Awesome Stuff: Gadgets For The New Year

from the small-stuff dept

Happy New Year, everyone! This week we're kicking off 2016's Awesome Stuff posts with another round-up of three crowdfunding projects for interesting new gadgets and gear.

Filed Under: awesome stuff, crowdfunding

Awesome Stuff: A Post-Holiday Grab Bag

from the belated-stocking-stuffers dept

This week, instead of a closer look at one product, we're rounding up a bunch of interesting Kickstarter campaigns that aim to ship in 2016. So, if you didn't get everything you wanted this Christmas — or if you are planning really far ahead for the next — take a look.

Filed Under: awesome stuff

How Private-Sector Innovation Can Help Those Most In Need

from the profit-can-be-good dept

Facebook Co-Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg's decision to dedicate 99 percent of his Facebook stock towards improving the world was met with strong praise this holiday season. The resources will be used to promote programs related to "personalized learning, curing disease, connecting people and building strong communities."

Everyone's talking about "why" this donation is important: namely, helping future generations live in a better world than we live in now. But fewer people are focusing on "how." The Facebook proceeds will be channeled through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, LLC – a for-profit company with philanthropic ambitions.

As a business rather than a non-profit, the Initiative will have more freedom to put the power of private sector innovation to work in the non-profit world, such as making private investments, and promoting public policy issues. This is not the first time social good was driven by private sector innovation. Digital platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are changing how we interact, driving fundraising and donations for large charitable projects, and enabling us to coordinate efforts and produce social change. We saw these macro effects throughout the Arab Spring, in places as distant as Tunisia and Egypt.

The innovation cycle is also impacting forward progress on the micro level, whether it's a solar-powered well that's being installed in a small, rural, mountainous community in Chile, a mobile phone in Africa that helps rural farmers know what prices they should expect for their goods at market or the anytime/anywhere connectivity that can keep a fisherman safe from storms he wouldn't have been aware of otherwise. What's born in a lab in Silicon Valley can have a life-altering impact on people half the world away in the Jordan Valley.

That could help explain why multibillionaire Google co-founder Larry Page has said he wants to leave his fortune to Elon Musk, the forward-thinking innovator and CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX. Leaving his billions to Musk would presumably ensure that research into "moonshot" projects akin to those of Google's new parent company Alphabet – robots, nanoparticles, self-driving cars, wind-energy-capturing kites, balloon-based WiFi and more – would continue after he's gone.

Musk is redefining the parameters of innovation. With Tesla, he's changing the whole structure of the car, which allows us to do other things in the car besides focus on the road. And by redesigning the car's power supply, he's changing the physical layout of the car, too – where we sit, where we store luggage. Musk refuses to allow the status quo to dictate the trajectory of tomorrow's innovation.

Yes, Musk is making $100,000 cars that may seem worlds away from the extreme poverty that pocket the earth, but innovation doesn't exist in a silo. Innovation permeates every facet of our life. In chaos theory, Edward Lorenz's "butterfly effect" describes how a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can produce very different outcomes in later states of that system. Musk and countless other private-sector innovators, are today introducing massive change into our world which in turn are powering and empowering massive change in the world that lays before us and before the billions of underserved among us.

The tangible examples of innovation's near-universal influence are numerous. Mobile payments aren't just for paying rent in Washington, D.C., or splitting lunch in San Francisco. They grow economic development in remote parts of the world by accelerating transactions, and improve safety by reducing the need to travel with large sums of money in dangerous locals. Booz Allen Hamilton estimates digitization of emerging markets could drive respective economic growth by $4.1 trillion dollars among the most underserved 3.9 billion consumers. The UN recently endorsed goals to eradicate extreme poverty over the next 15 years. Connecting the last billion people to the Internet will help end marginalization through banking, identification and the broad dissemination of information.

Our reliance on technological innovation for social change may be more important now than ever. Philanthropic giving has yet to rebound to pre-Great Recession levels, even as community needs expand, according to a report from the National Council of Nonprofits. This makes it hard for non-profits to keep up with demand, or upgrade and invest in their own technology and capabilities.

While there's certainly a continued need and role for charity, innovations and technologies are lifting one person at a time, and in the aggregate, they're lifting entire nations to a higher plane. Innovation isn't helping just the most desolate among us; it's improving the quality of life for all of us.

What may look on the surface like another business transaction – just another company out for profit – has the potential to do tremendous good. The great promise of innovation encompasses not only the predetermined outcomes or reasons for investment, but also all of the opportunity that is unleashed as a result of those investments and decisions.

Shawn DuBravac is chief economist of the Consumer Electronics Association and the author of "Digital Destiny: How the New Age of Data Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Communicate." Follow him on Twitter @shawndubravac.

Filed Under: charity, doing good, elon musk, innovation, larry page, private sector

Awesome Stuff: Towards The Future Of Drones

from the fleye-my-pretties dept

I've seen crowdfunding projects for personal drones that promise the moon and obviously fail to deliver — and it's not surprising that this happens and even sometimes works, given the automatic sci-fi appeal of an autonomous flying assistant that hovers at your side. Today, we're looking at a project by someone who shares that dream, but who recognizes it's not going to materialize overnight: Fleye, the personal drone and developer's platform that represents a step in the direction of that sci-fi future.

The Good

In a world increasingly saturated with drones, there are two things that make the Fleye stand out. The first is its design: unlike most drones, it's not a quadcopter, but rather is powered by a single blade concealed entirely within its round outer shell. Aesthetically, this is just cool: the Fleye doesn't look like it should be able to hover and maneuver the way quadcopters do, but it is. Functionally, this serves a key purpose: if the goal is a future where small flying robots operate regularly in human-filled spaces, then the safety factor becomes a real concern, and little bumper rings around exposed high-speed blades simply isn't going to cut it. The Fleye has nothing on the outside that can hurt you — and watching it gracefully recover after being bumped or shoved is delightful.

The second notable aspect is that the Fleye is focused on being a platform for developers. The creator clearly has a vision of a future full of small autonomous and semi-autonomous drones, hovering over our shoulders and running errands for us and taking our selfies for us — but he also gives the clear impression that he knows this future isn't "right around the corner" and, in fact, may never even arrive in the vague way we envision it. Rather, he wants to offer a real opportunity for people to explore and experiment in that direction. The Fleye has WiFi, an HD camera, and an on-board computer available in two different models: one with a dual-core and half-gig of RAM, the other with a quad-core and a full gigabyte. All this is wrapped up with an API and an SDK that lets developers create autonomous tasks for the Fleye, leveraging its ability to recognize its surroundings and make split-second adjustments to its course. The Fleye itself, as it is right now, probably isn't the drone that goes mainstream and starts appearing everywhere — but it may well be the platform that trains the generation of developers who go on to achieve that dream.

The Bad

Drones still face some severe technology limitations, and the Fleye is no exception. For one thing, though the video isn't entirely clear on this point, it surely makes the same loud and somewhat grating noise that we were all disappointed by the first time we saw a drone flying in person rather than doing graceful silent maneuvers in an audio-dubbed video. Secondly, it still has the limitation of a 10-minute flight time on a full battery charge. Neither of these things are the fault of the Fleye itself, but they do represent technological bottlenecks that diminish the usefulness and appeal of personal drones in general.

The Platform

By default, the Fleye is controlled solely by apps for iOS and Android. Normally this is a very irritating choice, but in the case of the Fleye, it's actually just a starting point: the drone is controlled by WiFi through an API that uses JSON-over-UDP, meaning virtually any WiFi-connected device is capable of become a controller. The creator is working on SDKs for iOS, Android, NodeJS and Python so people can begin creating their own control software for any and all devices. But that's just for remote control — the Fleye itself runs on Linux and can be accessed via SSH, deploying custom software directly to the drone so it can then operate autonomously or semi-autonomously to complete tasks you've designed. Custom apps don't need to train the drone from the ground up, as a low-level API within the Linux environment gives custom software easy access to the autopilot functions and video pipeline.

With all these capabilities, I'm excited to see what developers start creating once they get their hands on the Fleye.

Filed Under: awesome stuff, drones, uav

Awesome Stuff: Artisanal Handheld Games

from the now-that's-nice dept

This one's for collectors and folks with a little cash to spare: Pixel Vision, a beautiful hand-made game emulator from Sweden.

The Good

Love Hultén is a designer who makes incredible video game cabinets both large and small, and the Pixel Vision is a Kickstarted attempt to make some of his very desirable work available to more people with his smallest device yet. It runs on a Raspberry Pi board inside a handmade walnut casing — in fact everything about the Pixel Vision is handmade by one person. It has controls much like a classic Nintendo, runs emulators for a bunch of classic game systems, all controlled through a special minimal front-end interface that lets you access emulator functions like Reset and Save/Load State via hotkey combinations. It comes with some pre-loaded ROMs and you can load more via USB.

Given the completely hand-made nature of everything Hultén makes, all his products are ultra-limited edition, and this is no exception: there are only 500 Pixel Visions, and a few extra special versions with even finer materials. Nothing here is revolutionary, but all the elements are top quality and put together with style to create a product I suspect many gamers — and especially those with nostalgic memories of their Game Boys — would love to have in their collection.

The Bad

There was no way a lovingly hand-crafted, limited edition, solid wood handheld gaming device was going to be cheap, was there? Alas, the Pixel Vision costs around $470 (but is priced in Swedish Krona). Considering the nature of its construction and the fact that it's essentially an art piece, this isn't an unfair price — and indeed this is Hultén's less expensive offering, given that his other even-more-impressive designs cost considerably more — but it will certainly discourage most would-be buyers (that is, after all, more than a Playstation 4). Though, with only 500 on the market, that's not exactly a problem.

The Details

What really caught my eye about the Pixel Vision is just how much Hultén's attention to detail permeates every aspect of its design. This isn't just some electronics crammed in a nice hand-made wood box by a woodworker hoping to find a market — it's actually a complete design by someone who clearly cares about all the elements of the device, hardware and software included.

The best example of this is the 3.5" LCD screen. Anyone could stick a small screen in a box, but this one is mounted in a bezel that is ever-so-slightly curved outwards to evoke old-school TVs — but it doesn't stop there. The curved bezel is a great vintage look, but the screen would still clearly be modern, so the Pixel Vision runs custom OpenGL software that applies barrel distortion and a soft shader to all the emulator's graphics, giving it the genuine bulged look of an old CRT television. That's the sort of detail that ties the whole thing together and makes it not just a gimmick but a cohesive piece of great design.

Filed Under: awesome stuff, design, emulator, raspberry pi

Awesome Stuff: A New Approach To Smartphone VR

from the portability-maximized dept

Google Cardboard is a wonderful way to make virtual reality more accessible (you can even grab one on sale in the Insider Shop) but it still has its limitations. Today we're looking at a new twist on smartphone-powered VR: the Figment phone case with built-in viewer.

The Good

The main limitation to Cardboard-style VR rigs is that they simply aren't as powerful, immersive or responsive as headgear like the Oculus Rift — but in exchange they are affordable and mobile, with the potential to make VR (and its cousin, augmented reality) a bigger part of everyday life. However, if there's one thing that holds them back from fulfilling that potential, it's that they are bulky and somewhat ugly — portable, but not convenient enough to carry with you everywhere, and not something you can leave permanently attached to your smartphone. The Figment offers a new approach: it foregoes the boxy enclosure and embeds the most critical part — the lenses — directly into an iPhone case. The eyepiece sits flush with the back of the phone until you flip it out, at which point an aluminum arm holds the lenses in place at VR viewing distance, immediately bringing a 360-degree 3D video or an augmented reality layer to life.

Putting the lenses so close at hand unlocks the power of this type of lightweight VR as both a tool and a more common way to consume content. Setting up your Cardboard rig to check out a 3D YouTube video is a bit of a hassle that you'll only commit to on occasion; but flipping an eyepiece out of your phone hardly adds any barrier at all, and suddenly you might find yourself opening up such content on a whim.

The Bad

Obviously, the lack of a full enclosure means the Figment doesn't deliver a fully-immersive experience, and may be more suited to AR than VR on the whole. But that's a sensible sacrifice in service of the goal of portability and convenience — if and when it moves past the other key issue of only currently being available for iPhones, and as the price of full headset rigs comes down, Cardboard may start to look like an unnecessary middle ground: not as convenient as the Figment, not as immersive as the Rift.

The Content

Whether you've got a Rift or a Cardboard, or plan to get a Figment, you'll need content to enjoy. With VR becoming more widespread, a growing number of creators are working to harness its unique capabilities, and there's another Kickstarter project underway that's worth checking out: Blackout, "a virtual glimpse into the lives of strangers". It's an original virtual reality documentary based on the idea of reading the minds of fellow commuters on a stalled subway train, in which you can look around and hear thoughts based on actual interviews with real people from around the world. This sort of experimentation is what makes a new medium like VR truly exciting, so be sure to check it out.

Filed Under: augmented reality, awesome stuff, cardboard, oculus rift, virtual reality

Awesome Stuff: Let's Bore The Censors

from the rate-this dept

Film ratings and content warnings seem like a perfectly harmless and sensible idea in theory, but in practice they become a tool of censorship and industry protectionism. The UK has its own issues in this regard that are not unlike the ones we see in the US, and one filmmaker has come up with an amusing idea to fight back: crowdfunding a long and uneventful film of paint drying, to at least bore the censors to tears.

The British Board of Film Classification (formerly known as, yes, the British Board of Film Censors) is the UK equivalent of CARA, the film-rating portion of the MPAA. Both were formed by the industry to avoid government-administered content regulations, but where the MPAA's ratings stranglehold on the industry is based almost entirely on an economic monopoly, the BBFC's is backed up by ratings requirements in UK law. Where the MPAA can't actually ban films (instead forcing them to choose self-censorship or economic suicide), the BBFC can.

But the BBFC has one weakness, of sorts: it has to watch the films, even if it decides not to let anyone else do so. In fact, it seems to be quite proud of its commitment to watching every minute of footage that is submitted for classification. This gave Charlie Lyne, a London filmmaker and critic, an idea for how to take a dig at the BBFC while also sparking conversation around this under-discussed issue: force the censors to watch a very long, very boring, very pointless film of paint drying.

One of the most interesting things that this stunt highlights is the pricing system, whereby filmmakers must pay a per-minute fee for work they submit to the board — a fee that is trivial for a big studio production, but not so much for an indie working with a shoestring budget. Of course, in this case, Kickstarter neatly takes care of that problem: the final film will be scaled in length to the amount raised, with the crowdfunded cash paying the per-minute fee. Lyne has 14 hours of footage ready to go, which he figured would be plenty (it would cost a little over £6000 to get all that reviewed), but he's prepared to shoot more. And it looks like he might have to, since the campaign is past the halfway mark of using up all that drying paint. If it hits 13 hours, it'll snag a record too, becoming the longest film ever reviewed by the board.

A fan has even set up a website where you can track the length of the film based on the money raised so far. With 24 days still to go in the campaign, it looks like the BBFC is going to be staring at that paint for a very long time. Of course, it's easy to wonder if they actually will, but at least they confirmed to Mashable that they do watch every minute of submitted footage — plus, it's always possible someone slipped some objectionable content in at hour 7, right? What choice do they have?

So if you'd like to bore some censors and help spark conversation around the issue of movie ratings — which many people just assume are a system that works reasonably and fairly in the background, rather than a powerful and determining factor in the movie industry — head on over to the Kickstarter page and contribute a minute or two to this groundbreaking crowdfunded film.

Filed Under: awesome stuff, bbfc, censorship, mpaa, uk

Awesome Stuff: Open Source For Your Brain

from the eeg-for-all dept

Last year, a pair of creators crowdfunded OpenBCI — an open source software suite and interface board that made biosensing — taking readings of electricity in the human body, especially the brain — far more affordable and accessible. Now, the same people are back with the pushes this even further with new, even more affordable gear.

The Good

Electroencephalography has been evolving for nearly 150 years, but up until very recently it was exclusively the domain of researchers and doctors with access to the expensive, high-tech equipment and software required. Lately there have been fledgling steps to bring direct brain sensing into consumer technology for various applications, but in today's world of makers and tinkerers, there's exciting potential if the basic technology is made available to all. OpenBCI is all about making that happen: the first iteration focused on open-source software and a more affordable interface, but still required lots of equipment and know-how to set up and make use of a full biosensing rig. Now, they're busting through those remaining barriers.

The new OpenBCI offerings are an even more affordable interface board — "The Ganglion" — and a kit for building customizable 3D-printed headsets. The goal is to make the technology feasible for anyone who's interested — high schools, makers, independent researchers, and anyone operating with a shoestring budget. The Ganglion interface clocks in at a mere $100, and the parts for the headset (including new dry electrodes, eliminating the need for a lengthy and messy application of gel to a subject's head) only $350. The software, as well as the plans for 3D printing a headset, are all fully open source and available for free on Github. All told, for less than five-hundred bucks, anyone can start experimenting with technology that not long ago was almost completely inaccessible.

The Bad

What could be bad about giving people easier access to important tools for cutting edge science and engineering? Not much, really. As with most such things, there's a question as to what people will actually do with it, and how many really have a need for it — but that's thinking backwards. Apart from the obvious learning value if this is brought into schools, there's the fact that much of the untapped or unseen potential of brain-sensing technology stands to be unlocked by getting it into the hands of more people. Direct brain interfaces for computing have been possible for some time now, and many experiments in that area continue to happen, but these cheaper OpenBCI tools could be a major step towards making this exciting technology mainstream and finding new and useful applications for it.

The Open

High-tech Kickstarter projects can be divided into two camps: those focused on establishing a consumer brand, with closed technology and pages riddled with trademark signs and proprietary language, and those that are committed to expanding the world of open source, open hardware, hackable technology and interoperability. It's extremely gratifying that OpenBCI is so firmly in the latter camp. For the time being, a brain-computer interface isn't something average consumers are going to go pick up in a sleek box like a new iPhone — but it is something that developers and engineers are going to want to experiment and play with. If the technology were made affordable in the form of a locked-down consumer product, we'd still see lots of experimentation, but it would rely on a lot of hacking and reverse-engineering. Thanks to OpenBCI's commitment to open source and hardware, people with exciting ideas don't have to jump those hurdles. Thanks, OpenBCI!

Filed Under: awesome stuff, biosensing, eeg, open hardware, open source

Awesome Stuff: The Final Piece Of The VR Puzzle?

from the lean-don't-walk dept

We've talked before about how the booming field of virtual reality may start with better VR headsets and displays, but requires additional pieces of tech to truly meet its full potential. This week, we're looking at one such piece of tech that tackles the most critical VR challenge of all: the VRGO chair for controlling movement in a virtual world.

The Good

There's one fundamental challenge that has plagued the world of VR from its inception: how do you move about the virtual world? Of course, you can just do so with a joystick or directional pad like any other game, but that's extremely immersion-breaking in most cases, reminding you at every turn of the one thing VR is supposed to make you forget — that you're playing a game. At the other end of the spectrum, some have built multi-directional treadmill rigs that allow you to walk and run in place, but these have their own list of problems, such as the fact that they are very big and very expensive. Plus, it's not always appealing to exert the same amount of physical energy to play a game as you would if you were actually the superhuman action hero you control.

The VRGO offers a new solution. It's a sleek, compact chair that is carefully calibrated to detect your leaning and turning, and translate these movements into game controls. It offers the sort of direct, intuitive control that VR needs without requiring a dedicated room for all your gear or a budget of thousands (it clocks in at around $300 USD, which is hardly eyewatering) and while keeping your hands free. It's wireless and portable, and works not only with PC/Mac but with mobile devices (where a lot of VR experimentation is now happening). Plus, you get to sit down. All told, it may be the single best solution to the problem of movement in VR, especially if price is a factor in that determination.

The Bad

Videos of the VRGO in action tell us it looks good, appears to be responsive and makes users smile — but as with any such device, the ultimate test will be using it yourself to find out how it feels. Does your brain embrace the immersion and forget about the chair, or are you permanently aware that you're rocking back and forth on a plastic egg? And how quickly does this transition happen? Questions like these are why it might be tough to shell out money for the first model, unseen and untried, rather than waiting for some testimonials and hopefully a shot at trying it out somewhere. Still, if the VRGO lives up to its apparent potential, it (and the inevitable imitators, some of which may even improve the design) could become the go-to standard for VR gaming rigs.

The Combinable

While it might actually be fun to try the VRGO out all by itself for certain kinds of normal, non-VR games, obviously the real point of this device is to combine it with, at minimum, a VR display like the Oculus Rift or a smartphone in a Google Cardboard headset. Then there's a rapidly growing world of additional components: Wii-style handheld motion controllers, Kinect-style cameras, tactile feedback gloves, 3D audio systems... And this raises what might be the key challenge for VR as the technological kinks are ironed out, the price comes down, and it becomes mainstream: getting everything to work properly in concert and deliver an overall satisfying experience. In time there will surely be some companies selling comprehensive VR rigs with everything included, but for most gamers (PC gamers especially) their rig will be assembled from multiple different devices. Even assuming there are no strict hardware compatibility issues, there's an interesting question of calibration and optimization — will all these devices feel good together? Will the sensitivity and responsiveness of your VRGO harmonize with that of your motion control camera, or will it create a looming sense of physical dissonance? This isn't just a hardware challenge, but a software one too, and we'll see lots of action on this front as more developers build games with VR in mind as a (or the) primary use case. As the technology for VR comes into its own and the games proliferate, we'll have to move beyond answering each individual question of how to interact with the virtual world, and start focusing on marrying all these aspects into a harmonious, fully-immersive experience.

Filed Under: awesome stuff, gaming, virtual reality

Awesome Stuff: The Internet... Who Needs It?

from the good-ol-radio dept

As a growing number of web users have become more security-conscious, there's been an explosion of VPNs and encryption tools and other security services for the internet. But what about a device that lets you bypass the internet entirely? That's the goal of RATS, the Radio Transceiver System, an open source communication tool for the security-obsessed and/or the internet-bereft.

The Good

The RATS is simple: it's a small antenna that connects to computers by USB and lets them send encrypted messages and file transfers directly, via radio transmission. There are two obvious advantages to this: firstly, it doesn't rely on any network being up or even the power staying on — as long as your laptop has some batteries, you can send and receive — and secondly, it's a level of security and privacy that trumps most of what you can do online. Apart from being entirely separated from the internet, it employs AES-256 encryption with a randomized salt so even the same message sent repeatedly will produce completely different encrypted data every time.

The range of the RATS antenna is about a kilometer in a city, but it can also be connected to superior antennas and, in areas with no obstacles, achieve ranges above 5km. Obviously this means it isn't suited to everything, but alongside the internet it could be extremely powerful for certain local applications in urban neighborhoods, workplaces, and other situations where we normally use the robust global internet just to send short messages to people within walking distance. But perhaps more than anything it could be a boon for people living under governments that censor and monitor online communications, allowing local groups to coordinate without so much as touching the compromised networks.

The Bad

As noted, the RATS obviously isn't for everyone or every situation, and the Kickstarter project page certainly lines up with the fact that this isn't a regular consumer product. If anything, it feels a little more like a hobby project, with the pitch video seemingly incomplete and the fundraising target extremely low. This could raise a few red flags for cautious Kickstarter backers, though in truth it feels more like a labor of love by the Swedish creator, and is somewhat refreshing in a sea of crowdfunded technology with overproduced pitch videos and product pages full of PR speak.

One other concern with the RATS is the legality of the radio transmissions themselves. The software includes a system for downloading XML-based lists of available frequencies and selecting the appropriate transmitter power, but since this allocation differs from country to country, it will be up to the end user to make sure they aren't breaking any broadcast laws.

The Open

One of the first things early backers asked about RATS was why its software wasn't open source. The creator responded, saying that if that's what people want then it's what they'll get, and has now pledged to open-source the software as soon as its complete and the device is shipped. It would have been even cooler to see it go through a full open source development process and be accessible from the start, but it's great to see a creator rapidly and positively respond to these requests (especially since open source software makes especially good sense for a device like this, as it's certainly not the kind of thing that should rely on security-by-obscurity).

Filed Under: awesome stuff, encryption, privacy, radio, security