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After I wrote the Vuzix Smart glasses for just hours, Google launched their glass and built a new web site for this product. Maybe google do not want to be left behind when Vuzix award from CES. http://www.google.com/glass/start/ The page is simple and clear. We could see a video in the link to sense how it feels. All the functions that describe in what it does are totally from audio, video and gesture recognition. We can take the photo, record the video, translation, search the information, navigation…etc in real-time. All of the recognition technology have to link with the requirements of people and that’s why google raise a competition for people to write down “what would you do if you had Glass”. Once the idea is adopted, we could become the Glass Explorer and buy Glass with USD $1500. ...

I like to play basketball since I was a high school student and I still play around one to twice a week now. Although I love this sport, I do not have too much passion to see the games like NBA after MJ retired. In past year, I started to pay attention on it. One reason is Jeremy Lin and the other is the CEO of my company bought Memphis Grizzlies last year. I start to realize this is not just only a game but also contain a lot of things in it. ...

I saw a news that about the Vuzix Smart Glasses M100 and it get a recipient of the CES (Consumer Electronics Show) Innovations 2013 Design and Engineering Award BEST OF INNOVATIONS, and selected as Best Technology in the Wireless Handset Accessory category. More information in following link. http://www.vuzix.com/consumer/products_browse.html#video-eyewear It’s an interesting device but there are still challenges behind. Since Google launch their project glass, Vuzix is the 2nd company to make the similar product. So M100 get a lot of discussion even google guys go their booth to have it a look. According to the hardware specification from Vuzix web sites. It’s totally an android based smart phone and the difference is the glasses appearance only. It’s not special by just hardware specification only. ...

Just before the Chinese Lunar New Year, I received the latest alpha version of AirVision 2.0. It doesn’t just inherit the strengths of the previous version; it feels significantly faster and more stable. Here is a quick preview of the installation process and some of the main UI pages. Installation Process After launching the Windows installer and following the setup steps, you’ll see a Windows Security alert. Make sure your firewall isn’t blocking the application. ...

Weeks ago, the supplier demo the Miracast function to us and my colleague told me maybe we can think if there are applications for surveillance system. At first I saw nothing special for surveillance application but I may find there is now. Here is a capture picture from the whitepaper of WiFi alliance. Basically, Miracast is a protocol and this means Miracast can be over any kind of infrastructure. However, Miracast connections are expected to be predominantly established between Wi-Fi devices connected with each other directly, without an AP acting as an intermediary. According to the topology, what we can see is a source to a sink and it is a peer-to-peer connection. ...

The pure public cloud is no doubt building web services on a public infrastructure, while hybrid combines a private component. According to Wikipedia, the public cloud (aka external cloud) refers to services provided by a third party. A picture on Wikipedia describes this clearly. Basically, there are four deployment models on Wikipedia. A private cloud can’t fully satisfy the requirements of a surveillance system. We also won’t discuss community cloud since it’s not realistic for surveillance. ...

The pure public cloud is no doubt that we build the web services on public and the hybrid combine the private part. According to the information on wiki, the public cloud aka external cloud is related to the service is provided by third party. There is a picture on wiki can describe exactly what we talk about. Basically, there are four deployment models on wiki. The private cloud can’t satisfy the requirements of the surveillance system. We do not talk about the community cloud also because it’s not real on surveillance system. ...

Today is the end of the Dragon year and we use to have a good supper on this day. It’s brand new lunar year tomorrow and we call it Snake year. Sometimes, we’d call it Small Dragon year rather than Snake year because Dragon is much more significant in traditional. Hope my family and friends have a brand new good Small Dragon Year.

My colleague did some experiments on GStreamer alsasrc and osssrc plugins and found that alsasrc consumes a lot of CPU resource (around 16% on the chip we use). He asked me why the test tool provided by the chip vendor is quite efficient (around 1~2%). It was a big gap and I started to investigate why. After hours of checking, I found that the plugin may cause a busy wait in a while loop when the parameters are set to non-blocking mode. I made a simple code modification and the CPU rate dropped to 12%. Still frustrating, but some improvement. ...

A colleague recently observed a significant discrepancy in CPU usage while testing the GStreamer alsasrc and osssrc plugins. On our hardware platforms, alsasrc was consuming about 16% of CPU resources, whereas the vendor-provided test tools achieved the same task with only 1~2% overhead. This massive gap in efficiency piqued my curiosity, and I decided to investigate the root cause. After several hours of deep diving into the code, I discovered that when the plugin is set to “non-blocking mode,” it can trigger a busy-wait condition within a while loop, needlessly spiking CPU cycles. After a quick patch to optimize this behavior, I managed to bring the CPU usage down to 12%. While an improvement, it still felt far from the vendor tool’s efficiency. ...