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Weekly Tech Recap - № 180 - Vector the robot, Google Maps, Galaxy Note 9, Magic Leap One, Where’s Waldo?

August 10, 2018.

Vector the little robot

Vector robot, Anki.

Vector robot, Anki.

Vector. © Anki.

On Wednesday, Anki unveiled its new robot, Vector, which looks a lot like the adorable Cozmo. Just like Cozmo, Anki reminds us of a palm-sized WALL-E, but with far more features. Vector comes with a 1.2GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon, a wide-angle HD camera, an infrared laser for mapping and navigation, an array of four microphones to pinpoint the spatial origin of a sound, and touch sensors to know when you’re petting it, for example. While its voice capabilities are housed on the cloud, other capabilities, like person detection and recognition, are based on a convolutional neural network housed on its embedded processor. Vector can answer questions and take pictures on demand. It is available as of today on Kickstarter for a discounted price of US$200, but only in the U.S. It will be available in stores on October 12 for US$250.

IEEE Spectrum, “Anki’s Vector is a little AI-powered robot now on Kickstarter for $200.”

 

Earth no longer flat in Google Maps

Blue marble, Google Maps.

Blue marble. © Google.

To the dismay of those who still believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Earth is flat, Google has given up the Mercator projection for its mapping services. If you zoom out on the web version, you’ll find that Earth is now a globe. This has the advantage of avoiding many of the distortions inherent to a flat map, for example where Greenland looks as large as Africa, when it is in fact 1/14th of its size. Indeed, the downside of the Mercator projection is that it imposes a distortion effect that gets amplified as latitude increases. The new spherical projection works in map and satellite modes. You can even spin the globe with a click of your mouse. Cool!

TechCrunch, “Google Maps is no longer #flatearth.”

 

Samsung News

Ji-soo Yi unveils Galaxy Home at the Barclays Center in New York City.

Ji-soo Yi unveils Galaxy Home. © Samsung Electronics.

On Thursday, in New York, Samsung unveiled 3 new products: the new Note 9 phone, a smart speaker called Galaxy Home, and the new Galaxy Watch. The Note 9, which will be available as of August 24, looks an awful like its predecessors, but is more powerful, with a 4,000mAh battery. The phone comes with a new S Pen stylus that works with Bluetooth Low Energy, meaning that it can be used as a remote for the camera, for example. The Galaxy Home comes with Bixby and has eight microphones, six speakers and a subwoofer. Samsung hasn’t given any details as to release date or price, but an announcement is expected in November. Finally, Samsung parted with the Gear brand for its smartwatch, which will henceforth be called the Galaxy Watch. The device will be waterproof for swimming and offer LTE connectivity, a high-resolution AMOLED touch display and Gorilla DX+ glass. The company says that the watch will be able to last several days without charging. The Galaxy watch will come in three colours and two sizes, 42mm and 46mm, for US$330 and US$350 respectively.

The Verge, “The 4 biggest announcements from the Samsung Galaxy Note 9 event.”

 

Magic Leap One

Magic Leap One.

Magic Leap One.

Magic Leap One. © Magic Leap.

After raising some 2.3 billion dollars and working draped in secret for 8 years, the mysterious startup Magic Leap is finally releasing a product, the augmented reality headset Magic Leap One, for US$2,295. This headset is relatively light (415g) because the Nvidia Tegra X2 chipset micro-PC is offloaded on a CD-sized saucer worn on the belt. The battery has 3 hours of use time. Though this AR headset is undeniably superior, early testers say it is far from revolutionary, and even disappointing in light of the marketing hype that had geeks drooling (remember the video of a whale breaching from the floor of a gym?). Furthermore, the Magic Leap One unfortunately has the same flaw as the Microsoft HoloLens, i.e. the field of view is just 50° diagonally, compared to 110° for VR headsets.

The Verge, “I tried Magic Leap and saw a flawed glimpse of mixed reality’s amazing potential.”

Wired, “Inside Magic Leap’s quest to remake itself as an ordinary company (with a real product).”

 

Waldo-finding robot

There’s Waldo robot.

There’s Waldo. © Redpepper.

“Where’s Waldo?” is a series of picture books created by Martin Handford. The idea is to find the main character, Waldo, in an image. The problem is that each image is crammed with hundreds of people and objects, making it tough to quickly find Waldo, and keeping the kids engrossed for hours. Now, Matt Reed has developed a robot that finds Waldo. The robot has a robotic arm, the uArm Swift Pro, controlled by a Raspberry Pi. The camera takes a picture of the page and uses OpenCV to pick out the faces in the image. It then send them for analysis to Google’s AutoML Vision, which has been trained up on Waldo cartoons. If the robot finds a match with 95% confidence, the arm points to Waldo. And it works very well: Waldo is fingered in 5 seconds or less. Which kind of defeats the purpose of Where’s Waldo.

Circuit Breaker, “This robot uses AI to find Waldo, thereby ruining Where’s Waldo.”