Taodyne sponsoring the Nice Startup Week-End 2012

Tao Presentations and twitter feeds

Taodyne was the proud sponsor of the 2012 edition of the Nice Startup Week-End. It was a huge success. We had about 40 participants, a dozen projects were presented, and five teams formed and competed. The winner was iShootMyTV, a very smart way to make existing TV sets more interactive by shooting at them with a smartphone.

We used Tao Presentations to show live information about the event, including a real-time "vote of the attendees" that was remarkably in line with what the jury had decided. Anybody in the room could vote in real-time about the projects being presented using their smartphones, and Tao Presentations was showing the result in real-time on the screen.

The real-time voting worked quite well because it uses very little bandwidth. More bandwidth-hungry things like live twitter feeds were a little harder to get right, because as usual in this kind of event, the air was saturated with Wifi waves, and many browser applications were hard to use or unstable. We ended up using "regular" web browsers instead of Tao Presentations, and restarting them on a regular basis.

At the end of the show, we had a short demo of Tao Presentations on a 3D projector, with the usual "wow effect". I was very pleased to see young people who are used to all sorts of new technology be impressed by what we showed. One of them told me this was her favorite memory of the show.

We offered the winning team three free licences for Tao Presentations Impress.

Taodyne at ISE Amsterdam

Article dans Nice Matin

Un court article de présentation de Taodyne dans Nice Matin ce mardi:

Encore un peu de patience, notre nouveau site Internet sera bientôt prêt!

Taodyne has moved

We have moved. We are now at the World Trade Center in Sophia Antipolis.
The precise address is:

Building entrance

1300 route des Crêtes
Entrée I
06560, Sophia Antipolis 

The new buildings gives us a very nice showroom where we can demonstrate our software, but also hardware from various partners, including:

•  3D displays from Alioscopy and Philips/Dimenco,
• 3D TVs and projectors, with both active and passive glasses,
• Devices to interact with a 3D presentation system from TizzyWorld or LM3Labs.

Division of labor

Of course, installing everything was a lot of effort. We put our values to the test, with a stringent division of labor and strict equality between men and women, as you can see on the picture left.

Many many thanks to Claire, Catherine, Baptiste and Jérôme for their work. And we invite all of you to visit us and see what we have to offer.

Season's Greetings

Taodyne wishes you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

Modernizing the magic of LaTeX

A recent post by Valetta Ventures talks about how hard it is to port LaTeX to the iPad. Basically, the problem is that the code base is old and messy, part of it is written in old programming languages like WEB that need to be transliterated to C, and so on. I think they would stand a much better chance if they tried starting, say, with TeXmacs. I wrote to them about it.

But I think there is a more fundamental issue with trying to move LaTeX forward: while its rendering quality is second to none, it only creates static documents, it cannot integrate graphics, animations, or any kind of modern contents. Ever thought of integrating web page in a LaTex document?

Part of what we are trying to do with Tao Presentations is to capture the original magic of LaTeX, but in a more modern fashion. Below is a very short demo, here is the source code if you are curious.

If you want to hear more about this, please visit us at IC3D in Liege in december. We will be talking a bit about what we are doing with Tao, the programming language, and we hope to demonstrate the first baby steps of Tao, the user interface.

In the meantime, please take a look at our latest demo, YouCube, showing 6 YouTube videos on an interactive cube with sound synchronization.

What's coming up in the world of image sensors?

Dr Eric Fossum, one of the minds behind CMOS sensors, pre-annonced interesting work on a time-of-flight sensor. Would that mean real 3D from cheap sensors?