Austerity means the military can’t afford the big-budget training exercises to battle-harden new recruits, so it’s relying more on computer simulations. Sadly, Virtual Battlespace 2 can’t compete with the Hollywood-style excitement of Modern Warfare. That’s why it’s buying in game engines from the studios (VB2 was based on tech licensed from the makers of Operation Flashpoint) and cutting out the unrealistic physics — such as rifle bullets flying three miles and vehicles that don’t obey gravity. It’s hoped the project will keep the attention of death-match hardened trainees and encourage them to play it in their own time: the team were told that two soldiers learned enough skills to stay alive during combat thanks to marathon sessions in the game. If you’ve just unwrapped an FPS for the holidays, you can now tell disapproving family members that it’s educational.

SOURCE via The Guardian

Your momma always said your handsome mug would take you places. Now it might allow you to access your iPad. An Apple patent application released today describes a facial recognition system that requires minimal computing power, and works whether you’re indoors or out — we don’t use our tablets and phones in a photo booth, after all. The technology works by comparing a current image of your mug to a reference model user profile made using “high information” portions of the human face, like eyes and mouths.

Translation: it’ll take a picture, compare it against the pictures associated with various user accounts on the device and decide if the two images are similar enough to grant you access. Because this is just an application, it’s safe to say we won’t be seeing this kind of facial recognition in iOS anytime soon, but let’s hope it works better than the ICS version if it does.

An important thing to note is that Apple applied for this patent long before Android’s Face Unlock debuted a few months back. The paperwork was first submitted on June 29th, 2010 — it’s just now being disclosed to the public.

SOURCE via USPTO

Digitizing your analog archives? Vinyl to CD / MP3 / iPod turntables might do well enough for your old 45s, but the folks at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory prefer to listen to their old beats by taking pictures of them. More specifically, restoration specialists are using a system called IRENE/3D to snap high resolution images of damaged media. The cracked discs — often made of wax on brass or composition board — are then repaired digitally, letting researchers play the digitized discs with an emulated stylus. So far, the team has recovered a handful of 125 year old recordings from a team in Alexander Graham Bell’s Volta laboratory. The all-digital system gives researchers a hands-off way to recover audio from relic recordings without running the risk of damaging them in the process — and no, they probably won’t let you use it to listen to that beat up copy of the White Album you’ve had in your closet since eighth grade. Hit the source link to hear what they’ve recovered.

SOURCE via Berkeley Lab

It’s hard to set much store by early sales performance, particularly after the evergreen 3DS faced such a rocky road. Nevertheless, the Vita’s latest stats do look disappointing for such a highly anticipated — not to mention high-quality — console: after shifting a remarkable 321,000 units during its first two days on sale in Japan, it could only muster 72,500 in the whole week between December 19th and Christmas Day. In comparison, the PS3 sold 76,000 units during the same period, while the 3DS rang up half a million. This doesn’t necessarily reflect a lack of interest, however: there have been stock shortages, and it’s also possible that buyers are waiting to make sure that all the launch bugs get cleaned up.

SOURCE via All Things D

It was yet another solid year for Amazon’s Kindle family of products. The mega online retailer sent out its yearly post-Christmas card, bragging about moving “well over one million Kindle devices per week” for December, making it the best holiday yet for the e-reader / tablet line, according to the company. Three Kindles held the top spots on the site’s list of best sellers, led by the Fire, the Touch and the plain old fourth generation Kindle. No exact numbers from Amazon, as per usual, but it looks to have been a pretty green Christmas for Bezos and co.

Additional reports concerning Apple’s “iTV” HDTV have surfaced, adding a few additional details to the news distributed on Tuesday claiming that Samsung will provide the SoC — possibly the A5 which powers the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 — and that Sharp will provide the actual display. Tuesday’s report also said that Apple’s iTV will likely launch in 2Q12 or 3Q12, but now sources are claiming that the device won’t be rolled out until the end of 2012.

According to sources, Apple is entertaining bids from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), Advanced Semiconductor Engineering (ASE) and Siliconware Precision Industries (SPIL) to produce the HDTV components. Foxconn Electronics (Hon Hai Precision Industry) will likely obtain the assembly orders — this is the company that handles most of Apple’s manufacturing requirements. Apple will presumably place orders for the customized chips and other components directly with its contract manufacturers similar to the way it orders parts for its iPad and iPhone models.

Unfortunately, hardware standards aren’t expected to be finalized until the end of 2Q12, thus canceling out previous reports of a mid-2012 release. As reported on Tuesday, the iTV will measure 32- and 37-inches and will reportedly use Siri to provide “the simplest user interface you could imagine.” Little else is known in regards to the HDTV’s physical specs, and so far Apple hasn’t officially acknowledged that the device even exists.

Just last week Apple execs were reportedly meeting with media execs at several large companies to stream content onto the rumored Siri-powered HDTV. Apple essentially wants users to be able to start a movie or TV episode on one Apple device and continue on with another. The talks reportedly outline ways Siri and/or iOS could recognize users across multiple devices: phones, tablets and TVs.

Rumors of an Apple HDTV have been around for quite some time, but have lately gone into overdrive thanks to comments made by Steve Jobs in his biography. Since then, reports from Apple’s supply chain have seemingly been streaming in at a steady pace.