Day: November 17, 2016

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This New iPad App Makes Futuristic 3-D Scans of Your Home

When you attach Occipital’s Structure sensor to your iPad, you get a sense of what Geordi La Forge would look like if he was a tablet. The somewhat bulky 3D-scanning accessory, equipped with an infrared transmitter and sensor, clips onto the top of the iPad and plugs into its Lightning port.

From there, you can use the $380 rig to quickly create 3D scans of anything: Entire rooms, objects you’d like to 3D-print, and environments you’d like to turn into interactive AR backdrops using Occipital’s Bridge Engine. The Structure depth-sensing camera itself has been around for a couple of years, but Occipital’s been hard at work since then making it easier to use.

The result of that work is a new iOS app called Canvas, which lets you sweep the sensor rig across a room to create a raw 3D map of it instantly. The app guides you through a big scan, overlaying already-scanned areas with a paint-like filter to show you if you’ve missed a spot. When you finish capturing, you immediately see a raw 3D model of the scene in the app—and you can also see the distances between objects without having to use a tape measure at all.

But the thousands of measurements Structure makes every second get more useful when you use the Canvas app’s “Scan to CAD” feature. That part isn’t done on the iPad itself—you have to submit your scan via the app for processing by a beefier computer—but it generates a CAD file of that raw scan for hard-core DIY and remodeling projects. Because the infrared sensors on the Structure rig work in tandem with the iPad’s main camera (Occipital recommends its optional $20 wide-angle attachment for the best-quality scans), the CAD conversion is a full-color rendering.

Those CAD files take up to 48 hours to create and get emailed back to your account, but the alternative is usually much more costly in terms of time and money. According to Occipital Labs co-founder Jeff Powers, scanning an eight-room home takes about 30 minutes with Structure, while manual measurements would run around seven hours. Contracting the work would cost close to $2,000, while Occipital charges $29 per room for the “Scan to CAD” feature.

Canvas is the first app Occipital has built for its unique scanner, and the app and the Structure sensor are built specifically for use with the iPad. However, Powers and his team say it’s possible that in the future, the app could work with anything from Project Tango devices to Microsoft’s 3D-scanning tech.

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Helsinki Hopes This App Will Make People Ditch Their Cars

Helsinki, on the southern shore of Finland, has a regional population of 1.2 million. Its transportation options include buses, trams, and a metro, not to mention bike rentals in the summertime—yet plenty of people still use cars.

To encourage more of those drivers to use public transportation, the local government is working with a local tech company’s smartphone app. Called Whim, the app lets people combine public transit with car rentals, ride sharing, taxis, and other private sector services. The ultimate goal is to help the environment and ease congestion by giving residents a way to get around without having to own a car.

The app was made available for test users in October. Before you set out somewhere using Whim, you enter in a destination, and software designs the best route to get you there, whether it’s by bus, train, or car. If you’re happy with the plan, you can approve the trip and it’s automatically paid for. The app currently requires a monthly subscription, but single-trip payment could become an option in the future.

Of Helsinki’s 1.2 million people, 900,000 have used public transportation in the past six months.

Whim will soon become available in additional markets, first in Birmingham, England, possibly later in Toronto or Montreal, and a number of U.S. markets after that, says Sampo Hietanen, CEO of MaaS Global, the company that created the Whim app. (MaaS stands for “mobility as a service,” a term being used for this type of approach.)

In transportation, “we’re very focused on large, capital-intensive, fixed-rate services, and most people don’t live in places where that makes sense,” says David King, a professor of transportation and urban planning at Arizona State University. “We have to come up with flexible transit, multiple strategies of transportation.”  

Helsinki seems a good place to test the idea. It has a high rate of mobile phone use and good digital infrastructure. Public transit use is high, too: of its 1.2 million people, 900,000 have used public transportation at least once in the past six months. Strong government support for the idea has been pivotal, because transportation systems are generally fragmented among different state and city authorities and departments. 

One concern is that apps like these might leave public transit systems without a connection to their customers. Mari Flink, who runs communication and marketing for the Helsinki Transport Authority, notes that Whim—which has financial backing from car manufacturers and dealers—could promote more car sharing and thus decrease the use of public transit. To monitor that, the Helsinki Transport Authority is watching to see how many new users the app brings to public transit.

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Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835 is its first 10-nanometer CPU

Qualcomm has unveiled its next-gen Snapdragon 835 flagship CPU and confirmed rumors that it will be built by Samsung using its 10-nanometer FinFET process. Compared to the current 14-nanometer Snapdragon 821 (also built by Samsung), the new CPU packs 30 percent more parts into the same space, yielding 27 percent better performance while drawing up to 40 percent less power, the company says. It also improved the design, which will yield "significant" improvements to battery life

Other companies, including Intel and TMSC, are working on 10-nanometer chips, but Samsung said it’s the first to start building them. Samsung VP Jong Shik Yoon says "this collaboration is an important milestone for our foundry business," and no doubt a shot of good news to distract from Samsung’s smartphone problems. Qualcomm expects devices with the first Snapdragon 835 processors, possibly including Samsung’s Galaxy S8, to arrive in the first half of 2017. It reportedly has a Snapdragon 830 coming too, but is still mum about that CPU.

The new chip comes with Quick Charge 4, which supports 20 percent faster charging than Qualcomm’s last-gen tech. That, the company says, will give you up to five hours of extra battery life with just a five minute charge. In just 15 minutes, it’ll give Snapdragon 835 phones a half-full battery.

The system uses its "INOV" (Intelligent Negotiation for Optimum Voltge) tech, and says the tech is compatible with Google’s new guidelines for USB Type-C charging. Google previously said that Qualcomm’s Quickcharge 3.0 was not, in effect, compatible with its Nougat specs (above). Mountain View was trying to avoid multiple charge standards that could make it easy to plug the wrong charger into a phone and possibly fry it, or worse, cause a fire or explosion. For instance, OnePlus released a cable that works fine on the OnePlus 2 but can damage other phones or chargers.

However, Qualcomm says its system has "advanced safety features for both the adapter and mobile device." It can gauge current, voltage and temperature to safeguard the battery, cables and connectors. "An additional layer of protection is also being added to help prevent battery overcharging and regulate current throughout every charge cycle," its press release notes.

The addition of "compatibility with USB Power Delivery" means that it should meet Google’s compatibility specs. That’s a good thing, as Google said it may take a harder line on future releases. "While this is called out as ‘STRONGLY RECOMMENDED.’ in future Android versions we might REQUIRE all type-C devices to support full interoperability with standard type-C chargers," its spec says (emphasis theirs).

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