Photo credit Tony Buser from Flickr (links below)

Ever since Microsoft Research showed off the extremely impressive KinectFusion demo and shortly after published its research findings, developers have been trying hard to replicate the mad science to give more people the ability to turn everyday objects into 3D models with just a Kinect sensor.

Today Greg Duncan on Channel9’s Coding4Fun posted a video to ReconstructMe, one of the better implementations of such a third-party software that comes very close to what KinectFusion is able to achieve, and then some.

Among the alternatives including PointCloud’s open-source library and Materix 3Dify, ReconstructMe seems to produce the best results.

Currently free for non-commercial use, ReconstructMe allows anyone to take a Kinect sensor connect to a Windows PC and freely roam around objects to generate industry-standard 3D models that can even be printed straight by a 3D printer. And one 3D-print hobbyist, Tony Buser, has done just that.

In fact, Tony is so enthusiastic about Kinect scanning he’s even developed two mods to the Kinect that specifically improve its practical scanning use.

The first is a hand-held attachment that allows him to hold the Kinect like a barcode scanner. And the second, the an ingenious one, is attaching a pair of reading glasses that overcome Kinect’s close-proximity flaw to enable more detailed scanning of smaller objects with impressive results.

As I’m sure the software will improve with time and more people have access to 3D printers, we’ll see more and more practical hobbyists explore the scanning capabilities of the Kinect to make home replication of popular objects a practical and affordable reality.

tl;dr If you have a dual NVIDIA & Intel graphics configuration and are running the Windows 8 Consumer Preview experiencing crashes (black screens) when launching Metro apps, there’s a workaround.

Last week I received a new Dell XPS 15z laptop (which has its own set of issues but I digress) and one of the first things I did was to load the Windows 8 Consumer Preview on it for it to become my primary Windows 8 development machine.

Sooner than later, I discovered launching some Metro applications (mostly third-party ones) would flicker the screen black and eventually send me to the Windows login screen. This was a real roadblocker.

After some quick research and brute-force trial and error, I’ve come up with an elaborate but effective workaround for those of us lucky enough to have an alternate GPU fallback in the system.

1. Verify you have the latest NVIDIA drivers for Windows 8 (at the time of writing 296.17)
2. Open the NVIDIA control panel by right-clicking on the desktop
3. In “Manage 3D settings”, choose “Integrated graphics” as the preferred graphics processor globally
4. Apply/save the setting
5. Restart Windows (this is to ensure DWM will use this new setting)
6. Open “Device Manager” by right-clicking on the bottom left corner of the desktop
7. Expand the “Display adapters” section
8. Right click on the NVIDIA item and click “Disable”
   (Depending on your luck, you may be sent to a black screen where you’ll need to restart. The setting may also require a few attempts to take effect. Usually takes me 2 tries.)
9. Verify the NVIDIA card is disabled in the Device Manager. (It will have a small gray icon)
10. Try to launch a Metro app which crashed earlier, should work now

Aside from the obvious fact this won’t work if there’s no alternate integrated graphics processor, this workaround also has the side-effect of disabling some display functionality which may be tied directly to the NVIDIA GPU – most likely the HDMI port and of course 3D grunt processing power.

I’m hoping this is only a temporary workaround until NVIDIA fixes the underlying crash in their next beta driver update.

On a related note, AMD users should also be aware that the Windows 8 Catalyst drivers are also plagued with a problem in OpenGL, but there’s a workaround for that too.

Almost exactly a year after it was originally announced at Microsoft’s MIX11 conference, the Qantas airlines WP7 app is finally available.

Sent in by an anonymous tipster, the app is still private (not yet discoverable) but is downloadable through a direct link.

Since its original debut, the design has had a fresh coat of paint, aligning it with the updated Qantas styling.

Even though the app has some pretty useful such as a push live tile for individual flight updates, mobile checkins and mobile boarding pass, the app won’t be too useful for anyone who don’t have a booking or frequent flyer membership as there’s no flight search functionality.

Overall, Qantas should be applauded for shipping a pretty functional and polished app joining a small list of airlines who now have a native WP7 app.

Technoillusionist Marco Tempest, best known for his “iPod Magic“, wowed the TED crowd last month with a new trick he invented that pushes the boundaries of what magic looks like.

Combining sleight of hand and augmented reality visualizations powered by a Microsoft Kinect sensor, this is a 5-minute show you don’t want to miss.

Update: The creative studio onformative behind the visualizations, in collaboration with checksum5, have published a blog post and images detailing some of the effort required to pull off this visual feat for Marco.

The main task was to bring together a very long list of demanding interactive real-time effects – such as hand-tracking, face-tracking, face substitution, particle systems, elements in 3d space – with the exact course of a six minutes show, which was exactly timed by the given soundtrack.

First and foremost, “Bing Automatic” is a completely conceptual idea envisioned by what appears to be a team of marketing students for a college coursework assignment, so apply a generous coating of salt. I’m not even sure if Microsoft’s Bing team has seen this.

Besides the actual app, what’s somewhat amusing is the brief that Microsoft provided to these students, as one student proclaims,

During my third semester my team and I were given a very simple brief from our live client Microsoft Bing: “Do something that will scare the shit out of Google.” Nearly every team delivered an advertising campaign for the pitch. We presented a way for them to increase search traffic by using the most universal software application on the planet, Microsoft Office.

B+ for effort. B for execution. A for presentation.

Two years ago, I posted a little crud Photoshop mockup on this blog.

Recently we broke our record of over 8,000 unique/active users on a single day. Today, we’re releasing version 1.0 of MetroTwit with the much anticipated multi-account feature for professional users.

With all the blood and sweat David Golden, Winston Pang and I have put into taming the beast that is WPF, I’m unashamed to tell you all to download and try it now.