Google Powers Awesome Iron Man Flight Simulator

article via businessinsider

A team of virtual reality enthusiasts working in Israel has built a simulator that recreates the experience of flying in the Iron Man suit.

Via the Google Earth Blog, the system is built around the Google Earth Flight Simulator, which lets you fly around Google's 3D representation of the world. This program is fed into a set of virtual reality goggles, controlled by a motion-sensitive Nintendo WiiMote attached to the wing off of an unmanned aerial vehicle -- that is, a drone. The user is strapped to the wing and a propeller, and the whole rig is suspended in the air by a small crane.

It's very weird, way too elaborate, and incredibly awesome.

Enjoy:

Read more:

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2010/05/iron_man_flight_simulator.html

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/06/01/businessinsider-fly-like-iron-man-thanks-to-virtual-reality-weirdness-nintendo-and-google-earth-2010-6.DTL#ixzz0pp6VQ1R7

http://www.gamesradar.com/xbox360/iron-man-2/news/virtual-reality-project-aims-to-simulate-iron-mans-flight/a-20100601125216582034/g-2009020315502047077

President Shimon Peres meets the GarageGeeks

Israeli President Shimon Peres visited the city of Holon.
The president was meeting with high school students, visited the "Invitation to Silence" exhibition at the Childrens Museum, and met the GarageGeeks and Dr. Yossi Vardi at the MediaTheque .
GarageGeeks member and Feng-GUI CEO, Rafael Mizrahi, presented to the president's staff about of the underground high-tech scene and creative activities in Holon and Israel.

BirdBrain 2010 unConference

Come and spread your wings at Afeka Tel Aviv College of Engineering
March 2nd, with Jeff Pulver, Yossi Vardi and friends (you)!

You are hereby invited to join us for two co-joined special events:

08:30-10:00 the traditional Jeff Pulver Networking Breakfast - Signup here
10:30-15:00 "Bird Brain 2010" an Un-Conference about Creative Passion

Feng-GUI CEO, Rafael Mizrahi, will be presenting at:
10:50-11:00 Innovative Thinking - Inside the Box

BirdBrain is organized by Mel Rosenberg, Noam Fine, Yossi Vardi, Sharon Ariel and Afeka College, with the guidance of Yossi Vardi.

perception map report

The Dashboard 2.5 includes a new report: Perception map.
Perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of sensory information.
The Perception map visually displays what your viewers may perceive during the first few seconds of visual inspection.

enjoy,
The Feng-GUI team

Feng-GUI version 2.5

What’s New in Feng-GUI 2.5

Dashboard usability enhancements
* Login persistence.
* Feature analysis is merged into a single option.
* Recent thumbnails bottom carousel increased from 10 to 20 images.
* Dashboard heatmap is done on the same image and not creating a new image at the carousel.

Analysis improvements
* Performance improvements at Dashboard and at Web API Service.
* Text Detection.
* Face detection of frontal and profile.
* New Report: Perception Heatmap.

General
* Free version enables you to generate a free heatmap every 12 hours.
* Price range changed into 5 USD per image to 2.5 USD per image.

IMAGinE 2010

We are happy to invite you to IMAGinE (read: Imagine in IMAGE),
an informal, non-commercial gathering of like-minded people in the fields of animation, computer vision, 3D graphics, image processing, visualizations, augmented reality, video and photography.

IMAGinE is one of the unconference events initiated and inspired by Yossi Vardi, which include Kinnernet, GeekCon and MuseNet. As an unconference, the content is created by the event participants, so we depend on YOU to propose discussions, workshops, project displays and any crazy mash-up that comes to mind and can drive technologists and creative types to innovate, learn and inspire.

IMAGinE 2010 will be held on Friday, January 8^th 2010, at the Tiltan College of Design in Haifa.

The event wiki is located at http://imagine2010.pbworks.com, and registration is at http://imagine2010.eventbrite.com.

facebook event at http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=210873607370

See you there!

The IMAGinE organizing team: Dror Gill, Liad Nishlis, Erez Yissacharov and Yossi Vardi.

MakeUseOf.com review

Have you ever wondered what your subscribers are seeing when they come to your website or blog? Feng-GUI predicts what a human mind would look at within 5 seconds of looking at a web page and generates visual heatmap. This is the perfect way to tell what your readers are watching and what is grabbing their attention.

read the full review at

http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/feng-gui-visual-heatmap/




MakeUseOf also listed Feng-GUI at cool websites and tools

Moving to Chicago on November 1st

At 1st of November we are migrating the Feng-GUI Web Service to Chicago.
Our neighbors at the Data Center are PHP, YouSendIt and Ars Technica.

Dear Customer,

Please be informed that essential maintenance has been scheduled on the Feng-GUI services infrastructure on:
Sunday 1st November between 8.00 and 10.00 GMT+2.

During this time our Engineers will work to minimize any disruption to the Feng-GUI services, nevertheless please be aware that the planned maintenance is taking place.

Best regards,
Feng-GUI Support

Service Level Agreement published

The Feng-GUI Service Level Agreement published.
The agreement guarantees 99.9 percent availability of the service within a region over a trailing 30-day period. If Feng-GUI Services fails during that time, or doesn't meet the agreement, businesses get credit back.

"... the Feng-GUI Covered Services web interface will be operational and available to Customer at least 99.9% of the time in any calendar month (the "Feng-GUI SLA"). If Feng-GUI does not meet the Feng-GUI SLA, and if Customer meets its obligations under this Feng-GUI SLA, Customer will be eligible to receive the Service Credits described below."

"If the Monthly Uptime Percentage applicable to the month of such request is confirmed by us and is less than 99.9%, then we will issue the Service Credit to you within one billing cycle following the month in which the error occurred."

here is an example of an email sent from Feng-GUI support to a customer, with a credit back notification.

Whats new in Dashboard V2?

14th July 2009, Feng-GUI Dashboard V2 released.
here's some information on what's new in this release.

Loading time is 5 times faster.
The most recent generated images are presented in small thumbnails. These small images makes the page load 5 times faster.



Face and Skin detection
Increasing the accuracy of the attention heatmap by adding frontal and profile face detection along with skin hue detection.
Eye-tracking researches has proven that during the first half of a second we are attracted to faces found within the image.

Customized output layers
Choose which information to include at the output attention heatmap.



Transparent credit system
You can see how many credit you have at the Account Settings tab.



You only pay per image upload
We separated the upload and the heatmap into two actions.
Previously, if you wanted to test the same input image using different analysis parameters, you had to upload the same image every time you generate a heatmap.
Now, you are required to upload the input image only once, and for that image, you can generate as much heatmaps as you want.



And there’s another good thing for the Dashboard customers. You are charged only for the upload action, and
not for the heatmap action.
Notice, This does not apply to Web API users.
So this is how it goes. Click on ”Browse” button, to select an image file from your computer. Click the “Upload” button to upload it to the server.
Now, select the desired image from the thumbnails filmstrip at the bottom of the page, and click “Heatmap”.
This way, you can change the Analysis parameters and generate as much heatmaps without upload the image each time.