The View From Above: In Hard Focus Round-up (July 22, 2011)

Robots Using Kinect to Understand Surroundings: Two students at Cornell University are teaching robots to understand their surroundings and identify objects around them using none other than a Microsoft Kinect. As noted in the article on New Scientist, Kinect overcomes pitfalls in previous attempts, allowing robots a better system for understanding shape and color when evaluating objects. Check out the video above to see them in action. Also interesting - Carnegie Mellon's Daniel Huber notes outside of this study, Kinect sensors will make a big impact on the field computer vision as a whole. 

Instagram Comes Down With Bieber Fever: Looks like Justin Bieber is doing more than selling out stadiums; he's almost shut down mobile photo-sharing service Instagram too. According to TechCrunch, the singer shared his first picture on the service yesterday and Instagram saw a massive influx of traffic immediately following, almost shutting its servers down. 

AR Coming to a Vehicle Near You? Toyota is working on an AR concept called "Window to the World" that will allow passengers the ability to interact with the elements outside -- through the window. Just as kids draw shapes on fogged-up or dirty glass windows, the idea is to allow passengers to traces images on a window -- but with this technology, the images would become integrated with the landscape and stay in place as the car drives away. According to CNET, the window will let viewers identify, zoom in on and translate objects in another language, gauge distances of landmarks and -- our favorite -- help them identify constellations in the sky.