Gadgety News

Let me introduce you to the very cool (if not a little scary) world of Augmented reality (AR).

This is the combination of virtual worlds and reality and could lead to extremely useful applications in navigation systems, medicine, architecture and many other fields.

Geisha Tokyo Entertainment Inc. [JP] now found a way to help all single Otaku get one step closer to their dreams…………..

Their salvation from loneliness comes in the diminutive form of “Dennou Figure ARis”, or “Cyber Figure Alice” in English.

Buyers will receive the AR software, 2 cybersticks and 2 cybercubes.

Put one of the cubes in front of the computer, point a webcam at it and the screen will display a 3D image of Alice standing on top of the cube - all cute and innocent so far.

Using the cyber sticks they can go on to “touch”, caress and (of course)  “peep” at their new girl friend. It is even possible to undress Alice and change her clothes………ah.  There goes the innocent bit then!

This will go on sale in Japan starting in the Autum.

Taking into consideration that there’s probably not a lot of dialogue to be translated, chances are that “Cyber Figure Alice” will be soon offered by American and European web shops that specialise in Otaku products as well.

Via CrunchGear

A virtual stripper is helping to defeat anti-spam security checks.  Spammers have created a Windows game which shows a woman in a state of undress when people correctly type in text shown in an accompanying image.

The scrambled text images come from sites which use them to stop computers automatically signing up for accounts that can be put to illegal use.

By getting people to type in the text the spammers can take over the accounts and use them to send junk mail.

The free e-mail services, so far, have been extremely successful at using Captchas to recognise a human being or an automatic program,” said Raimund Genes, chief technology officer at Trend Micro.

The novel system for getting round Captchas uses images of a woman called “melissa” who invites victims to decipher the scrambled text. Entering the correct text produces another image and another chunk of scrambled text.

Mr Genes said the Captchas seen with the first versions of the malicious program are all taken from the sign-up system for Yahoo webmail.

In the past many viruses have tricked people into opening booby-trapped (ahem) attachments with the false promise of seeing explicit images, said Mr Genes, but this was one of the first to actually show people more images if people respond.

For more (not nudity though) check out The BBC News Site