Lifeboat Foundation

While many companies are tinkering with lasers, ultrasound and even arm muscles for touchless gesture control on portable devices and desktop PCs, Japan’s 16Lab just wants to put a pretty ring on you. The yet-to-be-named titanium wearable is designed by the award-winning Manabu Tago, and it features ALPS Electric’s tiny module (5.05 × 5.65 × 2.5 mm) that somehow manages to pack Bluetooth Smart radio, movement sensor, environment sensor plus antennas — there’s a video demo after the break. Despite its custom-made 10mAh lithium polymer cell, 16Lab is aiming for at least 20 hours of battery life. This is possible mainly because you have to place your thumb on the top pad (with the ring’s wedge pointing away from the user) to enable the sensors — upon which point the ring vibrates to confirm that it’s active. It’s then just a matter of waving and tilting your hand until you’re done.

Gallery | 13 Photos.

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The Apple Watch is just the start. How wearable tech will change your life—like it or not. http://ti.me/1qiDf9Q

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From helicopters to medical devices and power stations, mathematical proof that software at the heart of an operating system is secure could keep hackers out.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSvGSnOQms8

I’ll take one.

TF-X Flying Car IDEA
GI Page: https://www.facebook.com/gigigadgets

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https://youtube.com/watch?v=XwJ9fiH2Ksw

One of the most remarkable things about Monument Valley, the mobile puzzler from Ustwo, was how it managed to lure in people who don’t play games. Its intuitive controls and beautiful, MC Escher-inspired worlds made it the rare blockbuster that almost anyone could play. And now the studio is looking to do the same thing in virtual reality. On October 30th, Ustwo will release Land’s End on Samsung’s Gear VR, an exploration game that maintains many of the same principles of Monument Valley — stunning art, accessible controls — and transports them to a 3D space.

“The thing we wanted to do, is to bring our way of thinking to VR,” explains Peter Pashley, technical director at Ustwo Games. “We find that a lot of people who are making VR experiences are kind of making quite traditional games. I wanted to make sure that our branding was represented in the early days of VR.”

Continue reading “The studio behind Monument Valley is set to launch its first VR game” »

Right now, Mars is a frozen, lifeless, and entirely inhospitable place.

Yet the Red Planet holds great promise, and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk recently discussed its future with comedian and television host Stephen Colbert.

Continue reading “The best way to colonize Mars is crazier than Elon Musk’s idea of dropping nukes on the planet” »

Making spaceships and electric supercars isn’t enough for Elon Musk. Meghan Daum meets the entrepreneur who wants to save the world.

The name sounds like a men’s cologne. Or a type of ox. It sounds possibly made up. But then, so much about Elon Musk seems the creation of a fiction writer—and not necessarily one committed to realism. At 44, Musk is both superstar entrepreneur and mad scientist. Sixteen years after cofounding a company called X.com that would, following a merger, go on to become PayPal, he’s launched the electric carmaker Tesla Motors and the aerospace manufacturer SpaceX, which are among the most closely watched—some would say obsessed-over—companies in the world. He has been compared to the Christian Grey character in the Fifty Shades of Grey movie, though not as often as he’s been called “the real Tony Stark,” referring to the playboy tech entrepreneur whose alter ego, Iron Man, rescues the universe from various manifestations of evil.

The Iron Man comparison is, strangely, as apt as it is hyperbolic, since Musk has the boyish air of a nascent superhero and says his ultimate aim is to save humanity from what he sees as its eventual and unavoidable demise—from any number of causes, carbon consumption high among them. (As it happens, he met with Robert Downey, Jr., to discuss the Tony Stark role, and his factory doubled as the villain’s hideaway in Iron Man 2.) To this end he’s building his own rockets, envisioning a future in which we colonize Mars, funding research aimed at keeping artificial intelligence beneficial to humanity, and making lithium-ion electric batteries that might, one day, put the internal-combustion engine out to pasture.

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Following the FDA’s recent approval, human trials are expected to begin by the end of the year.

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The battlefield can be one of the most useful places for robots. And now, the US Marines are testing out Spot, a robo dog built by Boston Dynamics to see how helpful the ‘bot could be in combat.

Remember Big Dog, also from Google-owned robotics company Boston Dynamics? Well, Spot is a tinier, more agile iteration: At 160 pounds, it’s hydraulically actuated with a sensor on its noggin that aids in navigation. It’s controlled by a laptop-connected game controller, which a hidden operator can use up to 1,600 feet away. The four-legged all-terrain robo pup was revealed in February. Robots in combat aren’t new, but Spot signals a quieter, leaner alternative that hints at the strides made in this arena.

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