Blunt + Tile Umbrella: Innovation or a Gimmick?

Throughout today's advances of technology, many great men have created impressive new technologies from new found discoveries to make living life easier. Others, however, rip off these ideas, and try to incorporate these new technologies into items of impractical daily use, all to make a quick buck in a society of wealth. Current technology, such as smart watches and Wi-fi cameras, try to accomplish something new to improve or extend the way society uses technology, but fails to do so. One especially is Blunt and Tile's smart umbrella. The umbrella is basically a uniquely designed umbrella, the typical spokes replaced with blunts to reduce wear and tear and prevent eyeballs being ripped out from the eyesockets of incoming strangers, with a bluetooth tracker attached to it. The bluetooth module works with a smartphone application so that, in the case one ever loses his umbrella, they can track it. There are two ways that the module helps the clumsy owner find their umbrella; if within a 15 to 30m radius of the location of the umbrella, the umbrella will emit a tune, or else the application will points its location out on a map. The two models equipped with Tile's module, Blunt's Metro XS and Classic, each cost $69 and $99 respectively with the app only available to apple users at this time. Clearly, this technology is quite impractical as who would ever buy a one hundred dollar umbrella if he lives in cold climates or places that rarely rain, or those who actually have time to get their lost umbrella. To see more about this overpriced gimmick, go to this link: http://www.gizmag.com/blunt-tile-bluetooth-trackable-smart-umbrella/34328/

SightCompass: Helping the Blind

For many years, blindness is one of the many disabilities that gravely affects one's lifestyle. The visual sense of human beings is one that is most vital: sight is the most significant sense when one needs to navigate foreign areas, or recognizing objects and being visually stimulated by many new visual technologies. Furthermore, being blind prevents one from reacting appropriately to many immanent dangers, from rock slides to crossing the street. There are ways to help the blind, such as sight dogs that give indication to objects that the blind cannot hear, and prototype technologies that give the blind a glimpse of vision, or help the blind "see". One specifically is SightCompass, made by WorldBeacon,  a system that combines proximity beacons and a smartphone application to help the blind "see". The system consists of an array of beacons fixed to any object or building and can be programmed to output specific information such object such as the layout of the building and where everything is in that building. The beacons are detected via bluetooth with a 92m detection radius, and they have a battery life of 2 years, so these beacons can help the blind for a long time. The system itself has not been implemented yet, but arrangements has been made with many organizations that help the blind to install these systems in various sites in Arizona. It's currently in development, and even resorted to crowdfunding to raise awareness of their system in hopes that SightCompass will be evident in many educational and business institutions. To see more about the SightCompass, follow this link:http://www.gizmag.com/sightcompass-bluetooth-beacons-blind-surroundings/34282/

NavVis: Revolutionizing Map Making

For centuries, maps have been made to mark multiple of newly discovered landforms and cities so that others from foreign origins may visit those places to satisfy their crave for adventure. But in those days, maps were made by hand and required exceptional visual memory, and even those maps are not as good as maps right now; they were only two dimensional and were updated every other year or more. With new ultrasonic and mapping technologies, maps now feature three dimensions, and also reveal significantly accurate images of landforms in a two dimensional plane, as well as added visual details such as local buildings, all of which are updated on a much faster pace than centuries ago. The most notable example of this is Google Maps, which controls the majority of this market, but there is a new device that might compete against the many technologies that created Google Maps. Its called NavVis, developed by researchers that the Technical University of Munich, and consists of two laser scanners and two cameras. The devices works with a human operator that moves the device around the desired area where the scanners record the horizontal and lateral positions of the hallway while the cameras take pictures of nearly every detail in the area, much more efficient than Google's method of creating 3D maps which usually involves one camera. Once every detail is recorded, a 3D map is created featuring all the pictures in the appropriate positions. Accompanied with navigation software, users are able to virtually take a tour around the area, seeing every surface in the area with astonishing detail. Furthermore, NavVis's IndoorViewer interface allows the owner to add additional and informative content at various parts of the map, and allows the owner to also augment any data of their generated map to their specifications. To see more about the NavVis, click the following link: http://www.gizmag.com/navvis-interactive-mapping-trolley/34316/

Zeiss VR One: A New Competitor

Recently, a new technological trend has risen from the innovative minds of today's computer and software engineers: portable virtual reality. In other words, a virtual world where one can actually see the virtual environment as if one is there already, and is commonly, if not always, done with a headset. Its not unusual as to how this got so popular, especially when society has become so mobile, so active that many stationary displays, no matter how better the pixel density is, or the deeper contrasts, if they cannot provide the in-depth immersion of a virtual reality headset. One company that dominates this industry is Oculus, recent bought by Facebook, and their Oculus Rift, creating a gaming experience a television cannot achieve, and inspiring the development of other virtual reality equipment. But allowing one company to monopolize an entire market can cost many people lots of money. There are competitors out there, but one virtual reality set offers the cheapest option for these headsets without looking too ridiculous, or working to a specific platform. It's called the VR One, developed by Zeiss, which can work with a variety of phones, including over priced iPhones. Despite the fact that it has the potential to fit in a variety of phones, the device requires that the phone be put in a specific tray for that phone for optimized viewing experience; however, the only trays available at this time are the iPhone 6 and Samsung Galaxy S5 smartphones. The device is fully compatible with Unity3D's software development kit, allowing application developers to create android and apple apps compatable with the VR One. The specs are limited, as many of the functions the headset should provide are already provided by the smartphone, but they include a 100 degree field of view and a tinted translucent screen that blocks some light while allowing the camera to function. VR One also has a media app available to allow users to take first person videos and pictures, and they can their pictures by tapping on the sides of the headset. VR One is even compatiable with Google's street view, with 360 degree panoramas and the ability to move around the street by tapping the front of the screen. The VR One costs $99 and is currently in pre-order phase. To see more about the VR One, click the following link: http://www.gizmag.com/zeiss-vr-one-headset/34287/

Room Alive: Another Way to Play

Image resolution has improved exponentially throughout history. From the dreaded and ugly 8 bit characters to 4K ultra HD images of anything from frames of reality to awesome, detailed, hyper realistic computer generated images. But despite the sharp and clean graphics today, we are unable to interact with them, to touch or, virtually, change the image projected. Instead, we are left to admire those images through our eyes only, through visual stimulation. Sure, our society has developed new way to display images, such as holograms, but they are relatively too expensive and quite impractical. But for researchers from Microsoft's R&D, they have developed a system capable of allowing the player to interact the images within the game, but is quite impractical. The system is called RoomAlive, which consists of six procams, a projector with a Microsoft Kinect attached to it. The system uses projection mapping, projecting the images on various walls in the room while the Kinect sensors detect the motion of the persons in the room and determines what effect that motion has on the image. There are four interactive games optimized with this system, Setting the Stage, Whack-a-Mole, Robot Attack, and Traps, but the system is unavailable for consume purchase as the cost of actually buying all six procams, and having them properly installed in one's room for optimized visual experience is very expensive and impractical as many of the games that come with RoomAlive are simple and repetitive, but it does foreshadow the rise of new gaming systems that will dominate over the "sit down, stare, and play" method of gaming. To see more about RoomAlive, click the following link: http://www.gizmag.com/roomalive-living-room-video-game/34176/

Oxygen Absorbing Material: No More Scuba Gear?

Going to any tropical paradise is a blast; the very hot weather, beautiful scenery, and, of course, the beaches. At the beaches one is able to see the fine white sand, burning one's toes, and the sparkling azure waters, and in those waters lies beautiful wildlife followed by intricate and colourful displays of coral, and detailed landscapes that can only exist in water. To see and fully experience all of its glory, one needs a scuba suit, with a bulky tank of compressed oxygen, nitrogen, and other gases. Sure one can snorkel, but the majority of tropical oceanic wildlife lies in depths greater than 5m, and one can only hold his breath so long underwater. Furthermore, if one were to scuba, one runs the heavy risk of the tank exploding due to a malfunction, causing the gas pressures in ones body to greatly change, and must undergo extreme medical care or one will, literally, explode into meaty chunks. There is no solution to this problem yet, but, at the University of Southern Denmark, researchers have developed a substance that absorbs enough oxygen for deep sea diving. The material is composed of cobalt and another organic compound that makes the cobalt able to absorb oxygen relatively quick, and releases oxygen when heated or if it undergoes a vacuum. Experimenting with different chemical structures of the material, this substance could be used in a variety of applications such as regulating oxygen supply to fuel cells, oxygen mask filters, and, obviously, deep sea diving. In fact, just a few grain of this substance can absorb enough oxygen from water for one breath. This substance is clearly not commercially available, but may soon be in the future. To see more about this substance, go to the following link: http://www.gizmag.com/crystalline-material-absorb-oxygen-denmark/34064/

Recyclable Li-Ion Batteries

Stated in many of my previous blogs, today's society is rapidly advancing, with new technologies emerging in a matter of seconds. These advancements, though they lead to a much more sophisticated lifestyle and satisfy the desires for better items, have had a huge environmental impact. Materials lead, bisphenol-a, and other toxic molecular and ionic compounds and elements are required for advanced electronics are often left in landfills and poison nearby ecosystems. In fact, humanity's desire to continue to advance at such a rapid pace has made society numb and without concern for the earth; humanity no longer takes time to consider all the negative long term effects of developing new technologies, or explore new methods and techniques to make products more friendlier to the environment. Therefore, despite a small step, many companies are offering ecofriendly products and exploring new ways to make their products more efficient rather than making new items with such deadly substances. An example of this is an ecofriendly lithium ion battery, which, developed at the Uppsala University’s Ångström Laboratory, is made from substances extracted from alfalfa and pine resin. With these batteries, lithium can be extracted with chemicals such as water and ethanol, substances that pose little harm to the environment. Furthermore, the new batteries are able to deliver 99% of power in typical lithium batteries. Though this is not the first method of developing an ecofriendly battery, the concept of reusing lithium is significant in that it offers a cost effective technique to create new batteries without having to research new methods that could pose an even greater threat to the environment. To see more about this battery, go to the following link: http://www.gizmag.com/recycled-battery-alfalfa-seeds-pine-resin/34031/

Making AI Dumber, but Smarter

There always seems to be an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system in almost every science fiction novel and film. Whether they are spaceship autopilots or simply pets that never die, AI in our imaginations are advanced and holds lots of data in what they need to perform. This goes the same for current society; today's society is focused on making everyday technology, such as our phones and TV's, smarter by incorporating some kind of AI that can do the things one wants without that person having to do anything that strains the mind. Though today's society wants to make AI smarter, better, and faster, some want AI to adapt to new situations, and to learn about new advancements in today's technology to improve society, or to learn from the past and prevent past mistakes from being repeating in society. For researchers at the University of Gothenburg, they created a program called O* that actually learns. The program starts from a simple set of broad definitions to form a general cognitive model, and builds knowledge based on previous knowledge, drawing new conclusions about the world. This process is similar to how children learn: through logical reasoning. This logical reasoning the program uses can be used in many other areas, such as English, rather than pure math. The logical reasoning, and its name, is based on the principle of Occam's razor: one often favors short and simple explanations, and combines patterns in these explanations and combines them with prior knowledge to solve a problem. O* manages to learn arithmetic from scratch and can deduce logic problems much like an average adult. With this program, the researchers hope that their program will learn and find correct conclusions with reasoning so that programmers do not need to create an algorithm for it to find the correct conclusion, but the program will need many years of development before it is seen in today's society. To see more about O*, follow this link:http://www.gizmag.com/artificial-intelligence-program-imitates-child-cognitive-development/33972/