Google’s entire Home infrastructure has suffered a serious outage, with millions of customers on Wednesday morning complaining that their smart devices have stopped working.

At the time of writing, the cloud-connected gadgets are still hosed, the service is still down, and the system appears to have been knackered for at least the past 10 hours. The clobbbered gizmos can’t respond to voice commands, can’t control other stuff in your home, and so on.

Chromecasts can’t stream video, and Home speakers respond to commands with: “Sorry, something went wrong. Try again in a few seconds.”

Users in Google’s home state of California started complaining that their Google Home, Mini, and Chromecast devices were not working properly around midnight Pacific Time on Tuesday, and the issue cropped up in every country in which the Google Home devices are sold.

But it was only when the United States started waking up on Wednesday morning – the US has the vast majority of Google Home devices – that the reports started flooding in, pointing to an outage of the entire system.

Google has confirmed the devices are knackered, but has so far provided no other information, saying only that it is investigating the issue.

[…]

Updated to add

Google has issued the following statement:

We’re aware of an issue affecting some Google Home and Chromecast users. Some users are back online and we are working on a broader fix for all affected users. We will continue to keep our customers updated.

The web giant then followed up with more details – try rebooting to pick up a software fix, or wait up to six hours to get the update:

We’ve identified a fix for the issue impacting Google Home and Chromecast users and it will be automatically rolled out over the next 6 hours. If you would like an immediate fix please follow the directions to reboot your device. If you’re still experiencing an issue after rebooting, contact us at Google Home Support. We are really sorry for the inconvenience and are taking steps to prevent this issue from happening in the future.

Source: Not OK Google: Massive outage turns smart home kit utterly dumb • The Register

Building on the technology that debuted with Kinect and became a core part of HoloLens, Project Kinect for Azure combines Microsoft’s next-generation depth camera with the power of Azure services to enable new scenarios for developers working with ambient intelligence. This technology will transform AI on the edge with spatial, human, and object understanding, increasing efficiency and unlocking new possibilities.

everage capabilities like spatial mapping, segmentation, and human and object recognition to enable:

• Azure end-points
• Robotics and drones
• Holoportation and telepresence
• Object capture and reconstruction

Hardware features:

• 1MP depth camera
• 4K RGB camera
• 360° microphone array

Source: Perception-powered intelligent edge dev kits

Some smartwatches come with powerful processors, lots of storage, and robust software, but have limited capabilities compared to smartphones thanks to their tiny touchscreens. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, however, have now created a smartwatch prototype with a built-in projector that turns the wearer’s arm into a smartphone-sized touchscreen.

Despite what you may have seen on crowdfunding sites, the LumiWatch is the first smartwatch to integrate a fully-functional laser projector and sensor array, allowing a screen projected on a user’s skin to be poked, tapped, and swiped just like a traditional touchscreen. It seems like a gadget straight out of science fiction, but don’t reach for your credit card just yet, because it’s going to be a very long time before the technology created for this research project ends up in a consumer-ready device.

Source: The World’s First Working Projector Smartwatch Turns Your Arm Into a Big Touchscreen

The second generation of a deciwatt gravity-powered lamp designed by the British industrial designers behind the Psion computer keyboard was launched today.

Few innovations we cover can claim to save lives, but this just might be one of them. The $5 Gravity Light, designed by London’s Therefore Inc, offers the world’s poorest a clean alternative to burning kerosene or biomass for lighting or radios.

The clever bit is a winch that unwinds incredibly slowly, but steadily enough to provide a low but usable voltage. The lamp was first featured here in 2012.

The second generation adds solar power and a rechargeable battery. The latter may be surprising – co-designer Jim Reeves said short-lived and costly rechargeable batteries were far from ideal. But things change, and the ability to store the energy is useful.

Source: Grab your lamp, you’ve pulled: Brits punt life-saving gravity-powered light

Today, we are pleased to announce that anyone can now build their own Things Gateway to control their connected device directly from the web.

We kicked off “Project Things”, with the goal of building a decentralized ‘Internet of Things’ that is focused on security, privacy, and interoperability. Since our announcement last year, we have continued to engage in open and collaborative development with a community of makers, testers, contributors, and end-users, to build the foundation for this future.

Today’s launch makes it easy for anyone with a Raspberry Pi to build their own Things Gateway. In addition to web-based commands and controls, a new experimental feature shows off the power and ease of using voice-based commands. We believe this is the most natural way for users to interact with their smart home. Getting started is easy, and we recommend checking out this tutorial to get connected.
[…]
Built for everyone

If you have been following our progress with Project Things, you’ll know that up to now, it was only really accessible to those with a good amount of technical knowledge. With today’s release, we have made it easy for anyone to get started on building their own Things Gateway to control their devices. We take care of the complicated stuff so that you can focus on the fun stuff such as automation, ‘if this, then that’ rules, adding a greater variety of devices, and more.

Source: Announcing “Project Things” – An open framework for connecting your devices to the web. – The Mozilla Blog

So when you fall over the cable, it just unplugs instead of making your laptop, lamp, whatever, fall over

Source: TUG – ILOVEHANDLES

In December, I converted my one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco into a “smart home.” I connected as many of my appliances and belongings as I could to the internet: an Amazon Echo, my lights, my coffee maker, my baby monitor, my kid’s toys, my vacuum, my TV, my toothbrush, a photo frame, a sex toy, and even my bed.

Source: The House That Spied on Me

It’s a good story on the privacy and especially the practicality of living in a smart home.

I recognise quite a lot in that much of it is quite a bit of hassle, especially trying to get it working the way you want it to!

Amazon.com: Dr.meter Wifi Endoscope, 2.0 Megapixels HD Digital Inspection Camera with 5 Meters(16.4ft) Cable and 8 LEDs in the Camera Handheld Borescope Supports Windows iOS and Android System: Camera & Photo

Source: Amazon.com: Dr.meter Wifi Endoscope, 2.0 Megapixels HD Digital Inspection Camera with 5 Meters(16.4ft) Cable and 8 LEDs in the Camera Handheld Borescope Supports Windows iOS and Android System: Camera & Photo

The thing that always rubbed me the wrong way about Google Glass though, was how after an underwhelming debut, the company seemingly forgot about its moonshot tech. The only thing that remains of the project are enterprise-only models focused more on assisting business complete specialized tasks than expanding the tech as a whole.

It’s a shame because if Google had continued to develop the Glass, we might not have had to wait as long for something like the Vuzix Blade. Sporting a tiny DLP projector that spits images onto its full color see-through display, the Blade’s uses waveguide optics to project a tiny display onto the right lens of some surprisingly normal-looking glasses.

In addition to the Blade’s innovative display, it also has everything it needs to function as a standalone wearable, complete with a built-in CPU running a customized version of Android, 8-MP camera, 4GB of storage and a microSD card slot, wi-fi, and a mic and touchpad for controlling the device.
[…]
Controlling it is a cinch too. A two-finger swipe on the touchpad built into the right side of the glasses takes you to the home screen, while a one finger swipe advances you through UI, with a single-tap used for making selections.

From there, you can pair the Blade with your phone, which makes it easy to check your messages, view directions or even take first-person photos or videos, using either the touchpad or voice commands. But that’s not all, because in addition to Vuzix’s homemade smartphone companion app, the Blade also sports built-in Alexa integration. So if you want to ask about the weather without pulling out your phone? No problem. How about controlling smart home devices like lights or your thermostat? That’s easy too.

Source: The Vuzix Blade Is What Google Glass Always Wanted to Be

Magic Leap today revealed a mixed reality headset that it believes reinvents the way people will interact with computers and reality. Unlike the opaque diver’s masks of virtual reality – which replace the real world with a virtual one – Magic Leap’s device, called Lightwear, resembles goggles, which you can see through as if you’re wearing a special pair of glasses. The goggles are tethered to a powerful pocket-sized computer, called the Lightpack, and can inject life-like moving and reactive people, robots, spaceships – anything – into a person’s view of the real world.
[…]
Where the 1830s technology uses two flat images, virtual reality essentially uses two screens. Abovitz thought there had to be a better way. He was uninterested in improving virtual reality; instead, he sought a better way to create images that can be placed into a person’s view of the real world. In short, he was interested in mixed reality.
[…]
The first was something called the analog light field signal. The light field is essentially all of the light bouncing off all of the objects in a world. When you take a picture, you’re capturing a very thin slice of that light field. The eye, however, sees much more of that light field, allowing a person to perceive depth, movement and a lot of other visual subtleties. The other thing that Abovitz wanted to figure out was how that light field signal makes its way into your brain through the eye and into the visual cortex.“The world you perceive is actually built in your visual cortex,” he says. “The idea is that your visual cortex and a good part of the brain is like a rendering engine and that the world you see outside is being rendered by roughly a 100 trillion neural-connections.”
[…]
technology didn’t need to capture the entirety of the light field and recreate it; it just needed to grab the right bits of that light field and feed it to the visual cortex through the eye. Abovitz calls it a system engineering view of the brain. “Our thought was, if we could figure out this signal and or approximate it, maybe it would be really cool to encode that into a wafer,” he says. “That we could make a small wafer that could emit the digital light field signal back through the front again. That was the key idea.”

Suddenly, Abovitz went from trying to solve the problem to needing to engineer the solution. He was sure if they could create a chip that would deliver the right parts of a light field to the brain, he could trick it into thinking it was seeing real things that weren’t there. The realization meant that they were trying to get rid of the display and just use what humans already have. “There were two core zen ideas: The no-display-is-the-best-display and what’s-outside-is-actually-inside. And they turned out to be, at least from what we’ve seen so far, completely true. Everything you think is outside of you is completely rendered internally by you, co-created by you plus the analog light field signal.
[…]
The light field photonics, which can line up a fake reality in your natural light real one, may be the most obvious of the innovations on display, but there’s much more. The visual perception system is actively tracking the world you’re moving through, noting things like flat surfaces, walls, objects. The result is a headset that sees what you do, and that can then have its creations behave appropriately, whether that means hanging a mixed reality monitor next to your real one, or making sure the floating fish in your living room don’t drift through a couch. That room mapping is also used to keep track of the things you place in your world so they’re there waiting for you when you come back. Line up six monitors above your desk and go to sleep, the next day they’ll be exactly where you left them.

Source: Lightwear: Introducing Magic Leap’s Mixed Reality Goggles – Rolling Stone

Well I don’t like the design language much, but it does look a lot better (and lighter!) than the VR stuff out there

Gemini brings the Psion Series 5 design into the 21st century. Psion’s designer, Martin Riddiford of Therefore, has devised a new keyboard and hinge, which allows the machine to spring open and snap shut, just like Psions used to, and stand firmly on a flat surface without keeling over. Inside is a full phone board, MediaTek’s 10-core chip.It dual boots between Android – yes, with full Google Play Services – and Linux.

Source: How’s this for a stocking filler next year? El Reg catches up with Gemini • The Register

In a paper published on Thursday in the journal Optica, Duke professors Daniel Marks and David R. Smith, and postdoctoral researcher Okan Yurduseven describe a method for through-wall imaging (TWI) that compensates for the varied distortion produced by different wall materials, to allow details to be captured more accurately.

Source: Looking through walls, now easier than ever • The Register

Life has changed since 2007 and 2012 so it’s time for a rundown of modern systems!

For around $400,- you get Navdy, which takes some time to set up but offers the best solution for sale at the moment. It has map navigation, notifications, direct sunlight, hand gestures and control button on the steering wheel. You can answer calls, set up your music, etc. It’s well thought out and works best with you smartphone connected. It’s clearly visible in sunlight. It has it’s own screen through which you look.

homepage

amazon product page

Garmin has one which is way more basic, but also way cheaper at $150,-. It works with Garmin Streetpilot or Navigon apps for navigation. Also clearly visible in sunlight and has a reflector lens or can project onto a sticker on your windshield.

Garmin site + buy it

For around EUR 45,- you can buy an A8 system. It’s a bit more limited in it’s display (no navigation) and projects onto your windshield, which means you need to place a sticker in order to see it properly in daylight. For the price though, you can’t complain!

Megagadgets

Amazon

The we have the category: put your smartphone in it and project onto our little screen. Hudway Glass is an example of this. At $50,- they are clearly overpriced (and you can buy them cheaper om Amazon!) and you also need HUD software for it (if you have an iphone look at Atoll Ordenadores with ASmartHud+ and many others).

Hudway Glass

There are two promising pre-orders out there:

Exploride can be pre-ordered for $300 and will be produced for $500. This is a complete unit with its’ own screen and connects to you smartphone for lots of functionality

Carloudy which is an e-ink wireless HUD that connects to your smartphone. It has a voice command interface. It looks like it reflects onto a windshield sticker You can sign into the public beta in the US now for $260,-

Finally the Continental HUD as used in Mercedes, Audi and BMW. The information is very basic but the visibility is great from all angles.

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

MIT researchers and their colleagues are designing an imaging system that can read closed books.

In the latest issue of Nature Communications, the researchers describe a prototype of the system, which they tested on a stack of papers, each with one letter printed on it. The system was able to correctly identify the letters on the top nine sheets.

“The Metropolitan Museum in New York showed a lot of interest in this, because they want to, for example, look into some antique books that they don’t even want to touch,”
[..]
The system uses terahertz radiation, the band of electromagnetic radiation between microwaves and infrared light, which has several advantages over other types of waves that can penetrate surfaces, such as X-rays or sound waves. Terahertz radiation has been widely researched for use in security screening, because different chemicals absorb different frequencies of terahertz radiation to different degrees, yielding a distinctive frequency signature for each. By the same token, terahertz frequency profiles can distinguish between ink and blank paper, in a way that X-rays can’t.

Terahertz radiation can also be emitted in such short bursts that the distance it has traveled can be gauged from the difference between its emission time and the time at which reflected radiation returns to a sensor. That gives it much better depth resolution than ultrasound.

The system exploits the fact that trapped between the pages of a book are tiny air pockets only about 20 micrometers deep. The difference in refractive index — the degree to which they bend light — between the air and the paper means that the boundary between the two will reflect terahertz radiation back to a detector.

Source: Judging a book through its cover | MIT News

Researchers have developed a new design for harvesting body heat and converting it into electricity for use in wearable electronics. The experimental prototypes are lightweight, conform to the shape of the body, and can generate far more electricity than previous lightweight heat harvesting technologies

Source: Lightweight, wearable tech efficiently converts body heat to electricity — ScienceDaily

When plugged into a device, the USB Killer rapidly charges its capacitors from the USB power lines. When the device is charged, -200VDC is discharged over the data lines of the host device. This charge/discharge cycle is repeated many times per second, until the USB Killer is removed. Simply put: used on unprotected equipment, the USB Killer instantly and permanently disables unprotected hardware.

Source: USB Killer – ESD Tester to test and disable USB devices

The Kickstarter project allready has $1.5m of the $50k goal invested.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andromium/the-superbook-turn-your-smartphone-into-a-laptop-f

At the time most people didn’t ‘get’ the Palm Foleo – this has always been a bit of a problem for Palm: they were always too far ahead of the curve, allowing companies like Apple to steal their brilliant ideas and polish them up a little (well, ok, a lot!).

Anyway, the Foleo
some info here

Now a fast, simple, no-contact gesture yields the most precise temperature possible, and automatic sync with the dedicated app also allows you to track temperature readings, get reminders, and input related symptoms/medications right on your smartphone.

Source: Thermo

n the project video, a finger swipes and pokes at skin like it’s a touchscreen. As the finger navigates a hairy forearm, a cursor reacts to the movement on the smartwatch screen. There’s no projection and little lag between the finger’s movement and movement on the screen.[…] the researchers developed a ring that sends a high-frequency alternating-current signal into your finger. When your finger touches or hovers above your arm, that signal propagates outward along your skin to a wristband embedded with electrodes. By measuring something called phase difference, which this technology does by comparing the times at which the oscillating signal arrives at two pairs of electrodes, SkinTrack can determine the position of your finger with impressive accuracy.

Source: SkinTrack Turns Your Arm Into a Touchpad. Here’s How It Works

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/blips/blips?ref=project_link

Benson Leung, an engineer on Google’s Pixel team, was doing God’s work by risking his Chromebook Pixel, which charges via USB-C, to test every single USB-C to USB-A cord available to general consumers. One crappy cord, and his $1500 computer would be fried.

Source: Cheap USB-C Cables Could Kill Your Phone or Laptop

There’s a link to a spreadsheet of all his reviews here

The all-new Axis VIDIUS Drone is the World’s Smallest First Person View Drone™, capable of flying up to 100 feet away, performing 360 degree flips and rolls all while streaming and recording live video! You can control the VIDIUS from your Android or Apple device or the included 2.4 gHz controller. The live video feed is transmitted to your device through a wifi connection and can be recorded and shared right from the free VIDIUS Drone App to social media, blogs, messaging, email and more!

FEATURES:

World’s Smallest FPV Drone™ – 4.3cm x 4.3cm x 2.5cm
Live First Person View Video Camera Puts You in The Pilots Seat!
Control Flight with Included 2.4 gHz Controller, Smartphone or Tablet
Stream and Record Live Video & Still Images in 420p During Flight!
5-7 Minute Flight Time per 20 Minute Charge via USB Cable; 150 mAh Battery
3-Speeds Pre-programmed for Desired Level of Flight Sensitivity
6-Axis Gyro Stabilization Keeps Drone Stable and Centered
360 Degree Rotational Yaw Allows Users to Seamlessly Adjust Orientation
Pre-Programmed “Trick Mode” Algorithm Provides Amazing Flips and Rolls!
Bright LED Colored Lights for Night Flight and Drone Orientation
Super small and lightweight, NO FAA Registration Required!

Source: Axis VIDIUS ™ – The World’s Smallest FPV Drone™