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SAN FRANCISCO — Google said this week one of its least expensive innovations — virtual reality headgear made of cardboard — has become a huge hit.

And the tech giant said it has a new version of its cardboard gadget, which consumers can buy for as little as $4.

Playfully named Google Cardboard debuted last year at the Internet giant’s annual developers conference.

One simply folds the cardboard into goggles of a sort that have eye holes opening into a slot designed to hold smartphones that serve as display screens for immersive videos.

“It took off; people keep finding new and creative uses of Google Cardboard virtual reality,” vice president of product management Clay Bavor said at a Google I/O developers gathering.

“One guy even proposed to his girlfriend using Google Cardboard. I’m not sure how that worked, but I hope she said yes.”

Bavor introduced a second-generation version of Cardboard that required less folding and was adapted to the popularity of large-screen smartphones.

A Cardboard software kit works with Apple or Android smartphones, meaning they can be used as screens in the viewers, which can be had for just a few dollars.

Hundreds of applications have been created to work with Cardboard, taking advantage of position sensing capabilities in smartphones to give wearers a sense of looking around in virtual environments while turning their heads.

Virtual field trips

Bavor announced availability of an “Expeditions” version of Cardboard designed to let teachers take students on virtual field trips to places such as The Great Wall of China; undersea reefs, or Versailles.

Students wear Cardboard viewers while teachers using tablet computers guide virtual reality (VR) outings, according to Bavor’s presentation.

“It lets teachers take classed on field trips to anywhere,” Bavor said. “Hundreds of classes around the world have already gone on expeditions.”

He said that Google is working with GoPro on a specialised camera rig and accompanying system for capturing video in 360 degrees and weaving the imagery into VR presentations.

Google-owned video sharing service YouTube will support VR videos people will be able to view using smartphones and Cardboard.

“Google is definitely democratising virtual reality more than, say, Facebook,” Current Analysis research director Avi Greengart told AFP at the gathering.

“It is very clever of Google to almost back into it by giving people something at almost no cost.”

The chief executive of Facebook-owned VR head gear company Oculus Rift went on record this week estimating that getting going from the ground up with one of its systems could cost about $1,500 when it makes its market debut.

Brendan Iribe of Oculus was at a Code technology conference in California when he gave the ballpark figure, which included the cost of a computer with the processing power needed for rich, immersive, seamless video graphics.

Oculus, acquired by Facebook last year in a deal valued about $2 billion, has announced plans to begin shipping headsets to consumers early next year.

The headset, designed for immersive gaming and other applications, has built a strong following among developers and has won praise from analysts for limiting the motion sickness which affects users of VR gear.

“Virtual reality is going to transform gaming, film, entertainment communication and much more,” Oculus said when revealing launch timing.

Facebook co-founder and chief Mark Zuckerberg has described buying Oculus as a long-term bet that making the social network’s offerings more immersive would pay off in the future, enabling members to sort of “teleport” to distant places.

“VR will definitely have a place in gaming; whether it will have a place in general computing is anyone’s guess,” Greengart said.

Los Angeles Times (TNS)

Examining rocks on Mercury’s surface, scientists using data from NASA’s Messenger spacecraft have revealed that the planet probably had a much stronger magnetic field nearly 4 billion years ago.

The findings, published in the journal Science, offer insight into the field’s power source: the liquid dynamo in the planet’s outer core.

Scientists have known that tiny Mercury boasts a magnetic field ever since NASA’s Mariner 10 spacecraft detected it during flybys in the 1970s. But it has been unclear whether the field was a short-lived or long-term phenomenon.

Messenger, which in 2011 became the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury, sought to answer such questions about the sun-seared planet. Even though Messenger crash-landed on Mercury just last week, the data from its four years in orbit are still turning up a trove of fresh information. And before it ran out of fuel, the scientists used the spacecraft’s last reserves to swoop down to extremely low altitudes to better examine some of the features on Mercury’s scarred surface.

For most of Messenger’s mission, the closest the spacecraft’s elliptical orbit took it to the surface was about 200 kilometres. But during the last month or so, the Messenger team took the spacecraft to within 15 kilometres of the planet’s surface, getting an unprecedented close-up.

“It’s quite a risky thing to do because if you get it wrong, you wind up in the planet a little too early,” said study lead author Catherine Johnson, a geophysicist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.

Using its magnetometer, which sits at the end of a long boom to avoid interference from the spacecraft, Messenger measured the magnetic field’s strength and direction at two sites on the planet’s surface, particularly one called Suisei Planitia, a large basin whose name comes from the Japanese word for Mercury.

The scientists found that the smooth plains on Mercury — which are believed to have locked in their magnetic field characteristics when the molten rock solidified about 3.7 billion to 3.9 billion years ago — probably mark what the study calls the “lower bound on the average age of magnetisation”. In other words, the magnetic field is at least 3.7 billion to 3.9 billion years old.

If that time window is accurate, it would raise questions about the evolution of Mercury’s core, the researchers said.

“One of the puzzles these observations leave open is: How would you have driven that early dynamo?” Johnson said.

The churning dynamo could have been powered by super-fast cooling in the core — except that that’s thought to have ended 3.9 billion years ago, before those smooth plains finally set. It could have been powered by the solidifying of the inner core — but that’s thought to have started well after 3.7 billion years ago.

In other words, the magnetic field seems to fall into a temporal doughnut hole during which its power source cannot be explained.

The researchers hope to get to the bottom of this mystery using Messenger’s trove of data, gleaning further clues from the composition of the rocks and signs of past volcanic activity.

NEW YORK — Amazon.com Inc. is in a race against Google Inc. to store data on human DNA, seeking both bragging rights in helping scientists make new medical discoveries and market share in a business that may be worth $1 billion a year by 2018.

Academic institutions and healthcare companies are picking sides between their cloud computing offerings — Google Genomics or Amazon Web Services — spurring the two to one-up each other as they win high-profile genomics business, according to interviews with researchers, industry consultants and analysts.

That growth is being propelled by, among other forces, the push for personalised medicine, which aims to base treatments on a patient’s DNA profile. Making that a reality will require enormous quantities of data to reveal how particular genetic profiles respond to different treatments.

Already, universities and drug manufacturers are embarking on projects to sequence the genomes of hundreds of thousands of people. The human genome is the full complement of DNA, or genetic material, a copy of which is found in nearly every cell of the body.

Clients view Google and Amazon as doing a better job storing genomics data than they can do using their own computers, keeping it secure, controlling costs and allowing it to be easily shared.

The cloud companies are going beyond storage to offer analytical functions that let scientists make sense of DNA data. Microsoft Corp. and International Business Machines are also competing for a slice of the market. The “cloud” refers to data or software that physically resides in a server and is accessible via the Internet, which allows users to access it without downloading it to their own computer.

Now an estimated $100 million to $300 million business globally, the cloud genomics market is expected to grow to $1 billion by 2018, said research analyst Daniel Ives of investment bank FBR Capital. By that time, the entire cloud market should have $50 billion to $75 billion in annual revenue, up from about $30 billion now.

“The cloud is the entire future of this field,” Craig Venter, who led a private effort to sequence the human genome in the 1990s, said in an interview. His new company, San Diego-based Human Longevity Inc., recently tried to import genomic data from servers at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland.

The transmission was so slow, scientists had to resort to sending disks and thumb drives by FedEx and human messengers, or “sneakernet”, he said. The company now uses Amazon Web Services.

So does a collaboration between Regeneron Pharmaceuticals Inc. and Pennsylvania-based Geisinger Health Systems to sequence 250,000 genomes. Raw DNA data is uploaded to Amazon’s cloud, where software from privately-held DNAnexus assembles the millions of chunks into the full, three-billion-letter long genome.

DNAnexus’ algorithms then determine where an individual genome differs from the “reference” human genome, the company’s chief scientist Dr David Shaywitz said, in hopes of identifying new drug targets.

Showing how important Google and Amazon view this business, and how they hope to use existing customers to lure future ones, each is hosting well-known genomics datasets for free.

Neither company discloses the amount of genomics data it holds, but based on interviews with analysts and genomic scientists, as well as the companies’ own announcements of what customers they’ve won, Amazon Web Services may be bigger.

Data from the “1000 Genomes Project”, an international public-private effort that identified genetic variations found in at least 1 per cent of humans, reside at both Amazon and Google “without charge”, said Kathy Cravedi of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), one of the project’s sponsors.

Other paying clients with a more specific focus are picking sides.

Google, for instance, won a project from the Autism Speaks foundation to collect and analyse the genomes of 10,000 affected children and their parents for clues to the genetic basis of autism.

Another customer is Tute Genomics, whose database of 8.5 billion human DNA variants can be searched for how frequently any given variant appears, what traits it’s associated with and how people with a certain variant respond to particular drugs.

Amazon is hosting the Multiple Myeloma Foundation’s project to collect complete-genome sequences and other data from 1,000 patients to identify new drug targets. It also won the Alzheimer’s Disease Sequencing Project, which has similar aims.

Amazon charges about $4 to $5 a month to store one full human genome, and Google about $3 to $5 a month. The companies also charge for data transfers or computing time, as when scientists run analytical software on stored data.

Amazon’s database-analysis tool, Redshift, costs 25 cents an hour or $1,000 per terabyte per year, the company said. A terabyte is 1 trillion bytes, or 1,000 gigabytes, about enough to hold 300 hours of high-quality video.

Genetic gold

Another part of the cloud services’ pitch to would-be customers is that their analytic tools can fish out genetic gold — a drug target, say, or a DNA variant that strongly predicts disease risk — from a sea of data. Any discoveries made through such searches belong to the owners of the data.

“On the local university server it might take months to run a computationally-intense” analysis, said Alzheimer’s project leader Dr Gerard Schellenberg of the University of Pennsylvania. “On Amazon, it’s, ‘how fast do you need it done?’, and they do it.”

Another selling point is security. Universities are “generally pretty porous”, said Ryan Permeh, chief scientist at cybersecurity company Cylance Inc. of Irvine, California, and the security of federal government computers is “not at the top of the class”.

While academic and pharmaceutical research projects are the biggest customers for genomics cloud services, they will be overtaken by clinical applications in the next 10 years, said Google Genomics director of engineering David Glazer.

Individual doctors will regularly access a cloud service to understand how a patient’s genetic profile affects his risk of various diseases or his likely response to medication.

“We are at that transition point now,” Glazer said.

Matt Wood, general manager for Data Science at Amazon Web Services, sees cloud demand in genomics now as “a perfect storm”, as the amount of data being created, the need for collaboration and the move of genomics into clinical care accelerate.

Experts on DNA and data say without access to the cloud, modern genomics would grind to a halt.

Bioinformatics expert Dr Atul Butte of the University of California, San Francisco, said that now, when researchers at different universities are jointly working on NIH and other genomic data, they don’t have to figure out how to make their computers talk to each other. In March, NIH cleared the way for major research on the cloud when it began allowing scientists to upload important genomic data.

“My response was, it’s about time,” Butte said.

WASHINGTON — Threatened by disease and deforestation, the world’s last isolated tribes in the Amazon are on a collision course with modern society like never before, experts say.

Entire cultures of people are the verge of being wiped out in Peru and Brazil, according to a series of papers published this week in the journal Science.

“We are on the threshold of large extinctions of cultures,” Francisco Estremadoyro, director of the Lima-based nonprofit ProPurus, was quoted as saying.

“There is no question that this is a historic moment.”

While it is difficult to know precisely what is going on inside remote tribes, researchers say dangerous encounters with modern people are on the rise.

And not only because of the risk of violence — common ailments like the flu or whooping cough, transmitted accidentally by loggers, news crews, drug traffickers or well-meaning anthropologists, can be even more deadly.

In one case, a fish-bone necklace left by a German researcher decades ago was blamed by villagers along the upper Curanja River for being poisoned. Soon after it was found, a sore throat and fever illness killed around 200 people.

“We were so weak, and some vanished into the forest,” recalled Marcelino Pinedo Cecilio, who grew up planting potatoes and corn and using bamboo arrows, and who remembers running away with his mother the first time they saw people from the outside world in the 1950s.

While other regions of the world — such as the mountains of New Guinea and the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean — are home to remote tribes of people, “by far the largest numbers are found across the Amazon”, said the Science report.

“And it is in Peru that the situation appears most dire,” it added, describing what experts believe are 8,000 people scattered in small bands across the rainforest.

The Peruvian government has set aside three million hectares of protected land, but it may not be enough.

“A surge in sightings and raids in both Peru and Brazil may be a sign that some of the world’s last peoples living outside the global economy are emerging,” said the report.

As many as 100 million perished

The collision of cultures began in 1492 with the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas, and has killed an estimated 50 million to 100 million native people, the report said.

But even modern technology and knowledge may not be enough to stop wiping out even more people, mainly due to diseases for which tribespeople have no immunity, as well as the lack of enough forest land for food, medicine and materials.

The isolated tribes “are some of the world’s most vulnerable people”, said Beatriz Huertas, an anthropologist based in Lima.

In Brazil, where experts were horrified to see 50-90 per cent of tribes being killed by disease after encounters with the outside world in the 1970s and 1980s, the government did its best to stop such contacts unless absolutely necessary.

But while the plan by Brazil’s National Indian Foundation (FUNAI) became a model for the region, some say the juggernaut of the world’s seventh largest economy is too much to rein in, as developers push ever deeper into the Amazon to dig mines and build dams, pipelines and highways.

From 1987 until 2013, FUNAI made contact with five groups. But in the last 18 months, three tribes have sought out contact, including the Xinane, the Koruba and the Awa Guaja.

In one case, four Xinane men entered a village and took machetes, pots and clothing, which can be a source of infection.

So far, FUNAI is aware of 26 isolated indigenous groups in Brazil, and believes as many as 78 more groups may be in hiding or on the run.

But money and staff is perilously short at FUNAI, which has two specialised field teams but says it needs 14, at a time when experts believe contacts with isolated tribes will only increase.

“FUNAI is dead,” leading Brazilian ethnographer and former FUNAI employee Sydney Possuelo is quoted as saying.

“But nobody told it, and nobody held a funeral.”

Windows 10 is almost here. If yours is a legal, activated copy of Windows 7 or 8, chances are you are already seeing a new little icon in the bottom right corner of the taskbar inviting you to book your Windows 10 download and installation. This will entitle you to a free upgrade that will be available on July 29. The little icon has started showing in the taskbar since a couple of days only — at least in Jordan.

Windows 10 comes with a good pack of promises meant to make it up to us all after the not-so-popular Windows 8. Interestingly Microsoft has skipped number 9. Perhaps to show that Windows 10 will be a frank departure from version 8 and not just a minor change.

As it has been the case since the early days of Windows, promises of a new version have always looked nice but only actual consumers’ feedback after a few months of use can be taken as reliable opinion and will set the newcomer as one that is successful or not.

So, what’s in Windows 10 for us users?

For a starter the move inviting you to book your copy, and at no extra charge what’s more, is a smart one. It is unobtrusive and elegant. It’s the first time Microsoft does it this way.

The company says Windows 10 will load, understand will start (and restart…), much faster than all its predecessors. This alone would be a significant improvement if proven true.

Moreover, Windows 10 will bring an interface that is more consensual across all the various devices platforms in use today and that include desktop machines, laptops, tablets, phablets and last but no least smartphones.

Smoother and more intelligent adaptation to the user’s habits in terms of touch, keyboard or mouse control is part of the new features too.

Security, particularly at enterprise level, has also been the concern of the company. Its new Windows should take this important aspect to new heights. It is worth noting that Microsoft had already introduced its own antivirus named Microsoft Security Essentials that can be downloaded and installed free for all those who have a legally purchased and activated copy of Windows 7 or 8. The product has been very positively reviewed by IT pundits over the last couple of years. Will this good antivirus be built in Windows 10?

Multitasking capability has been enhanced and improved. This is a welcome move since we all run several applications at one time these days: browsing the web, listening to music, e-mailing, and so forth. Even smartphones have good multitasking functionality now.

Overall, and with devices that sport comparable hardware resources in terms of processor, graphics and memory, Windows 10 is expected to run faster than previous versions. Can’t wait to check it out.

The company says that there should be no compatibility issue in software applications already installed, as it had been the case sometimes when users moved from Windows XP to Windows 7. In other words one shouldn’t worry about having to buy or install updated versions of all the various applications they invested in when upgrading to Windows 10.

If Windows 10 keeps its promises it will come to show that not every version has been a success, but every other one.

Looking for a new app for making “to-do” lists on your Apple or Android phone? You could use Apple’s Reminders or Google’s Keep. But Microsoft is hoping you’ll try Wunderlist, created by a German tech start-up that Microsoft bought this week.

Microsoft’s acquisition of German firm 6Wunderkinder this week for an undisclosed sum is part of its broader effort to win friends in the mobile world. It is still promoting its Windows operating software for smartphones, but relatively few consumers are buying Windows phones. So the company is also building a stable of apps for devices that run on Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android platforms.

That includes Android and iOS versions of Microsoft’s Office programmes, which the Redmond, Washington, company created in-house and released earlier this year. Then there’s a mobile calendar called Sunrise, made by a company Microsoft bought in February. Microsoft Corp. also bought the start-up behind an email app called Accompli, which — like Sunrise and Wunderlist — has won praise from tech reviewers for its clean design and useful features.

Microsoft has since rebranded the Accompli app as “Outlook” for mobile devices. But it’s still offering the Sunrise calendar and Wunderlist apps under their original names, while planning to use some of their features in other services. All the apps have a free version. Microsoft hopes they’ll eventually win people over to services that make money from subscriptions or ads.

Holograms

Magic Leap, a secretive start-up backed by Google, is working on a breakthrough that it promises will make people feel like wizards starring in their own personal Harry Potter movie.

Although the technology is still shrouded in mystery, Magic Leap CEO Rony Abovitz describes it as a way to manipulate “rivers of light” so digital content normally seen on the screens of personal computers and mobile devices appears as holograms. Geeks typically refer to this concept as “augmented reality”. Abovitz prefers to think of it as “cinematic” or “mixed” reality.

“We are giving people a paintbrush to paint all the world,” Abovitz said Tuesday during a rare appearance at a San Francisco conference presented by the MIT Technology Review.

Abovitz is still being cagey about when Magic Leap will begin selling its products, but it might not be too much longer. He revealed that the Dania Beach, Florida, company is planning to manufacture a “photonic lightfield chip” in a 300,000-square-foot plant. The expansion is being financed by Google Inc. and other prominent investors, including Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who have poured $592 million into Magic Leap so far.

Another sign of progress: Magic Leap is getting ready to release a software kit that will enable outside developers create games and other content that will work with the technology.

“We are a dream factory where you dream something and then make it happen,” Abovitz said.

Insta-ads?

Instagram’s more than 300 million users will soon see a lot more advertisements in their feed of travelscapes, breakfast scones and stylish babies.

When Facebook bought Instagram in 2012, the popular, free photo-sharing app had no ads. Since then, Instagram has been careful to only show a few, hand-picked ads in users’ feeds, for fear of alienating its fiercely loyal following — or marring the Instagram experience. But we all knew that wouldn’t last.

This week, Instagram announced that it will make ads on its app “available to businesses of all types and sizes”. Advertisers will also be able to target their messages to users based on their age, location and gender, as well as their interests and things they follow on Instagram.

“Working with Facebook, we will enable advertisers to reach people on Instagram based on demographics and interests, as well as information businesses have about their own customers,” reads a blog post from Instagram.

To start, Instagram will be open to what it calls a “select group” of Facebook marketing partners and agencies, and will expand worldwide throughout the year.

AMMAN — In his fourth show at Nabad Art Gallery, world-renowned Lebanese artist Hussein Madi explores different themes with joyful experiments in colour and form.

The exhibition presents a variety of contrasting pieces, where some embrace an abundance of exuberant colours while others are limited to basic monochrome lines. 

The exhibition displayed a selection of acrylics, limited-edition giclée prints and drawings on paper all portraying the artist’s playful and humorous spirit through careful calculations and clear exact lines.

Talking to The Jordan Times about the diverse subjects of his artwork, Madi said: “It is natural for an artist to deal with varying themes instead of limiting himself to one subject. The principle of work and how an artist deals with a theme remains stable but the topics vary.”

“Inspiration comes to prophets not to normal people,” Madi said when asked about what spurs his creativity when it comes to his works. “I like to look around me, to read a lot, I like to watch people. 

“When I used to live in Rome I used to go to the bird zoo and draw there. Nature is full of different topics, so why restrict yourself to only one topic? You have the beauty of the human, the bird, the animal and the plants and so much more.”

With works exhibited in over sixty solo shows in Lebanon, Rome, Milan and Tokyo to name a few, Madi’s impressive fifty-year career as a painter, sculptor and printmaker made him one of the Arab world’s most prominent artists.

The works can be seen until June 18.

I was in a shopping mall the other day. Nothing unusual about that, other than the fact that I’ve been pretty busy lately and it was almost six months since I last stepped into one. But my neighbours were blessed with twin grandsons, and I was obliged to go to a nearby toy store to buy them arrival presents. 

I had not ventured anywhere close to a toyshop in a really long while. I had no reason to. Our daughter was at university and so was her peer group. There was no longer any need for me to agonise over kiddy gifts and thank God for that. Even at the peak of my young mum phase, when our child actually played with toys, I could never spot the right one for her. Each time, without fail, I would buy the wrong doll, puzzle or game. Her face was dejected the minute she unwrapped the parcel and the next day we would troop back to the shop. To exchange the gift, that is. Therefore I got her interested in books at a very young age and once she got hooked onto them we stopped making trips to the toy stores altogether. 

But on my recent visit I spotted a family. There was a husband, wife and their two children. The kids were running excitedly up and down the aisle. Actually, that is a mild statement. The boy and girl were almost tearing the place apart. They were throwing packets at each other, dropping the stationary on the floor, squealing at the top of their lungs and creating mayhem. I watched from a distance and waited for either parent to bring some semblance of order to the chaos but they looked on helplessly. I had noticed that modern families did not believe in using harsh corrective measures to discipline their children. 

When we were younger, we would never dream of misbehaving like this. Our mothers were strong disciplinarians; especially mine. She was also exceptionally good at administering slaps. Forget about making a rude comment in her presence, even the insinuation of one, would be rewarded by a stinging slap from her diminutive hand. The tingling sensation on the side of the face would take quite a while to subside. 

So when I became a parent myself I would warn my child about the smacking that was about to come, before smacking her. In most cases the warning was sufficient for the errant behaviour to subside.

However these days, parents had completely rejected the earlier authoritative manner of using punishment as a tool for raising well-mannered children. They tried to reason with them instead. Generally it did not work, like the scene I saw in the toyshop where the boy was now lying on the ground and flaying his hands and feet in the air because his every whim was not satisfied. He was in the middle of a massive tantrum. Right then, an elderly lady walked into the store. 

“Get up from the floor at once,” she announced in a loud voice. 

“Grandma! But I want those earplugs,” wailed the boy. 

“Here! You asked for it,” she muttered, pulling him up by the ears. 

“Ouch!” he exclaimed and stopped crying at once. 

‘Mom! You should explain to him why he cannot have them,” the father of the boy said. 

“I just did. I can demonstrate it to you too,” she glowered.

“No thanks,” he said, covering his ears. 

KISUBI, Uganda — Doctors amputated Ugandan schoolboy Jesse Ayebazibwe’s right leg when he was hit by a truck while walking home from school three years ago.

Afterwards he was given crutches, but that was all, and so he hobbled about. “I liked playing like a normal kid before the accident,” the nine-year-old said.

Now an infrared scanner, a laptop and a pair of 3D printers are changing everything for Jesse and others like him, offering him the chance of a near-normal life.

“The process is quite short, that’s the beauty of the 3D printers,” said Moses Kaweesa, an orthopaedic technologist at Comprehensive Rehabilitation Services (CoRSU) in Uganda which, together with Canada’s University of Toronto and the charity Christian Blind Mission, is making the prostheses.

“Jesse was here yesterday, today he’s being fitted,” said Kaweesa, 34.

In the past, the all-important plaster cast sockets that connect prosthetic limbs to a person’s hip took about a week to make, and were often so uncomfortable people ended up not wearing them.

Plastic printed ones can be made in a day and are a closer, more comfortable fit.

The scanner, laptop and printer cost around $12,000 (10,600 euros), with the materials costing just $3 (2.65 euros).

Ayebazibwe got his first, old-style prosthesis last year but is now part of a trial that could lead to the 3D technology changing lives across the country.

Life-changing technology

The technology is only available to a few, however, and treatment for disability in Uganda in general remains woeful.

“There’s no support from the government for disabled people,” said Kaweesa. “We have a disability department and a minister for disabled people, but they don’t do anything.”

There are just 12 trained prosthetic technicians for over 250,000 children who have lost limbs, often due to fires or congenital diseases.

The 3D technology is portable and allows technicians to work on multiple patients at a time, increasing the reach of their life-changing intervention.

“You can travel with your laptop and scanner,” said Kaweesa, adding that the technology could be of great use in northern Uganda, a part of the country where many people lost limbs during decades of war between the government and Lord’s Resistance Army rebels, who specialised in chopping off limbs.

After receiving his first 3D socket Ayebazibwe was overjoyed. “I felt good, like my normal leg,” he said. “I can do anything now — run and play football.”

The boy’s 53-year-old grandmother, Florence Akoth, looks after him, even carrying him the two kilometres to school after his leg was crushed and his life shattered. She too is thrilled.

“Now he’s liked at school, plays, does work, collects firewood and water,” said Akoth, who struggles to make ends meet as a poorly-paid domestic worker caring for five children.

Sitting on a bench outside the CoRSU fitting room were three young children and their parents.

“This is her first time walking on two legs,” said Kaweesa, pointing at a timid young girl who lost both her legs in a fire.

“Because they’ve seen other kids walking, playing, they realise they’ve been missing that,” he said. “Once you fit them they start walking and even running.”

NEW YORK — It was Pharrell Williams who was being honoured as a fashion icon, but it was another music superstar who got a lot of the attention at the annual Council of Fashion Designers of America awards on Monday night.

Introducing Pharrell, the producer-singer-songwriter who was receiving the evening’s Fashion Icon award, Kanye West took the opportunity not just to praise his friend, but to express some frustration at the fashion industry — for, he suggested, its cool reception to his efforts to be a serious fashion designer.

“It is very difficult to break perception,” West said. “Fashion had to be the hardest high school I ever entered. At least I had a big brother,” he said, referring to Pharrell, who “talked me through it and kept me going” in the face of criticism over his fashions. West called Pharrell “my style idol”.

Pharrell, in turn, thanked many fashion figures who’ve influenced his career and his personal style, and concluded by saying: “I’m not a style icon. I’m just inspired. And I’m OK with that.” Forgoing his famous shorts and tall hat for a very casual ensemble of lived-in jeans, a blue leather jacket and a beret-style cap, he spoke at length about his dual loves of music and fashion, and their relationship to each other. He also made a point of thanking the fashion world’s leading arbiter, Vogue editor Anna Wintour, for giving him some key visibility in her magazine a decade ago.

The emotional highlight of the evening, which honours the year’s top designers, was when Betsey Johnson, whose colourful, whimsical designs have been gracing the fashion world for more than 50 years, came onstage to accept her lifetime achievement award.

An ebullient Johnson, 72, treated the crowd to one of her signature cartwheels, and ended it with a split — a manoeuvre that led to a shoe falling off. She then called over her friend, presenter Kelly Osbourne, to help her up off the floor so she could give her speech. In an accompanying video which told the story of her career, Johnson spoke of learning to design clothes to fit her own body — a normal body, in other words — and how she realised that if she stuck to designing what she herself loved, her customers would stay with her.

Chelsea Clinton was another high-profile speaker, paying tribute to the late designer Oscar de la Renta, a good friend of her family. Clinton called de la Renta “the man I would have chosen for my grandfather”, and told a story about how he helped her gain confidence, when she was young, with the gift of a stylish brown dress. “I miss him every single day,” she concluded.

Kim Kardashian presented the media award to Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom, who repaid the favour by calling her, in his speech, “the Queen of Instagram”. Earlier in the evening, Kardashian had spoken on the red carpet about the transition of her stepfather, Bruce Jenner, to womanhood and the stunning Vanity Fair cover photo of Caitlyn Jenner in a strapless corset.

“Everyone has been so supportive and so amazing and I think that that’s all we could really ask for is kindness, and we feel that,” said Kardashian.

The evening’s top design awards went to sisters Ashley Olsen and Mary-Kate Olsen for womenswear for their high-end, minimalist label The Row, and to Tom Ford for menswear.

Ford noted that last year, he’d been given the lifetime achievement award, and said he was “so glad to know that there is still life after lifetime achievement”.

The award for accessories went to British designer Tabitha Simmons. The annual Swarovski awards for emerging designers went to Shayne Oliver of Hood by Air for menswear, Rosie Assoulin for womenswear, and Rachel Mansur and Floriana Gavriel for accessories.

Also honored: Millard “Mickey” Drexler, CEO of J. Crew, with the founder’s award, and Valentino designers Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli with the international award.

James Corden of CBS’ “The Late Late Show” hosted the evening, making frequent jokes about the healthy length of some of the speeches. He opened the show with a sometimes naughty musical roast of the fashion world — “The Unsewable Dress”, to the tune of “The Impossible Dream”.