Motion

Now that we've got the first consumer-level VR headsets out in the wild, it's only a matter of time before we see full motion capture immersion. What I mean is when you see someone inside the virtual world, you'll see their whole body. Their face will reflect what's actually being shown on their actual head in real time. Their body will be represented by a reasonably reconstructed virtual version of their real form. All we need is faster internet and the world's best GPUs.

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Home automation takes many forms, and they all have the same basic foundation: connectivity extended towards one's smartphone. With Notion, a new sensor that has seen ample success on Kickstarter, connectivity is its biggest feature. The sensor is small and able to detect a variety of conditions, shuttling the information to one's smartphone or tablet.

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Microsoft Research has shown off its latest work in the motion-control category: the Type-Hover-Swipe mechanical keyboard. With this device comes a keyboard equipped with small sensors between the keys that detect gestures in a mere 96 bytes, allowing for device control.

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Faceware and Vicon, two makers of motion capture technologies, has announced a new partnership that will bring their respective offerings together. For now, the partnership is bringing a simple merging of Faceware's software with Vicon's hardware to expand so-called mocap options in the industry, but additional options may be made available in the future.

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The Oculus Rift virtual reality headset is becoming more of an actual reality now. The company announced today that developer kits of the Oculus Rift are now shipping out to developers. In fact, the company says that units actually started shipping out Wednesday, so some developers may have already gotten theirs.

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As Leap Motion dev units have begun shipping out, developers have been toying with the motion-tracking device to find unique uses for it. One developer in particular ended up using his unit to help him out with his music recording. Stephane Bersot used the Leap Motion to play air drums, change the pitch of his guitar, and even control the EQ on his piano keyboard.

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Leap Motion has been working hard the past several months to get its gesture control technology in the hands of developers. It's doing a great job so far, and it looks like all that hard work will pay off, because the company just partnered up with ASUS to bring the Kinect-like technology to the desktop.

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More and more uses for drones and UAVs seem to be cropping up, but there are limitations. The Department of Defense in coordination with the University of North Dakota has developed a UAV that is capable of recognising specific objects on the ground and tracking them accordingly. Traditionally this was a hard exercise, requiring large computation powers, but the duo have come up with an imaging processing machine that’s light enough to be installed on the UAV itself.

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Intel is matchmaking vendors and manufacturers in an attempt to ensure the success of its ultrabook segment, pushing brand names into the embrace of ODMs promising ultraportables as cheap as $599. Epson, Onkyo, ViewSonic, Mustek, Motion Computing, WiPro and Positivo have all placed orders with Pegatron and ECS, DigiTimes reports, after Intel put them altogether for notebook speed-dating .

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Sony's plans to make the PlayStation Move controller a PC peripheral have been prematurely outed, after references to the "Move Server project" were included in a Game Developers Conference 2011 schedule. According to the description, Game Systems and Developer Support head John McCutchan will be discussing PC software development for Move at a GDC talk later this month.

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Motion's latest tablet PC may not be as slim as the Viliv X70 Windows 7 Slate, but the Motion CL900 is a whole lot more resilient. The ruggedized slate has a 10.1-inch 1376 x 768 display with Gorilla Glass and meets military specs for dust, drop, sand and temperature; it also supports both finger and stylus input, has Intel's latest 1.5GHz Oak Trail Atom CPU, and can be outfitted with Gobi 3000 broadband.

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Whether or not you own a Nintendo Wii, you've probably seen the commercials. Or know someone who owns one, and have experienced the gameplay for yourself. With that in mind, we all know that Nintendo intended for people to get off the couch and actually interact with their games on a whole "new" level. Sure, there's some commercials out there that show plenty of folks sitting on their couch, tilting their Wii remotes all over the place, but with accessories like Wii Fit and what not, we all know where Nintendo was going with this. (And subsequently, yes, Sony's Move is positioned in much the same way.) But, what about Microsoft's Kinect?

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