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Daily Archives: March 15, 2021

A Different Kind Of 3D Printer: Desktop Holograms

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Holograms aren’t new, but a desktop machine that spits them out could be available soon, presuming LitiHolo’s Kickstarter pans out. The machine will have a $1600 retail price and fits in a two-foot square. It can generate 4×5 inch holograms with 1mm hogels (the holo equivalent of a pixel).

The machine allows for 23 view zones per hogel and can create moving holograms with a few seconds of motion — like the famous kiss-blowing holograms.

Of course, you’ll also need a special self-developing film and a way to get 3D images into the printer such as software or a camera set up to do a 3D scan. In the 4×5 size, the film runs about $13 a plate which will create one hologram.

Since 5 inches is 127 mm the hogel resolution of the result is about 101×127, and the samples on the website and the video below certainly don’t look like they are in HD.

Will people pay $1600 for low-resolution holograms? More importantly, is there a market for grainy holograms that would let you earn back the investment? Maybe not, but that hasn’t stopped us from buying 3D printers and other workshop toys. Plus, if this catches on, what will be available in ten years time?

Of course, if you have the laser gear, you can already make your own holograms. You can even get kits that have most of what you need.

Source: A Different Kind Of 3D Printer: Desktop Holograms | Hackaday

Facebook is using AI to understand videos and create new products

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Facebook has taken the wraps off a project called Learning from Videos. It uses artificial intelligence to understand and learn audio, textual, and visual representations in public user videos on the social network.

Learning from Videos has a number of aims, such as improving Facebook AI systems related to content recommendations and policy enforcement. The project is in its early stages, but it’s already bearing fruit. Facebook says it has already harnessed the tech to enhance Instagram Reels recommendations, such as surfacing videos of people doing the same dance to the same music. The system is showing improved results in speech recognition errors as well, which could bolster auto-captioning features and make it easier to detect hate speech in videos.

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The company says the project is looking at videos in hundreds of languages and from almost every country. This aspect of the project will make AI systems more accurate and allow them to “adapt to our fast moving world and recognize the nuances and visual cues across different cultures and regions.”

Facebook says that it’s keeping privacy in mind when it comes to Learning from Videos. “We’re building and maintaining a strong privacy foundation that uses automated solutions to enforce privacy at scale,” it wrote in a blog post. “By embedding this work at the infrastructure level, we can consistently apply privacy requirements across our systems and support efforts like AI. This includes implementing technical safeguards throughout the data lifecycle.”

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Source: Facebook is using AI to understand videos and create new products | Engadget

Game Artists Not Happy That Developer Is Selling Their Nearly Decade-Old Work As NFTs

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indie developer Jason Rohrer has added a new wrinkle by creating an NFT auction using artwork he commissioned from other people in 2012—long before NFTs were ever created.

NFT is short for “non-fungible token,” a cryptographic token that is, unto itself, one of a kind. NFTs have been tied to images, videos, and even basketball collectibles, with some selling for millions of dollars. The images and videos can exist anywhere—on Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, or what have you—and their original creators can still maintain rights to those works. So what people are really paying for is a token that they verifiably own, via blockchain technology. The value of these tokens is derived entirely from artificial scarcity. While NFTs have been around since 2017, they’ve skyrocketed in popularity in recent months, with (mostly) prominent, established artists cashing in on an unregulated speculative market that has attracted wealthy buyers in droves. It is also, as with many things related to the blockchain, an environmental catastrophe that is riddled with scams.

This week, Rohrer, creator of indie standout games like Passage, The Castle Doctrine, and One Hour One Life, debuted an NFT auction called “The Crypto Doctrine.” It’s a Dutch auction, meaning that prices start high and fall over time. It launched with 155 paintings that Rohrer originally commissioned in 2012 for use in The Castle Doctrine, a controversial game about home defense.

“Inside the game world, only one player can own each painting, but paintings can be stolen by other players through in-game burglaries, which are completely legal,” reads The Crypto Doctrine’s description. “In the real world, only one person can own each non-fungible painting token, but tokens can be stolen by other people through real-life burglaries, which are completely illegal. Please acquire your tokens responsibly.”

As of today, there are 145 paintings in the auction. This, Rohrer told Kotaku, is because three artists have gotten in touch with him asking to have their paintings removed, and he has complied.

Artists were surprised to see their works appear in The Crypto Doctrine, and others took umbrage on their behalf in the responses to Rohrer’s tweet about the auction. In an email, Rohrer told Kotaku that he did not ask permission to sell people’s works as NFTs “mostly because having email conversations with 50+ people would exceed my bandwidth as a solo creator.” Rohrer does not believe many of the paintings will sell, though he did say that people have placed bids on two of them. He added that if any works do sell, he will share the resulting windfall with their creators.

Originally, Rohrer obtained these works in 2012 from creators he characterizes as “personal friends and relatives.” For this reason, he says, there were “no written contracts” involved. The page he made requesting artwork at the time informed creators that “your artwork will be auctioned, bought, prized, collected, coveted, stolen, re-stolen, reclaimed by the state, and auctioned again. Over and over, for the effective life of my game.” Granted, this was in reference to in-game actions and auctions—not real-life ones.

When word reached voice actress and writer Ashly Burch, whose work is part of the auction, she had yet to hear of NFTs. After doing some research, however, she was not pleased to learn that her art was being sold in that form.

“I definitely did not consent to him selling the art as an NFT,” she told Kotaku in a DM. “I mean, it was years ago. And the understanding was that it would be a piece of art in the game. That’s it…Definitely did not foresee this particular development.”

Game creator and scholar Andy Nealen also took issue with his art being included with the NFT auction and said as much publicly.

“I am not a fan, to put it mildly, but am deeply opposed to the current trend towards artificial scarcity of digital objects, for numerous reasons,” Nealen told Kotaku in an email. “The fact that this selfish, techno-anarchist move is also causing unprecedented environmental damage-in a time when we need the opposite-just solidifies my stance…I couldn’t care less whether Jason ‘claims ownership’ over my (infinitely replicable) digital art. But you can see that, for me, being at all involved with the enormous scam and betrayal of humanity that the blockchain represents, that’s simply a step too far.”

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Source: Game Artists Not Happy That Developer Is Selling Their Nearly Decade-Old Work As NFTs

Having Lost Its Original Atmosphere, This Planet Is Now Growing a New One

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Whereas Earth has always been a terrestrial, rocky world, GJ 1132 b began its life as a gaseous, Neptune-like planet. But as new research shows, a nearby red dwarf obliterated its original hydrogen- and helium-rich atmosphere with powerful radiation, so GJ 1132 b, having been stripped down to its rocky core, is now technically a terrestrial planet. The new paper will appear in an upcoming issue of the Astronomical Journal, but a preprint is available at the arXiv.

The authors of the paper reached these conclusions based on direct observations of the exoplanet and theoretical modeling. The telescope of choice was the Hubble Space Telescope, which allowed the team to spot the “secondary atmosphere,” which consists of molecular hydrogen, hydrogen cyanide, methane, and an aerosol haze resembling smog on Earth.

“It’s super exciting because we believe the atmosphere that we see now was regenerated, so it could be a secondary atmosphere,” Raissa Estrela, a co-author of the study and a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, explained in a statement. “We first thought that these highly irradiated planets could be pretty boring because we believed that they lost their atmospheres. But we looked at existing observations of this planet with Hubble and said, ‘Oh no, there is an atmosphere there.’

In terms of an explanation, the authors say much of the planet’s current hydrogen was retained from before, having been absorbed into the molten magma mantle. Volcanic processes are now causing this stored hydrogen to leak out from below, refueling the new atmosphere, according to the research.

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Source: Having Lost Its Original Atmosphere, This Freaky Planet Is Now Growing a New One

‘Wearable microgrid’ uses the human body to sustainably power small gadgets using sweat and motion

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Nanoengineers at the University of California San Diego have developed a “wearable microgrid” that harvests and stores energy from the human body to power small electronics. It consists of three main parts: sweat-powered biofuel cells, motion-powered devices called triboelectric generators, and energy-storing supercapacitors. All parts are flexible, washable and can be screen printed onto clothing.

The technology, reported in a paper published Mar. 9 in Nature Communications, draws inspiration from community microgrids.

“We’re applying the concept of the microgrid to create wearable systems that are powered sustainably, reliably and independently,” said co-first author Lu Yin, a nanoengineering Ph.D. student at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. “Just like a city microgrid integrates a variety of local, renewable power sources like wind and solar, a wearable microgrid integrates devices that locally harvest energy from different parts of the body, like sweat and movement, while containing energy storage.”

The wearable microgrid is built from a combination of flexible electronic parts that were developed by the Nanobioelectronics team of UC San Diego nanoengineering professor Joseph Wang, who is the director of the Center for Wearable Sensors at UC San Diego and corresponding author on the current study. Each part is screen printed onto a shirt and placed in a way that optimizes the amount of energy collected.

Source: ‘Wearable microgrid’ uses the human body to sustainably power small gadgets | EurekAlert! Science News

Pixels Are Bluetooth Dice That Let You Play Online Games and Flash An internal LED

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A pair of good dice is a guilty pleasure for a tabletop RPG gamer. You can never have enough, but I can tell you this: None are going to be as flashy as Pixels. These dice have an ace up their sleeve that the rest of your dice don’t have, because they light up and allow you to play online.

Yes, Pixels are electronic dice. Externally they look like ordinary resin dice, but when you throw them, their numbers light up using programmable LEDs. This alone would be enough for many players to smash the buy button on Kickstarter, where the product has already raised $2 million. But there’s more: The Pixels have a Bluetooth connection.

These days it’s not easy to get together with friends to play. Lockdowns have made things very complicated, but even without a pandemic, RPG players live in different cities, move to other countries, or simply can’t meet for meet several hours at other people’s houses on a regular basis. Online role-playing platforms that allow you to play different games over video calls are popping up, and these dice are compatible with popular services like D&D Beyond, Roll20, and Foundry.

Gif: Pixels

Both the lights and the Bluetooth run on small batteries and one die lasts around five hours on a charge. You can also turn off the LEDs to get in 20,000 rolls before the battery dies. Charging is wireless and uses an inductor hidden under one of its faces. The dice are sold separately or in kits containing D20, D12, D10, D8, D6, and D4 models.

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Source: Pixels Are Bluetooth Dice That Let You Play Online Games

Towards real-time photorealistic 3D holography with deep neural networks for every device

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The ability to present three-dimensional (3D) scenes with continuous depth sensation has a profound impact on virtual and augmented reality, human–computer interaction, education and training.

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The computationally taxing Fresnel diffraction simulation further places an explicit trade-off between image quality and runtime, making dynamic holography impractical4. Here we demonstrate a deep-learning-based CGH pipeline capable of synthesizing a photorealistic colour 3D hologram from a single RGB-depth image in real time. Our convolutional neural network (CNN) is extremely memory efficient (below 620 kilobytes) and runs at 60 hertz for a resolution of 1,920 × 1,080 pixels on a single consumer-grade graphics processing unit. Leveraging low-power on-device artificial intelligence acceleration chips, our CNN also runs interactively on mobile (iPhone 11 Pro at 1.1 hertz) and edge (Google Edge TPU at 2.0 hertz) devices, promising real-time performance in future-generation virtual and augmented-reality mobile headsets.

Source: Towards real-time photorealistic 3D holography with deep neural networks | Nature

What this means is that they can make really nice holograms (3D objects) on your phone for a fraction of the memory costs than other methods, by using lookup tables.

Cracking of Sky CC app dealt major blow to organised crime

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The cracking of the expensive messaging app, called “Sky ECC,” was what allowed over 1,500 police officers across Belgium to be simultaneously deployed in at least 200 raids, many of which were centred around Antwerp and involved special forces.

Investigators succeeded in cracking Sky ECC at the end of last year, according to reporting by De Standaard, and as a result were able to sort through thousands of messages major criminals were sending each other over the course of a month.

Information gained from those conversations is what led to Tuesday’s historic operation, two years in the making.

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Sky ECC became popular with drug criminals after its successor Encrochat was cracked in 2020 by French and Dutch investigators, who were able to intercept over 100 million messages sent via the app.

That led to over a hundred suspects being arrested in the Netherlands, uncovering a network of laboratories where crystal meth and other drugs were being produced and allowing police to seize 8,000 kilos of cocaine and almost €20 million.

A number of investigations are also still currently underway in Belgium based on the information from that cracking. While it led to panic among major criminal operations in the Netherlands, there wasn’t much of a reaction at the time in the Belgian underworld.

“Almost everyone in Antwerp switched from Encrochat to Sky two years ago,” a source told the Gazet van Antwerpen in July last year, adding that major Antwerp criminals in Dubai also used Sky ECC.

The company, which calls itself “the world’s most secure messaging app,” had previously said “hacking is impossible.” It defended its services, stating they “strongly believe that privacy is a fundamental human right.”

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Source: Cracking of Sky CC app dealt major blow to organised crime

Bucks County woman created ‘deepfake’ videos to harass rivals on her daughter’s cheerleading squad, DA says

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A Bucks County woman anonymously sent coaches on her teen daughter’s cheerleading squad fake photos and videos that depicted the girl’s rivals naked, drinking, or smoking, all in a bid to embarrass them and force them from the team, prosecutors say.

The woman, Raffaela Spone, also sent the manipulated images to the girls, and, in anonymous messages, urged them to kill themselves, Bucks County District Attorney Matt Weintraub’s office said.

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The affidavit says Spone last year created the doctored images of at least three members of the Victory Vipers, a traveling cheerleading squad based in Doylestown. There was no indication that her high school-age daughter, who was not publicly identified, knew what her mother was doing, according to court records.

Police in Hilltown Township were contacted by one of the victim’s parents in July, when that girl began receiving harassing text messages from an anonymous number, the affidavit said. The girl and her coaches at Victory Vipers were also sent photos that appeared to depict her naked, drinking, and smoking a vape. Her parents were concerned, they told police, because the videos could have caused their daughter to be removed from the team.

As police investigated, two more families came forward to say their daughters had been receiving similar messages from an unknown number, the affidavit said. The other victims were sent photos of themselves in bikinis, with accompanying text saying the subjects were “drinking at the shore.”

After analyzing the videos, detectives determined they were “deepfakes” — digitally altered but realistic looking images — created by mapping the girls’ social media photos onto other images.

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Source: Bucks County woman created ‘deepfake’ videos to harass rivals on her daughter’s cheerleading squad, DA says

Two Companies are Turning Airborne CO2 into Diamonds

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two companies are selling diamonds made in a laboratory from CO2 that once circled the Earth.

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Each carat of a diamond removes 20 tons of CO2. That, he said, is more invisible gas than the average person produces in a year.

With the purchase of a 2-carat diamond, Shearman pointed out, “you’re essentially offsetting 2 ½ years of your life.”

It can take Mother Nature as long as a billion years to make diamonds, which are formed in rocks. But as Shearman explained in an interview with E&E News, he has developed a patent-pending process that can make a batch of diamonds in a laboratory in four weeks.

Unlike other laboratory-made diamonds, his process starts with CO2 removed from the air. The gas undergoes a chemical reaction where it is subjected to high pressure and extremely high temperatures. All of this is created using solar, wind or hydraulic power.

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Aether has been selling its diamonds since the beginning of the year at prices ranging from $7,000 for a ring to around $40,000 for earrings with sparkling stone arrangements.

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Aether has a competitor, a British company called Skydiamond founded by Dale Vince, an entrepreneur and self-styled environmentalist who says he spent five years researching how to make what he calls the world’s first “zero-impact diamonds.”

Vince takes frequent potshots at the traditional diamond industry, noting that it has a history of using child labor and underpaid women. He also points to diamond mines that have scarred the Earth and damaged wildlife. He argues that a lack of regulations has fostered civil wars in Africa that can be funded by smuggled stones sometimes called “conflict diamonds” or “blood diamonds.”

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In 1954, an American chemist, Tracy Hall, invented an alternative to natural stones: the first diamonds made in a laboratory. He worked for General Electric Co. and used a reactor combined with a press to subject powdered carbon to high temperatures and pressures.

The result was diamond crystals made within a few weeks. It eventually led to a new industry that manufactured “laboratory diamonds” using two competing methods. Both required a lot of energy.

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According to Shearman, the CO2 is sent to a facility in Europe where it is converted into methane. That is sent to a reactor in Chicago, where pressure and heat fueled by renewable energy convert it into diamonds.

Climeworks has gone on to make a business out of accepting donations of CO2 from various sources and, for a fee, injecting it into a rock formation near a power plant in Iceland. Once it’s underground, the gas is mixed with water, and it will turn into stone in two years. The company is building a pilot plant called Orca that is designed to bury 4,000 tons of CO2 each year.

So far, over 3,000 companies and individuals from 52 countries have made contributions in exchange for a certificate showing that they have permanently stored CO2 underground

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Source: Modern Alchemists Turn Airborne CO2 into Diamonds – Scientific American

California will soon be home to the world’s first 3D-printed housing community

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Mighty Buildings, a construction tech company, specializes in 3D printed homes of varying sizes, presenting a technology-forward solution that could address issues like the housing crisis and sustainability. And so far, this formula has found the company success: last month, Mighty Buildings raised $40 million in a Series B round.

The California-based business isn’t the first or only company taking advantage of this growing 3D printing tech. But unlike other companies, Mighty Building’s upcoming project in Rancho Mirage, California will have the title of “world’s first planned community of 3D printed homes,” according to its maker.

Read more: This company is building 3-D printed, small homes on existing residential properties to fight back against California’s housing shortage. Look inside a unit that was move-in ready in one week.

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To create this first-of-its-kind community, Mighty Buildings partnered with development-focused Palari Group, a working relationship that first started from other property designs in September 2020.

In December of last year, Palari Group officially ordered Mighty’s “Cinco” models for the Rancho Mirage, California housing development.

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The tech-forward housing development will consist of 15 homes across five-acres. This $15 million project will be built using the Mighty Kit system, which utilizes prefabbed panels to create custom homes.

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The development will be completed next spring, and Mighty Buildings is already in talks with a “number of developers” for potential future communities.

Read the original article on Business Insider
Source: MSN

FarmBot | Open-Source CNC Farming robot

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Drag and Drop Farming

Graphically design your farm by dragging and dropping plants into the map. The game-like interface is learned in just a few minutes so you’ll have the whole growing season planned in no time.

Farm from Anywhere

The FarmBot web app can be loaded on any computer, tablet, or smartphone with a modern web browser, giving you the power to manage your garden from anywhere at any time.

Using the manual controls, you can move FarmBot and operate its tools and peripherals in real-time. Scare birds away while at work, take photos of your veggies, turn the lights on for a night time harvest, or simply impress your friends and neighbors with a quick demo.

Source: FarmBot | Open-Source CNC Farming