CODEGIRL ~ High School Technovation Teams!

Cool new documentary CODEGIRL...

"From rural Moldova to urban Brazil to suburban Massachusetts, CODEGIRL follows teams who dream of holding their own in the world’s fastest-growing industry. The winning team [in the Technovation Challenge] gets $10K to complete and release their app, but every girl discovers something valuable along the way."

Spike ~ 3D Measuring & Modeling via Mobiles

NBF spots Spike, laser accurate 3D object and building measurement & modeling via mobile with clip-on. See Kickstarter campaign vid... Especially check out this quick'n'dirty 3D building modeling element! This reminds me of Mok3 crossed with Viztu with a touch of C3 Technologies;-)

EarMachine ~ iOS Hearing Enhancement App...

Thanks to MedGadget for spotting the EarMachine, a Free iOS App for Hearing Problems...

"Smartphones have essentially the same hardware as hearing assist devices, including a microphone, analog-to-digital converter, and a CPU to process the audio and modulate it to the specific user. The EarMachine is a new app that harnesses the power of iPhones to do just that."

If we combine this sonic adjustment app with noise cancellation, whisperware, voice recognition, translational "babelfish" apps and we can really make progress towards Smartbuds, the acoustic analog to Glass.

Augmented 3D Prints ~ Inition's Lovely AR App...

WebUrbanist spots Inition's app for Augmented 3D Prints which...

"...takes a physical (real-world) model, places it on a pattern-mapped background, and [...] all kinds of additional layers of information begin to map themselves onto the object, shifting as you change perspective. Real-life simulations can thus be applied to the model, including wind and other weather patterns, day versus night views, pedestrians, trees, egress routes and traffic patterns. It helps visualize the kinds of things that are hard to picture purely on the screen, but generally impossible to show in actual space (let alone in context with map underlays and structural reveals)."

New Urban Mechanics ~ Boston's App Office...

The Globe's Eric Moskowitz writes about Bumps in the Road...

"A smartphone application known as Street Bump, developed by an in-house City Hall think tank and tested by 25 municipal employees, records the location of every bump a driver hits. Of the first 100,000 ride-jarring bumps registered by the app, traditional potholes accounted for a stunningly small percentage. They were vastly outnumbered by misaligned castings, according to the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, the think tank that developed the app. [... They] are also behind Citizens Connect, the nearly four-year-old app that ­allows residents to send the city GPS-tagged photos and descriptions of problems such as graffiti or darkened streetlights. After the early success of that app, the team ­began to wonder if smartphones could be used to detect potholes automatically, without waiting for citizens to report them. They developed an app harnessing two smartphone components -- the accelerometer, which gauges the direction and acceleration of a phone’s movement, and the Global Positioning System receiver -- to register the jostling of a phone placed in a car’s cupholder or center console and to mark the location based on GPS satellites. And they set out to refine it to weed out false positives, such as speed bumps."

The bottom-line is that new urban apps, data-driven priorities, and rapid responsiveness are the stuff of the modern vital city!

SynthCam ~ Levoy's Clever Mobile Camera App

Thanks to MIT Media Lab colleague Ramesh Raskar for spotlighting Stanford professor Mark Levoy's SynthCam...

Voice Search ~ Comparing Siri to Google Live...

Jon Rettinger at TechnoBuffalo does nice side by side comparison of Siri vs Google Search via voice...

Wearables Imaging ~ Panos, FotoCAD, Translate

Cool consumer imaging apps include Occipital's 360 Panorama... And Viztu's Hypr3D fotoCAD... QuestVisual's Word Lens translator... All especially relevant for use on wearable HUD "smartshades" systems of tomorrow! Plus check out Amy-Mae Elliott 2009 list of 10 Amazing Augmented Reality iPhone Apps on Mashable (thanks to Alper Celen for pointer). These are just scratching the surface when it comes to AR in the eyeglasses!