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Category: mobile phones – Page 29

Apple CEO Tim Cook today sent out a memo to employees, thanking them for their work on the Apple Vision Pro headset that was introduced today. In the memo, which was shared by Bloomberg, Cook compared the Vision Pro to the Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, and said that it is joining Apple’s “pantheon of groundbreaking products” that have both “defined Apple” and “redefined technology as we know it.”

Cook visited Apple Store Fifth Avenue in New York for the Vision Pro launch, and he said it was “incredible” to watch people try out the Vision Pro for the first time and see the “impossible become possible.”

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Facial recognition is a technology that can identify or verify a person’s identity based on their face. It can be used for various purposes, such as unlocking smartphones, verifying identities at airports, or finding missing persons. However, facial recognition also seriously threatens personal privacy, as it can be used to track, monitor, or profile people without their consent or knowledge. For example, some governments or companies may use facial recognition to spy on citizens, customers, or competitors or to collect and sell their data.

How can we prevent facial recognition from invading our privacy?

To protect our facial privacy, some researchers have proposed different methods to prevent facial recognition from working. These methods, collectively called anti-facial recognition (AFR), aim to hide, distort, or replace the faces in images or videos. For instance, some AFR methods use masks, makeup, glasses, or hats to cover or alter facial features. Other AFR methods use software to blur, pixelate, or swap the faces in digital media.

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Many people are familiar with facial recognition systems that unlock smartphones and game systems or allow access to our bank accounts online. But the current technology can require boxy projectors and lenses. Now, researchers report in Nano Letters a sleeker 3D surface imaging system with flatter, simplified optics. In proof-of-concept demonstrations, the new system recognized the face of Michelangelo’s David just as well as an existing smartphone system.

3D surface imaging is a common tool used in smartphone , as well as in computer vision and autonomous driving. These systems typically consist of a dot projector that contains multiple components: a laser, lenses, a light guide and a diffractive optical element (DOE).

The DOE is a special kind of lens that breaks the into an array of about 32,000 infrared dots. So, when a person looks at a locked screen, the facial recognition system projects an array of dots onto most of their face, and the device’s camera reads the pattern created to confirm the identity. However, dot projector systems are relatively large for small devices such as smartphones. So, Yu-Heng Hong, Hao-Chung Kuo, Yao-Wei Huang and colleagues set out to develop a more compact facial recognition system that would be nearly flat and require less energy to operate.

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The first reviews for Vision Pro are live, highlighting a ton of great, good and not-so-great things about Apple’s first mixed reality headset.

The $3,500 Vision Pro is set to launch on February 2nd, but it seems the first reviews are already out from a select number of outlets, including CNET, The Verge, The Wall Street Journal, and CNBC.

CNET’s Scott Stein took the lead on the Vision Pro review, lauding the headset for its clear micro-OLED display, mostly fluid hand-eye control interface, great mixed reality capabilities, impressive list of compatible iOS apps, and chance to view spatial video captured both on iPhone 15 and the headset itself.

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As demands for computing resources continue to increase rapidly, scientists and engineers are looking for ways to build faster systems for processing information. One possible solution is to use patterns of electron spins, called spin waves, to transfer and process information much more rapidly than in conventional computers. So far, a major challenge has been in manipulating these ultrafast spin waves to do useful work.

In a significant leap forward, researchers from The University of Texas at Austin and MIT have developed a pioneering method to precisely manipulate these ultrafast using tailored . Their findings are detailed in two studies in Nature Physics, led by MIT graduate student Zhuquan Zhang, University of Texas at Austin postdoctoral researcher Frank Gao, MIT’s professor of chemistry Keith Nelson and UT Austin assistant professor of physics Edoardo Baldini.

A key component underlying our smartphones, the internet and is recording technology for storing and retrieving vast amounts of information. This technology hinges on the manipulation of the magnetic spin states (up and down) in , representing the binary bits “0” and “1.” These spins are minuscule magnets, whose alignment determines the material’s magnetic properties.

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By 2020, the number of smartphone users in the world is expected to reach almost 2.9 billion — nearly doubling in six years from about 1.6 billion in 2014. Technology companies and researchers have been directly and indirectly imbuing smartphones with additional capabilities, including spectroscopy for biological and medical applications, among other uses (Figure 1).

Figure 1. The Changhong H2 is the first consumer device with an integrated imaging spectrometer. Courtesy of Consumer Physics.

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Opera revealed today that it will launch a new AI-powered browser built on its own engine for iOS in Europe. The Norway-based company announced the change following the news that Apple is going to allow alternative browser engines to run on iOS as a result of the requirements of the European Digital Markets Act (DMA). The changes will allow developers to offer browsers that are not based on the WebKit browser engine.

Apple currently requires third-party browsers to use WebKit, which is the same browser engine that underpins its own Safari browser. In order to comply with the DMA, Apple will begin allowing developers to submit non-WebKit-based browsers, for both web browser apps and for developers offering in-app browsers for displaying web pages within their iOS apps.

Opera says the changes will allow it to provide iPhone users with an AI-powered alternative to Safari.

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