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You’re walking along a street in Roman Pompeii at the start of the first millennium when you notice a spectacular stone building. You reach out towards it and your guide informs you it’s a temple to the god Jupiter, built in 200 BC. With a flick of your wrist you save the data and, school assignment complete, you step out of your Cocoon and back into your living room.

Educational historical journeys are just one possible use of the Immersive Cocoon, a walk-in virtual-reality pod being developed by NAU, an international design collective that aims to revolutionize the way we interact with computers.

When complete, the Immersive Cocoon will be a sleek and shiny human-sized dome. Step inside and you’ll be enveloped by a 360° display screen and full surround sound.

When the software boots up, instead of using a joystick or mouse to navigate the screens, motion-tracking cameras will follow the movement of your arms, legs and face, and a motion-sensitive platform will detect if you’re walking or jumping.

"You’ve got display, sound and interaction all combined to create this fully immersed digital experience," explains Tino Schaedler, the architect-turned-film designer who is one third of NAU.

Read more @ CNN.com

From CNN.

Since he started Facebook in college 4 1/2 years ago, Mark Zuckerberg has learned — sometimes painfully — that he can’t make significant changes to the popular online hangout without triggering an uproar among indignant users who preferred the status quo.

But Zuckerberg, still only 24, is hoping he has found a way to ease the journey down a different road so he won’t have to issue public apologies like he did in each of the previous two years after springing new products on users.

His theory will face a major test Wednesday when Facebook begins forcing its 100 million users to adapt to a redesigned Web site, whether they like the new look or not.

Since unveiling the makeover seven weeks ago, Facebook had left it up to users to decide whether they wanted to switch over. If they didn’t like what they saw, the converts could just click on a link to switch back to the old format.

But that option will be taken away from all users by the end of the week, a shift that Zuckerberg already knows will alienate some of Facebook’s audience and raise the risk of driving more traffic to rival social networks like MySpace and Bebo.

Read more @ Yahoo! News

Taking on Blackberry with corporate email 

Nokia has extended Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync support to all of its S60 mobile phones.

The move is set to help the Finnish mobile maker renew its battle for corporate email against the likes of Blackberry, which recently upped its share of the smartphone market.

Nokia also revealed that Mail for Exchange will be available as standard in all new Eseries and Nseries devices.

Provided the company is running an Exchange email server, this will allow workers to freely access their business email, calendar, contacts, tasks and company directory over a secure connection.

Read more @ theinquirer.net

From The Inquirer.

As I remember it was the great philosopher Roberto Duran who once exclaimed, "No mas. No mas." Is it time to follow Roberto’s advice or are we still in need of   additional Flash storage? No need to answer just yet, because ready or not, here comes SanDisk doubling CF capacity to 32GB with its Extreme III CompactFlash.

I was all set to explain how 32GB is much too much free space to carry in your pocket until I thought back to my first hard drive–40Mb. That’s not a typo! And that 40Mb was on a system which replaced a computer with nohard drive, just a floppy. It seemed like a lot of room at the time just as the 32GB CompactFlash does now. Don’t be fooled. Build it and they will come. Though SanDisk was thinking of professionals when they designed the Extreme III, its mere availability will undoubtedly affect what comes down the pipe for home shooters. I suppose this is living proof you can never have enough closet space.

If CompactFlash means still photography to you, it’s time to think outside the box. CompactFlash and its pocket size format siblings are now robust enough to replace videotape in high end applications. Thirty-two gigabytes means over 80 minutes of 100 Mbps, 10-bit, 4:2:2 HD video. Until now that was primarily a job for tape whose use brought all the problems associated with mechanical transports. SanDisk touts their temperature specs (minus 13°F to 185°F) because it’s a simple way of pounding home, "We’re not tape." Trading tape for a card means camcorders are simpler, more climate tolerant and (the real deal maker) the video is randomly accessible at every step of the process!

Read more @ pcmag.com

From PC Magazine.

• Meet a musical Genius.

With just a few clicks, the new Genius feature finds the songs on your iPod nano that go great together and makes a Genius Playlist for you.

• Rock and roll over.

Thanks to the built-in accelerometer, you can rotate iPod nano to flip through album art with Cover Flow. Watch movies and TV shows in widescreen. And view photos in either portrait or landscape.

• Shake to shuffle.

Just give iPod nano a shake and it shuffles to a different song in your music library.

• Curved ahead of the curve.

iPod nano now comes in nine vibrant colors and a new curved aluminum and glass design. The crisp, bright picture makes watching movies and TV shows amazing.

The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s new and largest particle collider, passed its first major tests by firing two beams of protons in opposite directions around a 17-mile underground ring Wednesday.

Scientists hope it’s the next great step to understanding the makeup of the universe.

After a few trial runs, two white dots flashed on a computer screen near Geneva, Switzerland, at 10:26 a.m. (4:26 a.m. EDT) indicating that the protons had traveled clockwise along the full length of the $3.8 billion collider — described as the biggest physics experiment in history.

"There it is," project leader Lyn Evans said when the beam completed its lap.

Champagne corks popped in labs as far away as Fermilab in Chicago, where contributing and competing scientists watched the proceedings by satellite.

Five hours later, scientists successfully fired a beam counterclockwise.

Read more @ FoxNews.com

Nokia’s Internet services are far from ready and the world’s top cellphone maker is seeking further acquisitions to speed up the introduction of new services, Niklas Savander, the head of the unit, said in an interview.

Nokia bought Navteq, a U.S. digital maps firm, for $8.1 billion in July and has acquired 10 smaller firms to jump start its Internet services business as the growth in the cellphones market is set to stall.

"We’re not done," Niklas Savander told Reuters in a recent interview, when asked about further acquisitions.

Likely targets could be small companies that develop services Nokia itself plans to offer in the future, enabling the Finnish company to roll those services out faster, he said.

In an online media event later on Tuesday, Nokia will introduce The Files on Ovi service, based on the acquisition of Avvenu last year, which allows users to store files in a "cloud" of servers so that they are always accessible, an increasingly common service offered by Internet firms like Google and Yahoo.

Read more @ iht.com

Is the U.S. Justice Department preparing to challenge a high-profile advertising partnership between Google and Yahoo?

That was the question being debated from Washington to Silicon Valley on Tuesday, after the Justice Department, which has been reviewing the partnership for several weeks, hired Sanford Litvack, a veteran antitrust lawyer, to help assess the evidence gathered by its lawyers.

The hiring of an outside lawyer like Litvack is rare and represents the clearest indication that the Justice Department could be planning to mount a legal challenge to the deal, some analysts said."They wouldn’t bring in a special counsel unless they were preparing to litigate," said Sam Miller, a partner at Sidley Austin in San Francisco who acted as a special trial counsel in the department’s first antitrust case against Microsoft.

But other experts said a challenge to the agreement was far from certain, noting that Litvack would most likely want to weigh the evidence himself before deciding whether to bring a lawsuit.

Read more @ iht.com