United Airlines announced last week that it came to an agreement with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to bring the Starlink internet service to its entire fleet. That’s a huge partnership for both parties, and as this rollout takes place, anyone who flies United will be able to access free Wi-Fi on their flight. Right now, United […]
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 will officially launch on November 19th, 2024. | Image: Microsoft
Preorders are now open for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 through the Microsoft Store. The next installment of the franchise will launch on Xbox and PC on November 19th, with updates that include new aircraft like hot air balloons and a more realistic-looking simulated earth. But the most welcome upgrade could be a much smaller installation size.
The current version of Microsoft Flight Simulator needs over 130GB of storage, but that’s just for the base version of the game. Players can enhance their experience by downloading additional aircraft or installing world updates that bring more details to local scenery and airports, but that can gobble up even more storage. Those playing on the Xbox Series S, which only offers players 364GB of...
Launching a new product is challenging, but doing it in a space dominated by tech giants requires bold innovation, sharp strategy, and the ability to scale quickly. TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 — taking place at Moscone West in San Francisco from October 28-30 — brings together three experts who are doing just that, while simultaneously addressing […]
A few months ago, I was driving my 2023 Volkswagen ID.4 when, seemingly out of nowhere, my driver-side door made several unusual clicking noises and then popped open.
“That’s not good,” I thought, as I quickly shut the door while also attempting to keep my hands on the wheel. And apparently, I wasn’t the only one experiencing this problem. Hundreds of other VW owners were also struggling to keep their doors closed while driving.
The issue culminated this week with VW halting production of the all-electric ID.4 at its factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee, as it scrambles to find a fix for the faulty electronic door mechanism. According to the recall, water was seeping into the door and shorting out the electronics, causing the circuitry...
We still don’t know much about the seventh season of Black Mirror, but at least the show’s return will have a stacked cast. Netflix announced a big list of actors who will appear in the next installment of the anthology when it premieres in 2025, and it includes Doctor Who alum Peter Capaldi, Barbie star Issa Rae, Sunny’s Rashida Jones, and the always delightful Paul Giamatti.
Here’s the full list:
Awkwafina
Milanka Brooks
Peter Capaldi
Emma Corrin
Patsy Ferran
Paul Giamatti
Lewis Gribben
Osy Ikhile
Rashida Jones
Siena Kelly
Billy Magnussen
Rosy McEwen
Cristin Milioti
Chris O’Dowd
Issa Rae
Paul G. Raymond
Tracee Ellis Ross
Jimmi Simpson
Harriet Walter
Of course, how these actors will figure into the new season remains unclear. Netflix...
Back Market held a press conference on Thursday morning in Paris to talk about upcoming product launches and give an update on the company’s current situation. If you’re not familiar with the French startup it operates a marketplace of refurbished electronics devices — mostly smartphones. It’s attracted a lot of investor cash in recent years […]
PlayStation has deftly come up with a way to get more people on board with the PS5 Pro. The company has announced a special 30th anniversary collection for the suite of PS5 consoles and accessories that is unfortunately sick as hell.
“To celebrate this 30th anniversary milestone, we had to create something that honored the history and joy that PlayStation has brought us all,” said PlayStation platform business CEO Hideaki Nishino. All the consoles and accessories are cast in classic PlayStation gray and feature the old-school multicolored PlayStation logo creating a look designed to target every gaming 30-something’s nostalgia organ with surgical precision.
The 30th anniversary collection features a PS5 Pro bundle that includes the...
Het Belgische onderzoeksinstituut imec presenteert een prototype van een solidstateaccu met een energiedichtheid van 1070Wh/l. De accu bestaat uit lithiummetaal en zou uiteindelijk voor elektrische voertuigen gebruikt moeten worden.
In a world where innovation knows no borders, a new trend is rising in the tech ecosystem: national-interest startups. From aerospace and defense to critical infrastructure, these firms are ensuring that innovation directly supports national growth, security, and prosperity. As we approach an inflection point in Silicon Valley’s evolution, the question arises: Can startups rebuild […]
UPchieve, the free, 24/7 online tutoring and college counseling app for low-income students, announced Thursday it’s giving teachers in Title 1 middle schools and high schools a new tool to ensure their students get the academic support they need. The new offering, called “UPchieve for Teachers,” allows teachers to offer 1:1 support to their students. […]
Pocketpair has responded to the lawsuit filed against it by Nintendo and The Pokémon Company. The studio that developed Palworld, the game at the heart of the suit, issued a statement early this morning saying it doesn’t know what patents it violated. “At this moment, we are unaware of the specific patents we are accused of infringing upon, and we have not been notified of such details,” the statement read.
According to Nintendo’s press release, the reason for the lawsuit has to do with Pocketpair allegedly infringing on multiple as yet undisclosed patents. The details of the lawsuit have not yet been made public, so we do not yet know which patents, and according to Pocketpair’s statement, it doesn’t know, either.
Research on the visual patterns that foreshadow migraines may reveal clues on how painful headaches arise from the brain even though it has no pain receptors.
DJI brengt de Osmo Action 5 Pro-actioncam uit voor een adviesprijs van 379 euro. De opvolger van de Action 4 beschikt onder meer over nieuwe oledschermen en kan beelden in bepaalde configuraties in een hogere resolutie of een hogere framerate maken.
Enlarge/ Instead of giving the ID.4 complicated door handles that recess into the side of the car, VW has designed these to be flush yet always accessible. (credit: Volkswagen)
Volkswagen has a bit of a headache on its hands with the ID.4 crossover. There's a problem with the electric vehicle's flush-set door handles, which VW says don't meet its waterproofing specs. Consequently, moisture can get into the door controller's circuit board, possibly allowing the door to open while the EV is in motion.
As a result, VW has issued a recall for almost 100,000 ID.4s, as well as suspending production of the popular crossover at its factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and issuing a stop-sale to VW dealers. The stop-sale applies to preowned ID.4s as well as vehicles on lots yet to find their first owner.
The recall applies to all US ID.4s—99,064 in total, from the initial model-year 2021 cars built in Germany to the latest 2024 models made in the USA. VW first started hearing complaints in February 2024. By June, together with its suppliers, it had determined the problem was due to inadequate protection against water entering and then corroding the door handle electronics.
Today on Decoder, we’re talking about the big Google antitrust trial that’s currently taking place in a federal courthouse. No, not the one you’re thinking of — it’s the second Google antitrust case in just as many months. The company lost a landmark case in August in which a court ruled that it had an illegal monopoly in search.
This time around, the Department of Justice is claiming Google has another illegal monopoly in the online advertising market.
Unlike the search case, the ads case is both extremely complicated and somewhat harder to see. We all use search all day, and we’re surrounded by online ads all day, but while it’s easy to talk about search, no one really wants to think about how the ads get there or how much they really...
Startup Battlefield 200 is a major highlight at every Disrupt, and we’re thrilled to find out which of the thousands of startup applicants will get the chance to pitch to top-tier VCs at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024. Join us at Moscone West in San Francisco from October 28–30 to witness the epic showdown where every contender […]
Did that rock move, or is it a squirrel crossing the road? Tracking objects that look a lot like their surroundings is a big problem for many autonomous vision systems. AI algorithms can solve this camouflage problem, but they take time and computing power. A new camera designed by researchers in South Korea provides a faster solution. The camera takes inspiration from the eyes of a cat, using two modifications that let it distinguish objects from their background, even at night.
“In the future … a variety of intelligent robots will require the development of vision systems that are best suited for their specific visual tasks,” says Young Min Song, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology and one of the camera’s designers. Song’s recent research has been focused on using the “perfectly adapted” eyes of animals to enhance camera hardware, allowing for specialized cameras for different jobs. For example, fish eyes have wider fields of view as a consequence of their curved retinas. Cats may be common and easy to overlook, he says, but their eyes actually offer a lot of inspiration.
This particular camera copied two adaptations from cats’ eyes: their vertical pupils and a reflective structure behind their retinas. Combined, these allowed the camera to be 10 percent more accurate at distinguishing camouflaged objects from their backgrounds and 52 percent more efficient at absorbing incoming light.
Using a vertical pupil to narrow focus
While conventional cameras can clearly see the foreground and background of an image, the slitted pupils of a cat focus directly on a target, preventing it from blending in with its surroundings. Kim et al./Science Advances
In conventional camera systems, when there is adequate light, the aperture—the camera’s version of a pupil—is small and circular. This structure allows for a large depth of field (the distance between the closest and farthest objects in focus), clearly seeing both the foreground and the background. By contrast, cat eyes narrow to a vertical pupil during the day. This shifts the focus to a target, distinguishing it more clearly from the background.
The researchers 3D printed a vertical slit to use as an aperture for their camera. They tested the vertical slit using seven computer vision algorithms designed to track moving objects. The vertical slit increased contrast between a target object and its background, even if they were visually similar. It beat the conventional camera on five of the seven tests. For the two tests it performed worse than the conventional camera, the accuracies of the two cameras were within 10 percent of each other.
Using a reflector to gather additional light
Cats can see more clearly at night than conventional cameras due to reflectors in their eyes that bring extra light to their retinas.Kim et al./Science Advances
Cat eyes have an in-built reflector, called a tapetum lucidum, which sits behind the retina. It reflects light that passes through the retina back at it, so it can process both the incoming light and reflected light, giving felines superior night vision. You can see this biological adaptation yourself by looking at a cat’s eyes at night: they will glow.
The researchers created an artificial version of this biological structure by placing a silver reflector under each photodiode in the camera. Photodiodes without a reflector generated current when more than 1.39 watts per square meter of light fell on them, while photodiodes with a reflector activated with 0.007 W/m2 of light. That means the photodiode could generate an image with about 1/200th the light.
Each photodiode was placed above a reflector and joined by metal electrodes to create a curved image sensor.Kim et al./Science Advances
To decrease visual aberrations (imperfections in the way the lens of the camera focuses light), Song and his team opted to create a curved image sensor, like the back of the human eye. In such a setup, a standard image sensor chip won’t work, because it’s rigid and flat. Instead it often relies on many individual photodiodes arranged on a curved substrate. A common problem with such curved sensors is that they require ultrathin silicon photodiodes, which inherently absorb less light than a standard imager’s pixels. But reflectors behind each photodiode in the artificial cat’s eye compensated for this, enabling the researchers to create a curved imager without sacrificing light absorption.
Together, vertical slits and reflectors led to a camera that could see more clearly in the dark and isn’t fooled by camouflage. “Applying these two characteristics to autonomous vehicles or intelligent robots could naturally improve their ability to see objects more clearly at night and to identify specific targets more accurately,” says Song. He foresees this camera being used for self-driving cars or drones in complex urban environments.
Song’s lab is continuing to work on using biological solutions to solve artificial vision problems. Currently, they are developing devices that mimic how brains process images, hoping to one day combine them with their biologically-inspired cameras. The goal, says Song, is to “mimic the neural systems of nature.”
Song and his colleague’s work was published this week in the journal Science Advances.
Time really does fly, doesn’t it? It seems like only yesterday we were looking at Amazon’s July sales event, and now we are once again heading for the company’s fall Prime Day roundup of deals. Amazon has announced that its two-day sales event for Prime subscribers will take place starting at 12:01AM PT / 3:01AM ET on Tuesday, October 8th, and run through Wednesday, October 9th,
If you’re interested in the goodies being offered but haven’t signed up for Amazon Prime, don’t worry — Amazon makes it very easy.
Huawei kondigt zijn vijfde generatie Watch GT en GT Pro-horloges aan. Beide modellen zijn verkrijgbaar in twee maten en beschikken over verbeterde dualband-gps-ontvangers en een nieuwe optische hartslagmeter.
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