What do you do if even the smallest Arduino boards (or their clones) are too big for your homebrew project? If you’re Johan Kanflo, you find a way to make them even smaller. His AAduino project turns the already miniscule Tiny328 Arduino clone into an even smaller computing device that’s about as big as an AA battery. Through creative wiring, it even fits inside a typical battery holder and draws power from the batteries in the remaining slots. He had to underclock the processor to extend to the battery life, but it’s otherwise as capable as its normal counterparts.
You aren’t about to buy a ready-made AAduino, but you don’t have to. Kanflo has posted instructions and schematics both on his own site and on GitHub, so you can replicate his invention yourself. This is mainly useful if you’re building an extra-compact gadget (Kanflo needed this for a radio node, for instance), but it shows that even daunting size requirements can be solved with a little ingenuity.
I can trace my computing history along a path of display milestones. The 10-inch VGA monitor that came with my Packard Bell desktop in the ’90s was a huge leap forward from the low-res Apple II displays I used in school. Then there was the 20-inch Sony Trinitron flat CRT that I brought to college with my first custom-built desktop, which served as my dorm entertainment center for years. These days, I rock two 24-inch 1080p LCDs at home, and I’m eyeing an ultra-wide screen upgrade at some point. After spending several hours with Virtual Desktop, a $15 app developed by Guy Godin for the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive that brings the full Windows experience to VR, it seems like we’re close to yet another display revolution.
Imagine having your entire Windows desktop projected on a movie theater screen while sitting in the best seat in the house, and you’ll have some idea of what Virtual Desktop offers. Instead of a darkened theater, though, the display floats atop your choice of backgrounds (I really enjoy the detailed space environments). It brings to mind fantastical interfaces from science fiction — in particular, the trippy augmented reality setup from the game Heavy Rain.
There’s a definite "wow" factor to Virtual Desktop. After installing and running the app, I just slipped on my Rift headset and was presented with an impressive recreation of my Windows setup. Once you’re in virtual view, you can resize the size and distance of the desktop, from the equivalent of sitting six feet away from a 60-inch display, to having it tower before you as if it were on a enormous IMAX screen. I found it most comfortable to have the virtual screen completely fill up my field of vision, even though that also involved occasionally moving my head around to focus on specific things.
SteamVR’s "desktop theater mode" on the HTC Vive also lets you use Windows in VR, but in my testing it was hard to actually read text and use Windows as you normally would. It’s mainly meant for playing non-VR games and movies in your headset. In comparison, I had no trouble going through my email, browsing the web and reading long articles with Virtual Desktop. It was so comfortable, in fact, that I was able to use it for hours on end.
Virtual Desktop is particularly impressive when it comes to watching videos, since you can freely make the screen larger for a more cinematic experience. Of course, you won’t get the full resolution of 1080p HD videos, since both the Rift and Vive are limited by their displays, which only offer a resolution of 1,280 by 1,080 pixels per eye. Videos still looked sharp and clear in full screen mode, though. And after being underwhelmed by the virtual theater apps on both the Rift and Vive, which seem more focused on reminding you that you’re in a VR environment than actually making videos look good, I was surprised to find I actually enjoyed watching things with Virtual Desktop.
There’s also support for viewing 360-degree videos and photos with the app, which is useful for quickly jumping into an immersive clip from YouTube. This is one area that the app needs to improve on, though. To plug in a video, you need to copy a URL to your clipboard and insert that into Virtual Desktop’s settings app. It’ll then proceed to download the video and play it instantly. You can also open up 360-degree videos already on your computer, but it’s far more likely you’ll be grabbing content from YouTube and other sites.
The big problem with the app? You still have to rely on your keyboard and mouse to navigate Windows, which will definitely be an issue if you don’t touch-type well. Remember, you can’t easily see what’s going on in front of you. Virtual Desktop shows why something like the Vive’s webcam, which lets you quickly view the outside world, is essential for all VR headsets. I did most of my testing with the Oculus Rift, so I was forced to either type very carefully, or remove the headset if I needed to hit a specific key. (Function keys, in particular, are hard to touch-type.)
I was able to write several lengthy emails while wearing the Rift, but it always took a few seconds for my fingers to readjust to the key positions after taking my hands away. That ended up being a bigger issue for entering web addresses or numbers of any kind, since those involve hitting keys that aren’t in my normal touch typing range. (My slim wireless keyboard doesn’t have a number pad, though that probably would make my life easier.) Mousing around Windows in Virtual Desktop was fine, and the app also made something mundane like photo editing feel like a revelatory experience. Cropping an recoloring a giant image felt akin to working on a giant Jackson Pollock-esque canvas.
I won’t be giving up my dual monitor setup anytime soon, but I was surprised by how well my workflow transferred to Virtual Desktop. I could see creative types preferring it to a restrictive monitor setup, especially for things like video and audio editing, where you normally have dozens of tracks to juggle at one. Just like the first batch of VR hardware, the app feels like a sign of things to come. It won’t be too long until we can just slip on a pair of glasses to have a full desktop environment emerge from our smartphones.
Cameras are already embedded in a lot of devices, but what you could wrap them around things like a "skin?" That’s the premise of "flexible sheet cameras" developed by scientists at Columbia University. Rather than having just a single sensor, the devices use an array of lenses that change properties when the material is bent. The research could lead to credit card-sized, large-format cameras that you zoom by bending, or turn objects like cars or lamp posts into 360-degree VR cameras.
In order to create a wraparound camera, the team first considered attaching tiny lenses to single pixel-sized sensors, a tact that’s been tried before on curved surfaces. However, they realized that when bent, such an array would have gaps between sensors that would produce artifacts in the final image. Instead, they created flexible silicon sheets with embedded lenses that distort and change their focal lengths when bent. The resulting prototype has no blank spots, even with significant curvature, so it can capture images with no aliasing.
The team flexed the prototype sheet — with a 33×33 lens array — in a predictable way, allowing them to produce clean (though low resolution) images. However, if the amount of deformation isn’t known, the system produces random and irregular images. For instance, they created a simulated camera based on a larger, more flexible sheet that produces a hilariously distorted image (above) when when draped on an object.
However, the goal is to eventually measure the amount of deformation with built-in stress sensors, then calculate the sheet’s geometry to produce a clean image. While the current prototype is very low-res, it proves that the concept is viable, so the team plans to "develop a high resolution version of the lens array and couple it with a large format image sensor." Eventually, the sheet camera could result in sensitive large format cameras that produce very high dynamic range images. If you want to be more futuristic, the tech could even turn household objects and wearables into giant image sensors. Invisibility cloaks for all?
As cool as thermal cameras may be, they’re not usually very bright — they may show you something hiding in the dark, but they won’t do much with it. FLIR wants to change that with its new Boson thermal camera module. The hardware combines a long wave infrared camera with a Movidius vision processing unit, giving the camera a dash of programmable artificial intelligence. Device makers can not only use those smarts for visual processing (like reducing noise), but some computer vision tasks as well — think object detection, depth calculations and other tasks that normally rely on external computing power.
You’ll have to wait for companies to integrate Boson before you see it in products you can buy. However, its mix of AI and compact size could bring smart thermal imaging to gadgets where it’s not normally practical, such as home security systems, drones and military gear. You may well see a surge in devices that can recognize the world around them in any lighting condition — even in total darkness.
BVM launched a “LV-67S” Mini-ITX board with Intel 6th Gen Core S-series and Xeon CPUs, with up to 32GB RAM, dual GbE, quad SATA, and five display outputs. BVM Embedded Intelligence is reselling a Commell-built “LV-67S” Mini-ITX board equipped with Intel’s 6th Gen (“Skylake”) Core S-Series and Xeon processors. The board is aimed at graphics […]
Hitch — not to be confused with the dating app of the same name — is a new product from the team behind API Changelog and plays in roughly the same space. It promises to offer Software-as-a-Service to help API owners manage and grow their API community, either internally or externally. Read More
