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Starbucks VIA “Ready Brew” instant coffee
I actually bought something at Starbucks.
I actually bought instant coffee.
I actually bought instant coffee at Starbucks.
And it wasn’t awful.
All of these should come as a surprise to anyone who knows me, but was in exactly the situation that I hoped it would be good for: air travel.
Airplane coffee is awful. Even JetBlue’s, despite the claim to have “fresh” Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, is awful. (Not that Dunkin’ Donuts is an ambitious goal.) You can count on airplane coffee being abysmal. But you can also count on any plane with beverage service to be able to give you a cup of hot water instead.
I didn’t like Starbucks VIA as much as Dan Benjamin did, but I can honestly say that it’s not bad.
VIA comes in two flavors: Italian Roast (“Extra Bold”) and Columbia (“Medium”). The Italian Roast tastes burnt and flat — definitely not recommended. But the Columbia provided a much more full-bodied, complex flavor than I ever expected from a packet of powder with a Starbucks logo on the front. The rest of this review is only referring to the Columbia.
It tastes much better than any coffee I’ve ever been served at Starbucks.
There’s a small amount of fine sediment left at the bottom of the cup, but it’s very minor — much less than you’d get from a typical French press.
While I disagree with Dan Benjamin on how it stacks up against well-made drip coffee, I agree with his statement on the quality relative to typically bad-coffee settings:
It’s as good or better than the coffee you’d find in a decent restaurant. It’s much better than any coffee I’ve made in a hotel room, while camping, or while on a road-trip. And of course, it’s far superior to any instant coffee I’ve ever tasted.
The tiny 4-ounce cups that Delta gave me provided a very good water ratio for a single VIA packet. Starbucks recommends one packet to 8 ounces of water, but that would be far too weak.
I can’t imagine ever wanting to make this at home or work, since I already have better coffee regularly available. But at a tenth of an ounce and just under $1 per packet, it’s not ridiculous to carry a few around while traveling.
I’m impressed.
Agreed. I need some pick-me-up, even at 30,000 feet.
Dulles Airport Terminal, designed by Eero Saarinen in 1958. A retrospective of Saarinen’s work is on through January at the Museum of the City of New York. Regrettably something else we missed on the recent trip. (via Ck/ck)
Amazing Software Turns Cheap Webcam Into Instant 3D Scanner
It’s called ProFORMA, or Probabilistic Feature-based On-line Rapid Model Acquisition, but it is way cooler than it sounds. The software, written by a team headed by Qui Pan, a student at the Department of Engineering at Cambridge University in England, turns a regular, cheap webcam into a 3D scanner.
Normally, scanning in 3D requires purpose-made gear and time. ProFORMA lets you rotate any object in front of the camera and it scans it in real time, building a fully 3D texture mapped model as fast as you can turn an object. Even more impressive is what happens after the scan: The camera continues to track the objsct in space and matches it’s movement instantly with the on-screen model. Here’s a video of it in action:
It works by generating a 3D point cloud from the image coming through the camera and then uses some clever math to both ignore the occasional occlusion of the model by a hand and to work out where the surfaces are. Then things go over my head, involving a process called Delaunay tetrahedralisation to turn the 2D surfaces into a 3D model.
Like I said: clever math. But imagine, for a second, the uses. Forget Nintendo’s Mii avatars, for instance. Instead you could make a 3D version of yourself, or add your favorite household items into a game of Mario Kart. You could quite possibly hook this rig up to a 3D printer and make fast facsimiles of almost anything. And remember, this is all done using a single camera, just like the one that’s probably staring from the top of your laptop screen as you read this. I want to play with this right now.
ProFORMA product page [Cambridge University via Core77 via BoingBoing]
via feeds.wired.com
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