install start-up programs or change any configuration of the operating system without communicating through a broker process. This increases the security of the system considerably.
The ‘Protected Mode’ operation will not be included in the Windows XP version of Internet Explorer 7, as it relies on technologies not found on systems before Vista. It also supports the Parental Controls and Network Diagnostics features which are unique to Vista.
The security level of IE7 is vaunted to be high, but other browsers like Firefox, Safari, Netscape and Opera too vaunt of additional features and better security.
Mozilla Firefox, a free open source, cross-platform, graphical web browser developed by the Mozilla Corporation and hundreds of volunteers, has a spontaneous interface and blocks viruses, spyware, and popup ads.
The main features included with Firefox are tabbed browsing, incremental find, live bookmarking, a customizable download manager and a built-in search toolbar.
The new version of Firefox boasts of automatically upgrading the latest security and feature updates.
Safari, on the other hand, is a web browser developed by Apple Computer, Inc. and is available as part of Mac OS X. It was included as the default browser in Mac OS X v10.3 (Panther) and is the only browser bundled with Mac OS X v10.4 (Tiger).
Safari 2.0.4, the latest version, was released on June 27, 2006, and is packed with Apple's brushed metal user interface and has a bookmark management scheme that functions like the iTunes jukebox software. It also integrates Apple's QuickTime multimedia technology and features a tabbed-browsing interface similar to that of Firefox and Opera. The browser also includes an integrated pop-up ad blocker and a configurable image blocker.
Opera 9, developed by Opera Software, is the latest version unmasked on September 21, 2006. There are several new features in Opera 9. The most important ones are: Simple BitTorrent client, targeted towards novice users, content blocker (also known as AdBlock), thumbnail preview of tabs, site specific preferences (pop-up blocking, cookies, scripts, user style sheets, user-agent masking), the ability to create search engines from a textfield, improved rich text editing and redefined default hot keys to be more like Internet Explorer.
Netscape Communications Corporation(commonly known as Netscape), an American computer services company, best known for its web browser, was once dominant in terms of usage share, but lost most of its share to Internet Explorer during the first browser war. As of 2006, the usage share of Netscape browsers is under 1% and falling.
The company existed only from 1994 to 2003, latterly as a subsidiary of AOL, but the Netscape brand is still in use. In June 2006, Netscape redesigned their website to a totally different format which was similar to Digg. Users can vote for which stories are to be included on the front page, and may comment on them as well. Netscape's market share had been declining for over a year at the time of the change-over.
The current version of Netscape was released to mixed reactions. Some users really like that users had more participation ability, while others found the pages to be harder to navigate and not as structured. In fact, soon after the release of the new site, a story entitled ‘Netscape's Blunder’ was the top rated story.
As of July 2006, estimates suggest that Firefox's usage share is around 12% of overall browser usage, with its highest usage in Germany (about 39%). The usage data gives Opera's overall global share of the browser market as being between 0.5% and 1.0%, although Opera's usage share is over 11% in Ukraine, over 8% in Russia, over 7% in Poland and over 6% in Lithuania.
Safari’s global share has been climbing ever since its release, but is still below 5%.
The adoption rate of Internet Explorer seems to be closely related to that of Microsoft Windows, as it is the default web browser that comes with Windows. Since the integration of Internet Explorer 2.0 with Windows 95 OSR 1 in 1996, and especially after version 4.0's release, the adoption was greatly accelerated: from below 20% in 1996 to about 40% in 1998 and over 80% in 2000.
Internet Explorer had almost completely superseded its main rival Netscape and dominated the market.
After having fought and won the browser wars of the late 1990s, Internet Explorer began to see its usage share shrink. Having attained a peak of about 96% in 2002, it has since been in a steady decline, likely due to the rapid adoption of Mozilla Firefox, which statistics indicate is the current most significant competitor.
Nevertheless, Internet Explorer remains the dominant web browser, with a global usage share of around 85%. Usage is higher in Asia and lower in Europe.
