The View From Above: In Hard Focus Round-up (September 1, 2011)

AR brings boardgames to life: A recent Kickstarter project, called the OggBoard, aims to give board game fans a 3D experience with the use of Augmented Reality. If the project is funded, the physical ‘board’ upon which games are played will be simple in design, yet provide physical cues for smartphones to populate AR game content – be it a chess piece, user-created characters for specialty games, or perhaps a battleship. See the video above, via CNET.

Microsoft’s own ‘Locationgate’: We recently covered the discovery that Microsoft, alongside Apple, has been collecting locations of smartphones and other Wi-Fi enable devices, so it comes to no surprise that a recent class action law suit has been filed around Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 tracking of data. TechCrunch reports that a Seattle district court is handling the case, which centers on the idea that WP7 users, regardless of whether or not they opt out of location tracking, have their location and data harvested. While this location tracking is purportedly only for marketing and advertising purposes, the fact that they keeping tabs on people unawares is quite sketchy.

Holograms could make microscopes more accessible in the medical field: UCLA researchers are developing a microscope that trades traditional (and heavy) lens with lightweight hologram technology.  The technology works by shining light on a sensor chip with the object, which then collects in a cloud-based software program that recreates the image. What’s amazing is that this breakthrough could mean the ability to a) carry in microscopes to remote areas (Engadget reports that the new model could be the size of a banana) and b) access and analyze the image remotely via computers, tablets and smartphones.