NVIDIA announces YouTube is giving users the ability to view thousands of 3D videos on their NVIDIA 3D Vision PCs and notebooks.
The videos will work with the latest version of the Mozilla Firefox web browser. “We’re excited to introduce HTML5 and WebM support to the thousands of 3D videos available on YouTube,” said Jonathan Huang, 3D Product Manager at YouTube. “By embracing these open standards, NVIDIA 3D Vision users now have a great way of experiencing YouTube’s library of 3D content.”
With the growth of 3D camcorders for the consumer market, the amount of content that can be created by consumers and uploaded to sites such as YouTube has risen. YouTube’s support of NVIDIA 3D Vision technology extends its existing commitment to 3D, enabling even more consumers and 3D enthusiasts to share their 3D videos online.
“Firefox with 3D Vision creates a stunning and smooth 3D video experience using HTML5 video based on open standards,” said Jay Sullivan, VP of Products at Mozilla. “3D Vision from NVIDIA is a great example of the rich, innovative experiences that are being built on top of the speed and graphics power that Firefox delivers to the Web.”
To further showcase the new YouTube stereoscopic 3D video streaming capabilities and some of the latest professional and user-generated 3D YouTube videos, NVIDIA is now hosting the top YouTube stereoscopic 3D videos on its 3D web community site at www.3DVisionLive.com/YT3D.
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Result for: technology
Skype founder Niklas Zennstrom predicts that Microsoft will capitalize on its $8.5 billion acquisition of the service.
“Skype’s full potential hasn’t been realized yet,” he said in an interview at the e-G8 forum underway in Paris. He suggests that Microsoft could push Skype into higher places if they expand it more into the mobile territory and if they make dramatic improvements to the quality of video calling on the Internet.
“I think that Microsoft has a huge opportunity to integrate it into a lot of their different services,” Zennstrom said. “Of course they have so many different assets. If they do a good job integrating Skype, the company can grow even more.”
Zennstrom will sell all of his shares in Skype once the Microsoft deal closes, and will no longer retain a management role at the company which he founded with Janus Friis in 2003. Skype has grown a lot since then, and touts 145 million users per month. eBay also owned Skype from 2005 until a consortium (of which Zennstrom was a part) bought it back in in 2009.
Microsoft can combine Skype services with many of its own existing products and services. One possibility is integrating it to the popular Outlook application so to provide video conferencing for business users. It will likely use Skype to boost its position in the mobile space however, after making several moves in the territory recently, such as partnering with Nokia.
“We still all travel a lot for meetings because you can’t match the intimate experience of seeing someone in person, even with Skype video calling,” he said. “There is a lot more work to do on the core technology to improve quality of video calls.”
Result for: technology
The National Sleep Foundation has released their annual study this week on American’s sleeping habits, and once again concluded that technology is ruining our sleep.
Says vice chairman Russell Rosenberg:
Unfortunately, cell phones and computers, which make our lives more productive and enjoyable, may be abused to the point that they contribute to getting less sleep at night leaving millions of Americans functioning poorly the next day.
95 percent of those in the study said they used some electronic device within one hour of sleep, and 65 percent admitted they do not get enough sleep during the week.
Exposure to artificial light within one hour of bed can “increase alertness and suppress the release of melatonin, a sleep-promoting hormone,” says Charles Czeisler, of Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
Continues Czeisler (via Reuters):
Technology has invaded the bedroom. Invasion of such alerting technologies into the bedroom may contribute to the high proportion of respondents who reported they routinely get less sleep than they need.
“Baby Boomers,” adults aged 45-64, had the biggest percentage of those watching TV before bed while 61 percent of all admitted to using their computers at least a few nights each week.
