You'd better watch your back Adobe, because it looks like you've got company in the 3D picture game. Stanford University researchers have recently hit upon a method of image sensing which can judge the distance of subjects within a shot. By using a 3-megapixel sensor which is broken into multiple, overlapping 16 x 16-pixel squares (referred to as subarrays), a camera is capable of capturing a variety of angles in one frame. When the images taken by the multi-aperture device are processed by proprietary software, location differences are measured from each mini-lens, and then combined into a photograph containing a depth map. This procedure allows the same image to appear at different angles, provided the subject has depth to begin with (i.e., isn't a flat surface). Here's hoping this technology makes it into consumer products pronto, ASAP, and forthwith.

[Via Wired]

In an achievement that is heavily weighted towards the addition of a PS3 client to the project, Folding@Home has busted through the Petaflop mark, producing a distributed supercomputer capable of above and beyond a thousand trillion flops. Currently the client stats show 1.194 Petaflops of activity, 0.93 of which is due to the PlayStation 3's contribution. Of course, Sony will likely be preparing a press release as we speak, and they've every right to. What we've got to ask is where are Microsoft and Nintendo in this equation? Sounds to us like the only specifications needed are an internet connection and a CPU, which -- last time we checked -- the Wii and 360 both have.

Gaze-based password entry might sound like a chore -- and we can't say we find the fact of aligning our eyes with an on-screen ATM keyboard all that practical -- but if it means we can finally avoid that awkward moment at the cash machine where we block the keypad view from that shifty-looking sixth grader standing next to us, it just might be worth it. Stanford University has folks working on just such a solution to the dreaded "shoulder-surfing" at ATMs, and has come up with EyePassword. They're testing some systems that track your eyeballs in a variety of ways to perform PIN input, and while the resulting study shows that input times are slowed a little, the system does indeed make "eavesdropping by a malicious observer largely impractical." Of course, there's no telling when something like this will hit your neighborhood deli.

[Via New Scientist]

Apparently the insane amount of gigaflops that your modern-day graphics card can churn out is nothing short of a phenomenon, as Folding@home's forefather Vijay Pande has tailored a new piece of software to harness to raw processing power of GPUs. Pande claimed that even the latest dual-core CPUs can't hold a candle to the floating point performance of ATi's X1900 / X1950 graphics cards. He estimated a Core 2 Duo chip could push about 25 gigaflops of folding power, while a high-end off-the-shelf ATi card could unleash a whopping 375 GFLOPS, which is about "20 to 40 times more speed" than the project has seen thus far. The team has also optimized the algorithms in the GPU-centric software, which is expected to add "10 to 15 times" more speed on top of the GPU's already impressive performance figures. Currently, the beta version is limited to the X1900 lineup, but plans are to include the X1800 variety in the near future, and Pande even mentioned that a PlayStation 3-friendly version was in the works. So if you aren't too busy tweaking your GPU-based supercomputer (or stressing over your energy bill), why not put those excessive GFLOPS to good use through Engadget's own Folding@home team, yeah?