Human Engines co-founder Baback Elmieh was recently invited to participate as a contributing author for an RCR Wireless “Reality Check” segment. RCR has gathered a group of “visionaries and veterans” in the mobile industry to give their marketplace insights, and runs a weekly issue of these insightful musings. Check out our own Baback Elmieh as he gives the industry a Reality Check on the state of the tablets and the market call for innovation.

Read the full article here…

SAN DIEGO – AUGUST 9, 2011 – Human Engines, an innovative software development company dedicated to redefining user experiences, today announced Influx, a timeline-based mobile communications manager that fundamentally changes the user experience on Android™-enabled mobile devices. Influx simplifies the connected mobile life by streamlining all email, social media, SMS, calendar functions and alerts into a graphically-rich, universal timeline that prioritizes the delivery of information when, where and how the user prefers. A first-of-its-kind white-label solution, Influx maximizes the Android operating system and is installed at the OEM level, where it can be customized and optimized for the device. Influx is now commercially deployed for the first time as “SocialTouch” on the Lenovo IdeaPad® Tablet K1 and ThinkPad® Tablet, announced in July running the Android 3.1 (Honeycomb) operating system.

“We designed Influx to help users better understand and use the various communications tools available to them in a world of information overload,” said Baback Elmieh, president of products, Human Engines. “Currently, most people have to access corporate email, Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, calendar and browser alerts in separate applications – it’s enough to create more than a little confusion in our busy lives. Influx simplifies things and puts the focus back on the comprehensive user experience versus individual applications.”

Human Engines’ groundbreaking user experience (UX) technology redefines what the mobile experience can and should be by offering a customizable tool for unified delivery of personal content. Influx’s streamlined UX approach utilizes a Timeline for notifications, communications and events that can all be easily accessed via “snack” views, or quick, short summaries – all done without leaving the program. Influx gives users what they need, when they need it with context filters that prioritize messages or events, e.g. “Home,” “Work,” “Commute.”
Additional features for Influx by Human Engines include:

Fully Integrated Communications – corporate email, Gmail, calendar, SMS, Facebook and Twitter are all accessed through one central hub. Influx understands, streamlines and prioritizes communications while carrying out automatic message threading to keep the timeline manageable and organized.

Unified Inbox View with Streamlined Timeline – Influx collects your digital life all in one place, sorted by time and priorities you’ve established.

“Snack Size” Message Previews – Easy to digest snippets of information can be expanded and interacted with in one touch, without ever leaving Influx.

Context-based Filtering Options – Influx allows users to prioritize communications applications based on where they are at during different times of day, such as in the office, at home or on the road. Users can also search through all communications easily by viewing an entire day by a single contact or application.

Smart Alerts – Influx automatically monitors calendar items and uses Google maps to notify you of traffic delays, or alerts you and your meeting attendees if you’re likely to be late.

Lenovo’s IdeaPad Tablet K1 and ThinkPad Tablet, premiering Influx as SocialTouch, are the first tablets to deploy this new streamlined communications solution. The Lenovo tablets offer flexibility, power and security to do more virtually anywhere: entertainment, social networking, true HD, cloud sharing, apps and more.

Click here to download press materials.

Click here to view the embedded video.

We’re totally psyched! Human Engines collaborated with Google back in October to create the Aquarium and Collectibles Painter demos to help demonstrate the types of experiences WebGL will make possible.

Today Google announced the release of their Chrome beta browser and released the demos on their dedicated WebGL Chrome Experiments page. You can now run these demos without having to download special builds or play with command line arguments. So go check em’ out.

Google has launched their Chrome OS pilot program and demo’d one of the WebGL demos we collaborated with them on. ArsTechnica was there to see the show, here is what they had to say:

Google has also been focusing on WebGL, work that is progressing swiftly. During the presentation, Google showed several impressive WebGL demos, including a virtual 3D aquarium with sharks that shoot lasers out of their eyes. The availability of rich 3D functionality through native Web standards will be significant for enabling the next generation of browser-based games.

We agree! Check out the article here

Click here to view the embedded video.

The demos were announced formally on the Chromium Blog with the Aquarium demo featured on the homepage. The Aquarium demo and Collectibles Painter demo are available as a set of official WebGL demos offered by Google.

Aquarium Demo

The Aquarium demo immerses you in a beautiful aquarium full of fish, sharks and coral. The demo features 3D models with high-quality textures, scene animation, pixel shader animation, reflections, refraction and caustics.

Link: http://webglsamples.googlecode.com/hg/aquarium/aquarium.html

Collectibles Painter Demo

The Collectibles Painter demo was developed on top of Human Engines’ webGL based content technologies. It demonstrates the types of fun interactions that will be possible when you mix the power of CSS with Chromium’s GPU accelerated 3D.

Link: http://webglsamples.googlecode.com/hg/collectibles/index.html

Chromium WebGL Demos

Link: https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/dev/developers/demos-gpu-acceleration-and-webgl

Chromium Canary Build

Link: http://www.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel

An exciting development for upcoming platforms is WebGL, which provides hardware accelerated 3D graphics right within your browser for the first time without having to load any additional plug-ins. A potential that makes high-performance content available to a truly massive audience. While games are a big use-case for this technology, we are looking at WebGL from the perspective of enabling more compelling mass-market and branded consumer experiences  on the web.

You can check-out some of our early work on our Influx page which is WebGL enabled using either Chrome or Firefox which support WebGL in their nightly builds. Link »

WebGL is a rapidly developing technology, follow these instructions from Khronos to get the latest browsers. Link »