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5 October 2013 | NewScientist | 21

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Take a 3D tour with WikipediaWish you were here? Bryan Russell at the University of Washington in Seattle and colleagues have developed the first online system that automatically creates annotated 3D reconstructions of tourist sites. To build up the visualisation, off-the-shelf software grabs images from online photo sites such as Flickr and stitches them together in three dimensions. The system uses Wikipedia entries for the site to annotate the visual model. Users can zoom in on a feature, or, where a narrative sequentially describes a site, they can embark on a fly-through to visualise the description.

“i just used my phone for about 20 minutes and now i feel like i’m going to vomit” One of many complaints on an Apple forum that animations in the iOS 7 operating system are making users nauseous

Bringing a PC to the console battleWatch out Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and Wii U – Steam Box is gearing up for a fight. US video game firm Valve fired off a salvo of announcements last week outlining its plans to bring PC gaming to gamers’ living rooms. The company said that next year it would release a compact PC, the Steam Box, as well as a Linux-based operating system, SteamOS, and a videogame controller with super-precise touchpads that mimic the feel of a mouse and keyboard.

Careful what you sayOur words are a dead giveaway. The language we use speaks volumes about our personality, says Saif Mohammad at the National Research Council Canada. He has built software that analyses the sentiment of the language in a series of essays, and gauges each author’s personality. When evaluating anonymous essays, most of the time it agreed with psychologists’ assessments of where the author fell among the “Big Five” personality traits of extroversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness.

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only options. ID3, an MIT spin-off, is building a cloud version of openPDS. A personal data store hosted on US cloud servers would still be secretly searchable by the NSA, but it would allow users to have more control over their data, and keep an eye on who is using it.

“OpenPDS is a building block for the emerging personal data ecosystem,” says Thomas Hardjono, the technical lead of the MIT Consortium for Kerberos and Internet Trust, a collection of the world’s largest technology

companies who are working together to make data access fairer. “We want people to have equitable access to their data. Today, AT&T and Verizon have access to my GPS data, but I don’t.”

Other groups also think such personal data stores are a good idea. A project funded by the European Union, called digital.me, focuses on giving people more control over their social networks, and the non-profit Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium advocates for individuals’ right to control their own data.

OpenPDS is already being put to use. Massachusetts General Hospital wants to use the software to protect patient privacy for a program called CATCH. It involves continuously monitoring variables including glucose levels, temperature, heart rate and brain activity, as well as smartphone-based analytics that can give insight into mood, activity and social connections. “We want to begin interrogating the medical data of real people in real time in real life, in a way that does not invade privacy,” says Dennis Ausiello, head of the hospital’s department of medicine.

OpenPDS will help people keep a handle on their own data, but getting back information already in private hands is a different matter. “As soon as you give access to that raw data, there’s no way back,” says de Montjoye. n

–They know where you are–

much higher resolutions than standard consumer 3D printers. The team is using the Form 1 printer, built by start-up firm Formlabs, which is capable of printing layers just 25 micrometres thick.

The resins these printers use have limitations in terms of strength, though, and the chain design weakens things further. “If you want to make large-scale furniture or buildings, there needs to be an approach to make them stronger,” says Tibbits.

Manually clicking each link into place isn’t ideal either. That’s where Tibbits’ other work in “4D” printing

might help. 4D printing uses materials that are 3D-printed to produce an intermediate object that, when exposed to water, will bend and twist itself into the final structure. “You can see how Hyperform and 4D printing are pointing towards each other,” he says.

Clément Moreau, CEO of French 3D printing firm Sculpteo, says projects like Hyperform are shaping the future of 3D printing. “This is yet another example of how 3D printing constantly opens up new possibilities in terms of materials used and shapes which can be printed.” niall Firth n