MADRID, Spain – Attention, tourists: Forget about stumbling on cobblestone and fumbling through guide books in stifling heat. Entrepreneurs in the Spanish city of Cordoba have devised battery-powered sightseeing cars with computers that talk.
The vehicles boast Global Positioning Satellite technology that provides passengers with their location and explains attractions with its tactile screen or audio recordings.
A memory card stuck into a USB port provides information in Spanish, French or English on more than 150 attractions.
A trio of entrepreneurs launched the business, called Blobject, in May after concluding that monument-rich Cordoba, featuring an exquisite old quarter and a Moorish mosque with a Catholic cathedral built around it, often got overlooked by tourists lured to other southern Spanish cities, such as Seville or Granada.
“Cordoba’s marketing was very poor,” said co-founder Alfredo Romeo.
The project joins GPS tourism efforts in places including Montgomery, Ala., where IntelliTours LLC offers audio tours of Civil War and civil-rights sites using similar technology.
Web-cast TV show offers something for the nerd: NerdTV identifies its target audience with its very name and with its format: It’s not available over the air but rather via a free Internet download.
The tech-focused interview show, created by pundit and PBS host Robert Cringely, is meant to be unlike anything on regular TV or elsewhere on the Internet, where video tends to come in short clips.
Instead, this is a “Charlie Rose” -style chat, about an hour, with “some incredibly smart person you always wanted to meet,” Cringely says.
Among the names lined up for coming weeks are former Sun Microsystems Inc. guru Bill Joy, Apple Computer Inc. co-founder Steve Wozniak, computing pioneer Doug Engelbart and Google Inc. CEO Eric Schmidt.
This week’s debut offering was a talk with Andy Hertzfeld, who is described with a sort of nerdish breathlessness as “the first Macintosh programmer … ever.”
TiVo cuts price for recorders: In an effort to attract more subscribers as competition heats up, TiVo Inc. has cut prices of its digital video recorders to as low as $50 after a rebate.
The devices will now go for $50 for a model that can hold up to 40 hours of television on its built-in hard drive and $150 for the 80-hour model.
Prices are after a $150 rebate offer, which runs through November and requires activation of a $12.95-a-month service prior to Jan. 15.
Previously, the lowest-priced TiVos retailed for about $100 after rebate.
TiVo was a pioneer of the technology that allows couch potatoes to pause, rewind and fast-forward television programming. But while its fan base is strong, it has had trouble translating that support into profit.
Last month, the Alviso, Calif.-based company reported its first profit in its eight-year history. But some analysts question whether the company can continue to grow as satellite and cable companies develop their own DVR technology that offer lower subscription fees.
Virtual reality merges with an arcade classic Though a quarter-century old, Pacman has classic appeal that persuaded a group of researchers to reinvent it in a format where the virtual world meets the real one.
“Instead of pressing buttons on a keyboard or using a joystick to move Pacman around a flat maze on a computer screen, the player actually becomes Pacman and plays in the streets,” said Adrian David Cheok, head of Nanyang Technological University’s Mixed Reality Lab, a Singaporean team developing “Human Pacman.”
In a recent demonstration, researcher James Teh played Pacman by strapping on a backpack containing a laptop and donning a headset comprising a camera and goggles. Sensors and other gadgets were attached to the backpack with electrical tape.
As in the video game, Teh’s objective was to collect as many yellow dots as he could. In the human version, the dots appeared in his goggle display as yellow orbs bobbing above a road lined with parked cars. Pedestrians looked on curiously.
When Teh turned, he could see his similarly equipped colleague, Lee Shang Ping, whose objective as Pacman’s nemesis “Ghost” was to tap Teh’s backpack, thereby eliminating his existence.
The goggles are key to merging the video game and the player’s physical surroundings. Through them, virtual objects are superimposed on real-time video of the environment, creating “mixed reality.”
The equipment can be heavy at 5.5 pounds, and a standard setup costs about $7,780, Cheok said. But the team secured a deal with a Hong Kong gaming company in mid-August to develop a minimized version in which the wearable computer and headset would be replaced by a mobile phone using third-generation, or 3G, technology.
From Herald news services
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