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  Been itching to get your hands into gesture-based computing? A key piece of the equation is now available. Intel recently announced public availability of its new The Creative* Interactive Gesture Camera Developer Kit. The $149 camera is a small, light-weight, USB-powered device optimized for close-range interactivity.  Designed for ease of …

Performance increases in next-generation microprocessors no longer rely on cranking clock speeds–except during Turbo Boost. Instead, speed-ups today come from parallel programming harnessing multi-core hyper-threaded processors, spanning everything from tiny mobiles to massive supercomputers. In fact, all modern Intel central processing units (CPUs) are parallel processors–from the tiny Atom to …

  As a developer of services that use multi-core processors, Fixstars Corporation needed a cutting-edge platform for lucille*, a high-speed renderer targeted at the CG market. Learn why the Tokyo-based company chose Intel® Parallel Studio XE bundled with Intel® compilers, analysis tools, and other development software as the foundation for …

  The short answer: these two thread libraries are quite different in implementation and purposes.    But let’s take a step back and consider the definition of a thread. A program can launch separate threads, even on a single core machine. The operating system (sometimes even at the hardware level), …

  All great science-fiction series, such as Star Trek*, Star Wars*, and Dr. Who*, have imagined rapid, accurate machine translation (MT) to smooth over cultural differences. Intel has been experimenting with “real-time” MT within the community threads, which is leading to even richer dialogue. Libraries of white papers and piles of technical documentation …

  If you think the emerging area of perceptual computing is all hype, take a look at this neat demo from SoftKinetic Studios. The company’s “Solar System” augmented reality demo lets users “hold” the entire universe in their hands.  Users can rotate and scale (zoom) the galaxy by moving both …

  Got a great idea for the next killer app in perceptual computing? The Intel® Perceptual Computing Challenge  launched this week offers $1 million in prize money to the “brightest, boldest, and baddest PerC developers” using the Intel Perceptual Computing SDK 2013.  The challenge offers parallel and conventional programmers alike …