In the past, we’ve seen keyboards that are protected on flat surfaces using a red outline of a traditional keyboard. Samsung has unveiled something at CES 2020 that is similar, but different at the same time. The new feature is called SelfieType.
SelfieType is software that uses the front-facing selfie cam or a smartphone, tablet, or laptop to create an invisible keyboard users can type on. The tech uses a proprietary AI engine that can analyze the finger movements and interpret them as a valid keypress.
The only issue we see is that you will need to be a touch typist to get any benefit from the feature. To use Samsung’s system, the front-facing camera only needs to be angled down towards the hands reports TechSpot.
The other issue that some users will have is that there is no haptic feedback. That means no vibration or sound when you press a key. Some may not find that an issue. It’s cool to have another alternative to type on your smartphone.
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These are the vintage comic book covers imagined by artist and Instagrammer dvglzv for each of the eight episodes in the first season of The Mandalorian. Pretty sweet, right? I love the vintage feel. Like in general, that’s why I still wear the same clothes I have been my whole life. Plus, you know– "The last time I tried to take him shopping he set a fire in the mall." Honey! "What?" That case hasn’t been settled yet.
Keep going for the rest, but dvglzv has a small gallery of each with closeups on Instagrammers.
Thanks to Milad, who, unfortunately, refused to share his Disney+ password with me.
via Geekologie – Gadgets, Gizmos, and Awesome https://geekologie.com/
Progress isn’t always positive. Although the occupants of modern cars are undeniably safer in a crash than they would be in models just a few years old, that’s not true for people using Shank’s pony. Overall, fewer people died on America’s roads in 2018 (the last year for which full data is available) than the year before—some 36,600 in total. But concealed within that figure is a big rise in the number of pedestrians who were killed by drivers—6,283 in all, an increase of 3.4 percent on 2017.
Obviously there’s no single cause to which we can point. More than three-quarters of pedestrians were killed after dark, and a similar percentage were killed while crossing a road, but Americans’ antisocial love for big SUVs
when it comes to shrinking that body count. We could implement far stricter driver training and significantly beef up traffic law enforcement, but only the most naive optimists think there’s any actual possibility of that happening any time soon.
Pedestrian detection is increasingly a component of the advanced driver assistance systems that are fitted to some new cars, but independent testing suggests you probably don’t want to rely on these to save your life. Meanwhile, some are hoping that another technology can save us through deployment of what’s known as Vehicle-to-Pedestrian (V2P). V2P is related to the Vehicle-to-Vehicle communication protocol, a protocol that after 20 years has yet to be deployed and is now the subject of a bitter fight among regulators and interest groups over its allocated 5.9GHz bandwidth. But not all Vehicle-to-whatever communication needs to use dedicated short-range communications (DSRC); in the past we’ve reported on a compatible cellular approach, called C-V2X.
It’s this approach that some technology companies hope will make future years safer for those of us who walk places. At CES this year, Harman unveiled its new V2P system, which uses low latency 5G peer-to-peer signals to detect objects—or more specifically a smartphone (and therefore the person carrying it) in a vehicle’s path. And the pedestrian (or cyclist) also receives an alert—helpful for those 76 percent of pedestrian deaths that happen in low-light situations.
Similarly, the mapping company Here is collaborating with Verizon to do something similar with a Vehicle-to-Network system that leverages 5G (as well as Here’s HD maps and computer vision technology) to predict vehicle travel paths and then warn drivers of impending collisions.
Truth be told, none of this is particularly novel; in 2015
, the University of Michigan’s outdoor research lab for new vehicle technologies. But it
might
finally be getting ready for the real world—a company called Savari announced at CES this week that its SmartCross V2P system is going to be deployed by the New York City Department of Transportation as part of that city’s Vision Zero. Savari’s app is integrated into NYCDOT’s traffic management system, and it says it “provides critical information regarding the intersection geometry and traffic light status to pedestrians who may otherwise be distracted,” as well as alerting V2X-enabled vehicles of their presence.
Of course, the simplest solution would be for everyone—drivers and pedestrians—to be alert to their surroundings and not buried in their phones while driving or walking. We can but hope.
LG’s rollable 65-inch OLED TV, which first debuted at CES 2019, is once again on display at CES 2020. The screen, which can be rolled up into its own base when it’s not being used, is pretty incredible–and CNET has learned when it’s coming and how much it will cost. It’s called the OLED TV R.
The rollable television, which was also shown as a drop-down model during CES 2020 (which is a concept design and might not actually release), will apparently cost $60,000 when it ships this year between April and September. LG representatives at CES 2020 said that pricing “isn’t finalized,” but CNET received this figure from JS Lee, head of global marketing for LG home entertainment.
The television, which has been tested for up to 50,000 rolls, can be partially unfurled and display in “line mode” too, as seen below. The TV can also play music with the screen fully covered, and will sync with a phone via Bluetooth.
The television works by fixing the OLED screen to thin horizontal bars that are risen by a pair of arms at the back, allowing the screen to appear solid when it’s fully unfurled. It is covered by a standard TV warranty, but according to CNET, the display unit did not show any signs of wear or stress.
You’ll be able to pick up the LG Signature OLED TV R later this year, but only if you can afford such an expensive, fancy television.
Elsewhere at CES 2020, Sony unveiled the logo for the PlayStation 5 for the first time. By the end of 2020, you’ll be able to play PlayStation 5 on the OLED TV R.
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No, that’s not a Razer Phone 3 in the photo, but it’s a Pixel 3a XL wedged between two halves of a new Razer gamepad. Following the Junglecat, Razer chose CES to launch the Kishi controller, which plugs straight into your Android (via USB-C) or iPhone for lower latency and hence faster response. Obviously, this can be life or death in world of competitive mobile gaming, especially with cloud gaming being pitched as a growing trend in the 5G era. On a similar note, the Kishi provides passthrough charging at the bottom right side, so you wouldn’t have to worry about battery life while busy shooting at enemies.
The Kishi comes with a "universal fit" thanks to its Gamevice belt on the back, which stretches to accommodate XL-sized Pixels, most Samsung phones as well as iPhone 7 and beyond. In theory, any recent phone with a USB-C socket or Lightning port positioned in the middle should be compatible (so that’s a no-go for my ROG Phone II). When you’re done with the controller, the belt can be tucked away to let the two halves click together — the process of which I found to be a little fiddly. But then again, I was a little jet-lagged as well.
To my surprise, the Pixel 3a XL was running Gears 5 over Project Xcloud (and over slow hotel WiFi), but apart from a few minor hiccups, both the stream and the controls felt fine with no noticeable latency. Still, I wish I had tried a different game over a more solid Internet connection just to be sure. As far as build quality goes, it was just as nice as any other Razer input peripheral I’d come across, and I appreciated the ergonomically shaped handles.
The Kishi will be launching some time in 1Q 2020. While the price is yet to be determined, we were told that it’ll be similar to the $100 Junglecat.
When you plug your phone in at bedtime and let it charge all night, there’s a chance that your phone could “overcharge” and reduce the lifespan of your battery. That sucks, especially since phones are getting more expensive and we are all hanging on to them for longer and longer periods of time. To help, OnePlus is planning to introduce a software feature called Optimized Charging.
With Optimized Charging, your phone will recognize your night time charging pattern, charge your phone in the middle of the night to 80%, then pause from finishing up the rest of the charge. Looking at your wake patterns, Optimized Charging will fire up the final 20% charge within 100 minutes of when you typically wake up to make sure you are at 100%.
That’s pretty cool, right?
OnePlus didn’t say when we might get Optimized Charging or which phones will support it. They did say that you’ll be able to turn it off or on by opening the settings app, tapping Battery, and then looking for Optimized Charging. There will be a shortcut to toggle this off and on in the notification drop down too, as well as special battery icons to let you know when your charging is being optimized.
They also said that in the future, Optimized Charging will be able to recognize a changing sleep cycle, like weekends or if you were to change time zones.
We’ll let you know if/when this new feature arrivecs.
The wildfires currently tearing through Australia aren’t just unprecedented—they’re catastrophic, as one fire researcher put it. Climate change and fierce heat waves have dried the landscape into swaths of tinder, and all it takes is a single spark to unleash wildfires so powerful, they create their own weather.
Researchers have been catching Australia’s fires in the act of producing pyrocumulonimbus clouds, or pyroCbs. These ominous phenomena take two ingredients: a mass of hot air that produces an updraft, in this case columns of smoke-filled air. And two, they need an unstable atmospheric environment that allows the updraft to continue rising higher than it otherwise would, says Scott Bachmeier, a research meteorologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. As the mass climbs higher, the smoky air cools and forms into a pyrocumulonimbus cloud, a soup of water and smoke particles towering miles into the sky. (Though to be clear, the cloud itself isn’t on fire.)
Video: Scott Bachmeier/University of Wisconsin-Madison
If you take a look at the GIF above, you can see two pyroCbs sprouting, captured by satellite in the infrared spectrum. In the top panel we see the fires, and the bottom panel shows cloud-top temperatures. Red pixels indicate the heat of the wildfire, whereas violet indicates a cloud-top temperature of -70 degrees C. The colder it is, the higher the altitude. The low temperatures reveal that a pyroCb is soaring into the sky.
And another one forming here.
Video: Scott Bachmeier/University of Wisconsin-Madison
For hundreds of millions of years, thunderclouds and their lightning have been natural partners to fire. Any wildfire is likely to spread when strong surface winds carry embers perhaps miles ahead. “But what’s carried aloft by the pyroCb updraft are copious amounts of smoke particles, which then get carried up to or even ejected above the pyroCb cloud top,” says Bachmeier. If wildfires are sprouting pyroCbs that strike the landscape with lightning without also dumping water, the conflagration will spread all the more readily.
