Communications Technology

The next evolution in portable music - storing your songs on the internet and streaming them on a smartphone - has taken a leap forward after Amazon became the first big company to offer the service.

Amazon customers can upload five gigabytes of their own music for free on the retail giant’s website. They can listen to that music anywhere in the world as long as they have an Android smartphone - iPhones are not compatible - that can tap wireless broadband.

Any PC or Mac connected to landline broadband will also play the service, known as Cloud Player.

”Our customers have told us they don’t want to download music to their work computers or phones because they find it hard to move music around to different devices,” said Bill Carr, Amazon’s vice-president of music. ”Now, whether at work, home or on the go, customers can buy music from Amazon MP3, store it on the cloud, and play it anywhere.”

The ”cloud” is jargon for websites such as Facebook, Gmail, SkyDrive, Dropbox, Posterous, Flickr - and now Amazon - where users can upload and store personal documents, photos, and sound and video files.

The five gigabytes on Cloud Player is equal to 9.5 hours of CD-quality music or 100 hours of MP3-quality music. US customers can have four times that amount of storage if they buy an album on Amazon MP3, but Amazon would not say if this offer will spread to markets such as Australia.

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Computer animation has a problem: when it gets too realistic, it starts creeping people out.

Most recently, moviegoers complained about the near-realistic depiction of humans in Disney’s 3D flick Mars Needs Moms.

A theory called the “uncanny valley” says we tend to feel attracted to inanimate objects with human traits, the way a teddy bear or a rag doll seems cute. Our affection grows as an object looks more human. But if it looks too human, we suddenly become repulsed.

Instead of seeing what’s similar, we notice the flaws - and the motionless eyes or awkward movements suddenly make us uncomfortable.

Mars may have plunged to the bottom of this valley of fear.

“People always comment on things feeling strangely dead around the eyes,” said Chuck Sheetz, an animation director of The Simpsons and a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. “If it gets too literal, it starts to feel false or has a strange effect.”

Skin texture that is slightly off can especially leave people feeling unsettled, said Patrick Markey, a psychologist and director of Villanova University’s Interpersonal Research Laboratory.

The near-realistic animation style championed by producer Robert Zemeckis uses motion-capture technology, where actors are covered with dots and skin suits and have their performances captured on computer. The dots provide the frame, and the rest is filled in with computerised graphics.

Mars creates humans that are more realistic and detailed than Zemeckis’ earlier attempts in such movies as Beowulf and The Polar Express - which were also criticised for inviting this discomfort. The greater detail might have made things worse.

Doug McGoldrick, who took his two daughters to see the movie, said the faces of the main characters “were just wrong”. Their foreheads were lifeless and plastic-looking, “like they used way too much botox or something”, said the 41-year-old photographer in the Chicago suburb of River Forest, Ill.

Marc Kelley, a 32-year-old pastor in Allegan, Michigan, who went with his two young children, said he found the renditions of characters “all annoying in their own way”.

Indeed, when the mother of the main character Milo mentioned the word “zombies” at the start of the movie, it conjures up a feeling that the characters themselves are undead.

Animation experts say the key to success is to be only authentic enough to tug at our heart strings.

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When the iPad was launched last year, it was pilloried as a device that no one needed with a design that evoked sniggers of derision - to some it looked like an iPhone that had been flattened out by a rolling pin.

Barely a year later, and with almost 15 million iPads sold in the nine months to the end of December, tablets are now a multi-billion dollar business for Apple and one of the fastest-selling consumer electronics products in history.

When Apple reported its quarterly result in January, iPads, together with the iPhone and the iPod touch, accounted for $US17.3 billion in sales. Placed in context, that means two-thirds of Apple’s revenue is being generated by products which only came into being a little over three years ago.

For a company that was founded 35 years ago next Friday, that’s a major change of direction in a short time.

Now, as Apple kicks off its worldwide rollout of the iPad 2, competitors are scrambling to play catch-up and analysts are predicting that the market for tablets will treble in the coming year.

“Last year, Apple’s take on the iPad seemed to be that they believed they had something good,” wrote long-time Apple watcher John Gruber on his Daring Fireball blog. “This year, they seem to know they have something enormous.”

Apple’s co-founder, Steve Jobs, spoke of that sense of epochal change at the unveiling of the iPad 2 in San Francisco three weeks ago, declaring that the world was entering a “post-PC” era - one in which we are no longer tethered to the desktop (and to Microsoft) but linked to the “cloud” using tablets and smartphones.

And with a dozen or more rival tablets primed to hit the shelves this year, the market is set to go mainstream and iPad 2 - which went on sale two weeks ago in the US - is already leading the charge into that new era.

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