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Category: transportation – Page 596

The Osterhout Design Group, which has been making high-end night-vision goggles for years, has begun shipping its R-7 augmented reality glasses for enterprise applications. The $2,750 smartglasses are a sign of things to come, as the company eventually hopes to bring the technology to the masses at consumer prices.

Augmented reality is expected to become a $150 billion market by 2020, according to tech advisor Digi-Capital. But first, it has to become cheaper, lighter, and otherwise more practical. The R-7 represents ODG’s best trade-off between capability and cost. The company is showing the R-7 at the 2016 International CES, the big tech trade show in Las Vegas this week.

The ODG R-7 shows heads-up display images on the inside of the lenses, so you can see stereoscopic 3D or other animated imagery on top of objects in the real world. The company is targeting applications in health care, energy, transportation, warehouse, logistics, and government.

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The Wi-Fi Alliance branded its next-generation 802.11ah wireless protocol as Wi-Fi HaLow. It is targeted at the Internet of Things (IoT), which includes the smart home, connected car, and digital healthcare, as well as industrial, retail, agriculture, and smart-city environments. Unlike the older and more familiar 802.11 protocols, which mostly use the 2.4 or 5GHz bands, 802.11ah is a sub-gigahertz protocol that uses the 900MHz band. It has an enviable combination of characteristics.

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Nvidia took pretty much everyone by surprise when it announced it was getting into self-driving cars; it’s just not what you expect from a company that’s made its name off selling graphics cards for gamers.

At this year’s CES, it’s taking the focus on autonomous cars even further.

The company today announced the Nvidia Drive PX2. According to CEO Jen-Hsun Huang, it’s basically a supercomputer for your car. Hardware-wise, it’s made up of 12 CPU cores and four GPUs, all liquid-cooled. That amounts to about 8 teraflops of processing power, is as powerful as 6 Titan X graphics cards, and compares to ‘about 150 MacBook Pros’ for self-driving applications.

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LG Display has a prototype 18-inch screen it’s showing off at the Consumer Electronics Show this week that rolls up like a piece of paper. The technology builds on LG’s forward-looking OLED work focusing on bendable, rollable, and curving displays. The company showed similar technology last year as a proof of concept, but kept images behind closed doors. Now LG looks ready to show the world.

We’ve seen this type of concept display from the likes of Sony, Samsung, Sharp, and others in the past. However, it does indicate that LG sees these types of futuristic displays as differentiation points for smartphones, tablets, and TVs. LG envisions these types of screens rolling up into our pockets or being made to wrap around interior spaces, and the company will show off a 25-inch curved screen installed on the inside of a car at its Auto Zone section on the show floor.

We’ll get a closer look at the newspaper-like screen in a couple of days, as well as a new 55-inch “paper thin” TV that has all its electronics installed independently, according to LG. So check back in with The Verge for LG coverage and everything else CES-related throughout the week.

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“You like your Tesla, but does your Tesla like you?” My new story for TechCrunch on robots understanding beauty and even whether they like your appearance or not:

Robots are starting to appear everywhere: driving cars, cooking dinners and even as robotic pets.

But people don’t usually give machine intelligence much credence when it comes to judging beauty. That may change with the launch of the world’s first international beauty contest judged exclusively by a robot jury.

The contest, which requires participants to take selfies via a special app and submit them to the contest website, is touting new sophisticated facial recognition algorithms that allow machines to judge beauty in new and improved ways.

Continue reading “The First International Beauty Contest Judged By Robots” | >