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
Intel’s depth-reading RealSense cameras can let you log into your computer thanks to Windows Hello. That’s pretty cool, but Intel wants to encourage makers to let their imaginations run wild. To help them […]
Black Box Corporation has acquired a small, privately held Irish firm, Cloudium Systems, which specializes in the development of desktop… Read more at VMblog.com.
Despite the increasing ubiquity of online videos, making a professional-looking one is still a complicated process that usually involves chains of emails and uploads. 90 Seconds wants to fix that problem with its cloud-based platform, which lets users handle almost every part of the video production process in one place. Today, the startup announced it has raised a $7.5 million Series A led… Read More
The content below is taken from the original (Botlist is an app store for bots), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
A new site launching today wants to be the app store for bots. Botlist, as it’s called, is a third-party database that’s a catalog a lot of the bots currently available across platforms, including email, web, SMS, Slack, mobile, apps, and more. There’s no question that bots are all the rage. Facebook is planning to introduce chatbots on Messenger this week; Microsoft just… Read More
With language like this, social networks become a natural point of interaction between people and things, and TAGs will make it seem effortless for us all. This is already the way existing entities on the Internet (including Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) create relevance and context for digital elements of graphics and text; it just needs to be extended to the things in the IoT. Read More
Doom and Doom II are two of the most-loved first-person shooters of all time. The games are classics that have withstood the test of time. As great as the games are in their original forms, it’s […]
As a Berlin-based VC firm focused on SaaS, we often get questions about the current state of the European cloud software landscape. To be able to answer these questions more precisely we decided to analyze each major European ecosystem, starting with France. Our goal was to find all the relevant players in the French cloud ecosystem — from early-stage startups to large public companies. Read More
If there’s a session you’re interested in, but can’t attend because of conflicting reasons, consider getting the conversation going early on the OpenStack Developer mailing list.
The news almost reads like an Onion headline: Sweden, the country, has got its very own telephone number. And you can call it anytime you like to chat with a random Swede about, well, anything really. The quirky announcement is the work of the Swedish Tourist Association, which has created the number as a 250th anniversary tribute to the country’s abolishment of censorship. It’s an initiative designed to highlight the country’s commitment to freedom of expression in a time when, according to the tourism board’s CEO Magnus Ling, "many countries try to limit communication between people." But before you open the dialer on your cellphone, be aware that the call is not toll-free and you will be charged local and international rates.
In the spirit of ‘why not?’ (and because I have some Google Voice credits to burn), I called the number hoping to engage a Swede in some discussion about Weezer’s new album. The results were disappointing. On my first attempt, I was connected to a Swedish man who rambled a bunch of very polite sounding Swedish noises into my ear. I asked if he spoke English, but then the line soon went dead. So I tried calling again. The second time, I had to wait a bit as a recorded message informed me that "a lot of people are calling Sweden right now." Obviously. When I did manage to get through to another Swede, the call quality crapped out, prompting a handful of broken "hellos" back and forth and not much else.
I never did find out what Sweden thinks of Weezer’s White album… if they think it’s as good as Pinkerton. But maybe one of you intrepid folks can spare the change and bridge that social divide.
Six vehicle manufacturers just proved that self-driving trucks are perfectly capable of driving across a whole continent. These companies, including Volvo and Daimler, participated in the European Truck Platooning challenge organized by the Dutch government. "Truck platooning" is the term used when a fleet of autonomous trucks closely follow one another on the road. Since the rigs behind the first ride in its slipstream, they tend to use less fuel and emit less carbon dioxide.
The self-driving rigs started their journey from different parts of Europe and ended in the Port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Quartz notes that if this accomplishment convinces various government in the continent, then a number of corporations like Unilever will begin using autonomous trucks to pick up cargo from the port to distribute across Europe. If you keep an eye out for autonomous vehicle news, you might have already seen the video of Daimler testing its vehicle on public roads. But if you want to see more self-driving trucks on a road trip, you can watch a coverage of challenge below:
AirMap, a startup that provides drone operators with airspace information to let them know when and where they can fly, today announced that it has raised a $15 million Series A funding round. The round was led by General Catalyst Partners, with Lux Capital (which led the company’s $2.6 million seed round), Social Capital, TenOneTen Ventures, Bullpen Capital and the Pritzker Group… Read More
The content below is taken from the original (Android Studio 2.0), to continue reading please visit the site. Remember to respect the Author & Copyright.
