Changes are a-coming to chkdsk and NTFS health in Windows 8, and unlike the controversial Metro interface, these tweaks should make everyone happy. As hard drives get bigger, the Windows 7 chkdsk times get longer (and longer, and longer…) when hard disk errors occur, as infrequent as they are. In a worse-case scenario, attempting to boot a corrupt drive can take hours. The new system changes all that.

The Windows 8 improvements will let NTFS try to identify corruptions on-the-fly and make an instant fix in the background, no usage interruptions required. If that doesn’t work, Windows 8 will conduct a “spot verification scan” to determine if the corruption is genuine or just a brief memory glitch.

Genuine errors will be reported to the user and the OS will start scan the system during idle CPU/storage times and log the location of the problems. When the scan is done, Windows 8 will prompt the user to reboot the PC at his convenience. Chkdsk will then use the information NTFS logged about the errors to fix the corruptions quickly.

“The restart is quick (adding just a few additional seconds) and the PC is returned to a healthy state,” core manager Kim Bangalore writes on the Building Windows 8 blog. Hopefully it really is that quick and simple! For all the nitty gritty details and a helpful FAQ, hit the link.

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Building a next-generation jet engine isn’t easy, but from the cool confines of a blacked out holographic chamber in Brooklyn, it can at least be easier. Here, GE and its partners at BBDO New York have assembled ThrottleUp, an immersive 3-D holographic experience that lets users build one of GE’s new energy efficient GEnx jet engines using a gesture controlled holographic interface.

ThrottleUp was assembled in just three weeks from an impressive battery of technologies, including the same Musion Eyeliner projection technology that brought Tupac Shakur back to the stage for a posthumous performance at Coachella last month and a SoftKinetic sensor camera that captures the user’s hand movements. And while yes, it is basically a huge advertisement for GE, the finished product is a legitimately cool, technologically dazzling thing to see (and feel and hear).

“We wanted to show people how beautiful and amazing this engine is, but we didn’t just want to do 3-D,” says Neely Lisk, BBDO New York’s interactive producer on the project. Instead they’ve created a system that dazzles on all fronts–not just visually but sonically and texturally as well. When you step into the custom built chamber, the motion sensor puts you through two quick motions to sync itself to your body. Then the room goes black and the fun begins.

In a starry sky over a nighttime cityscape floats a disorganized cluster of real GE jet engine parts, each one slowly whirling in high-detail 3-D. Taking cues from the system, you then start to piece together the engine components using hand gestures, gathering parts into clusters that self assemble into larger pieces of the GEnx engine. You then fit the larger pieces together to produce a full working engine, which attaches to a jetliner that streaks away into the distance.

If it sounds like a simple video game, it’s not. It’s richer, more immersive, and far more technologically dazzling when you’re standing in a near pitch black space moving the world around you.

“The SoftKinetic camera ran software we licensed in order to use the camera sensors, but everything else was more or less a custom build,” Lisk says. “We were working through the night to implement new code. Setting up took hours to get the Musion film where it needed to be. Float was testing in its office in San Francisco, so there was no way for us to actually test until it was built. We kind of had to hold hands and pray that it would all work.”

Float refers to Float Hybrid Entertainment, the company that custom-developed the game engine that ran the overall experience. Effects companies LMG and Framestore delivered custom visual and sound effects that were derived from real CAD drawings of GEnx engine parts and sounds recorded from factory floors, while Musion delivered its patented projection technology that relies on a thin film stretched at a 45-degree angle toward the viewer that reflects images projected onto it from above as 3-D images–a film that had to be hung with two tons of tension to work properly. The team even contracted out a custom musical score to serve as background for the experience.

Blended together with the motion-controlled interactivity supplied by the SoftKinetic sensor array, the entire experience is as immersive as it gets and a nod to what future storytelling can be. Why watch when you can participate?

“We believe in taking storytelling to the next level,” Lisk says. “And this is something you can see and feel and touch.”

What exactly do you feel and touch? GE and BBDO didn’t leave out this sensory aspect in ThrottleUp but we don’t want to spoil the surprise ending for you, though we’re fairly sure you’ll be blown away. If you’re around the NYC area, Throttle up is free and open to the public through Friday, May 11 at 56 Water Street in Dumbo. It’s worth checking out.

Building a next-generation jet engine isn’t easy, but from the cool confines of a blacked out holographic chamber in Brooklyn, it can at least be easier. Here, GE and its partners at BBDO New York have assembled ThrottleUp, an immersive 3-D holographic experience that lets users build one of GE’s new energy efficient GEnx jet engines using a gesture controlled holographic interface.

ThrottleUp was assembled in just three weeks from an impressive battery of technologies, including the same Musion Eyeliner projection technology that brought Tupac Shakur back to the stage for a posthumous performance at Coachella last month and a SoftKinetic sensor camera that captures the user’s hand movements. The result is something that takes just a few moments to acquaint itself with a user’s body before launching him or her into an interactive holographic experience.

“We wanted to show people how beautiful and amazing this engine is, but we didn’t just want to do 3-D,” says Neely Lisk, BBDO New York’s interactive producer on the project. Instead they’ve created a system that dazzles on all fronts–not just visually but sonically and texturally as well. When you step into the custom built chamber, the motion sensor puts you through two quick motions to sync itself to your body. Then the room goes black and the fun begins.

In a starry sky over a nighttime cityscape floats a disorganized cluster of real GE jet engine parts, each one slowly whirling in high-detail 3-D. Taking cues from the system, you then start to piece together the engine components using hand gestures, gathering parts into clusters that self assemble into larger pieces of the GEnx engine. You then fit the larger pieces together to produce a full working engine, which attaches to a jetliner that streaks away into the distance.

If it sounds like a simple video game, it’s not. It’s richer, more immersive, and far more technologically dazzling when you’re standing in a near pitch black space moving the world around you.

“The SoftKinetic camera ran software we licensed in order to use the camera sensors, but everything else was more or less a custom build,” Lisk says. “We were working through the night to implement new code. Setting up took hours to get the Musion film where it needed to be. Float was testing in its office in San Francisco, so there was no way for us to actually test until it was built. We kind of had to hold hands and pray that it would all work.”

Float refers to Float Hybrid Entertainment, the company that custom-developed the game engine that ran the overall experience. Effects companies LMG and Framestore delivered custom visual and sound effects that were derived from real CAD drawings of GEnx engine parts and sounds recorded from factory floors, while Musion delivered its patented projection technology that relies on a thin film stretched at a 45-degree angle toward the viewer that reflects images projected onto it from above as 3-D images–a film that had to be hung with two tons of tension to work properly. The team even contracted out a custom musical score to serve as background for the experience.

Blended together with the motion-controlled interactivity supplied by the SoftKinetic sensor array, the entire experience is as immersive as it gets and a nod to what future storytelling can be. Why watch when you can participate?

“We believe in taking storytelling to the next level,” Lisk says. “And this is something you can see and feel and touch.”

What exactly do you feel and touch? GE and BBDO didn’t leave out this sensory aspect in ThrottleUp but we don’t want to spoil the surprise ending for you, though we’re fairly sure you’ll be blown away. If you’re around the NYC area, Throttle up is free and open to the public through Friday, May 11 at 56 Water Street in Dumbo. It’s worth checking out.

Like Kinect, but with a microphone and no camera

WIth the Kinect, Microsoft opened up the world of gestural controls to the masses, allowing users to manipulate video games and otherwise control their devices with simple motion controls. Now Microsoft Research is doing it again, this time using inaudible sound waves to create the same kind of gestural interface, no cameras necessary.

Aptly named SoundWave, the technology allows users to control their computers via gestures that are evaluated based on sound. It requires a microphone and speaker to work, as the SoundWave system emits a constant inaudible tone that is altered by hand movements in front of the computer. The microphone picks up changes in frequency caused by said gestures, and the software quickly infers what gesture was made.

SoundWave is still in the incubator at Microsoft Research, so it’s not available for PCs just yet. And it kind of begs the question: why? Kinect is good and getting better, and cameras only grow more ubiquitous on our gadgets. If visual gesture recognition is such a robust technology–and Microsoft itself has gone a long way toward proving that it’s here to stay–then SoundWave seems somewhat redundant.

But we’re also all about the idea of research for the sake of research, and in a videoposted to the research group’s site the technology does appear to work, albeit with a slight delay and with a much shorter range than Kinect-like, vision-based systems. See it in action here.

[CNET]

This week the Ubuntu Developer Summit is going on in Oakland, California, and Mark Shuttleworth and others have been filing some interesting reports coming out of the conference. According to Shuttleworth, today will be "Cloud Day" at the meeting, with speakers including Richard Kaufmann, CTO of HP Cloud, Randy Bias of Cloud Scaling, and Mark Collier of Rackspace. Perhaps the most interesting points coming out of the summit so far, though, have to do with new market share claims for Ubuntu.

Canonical is, of course, getting a lot of notice for its new 12.x Ubuntu releases, as we covered here.  The new releases are part of the discussion at Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS), but there are some really surprising market share numbers coming out.

As Phoronix reports, Chris Kenyon, VP of sales and business development at Canonical, said that Ubuntu will soon ship on five percent of PCs, and threw in these numbers: "Eight to ten million units shipped last year world-wide…[and]…"Last year Ubuntu shipped on 7.5 billion dollars (presumably USD) worth of hardware."

Steadily, Canonical has been bringing the interface and compatibility conventions  in Ubuntu toward industry standards, which has caused controversy, especially in the case of the Unity interface. But to get to shipping on five percent of PCs, enterprises will have to buy into Ubuntu for users and major hardware makers will have to support the OS.

To put that five percent number in perspective, for decades Apple’s market share on personal computers sat squarely at five percent, and look where Apple is now. 

One of the other interesting reports coming out of UDS is that Canonical is expanding its presence in China, including many physical stores featuring Ubuntu branding. This is going to be a transformative year for Canonical. Let’s see where the numbers sit come December.