Introducing the world’s cheapest tablet that’s opening up the digital world to internet users in India. It’s called AAkash – translated as Sky – and it’s being targeted at the ‘next billion’ users in a country where 800 million people have a mobile phone, but only 10 percent have internet access.

It’s priced at £22, runs Android 2.2 and has a seven-inch touchscreen, 256MB of RAM and two USB ports. Click on the image for a video about Aakash and share your thoughts: a cheap gimmick or a digital revolution with the potential to empower the masses?

EELS 3D projection mapping multiplayer game from B-Reel & B-Reel Films on Vimeo.

The EELS project, created by Riccardo Giraldi at B-Reel Films in London, combines a dizzying array of technologies to take projection mapping an interactive step forward. It’s a multiplayer game experience where people can control their virtual EEL projected on a physical installation via an iPad App. It’s a quantum-leap forward from Nokia’s classic ‘Snake’, and I can see big possibilities, not just in the world of gaming, but for interaction, accessibility and communication on a much broader scale.

We have been attending regular meetings of the Ghent Work Group and are involved in discussing the important detail in PDF workflows. There seems to be a range of opinions which depends primarily on how far your customers have gone with PDF creation; the newer ‘flavours’ of PDF can add problems rather than make life easier, it seems.

While Adobe’s PDF/X-4 standard incorporates transparency and updated layering, there have been issues reported by users, more especially with some fonts. This issue was raised at the recent meeting in Milan and concerns missing glyphs in some typefaces, which may only be shown as a space in PDF/X-4 files made from some applications, including Adobe CS. The resulting output error, although rare, can be expensive in the wrong place. This problem is intended to be fixed by the .notdef glyph which should have a certain shape – an empty rectangle, or one which contains a X or a question mark inside it. This should then highlight the problem with that character in a visually obvious way.

The GWG and its members is working hard to resolve the reporting of these problems and provide specifications that will create PDF/X-4 files appropriate to a range of printing conditions and which flag up .notdef problems in an efficient way for current workflows. Further testing of the new specifications is underway prior to final release, due in 2012.

More information can be found at the Ghent Work Group website.

As an enthusiastic Geocacher, I think this creative partnership between a Sydney radio station and a car dealer is good fun. It’s smart use of a location-based gaming platform. Just ignore the waffle about shared objectives at the start of the video.

The Shallows

Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows is an interesting look at how, in the era of Twitter, Facebook and blogs like this one, we process information, and even how our capacity to finish a whole book may soon be lost. Believing ‘old fashioned’ learning is being eroded by the internet, he argues that this new way of getting information (Wikipedia in particular comes in for a bit of a bashing) is somehow less worthy than in previous non-digitised generations. But are things really changing? The Victorians worried that the same thing was happening when magazines took off. But with the average Britain spending more than 5 hours a day behind a screen, taking in bite sized nuggets of information from across the globe, is War and Peace in jeopardy of being read by even fewer people? Have you struggled to get to the end of this post because it’s more than 140 characters? And how many other windows do you have open, right now, vying for your attention?

Unity is awesome. A complete  games development kit that costs less than a single PC. It works on PC/Mac, iPads and iPhones, Android and Wii. It’s pretty easy to get into -the scripts are simple enough even for my very limited coding skills. The graphics range from brilliant to amazing – there’s realtime lighting, shadows, reflctions, depth of field, bokeh lens effects and all kinds of surfacing such as bump, specular and transparency. It interfaces really well with 3D Studio Max too making it easy to create for. It’s on my Christmas list…

The game shown here comes with it and is there to pick apart and learn how to use it. Hopefully we’ll be getting into this stuff soon. Vist www.unity3d.com to see more demo’s

The Maker Bot Thing-o-Matic arrived last week. After some serious head scratching we’ve managed to make it produce pretty reliably. It’s a proper geek-project involving some inside knowledge on stepper-motors, COMport USB connections, Skeinforge profiles and an extremely convoluted wiki…but…we can now make things that exist outside of the computer!

Using extruded ABS plastic, the newly named MakerBeast will print out models produced in 3D Studio or SolidWorks. First steps for us is to print out a range of test-models to figure out what the limitations are, next steps to produce proof of concept models for our clients. Expect more pictures soon when we link it up to ZBrush, for some realistic organic models…

If you’d like to see it in action, then please do drop by the multimedia area in Linney Design.

Wikipedia is celebrating its tenth anniversary with a video (narrated by founder and CEO Jimmy Wales) and an infographic showcasing the organization’s major milestones over the years. This animation caught my eye – executed really well with a lovely style. The State of Wikipedia is the fourth installment in JESS3′s “The State Of” series. The first installment, The State of the Internet, made its debut about a year ago.