Siggraph demos next-gen 3D

If the developers showcasing their inventions at the Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques (Siggraph) have their way, the 3D experience will soon change significantly and one won't need glasses to view 3D content, says NDTV.

At the 37th International Siggraph conference, the latest in 3D technology and interactive holograms are on a display.

"It's audio stereoscopic, which means 3D without special customised glasses. Its 360, which means that rather than a flat-screen, it's round. The reason that people are sticking their hands around some of the displays or others have game controllers is that it's fully interactive," said MK Haley, professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

Microsoft has expanded its Hohm energy monitoring portal so home owners can see, directly from their personal computers, how much power their homes use, reports Business Week.

The Hohm service can now ingest data from a wireless energy tracking device offered by Blue Line Innovations, called PowerCost Monitor, Microsoft said this week. The combined offering graphs energy usage within a household, showing an up-to-the-minute longitudinal summary of how much energy is being consumed.

In a blog entry on the Hohm site, Microsoft Hohm GM Troy Batterberry said this partnership with Blue Line is another step in Microsoft's plan to create an entire home-based "ecosystem" of energy-aware appliances and devices, such as light bulbs, smart appliances and electric cars.

Intel says it has reached the milestone of 50Gbps transfer speeds using an underlying technology that could go much, much further, according to Gizmodo Australia.

This could mean transferring the entire printed catalogue of the Library of Congress in a minute and a half. Intel says it's got the technology to make it happen (eventually).

Intel CTO Justin Rattner explained that “silicon photonics” is a combination of optical technology with traditional silicon chip manufacturing techniques. By employing existing methods, turning data into light and back again will be affordable. Intel's photonic technology encodes data into laser streams. These streams converge into one and travel along a fibre-optic strand to their destination, where they are decoded from light back into electrons.