Common Paradox Tech Blog

There were two major problems with the Emperor 200 workstation. One is that at $40,000, it was just too damn expensive. But even if you could afford the contraption, the other problem was figuring out a way to convince your significant other that the funky workstation goes with your home decor.

NovelQuest, the company behind the Emperor 200, looks to solve one of those problems with a new model that costs far less, but probably still way too much. The Emperor 1510 retains the same basic shape, only this time it costs $4,950, plus the cost of shipping.

For five large, you get an adjustable seat and leg rest, a handmade Canadian steel frame, forward and back tilting capability, an adjustable keyboard tray, LED lighting, and inputs/outputs for plugging in your PC.

The company is taking preorders now and plans to officially launch the new workstation tomorrow.

Video demonstration (of Emperor 200)

Image Credit: NovelQuest

Remember the Emperor 200 workstation? All $40,000 of it? Well there’s a cheaper version coming soon. Emphasis on the “er” because even if we’re billing this new one as a budget offering, it certainly isn’t cheap.

This new model is called the Emperor 1510. For $4,950, you get about the same shape as the big brother, as well as a number of its high end features. These include seat tilting, integrated audio, LED lighting and an inferiority complex the likes of which no IT department has ever seen.

This guy launches December 15, with any purchaser’s ego following it into the stratosphere soon after. [Novel Quest via Born Rich]

robotsrule writes “As we discussed last month, RealityServer 3.0 is Nvidia’s attempt to bring photo-realistic 3D images to any Internet-connected device, including the likes of Android and iPhone. RealityServer 3.0 pushes the CPU-killing 3D rendering process to a high-power, GPU based, back-end server farm based on Nvidia’s Tesla or Quadro architectures. The resulting images are then streamed back to the client device in seconds; such images would normally take hours to compute even on a high-end unassisted workstation. Extreme Tech has up an article containing an interview with product managers from Nvidia and Mental Images, whose iray application is employed in a two-minute video demonstration of near-real-time ray-traced rendering.” Once you get to the Extreme Tech site, going to the printable version will help to preserve sanity.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Think about your workspace and imagine if your furniture or your desk or cubicle could automatically reconfigure for different applications with a simple wave of the hand. Now check out the reality of Clemson’s Animated Work Environment (AWE).

Essentially, AWE is a programmable wall with varied displays that can switch between six configurations just by activating a proximity sensor. For example, when the wall is hanging overhead like a ceiling, the act of standing up triggers the sensor and instructs the wall to move out of the way. The project is in it’s infancy, but it is easy to see how future applications could lead to a whole range of dynamic, multi-functional furniture that automatically reacts to its environment. [AWE Project via IEEE Spectrum via BotJunkie]

I love this mobile workstation, but I think the manufacturer could go farther by including pedals and a steering wheel. I mean, they even have a two-seater version of this. Tandem computer-cycling baby!

Check out the two-seater version in the upper right hand corner of the image above. That’s gonna run you $1000. Single seat versions are priced at $500. [Opulent Items via 7Gadgets via OhGizmo]

MojoKid writes “To date, the majority of cloud computing applications have emphasized storage, group collaboration, or the ability to share information and applications with large groups of people. So far, there’s been no push to make GPU power available in a cloud computing environment — but that’s something NVIDIA hopes to change. The company announced version 3.0 of its RealityServer today. The new revision sports hardware-level 3D acceleration, a new rendering engine (iray), and the ability to create ‘images of photorealistic scenes at rates approaching an interactive gaming experience.’ NVIDIA claims that the combination of RealityServer and its Tesla hardware can deliver those photorealistic scenes on your workstation or your cell phone, with no difference in speed or quality. Instead of relying on a client PC to handle the task of 3D rendering, NVIDIA wants to move the capability into the cloud, where the task of rendering an image or scene is handed off to a specialized Tesla server. Then that server performs the necessary calculations and fires back the finished product to the client.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.