Google WorldSense

/in , /by

Google have recently announced a standalone Daydream VR headset that will utilise the Tango Augmented Reality system, the way it does this is not with cameras around the room like with a HTC Vive, a head on camera like the Playstation VR but with camera’s built into the headset itself.

Calling this tech ‘World Sense’ it allows users to walk around in AR/VR worlds without the fear of walking into walls or falling down the stairs.

“The idea is that you have everything you need for VR built right into the headset itself, there’s no cables, no phone and certainly no big PC. The whole device is designed just for VR……..World Sense enables what’s known as positional tracking and with it your view in the virtual world exactly matches your movement in the real world. It works by using a handful of sensors on the device that look out into your surroundings, and that means it works everywhere, there’s no set-up and no cameras to install.”  (Head of Google VR Clay Bavor)

It does support the Daydream controller but it won’t be visible in the VR world nor will it interact with things that are in the Virtual world like much of the other VR systems available today.

Scotland’s Renewable Energy

/in , /by

During the 1st 6months of 2017 Scotland generated enough power by their wind turbines to power Scotland for more power than they actually need for 6 days straight.

The data was collated by WeatherEnergy and later analysed by WWF Scotland, which concluded that the turbines generated 1,039,001 MWh of electricity in June which is enough energy to power 3M homes!

Dr Sam Gardner, the acting director of WWF Scotland, said in a statement

The first six months of 2017 have certainly been incredible for renewables, with wind turbines alone helping to ensure millions of tonnes of climate-damaging carbon emissions were avoided.

Scotland is continuing to break records on renewable electricity, attracting investment, creating jobs and tackling climate change.

If we want to reap the same rewards in the transport and heating sectors, we need the Scottish Government to put in place strong policies on energy efficiency and transport in the forthcoming Climate Change Bill.

 

Karen Robinson of WeatherEnergy also released a statement:

It’s great to see this data confirm that Scotland is knocking it out of the park on wind power with total output for June in particular up on the same period compared to the past two years.

There’s no doubt renewables are helping households increasingly avoid fossil fuels for their electricity needs.

 

Self Healing Phones?

/in , /by

University of Melbourne researchers are probably going to save a lot of people a lot of money, by developing a self healing gel that could prevent phone screens from permanent damage.

Melbourne School of Engineering researcher Dr Luke Connal said:

After printing, these objects can heal a crack or even a cut and regain their original strength. This could enable custom printing of coatings that can heal after breakages, potentially as coatings for mobile phones.

The materials we developed can also change shape when triggered by being swollen in a solvent, such as water. This enables printed objects to change shape once printed, which is known as 4D printing.

To listen to the guys chatting about this please click here!

Disney Laughing Detection

/in , /by

Disney want to know how you enjoy their films, at IEEE’s Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Disney Research and Caltech highlighted the way they track facial expressions of people watching films.

The tech is so advanced they claim that they can predict the face’s future expressions through the remainder of a film, its called “factorised variational autoencoders” (FVAEs)

To make this possible, researchers used infared cameras to the audiences of 150 showings of 9 films, including a lot of Disney movies! Like Zootopia, Big Hero 6 and the recent Star Wars films.

After compiling this huge amount of data, they went back and tested it on some more moviegoers, after an initial set up period the FVAEs were able to predict when an audience member (remember these are brand new fresh audiences) was about to laugh or smile as tied to significant moments in each of the films. They hope to predict other emotive moments in films such as fear and sadness. How this data will be used is unclear, but it could help them better understand audience reactions than human based market research.

 

A Company Is MicroChipping It’s Employees

/in , /by

A company in the US, Three Two Market based in Wisconsin, is planning to microchip it’s employees, yet the implants are totally voluntary.

Three Two Market are paying for the £230 procedure which is performed by a Swedish Company called BioHax. Todd Westby CEO of Three Two Market sees the implants (which strangely enough, will go between the webbing of the thumb and index finger) to open doors, use of copy machines, logging on to the computers, storing medical info and payment at RFID terminals.

Security is of course a major concern as it could allow hackers to steal data and what’s stopping the companies people work for from snooping on their employees? However it is said that no data is stored or monitored at a company level, but it is unclear if BioHax has access to this data. The chip only communicates with a reader such as a door, or a vending machine. But what happens if someone quits? Leaves?

 

Drones with X-Ray vision

/in , /by

Kind of… 

X-Ray vision was still thought to be a thing of the future…

…we are now in the future. Researchers are trialling a process that uses WiFi signals and a little interpolation to literally see through walls.

The system is two-fold, one drone blasts WiFi through the structure and another picks up the signal.

They then work in tandem, the two drones fly around the solid structure until it maps the differences in wave strength at different points. Using this information the researchers have been able to create a 3D model of a closed building.

Although you won’t be able to see though walls in incredible detail, the process has implications to be used in emergency situations when you need to know what’s inside the building without breaking down the doors.

Facebook Shut Down Their Own AI After It Creates Own Language

/in , /by

Facebook shut down their AI programs after it appeared to create it’s own language that only they could understand. The chatbots created their own changes to English which made it easier for them to understand but was absolute rubbish to humans.

The task they set their chat bots were to trade items with one another, each item being given a numerical value, however it soon became apparent that only the bots understood what they each meant, after being told not to use comprehensive English, they (the chatbots) created a form of shorthand, after being instructed to work out how to negotiate and improve bartering.

The negotiations look weird:

Bob: i can i i everything else . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Alice: balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to

Bob: you i everything else . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Alice: balls have a ball to me to me to me to me to me to me to me

Bob: i i can i i i everything else . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Alice: balls have a ball to me to me to me to me to me to me to me

Bob: i . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Alice: balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to

Bob: you i i i i i everything else . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Alice: balls have 0 to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to

Bob: you i i i everything else . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Alice: balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to

As you can see there seems to be some rules, the chatbots stress their own name as a way of negotiating and it’s not a glitch, with some items being traded successfully. With Facebook’s Artificial Intelligence Research divisions visiting researcher Dhruv Vatra saying that “If I said ‘the’ five times, you’d interpret that to mean I want five copies of this item. This isn’t so different to the way communities of humans create shorthands”

Researcher Mike Lewis told FastCo that they shut down the ChatBots because they wanted to have bots that could talk to humans, not because they were afraid of SkyNet coming to life in front of them.

To listen to the guys chatting about this please click here!

 

Nakefit

/in , /by

 

Nakefit is a sticky pad that attachest to your feet and adds a protective layer to help you walk around town, on the beach or at the pool barefooted but have protection at the same time! No more sandy feet after going to the beach, or getting sore feet when you go to the swimming pool!

Nakefit is designed to:

‘Keep your feet effectively protected and at the same time support all of the amazing things it can already do. Nakefit is designed in Italy and is produced without harming people, animals or the environment (vegan and barefoot friendly)’

Free WiFi Cleaning?!

/in , /by

Maybe you should read the T’s & C’s of Free WiFi, as recently 22,000 people are now legally bound to 1000hrs of community service. Which includes, but not limited to cleaning toilets at festivals, scraping gum off the street and “manually relieving sewer blockages” – Sounds horrifying!

Whether or not these people actually completed their smelly tasks is anyones guess but, Manchester based WiFi company ‘Purple’ slotted the cheeky terms into their T’s & C’s for 2 weeks to highlight the importance of T’s & C’s and raise the awareness that people should have when signing up to free wifi. They also offered a prize if you raised it to them and only 1 person highlighted the cleaning contract to them.

Not the first time this has happened, in 2014 Cybersecurity firm F-Secure done the same, but this time, free WiFi was in exchange of their first born.

While Terms and Conditions are legally considered contracts and binding, it is argued that the inability to negotiate such terms violates common law practices, thus leaving them void.

To listen to the guys chatting about this please click here!

WannaCry Hacker Arrested

/in , /by

Marcus Hutchins a British Cyber-Security researcher will appear in court in Vegas, whilst attending the Black Hat and Def Con cyber security conferences, charged with his involvement with Kronos – malware which steals banking logins from infected computers.

Hutchins stopped the WannaCry Cyber-Attack which hit the NHS in May and the FBI arrested him on Wednesday, with the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre were surprised at his arrest.

The US Department of Justice released a statement on his arrest stating that:

“Marcus Hutchins… a citizen and resident of the United Kingdom, was arrested in the United States on 2 August, 2017, in Las Vegas, Nevada, after a grand jury in the Eastern District of Wisconsin returned a six-count indictment against Hutchins for his role in creating and distributing the Kronos banking Trojan….The charges against Hutchins, and for which he was arrested, relate to alleged conduct that occurred between in or around July 2014 and July 2015.”

It is alleged that Hitchins created and sold Kronos on the dark web, Jane Hutchins, Marcus’ mother said that it was ‘highly unlikely’ that her son was involved saying that he spent his time preventing attacks from occurring. With those who work with Hutchins coming to the defence feeling that the US justice system have made a “huge mistake” Digital rights groups have said they are “deeply concerned” by his arrest.

Cyber-attorney Tor Ekeland has said that Mr Hutchins could face “40 years in jail” if found guilty, even though the case states no victims. But is worried about the outcome of this case for legitimate programmes, speaking on Radio 4’s Today:

“I can think of a number of examples of legitimate software that would potentially be a felony under this theory of prosecution.”

Hutchins has been granted £23,000 bail and at the time of writing it is unknown if he was able to pay this. He left court unshackled but ordered to leave his hands behind his back.

His defence lawyer Ms Lobo told the BBC that he has pled not guilty and the federal indictment against him is “pretty flimsy, pretty slim compared to what we normally see in a US indictment”

It is claimed that he software was sold for $2,000 in digital currency in June 2015 and Dan Cowhig, prosecuting, told court room that Hutchins confessed during a police interview that he was the “author of Kronos malware and indicated that he sold it”

To listen to the guys chatting about this please click here!