Adidas Wilson's Blog, page 130
June 21, 2017
This 10-Year-Old Is Creating A Device To Prevent Infants From Dying In Hot Cars
After Bishop Curry heard his neighbor’s 6-month-old infant died from being in an overheated car, he decided to create a life-saving device to prevent incidents like this from reoccurring ― as any responsible 10-year-old would.
“It kind of came in my head,” Bishop told HuffPost of his device, the Oasis.
The Oasis would respond to rising temperatures by emitting cool air and use an antenna to signal parents and authorities. At the moment, Bishop only has a 3-D clay model of the device, but his father, Bishop Curry IV, began a GoFundMe campaign for the Oasis in January.
“I got lots of help from my parents,” Bishop said.
Attorneys advised the family that the minimum amount they’d need for prototyping and manufacturing fees, as well as a patent for the device, is $20,000.
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The GoFundMe campaign has already exceeded that $20,000 goal and, as of Monday, has raised over $23,700. Bishop, who will begin sixth grade in the fall, told Fox News last week that in addition to his parents, his classmates and friends are fully behind him on his projects.
“They want to work for me,” he said.
Last June, CNN reported that the number of hot-car deaths had nearly tripled compared to the same time in 2015, which had 24 hot-car deaths in total.
When Curry grows up, he wants to center his career around inventions, including a time machine.
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YouTube’s New L.A. Studio Will Help Creators Crank Out VR Videos
CANNES, France—YouTube wants to help creators make more VR video, so it’s announcing a new program today at Cannes to arm folks with the equipment and expertise that they need to do so.
The VR Creator Lab will be housed within YouTube Spaces Los Angeles, where top creators and brands learn the platform’s best practices and make videos. The three-day program will offer creators cameras and equipment, tools for stitching clips together and resources including training sessions and talks from Google that will all center around making VR videos.
To participate in the program, creators need to have already made two 360-degree videos, have at least 10,000 subscribers, go through an orientation and be at least 18 years old.
Adweek sat down with Google’s VR business boss Amit Singh to talk about the new studio and how brands are using virtual and augmented reality.
“We teach you how to do it, we handhold you, we help you with creative so that you can experiment,” said Amit Singh, Google’s vp of business for augmented reality and virtual reality. “Whether it’s original content or an ad that you’re building for a brand, this technology should start to become mainstream.”
After the program ends, creators are tasked with producing at least four VR videos and one behind-the-scenes clip. Participants will also meet at the L.A. YouTube Spaces every two weeks from Aug. 28 to Nov. 6 to talk about their VR projects and meet with mentors.
Google has also greenlighted VR series with Major League Baseball, Vogue magazine and Discovery Travel. The studio will work with creators and brands to develop different types of content specific to VR.
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For example, the NFL worked with Google late last year to make a VR series. One of the biggest learnings about the series is that people don’t want to watch games using a headset. “The energy and 12 hours before the game [and] the search query interest in the game and all the activation before the game is bigger than the game,” Singh said.
Based on those learnings, MLB’s series will focus on content around the games and players.
The league will, “do a bunch of behind-the-scenes dugout, player interviews and stuff that you haven’t seen before,” Singh said. “Whether you do it in a big headset or a Cardboard or the Major League Baseball app, you can see the pitch in three dimensions.”
The education part is particularly important in getting brands up to speed on the shift from mobile to virtual reality.
“People are looking for that next deeper immersion,” Singh said. “It’s moving from a gimmick or marketing activation to where there’s storytelling about the brand tied into the series—that’s where we’re trying to go next.”
Source:
http://www.adweek.com/digital/youtubes-new-l-a-studio-will-help-creators-crank-out-vr-videos/
The Fidget Spinner Is Google’s Latest Easter Egg Distraction
I wasn’t above squeezing an occasional round of Doom in between study sessions in college, and am certainly not shy about catching some Pokémon if any are lurking in my office (that’s a no).
But if I have a particularly busy workday and want to kill 30 seconds before entering a meeting, or want to keep my attention focused during a meeting, Google’s got my back with some sweet search engine Easter eggs. They just added a new one. It rhymes with “digit sinner.”
Fidget Spinner
The latest edition to Google’s list of Easter eggs is the iconic fidget spinner, now digitized for your perpetually spinning pleasure. Searching for “spinner” and clicking the toy makes it spin in your browser window; you can spin it with your finger on your smartphone, too. There’s also the option to change the fidget spinner to a numerical spinning wheel if you need a random number from one to twenty. You can’t modify any colors, but then again if it were any more interactive you’d probably waste even more time.
Tic-Tac-Toe
Enter “tic tac toe” for Google’s take on the two-person board game. You can futz with the three difficulty settings and, if you’re sitting next to an equally unproductive coworker, compete against them on the same machine in two-player mode.
Pac-man
Appearing as a Google doodle in 2010, searching for “Pac-man” will bring up a playable version of the game in your browser. Instead of the traditional layout of pac-man games past, the field of play spells out, of course, Google.
Solitaire
I’m not exactly sure how Microsoft doesn’t have a patent on every implementation of the classic card game solitaire, but Google’s version (search for “solitaire,” of course) offers two difficulty settings as well as a timer, score, and number of moves made.
Source:
http://lifehacker.com/the-fidget-spinner-is-googles-latest-easter-egg-distrac-1796298110
Superman Returns On This Striking Justice League Poster; Trailer Reveal Planned For San Diego Comic-Con
How fitting is it that Warner Bros. and DC plan to unveil the new (and perhaps final?) trailer for Zack Snyder and Joss Whedon’s Justice League at San Diego Comic-Con next month?
Last year, the studio showcased a special reel of footage to those in attendance at Hall H and now, almost a full year later and with Snyder’s ensemble movie fast approaching the finish line – with the help of Joss Whedon (Batgirl), of course – Warner Bros. is reportedly ready to roll out the second full-length Justice League trailer.
Word comes by way of Twitter, which also unearthed the film’s brand new poster (seen in the gallery below). It retains the same style and color scheme of previous Justice League one-sheets, wherein all DC icons stand shoulder to shoulder, staring off into the distance at some unseen threat. But this time, Superman returns. And not a moment too soon.
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Clear your schedule, folks; SDCC is looming on the horizon, and now that the DC Extended Universe has received a welcome shot in the arm thanks to Wonder Woman, Warner Bros. will no doubt hope to strike while the iron is hot to unveil some new footage for Justice League. The bigger question is whether the studio will go one step further to shed light on some of its other in-development blockbusters (Aquaman, perhaps?) when the lights go down in Hall H. Stay tuned for more on that one as the weeks wear on.
Ready to unite the League? Warner Bros. will call upon Batman (Ben Affleck), Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), Aquaman (Jason Momoa), Cyborg (Ray Fisher), The Flash (Ezra Miller) and Henry Cavill’s resurrected Man of Steel to defend Earth from otherworldly threats when Justice League bows on November 17th.
Tell us, what are you hoping to see in the new trailer? Take to the comments section and give us your thoughts!
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This high school dropout who invested in bitcoin at $12 is now a millionaire at 18
Erik Finman made a bet with his parents that if he turned 18 and was a millionaire, they wouldn’t force him to go to college. Thanks to his savvy investments in bitcoin and the current all-time high valuation, he won’t have to get his degree.
“I can proudly say I made it, and I’m not going to college,” Finman said.
He currently owns 403 bitcoins, which at the current $2,700 a coin puts his bitcoin value at $1.09 million. He also has smaller investments in other cryptocurrencies, including litecoin and ethereum.
Bitcoin is very volatile, and the value could decline rapidly. A technical analyst told CNBC he believes bitcoin will only go up to $2,800 before the value recedes, while others think it may reach $100,000 in a decade.
Finman thinks its best days are still ahead. “Personally I think bitcoin is going to be worth a couple hundred thousand to a million dollars a coin,” he said.
Bitcoin and the blockchain technology it is built on allow people to cut out the middleman, Finman explained. For example, an open source blockchain ride-share platform would allow users to power the service on their phones using peer-to-peer technology without a central hub. It would allow the drivers to get more money by cutting overhead costs, he added. It could also create the next evolution of the internet, one which wouldn’t be reliant on servers.
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The first time, he turned $1,000 into $100,000
Finman began investing in bitcoin in May 2011 at the age of 12, thanks to a $1,000 gift from his grandmother and a tip from his brother Scott.
Though he’s close with his family — which he calls the “Elon Musk version of the Kardashians” — growing up in “small town” Idaho outside of Coeur d’Alene wasn’t easy. Finman was especially frustrated with his high school teachers, and begged his parents to let him drop out at 15.
“(High school) was pretty low quality,” he said. “I had these teachers that were all kind of negative. One teacher told me to drop out and work at McDonald’s because that was all I would amount to for the rest of my life. I guess I did the dropout part.”
Surprisingly, his parents — who met pursuing their Ph.D.s at Stanford — agreed. Finman sold his first bitcoin investments at the end of 2013, when they were valued at $1,200 a piece.
With the $100,000 Finman launched an online education company called Botangle in early 2014 that would allow frustrated students like him to find teachers over video chat. He also used the funds to move to Silicon Valley, did some fun things like meet Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and traveled.
“I really liked Colombia,” he said. “It was fun, but a little sketchy. Some interesting stuff happened. I was held up at gunpoint there, which is pretty scary, but I have this emergency button I programmed in Android that puts you on speaker but turns off audio automatically and dials [a local emergency number].”
“Maybe I’ll turn that into an app,” he added. “It’s handy.”
It was hard getting people to take a 15-year-old tech entrepreneur seriously, Finman admitted. He recalled being called in to interview with a “really, really high-up” unnamed Uber executive, who instead of listening to his Botangle pitch discouraged him and told him he would never win the bet with his parents.
Eventually he found a buyer for Botangle’s technology in January 2015. The investor offered either $100,000 or 300 bitcoin, which had dropped in value at that time to a little more than $200 a coin. He took the lower cash value bitcoin deal because he believed it was “the next big thing.”
“My parents asked ‘Why don’t you take the more cash?”‘ Finman explained. “But I thought of it more of an investment.”
Since then, Finman has been managing his family and his own bitcoin investments. He’s also kept busy on other projects, including working with NASA to launch a rocket through the ELaNa project. One thing he won’t do is go back to school.
“I never got my GED, and I don’t see the value in it,” Finman said. “The purpose of that would be to get another education level and get a job. I had to learn through running a business. Instead of writing essays for English class, I had to write emails to important people.”
Although the rest of his family has degrees — his brother Scott went to Johns Hopkins at 16 and now has an enterprise software company, while his other brother Ross went to Carnegie Melon at 16 for robotics and is now pursuing his Ph.D. at MIT — he’s happy learning about the real world from experience.
“The way the education system is structured now, I wouldn’t recommend it,” Finman said. “It doesn’t work for anyone. I would recommend the internet, which is all free. You can learn a million times more off YouTube and Wikipedia.”
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June 20, 2017
Apple may eventually launch ‘iGlass’ smart glasses for augmented reality
Apple may leverage augmented reality on the iPhone to help pave the way for a future smart glasses product, UBS said in a note to investors Tuesday.
Apple recently launched its ARKit developer tools, which will allow its partners to build new augmented reality applications for millions of iPhones already in the hands of consumers. It will give Apple an overnight leg up on companies like Google that are participating in the space on a much smaller scale.
Apple hasn’t participated in the smart glasses space yet, but the idea is that a user will be able to wear a special pair of glasses that overlays computer images over the real world. You might learn more about a restaurant, perhaps view its menu, by standing in front of it, for example.
Right now, companies like Apple and Google would be forced to create bulky glasses that wouldn’t be feasible or comfortable to wear. UBS believes Apple could use AR-ready iPhones to power the experience.
“Advanced sensors and camera capabilities will enhance the iPhone; eventually there could be independent hardware offerings, perhaps iGlass,” UBS analyst Steven Milunovich said. “We can imagine a pair of glasses with quintessential Apple design (iGlass), which enable a Hololens-type experience,” the company said, referring to Microsoft’s bulky alternative.
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“However, the amount of compute power and sensors required likely pose a serious design challenge. If Apple could find a way to send massive amounts of data from the eyeglasses to the iPhone where the bulk of the compute would occur, the eyewear could have a more attractive design. The issue then becomes how to transfer massive amounts of complex data between devices quickly.”
Milunovich laid out 10 AR use cases ranging from games and entertainment to home improvement and health care/medical diagnostics. It said AR will help Apple retain iPhone users.
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GM eyes HD mapping to boost self-driving car development
Last year, GM bought Cruise Automation, a startup focused on self-driving car technology, and now it appears the automotive giant is getting serious about creating HD maps. Cruise Automation has just announced that it’s recruiting a Head of Mapping, who will “own the strategy, planning, and execution of our specialized HD maps,” according to the job posting.
While GM might be the country’s top auto manufacturer, it lags behind Google and other Silicon Valley companies when it comes to self-driving technology. Indeed, Google’s self-driving project, called Waymo, has an upper hand on its rivals because of the company’s robust maps. GM and other car companies are racing to keep up with the tech giant.
However, GM has an advantage that Google does not: actual cars on the road. Last year, GM announced that it would begin to use OnStar, the safety system and in-car concierge installed in its cars, to create maps for autonomous vehicles. Now, it appears as though the company is ready to take advantage of all that data. “Look at how many cars GM sells — it won’t take much to have that data very quickly,” Dave Sullivan, an analyst with AutoPacific Inc., told The Wall Street Journal.
GM also recently announced that it was adding an additional 130 cars to its test fleet of autonomous Chevy Bolts. Between its prototype driverless cars and advances in HD mapping, it appears as though GM is very serious about developing safe and effective self-driving vehicles as quickly as possible.
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Source:
https://www.engadget.com/2017/06/19/gm-hd-mapping-self-driving-cars/
Driver killed in Tesla crash was warned seven times to put hands on wheel, report says
Joshua Brown’s Tesla warned him seven times to put his hands back on the wheel before he plowed into a truck.
A National Transportation Safety Board report on the deadly crash also found that Brown had his hands on the wheel of the Tesla Model S for 25 seconds out of 37 minutes that the car was on autopilot.
The crash, near Gainesville, Florida, in May 2016, drew attention because of the questions it raised about the safety of self-driving cars.
An earlier investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that the crash was not the result of any defect in Tesla’s autopilot feature, which can keep a car in a lane and brake to avoid traffic and other obstacles.
In this case, the car hit the trailer of a truck that pulled across its lanes of traffic at an intersection.
The NTSB cautioned that its report was only fact-finding about the crash. The agency said it was not drawing conclusions about why the crash happened.
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