For decades, the smart home has been a mainstay in pop culture, from Disney's 1999 flick "Smart House," in which an artificially intelligent home takes on the personality of a domineering mother, to the retro high-tech home of "The Jetsons." The 1960s cartoon offered a view of domestic life a century later, from a grooming room that combs your hair and brushes your teeth, to the ever-attentive and overworked Rosie, the robot maid.
Some of the Jetsons' housewares and furnishings, such as the bed that ejected the occupant like a piece of toast, are still a pipe dream. But 60 years later, we've got their smart watches and (comparatively primitive) digital assistants.
In our homes, devices like Google Nest identify friends or strangers at the door, while Philips Hue lights can be programmed to shift their color based on our circadian clocks. When we plan meals for the week, Samsung's Family Hub refrigerator photographs what's left in the fridge and makes suggestions based on our diets. If there are unusual sounds in our homes (like the cat lazily knocking a drinking glass to the floor), Amazon's Alexa alerts us. In 2020, Samsung also teased a forthcoming robot companion named Ballie, that can roll around like BB-8 from "Star Wars" and help operate our smart home devices.
For the most part, we still explicitly direct our devices on how best to serve us, but that's about to change, according to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor Joseph A. Paradiso, who directs the MIT Media Lab's Responsive Environments group.
https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/goo ... id-4139289May 21, 2021
Google, Amazon and Apple are among the tech giants pioneering an effort to ensure smart home products share an infrastructure that’ll work across platforms.
The new Matter standard will mean those smartening up their homes won’t need to be so concerned about whether the product supports the individual protocols that underpin the major platforms. The overall goal is to boost interoperability among the best smart home devices making it into people’s domiciles.
The hope is that the standard will make it easier for third-party manufacturers to make products that support Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google’s Assistant, as well as any emerging voice assistants. The alliance says it wants reliable and secure smart home tech that will enable devices to “work seamlessly together today and tomorrow.” It says it has support from across the industry and Samsung’s SmartThings will also be adopting the standard.
Android Matter
During Google I/O, the company revealed it is bringing the Matter protocol – launching later this year – to Nest and Android, with the company saying it’ll be easier and faster to set-up and pair new devices and link others. As well as that, Google is ensuring devices like the Nest Wi-Fi, Nest Hub (2nd-gen) and Nest Hub Max, as well as the thermostats and smart speakers will act as Matter ‘hubs’.
https://advanced-television.com/2021/05 ... -channels/Disney is set to close 100 of its cable television channels this year as it continues its move towards a streaming future.
Speaking at JPMorgan’s annual Global Technology, Media, and Telecommunications Conference, The Walt Disney Company’s Chief Executive, Bob Chapek, revealed the plans to shut down the international channels in favour of placing its Disney+ streaming service at the forefront.
He added that “when the time is right to really stomp on the gas”, the Disney will “go even stronger into our direct-to-consumer platforms for sports”.
“We closed 30 channels in Fiscal Year 2020 or in 2020. We plan to close 100 in 2021,” Chapek said. “We will continue at a robust rate […] the great majority of that content will migrate to Disney+. The decisions that we make in individual channels and individual markets, and the timing of such, are sort of framed up by existing deals […] some of the constraints we’ve got there. But as you can see, that continues to be a core strategy for us as we pivot toward direct-to-consumer.”
https://www.chron.com/business/article/ ... 212247.phpMay 29, 2021
Maintaining landscaping in the face of droughts has gotten more difficult for homeowners, especially those in heavy-hit areas like California. About 60,000 gallons of water are wasted on outdoor use per home due to issues like inefficient, overlapping sprinkler systems, and in high water cost areas those homeowners spend between $600-$1,200 a year on wasted water. That spells bad news for drought-ridden areas and homeowner's wallets.
But as technology gets smarter, so do options for watering a lawn. Irrigreen is the smart, digital sprinkler system that cuts water usage and water bills up to 50 percent. As homeowners look for a way around waste and high water usage, Irrigreen offers them a system that could disrupt the $6 billion landscaping industry with a smart, thriftier way to keep landscaping lush and water bills low.
Investors took notice as this green company made a splash on the smart home tech market. Silicon Valley investors have put up $4.9 million already. With more than 340 installations since launch plus six issued patents, Irrigreen is looking to expand with backing from sharp-eyed tech investors.
While the fabrics we wear today might keep us warm and protect us from the elements, scientists continue to demonstrate how they might soon do far more than that. MIT scientist Yoel Fink has been at the cutting edge of this field for more than a decade and has just made a significant breakthrough, demonstrating the first ever digital fabric-fiber that can store and process information, among other some other exciting functions.
From stretchable fabrics that power wearables with sweat, to shirts that harvest energy from movement, and weavable LED fibers that could form wearable displays, the field of smart textiles is one brimming with exciting possibilities. Fink and his colleagues demonstrated an interesting one way back in 2010, developing fibers that detect sound and can be woven into fabric to turn it into a sensitive microphone.
Fink's team has now broken further ground in this area. They describe the electronic fibers that have been developed so far as analog, in that they can carry a continuous electrical signal but not digital information, which would be processed in 0s and 1s. To bring this kind of capability to textile fibers, the MIT team had to get creative.
An international group of researchers has developed a new technique that could be used to make more efficient low-cost light-emitting materials which are flexible and can be printed using ink-jet techniques.
The researchers, led by the University of Cambridge and the Technical University of Munich, found that by swapping one out of every one thousand atoms of one material for another, they were able to triple the luminescence of a new material class of light emitters known as halide perovskites.
This 'atom swapping', or doping, causes the charge carriers to get stuck in a specific part of the material's crystal structure, where they recombine and emit light. The results, reported in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, could be useful for low-cost printable and flexible LED lighting, displays for smartphones or cheap lasers.
Purdue University engineers have developed a method to transform existing cloth items into battery-free wearables resistant to laundry. These smart clothes are powered wirelessly through a flexible, silk-based coil sewn on the textile.
In the near future, all your clothes will become smart. These smart cloths will outperform conventional passive garments, thanks to their miniaturized electronic circuits and sensors, which will allow you to seamlessly communicate with your phone, computer, car and other machines. This smart clothing will not only make you more productive but also check on your health status and even call for help if you suffer an accident. The reason why this smart clothing is not all over your closet yet is that the fabrication of this smart clothing is quite challenging, as clothes need to be periodically washed and electronics despise water.
(MSN) A class action lawsuit has been filed in the 11th Circuit Court against the Champlain Towers South Condominium Association in Surfside by a resident who owns property in the building, the first suit filed after Thursday's partial collapse that left at least four people dead.
The lawsuit was filed by the Brad Sohn Law Firm, on behalf of plaintiff Manuel Drezner and "others similarly situated" at 11:29 p.m. on Thursday evening, hours after the partial collapse of the 12-story condo building in the town of Surfside.
The suit seeks $5 million in damages "due to Defendant's acts and omissions and their failure to properly protect the lives and property of Plaintiff and Class members."
The lawsuit continues saying that the condo association "disregarded the rights of Plaintiff and Class members by intentionally, willfully, recklessly, or negligently doing the following: failing to take adequate and reasonable measures to ensure the safety and protection of its residents and their property, failing to disclose to its residents and visitors that it did not have adequate safety measures in place to safeguard occupants of Champlain Towers South, failing to take available steps to prevent the catastrophic collapse of the building, and failing to monitor the building and activities that led to the collapse of the building, among other things."
The cause of the collapse remains under investigation and officials say it will likely take months before we know the actual cause.
A new electrode that could free up 20% more light from organic light-emitting diodes has been developed at the University of Michigan. It could help extend the battery life of smartphones and laptops, or make next-gen televisions and displays much more energy efficient.
The approach prevents light from being trapped in the light-emitting part of an OLED, enabling OLEDs to maintain brightness while using less power. In addition, the electrode is easy to fit into existing processes for making OLED displays and light fixtures.
"With our approach, you can do it all in the same vacuum chamber," said L. Jay Guo, U-M professor of electrical and computer engineering and corresponding author of the study.
Unless engineers take action, about 80% of the light produced by an OLED gets trapped inside the device. It does this due to an effect known as waveguiding. Essentially, the light rays that don't come out of the device at an angle close to perpendicular get reflected back and guided sideways through the device. They end up lost inside the OLED.
Putting the last piece of a project together and finally finishing it up is a satisfying feeling. When the last piece of a puzzle like that is a literal puzzle, though, it’s even better. [Nadieh] has been working on this jigsaw puzzle that displays a fireworks-like effect whenever a piece is placed correctly, using a lot of familiar electronics and some unique, well-polished design.
The puzzle is a hexagonal shape and based on a hexagonally symmetric spirograph, with the puzzle board placed into an enclosure which houses all of the electronics. Each puzzle piece has a piece of copper embedded in a unique location so when it is placed on the board, the device can tell if it was placed properly or not. If it was, an array of color LEDs mounted beneath a translucent diffuser creates a lighting effect that branches across the entire board like an explosion. The large number of pieces requires a multiplexer for the microcontroller, an ATtiny3216.
Imagine sitting out in the sun, reading a digital screen as thin as paper, but seeing the same image quality as if you were indoors. Thanks to research from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, it could soon be a reality. A new type of reflective screen – sometimes described as ‘electronic paper’ – offers optimal colour display, while using ambient light to keep energy consumption to a minimum.
Traditional digital screens use a backlight to illuminate the text or images displayed upon them. This is fine indoors, but we’ve all experienced the difficulties of viewing such screens in bright sunshine. Reflective screens, however, attempt to use the ambient light, mimicking the way our eyes respond to natural paper.
“For reflective screens to compete with the energy-intensive digital screens that we use today, images and colours must be reproduced with the same high quality. That will be the real breakthrough. Our research now shows how the technology can be optimised, making it attractive for commercial use,” says Marika Gugole, Doctoral Student at the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Chalmers University of Technology.
https://gizmodo.com/in-2030-you-wont-ow ... 18471765407/06/21
Owning things used to be simple. You went to the store. You paid money for something, whether it be a TV, clothes, books, toys, or electronics. You took your item home, and once you paid it off, that thing belonged to you. It was yours. You could do whatever you wanted with it. That’s not how it is today, and by 2030, technology will have advanced to the point that even the idea of owning objects might be obsolete.
Many a think piece has been written about how Millennials aren’t as interested in owning things as their predecessors. After decades of Boomers keeping up with the Joneses, Millennials were supposedly “more about the experience” than physical goods. There’s a kernel of truth in that, but the shift to services was telegraphed a long time ago.
Back in 2016, the World Economic Forum released a Facebook video with eight predictions it had for the world in 2030. “You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy,” it says. “Whatever you want, you’ll rent. And it’ll be delivered by drone.”
“Everything you considered a product, has now become a service,” reads another WEF essay published on Forbes. “We have access to transportation, accommodation, food, and all the things we need in our daily lives. One by one all these things became free, so it ended up not making sense for us to own much.”
The WEF’s framing is overly optimistic, but this is the future we’re rapidly hurtling toward. I rent my apartment, and therefore, all the home appliances in it. If I wanted, I could rent all my furniture and clothes. Sure, I have my own computer and phone, but there are plenty of people who use company-issued gadgets. And if I didn’t want company-issued items, I could always rely on electronics rentals. I like cooking and grocery shopping, but I could just sign up for a meal kit service and call it a day. I wouldn’t even need appliances like toasters, rice cookers, blenders, air fryers, or anything beyond a microwave. To get around, there are Citi Bikes, Uber, and Zipcar.
We are really living now in a world full of collecting data even our fabrics! Privacy nows pays a lot.weatheriscool wrote: ↑Sat Jun 05, 2021 6:45 am MIT's world-first digital fabric can collect, store and process data
By Nick Lavars
June 03, 2021
https://newatlas.com/wearables/mits-wor ... cess-data/While the fabrics we wear today might keep us warm and protect us from the elements, scientists continue to demonstrate how they might soon do far more than that. MIT scientist Yoel Fink has been at the cutting edge of this field for more than a decade and has just made a significant breakthrough, demonstrating the first ever digital fabric-fiber that can store and process information, among other some other exciting functions.
From stretchable fabrics that power wearables with sweat, to shirts that harvest energy from movement, and weavable LED fibers that could form wearable displays, the field of smart textiles is one brimming with exciting possibilities. Fink and his colleagues demonstrated an interesting one way back in 2010, developing fibers that detect sound and can be woven into fabric to turn it into a sensitive microphone.
Fink's team has now broken further ground in this area. They describe the electronic fibers that have been developed so far as analog, in that they can carry a continuous electrical signal but not digital information, which would be processed in 0s and 1s. To bring this kind of capability to textile fibers, the MIT team had to get creative.
they can f*ck right off with that. I get the appeal of mobility that allows you to literally not have to drag around an anchor of everything you own, which starts to feel like your things own you... but monthly rental or lease payments for literally everything? 20$ for a cheap microwave, once and you own it... or 3$ a month for for indefinite time? by five years in you have paid 9x as much for the same usage and you have no resell rights.Time_Traveller wrote: ↑Thu Jul 15, 2021 7:22 pm In 2030, You Won't Own Any Gadgets
https://gizmodo.com/in-2030-you-wont-ow ... 18471765407/06/21
Owning things used to be simple. You went to the store. You paid money for something, whether it be a TV, clothes, books, toys, or electronics. You took your item home, and once you paid it off, that thing belonged to you. It was yours. You could do whatever you wanted with it. That’s not how it is today, and by 2030, technology will have advanced to the point that even the idea of owning objects might be obsolete.
Many a think piece has been written about how Millennials aren’t as interested in owning things as their predecessors. After decades of Boomers keeping up with the Joneses, Millennials were supposedly “more about the experience” than physical goods. There’s a kernel of truth in that, but the shift to services was telegraphed a long time ago.
Back in 2016, the World Economic Forum released a Facebook video with eight predictions it had for the world in 2030. “You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy,” it says. “Whatever you want, you’ll rent. And it’ll be delivered by drone.”
“Everything you considered a product, has now become a service,” reads another WEF essay published on Forbes. “We have access to transportation, accommodation, food, and all the things we need in our daily lives. One by one all these things became free, so it ended up not making sense for us to own much.”
The WEF’s framing is overly optimistic, but this is the future we’re rapidly hurtling toward. I rent my apartment, and therefore, all the home appliances in it. If I wanted, I could rent all my furniture and clothes. Sure, I have my own computer and phone, but there are plenty of people who use company-issued gadgets. And if I didn’t want company-issued items, I could always rely on electronics rentals. I like cooking and grocery shopping, but I could just sign up for a meal kit service and call it a day. I wouldn’t even need appliances like toasters, rice cookers, blenders, air fryers, or anything beyond a microwave. To get around, there are Citi Bikes, Uber, and Zipcar.
For the past 10 years, Sonia Grego has been thinking about toilets – and more specifically what we deposit into them. “We are laser-focused on the analysis of stool,” says the Duke University research professor, with all the unselfconsciousness of someone used to talking about bodily functions. “We think there is an incredible untapped opportunity for health data. And this information is not tapped because of the universal aversion to having anything to do with your stool.”
As the co-founder of Coprata, Grego is working on a toilet that uses sensors and artificial intelligence to analyse waste; she hopes to have an early model for a pilot study ready within nine months. “The toilet that you have in your home has not functionally changed in its design since it was first introduced,” she says, in the second half of the 19th century. There are, of course, now loos with genital-washing capabilities, or heated seats, but this is basic compared with what Grego is envisaging. “All other aspects of your life – your electricity, your communication, even your doorbell – have enhanced capabilities.”
The smart toilet’s time has come and it is a potentially huge market – in the developed world, everyone who is able to uses a toilet multiple times a day. Grego adds that she can “certainly envision a world” in which a toilet that does more than flush excreta “is available to every household”. There are numerous companies working on bringing that to market – a race to the bottom, if you will.
The rumors were true. Amazon is working on an Alexa-powered robot on wheels. At its fall hardware event, the company showed off Astro. Set to initially cost $1,000 when it becomes available later this year, it's essentially an Alexa display that can roam around your home.
The robot features a periscope camera that allows it to expand its field of view beyond floor level. It can extend that camera to check on things like stovetops and sleeping pets. With Ring's Protect Pro subscription service, you can also program Astro to patrol your home while you're away. It can detect the sound of a smoke alarm, carbon monoxide detector or breaking glass. It will send you notifications when it notices something usual, and you can save what it records to your Ring account.
