#Furniture Shopping with Augmented reality In a darkened room in the back of a small furniture store just south of San francisco International airport, the couch in front of me keeps changing colors and patterns, from red to blue to beige
This is the work of Vizera Labs, whose cofounders imagine a future where brick -and-mortar stores could be replaced by smaller, cheaper, simpler spaces
whose expensive physical inventory is replaced by virtual designs that can be projected onto just a few floor models.
While it could allow companies to open smaller stores, it could also let customers get a better idea of how a pattern
or the walls of a room. hey can still touch the swatches, so there is no shortcoming of the tactile feeling side of it,
You can use an ipad to tap between different realistic-looking fabric options that change via an overhead projector.
and uses software to segment the resulting 3-D model into pieces, similar to the way in
though it still needs work: when I see it at Cre8 a Couch in Burlingame,
ük re-registers the real couch location with Vizera server; and if I were to move the carefully positioned throw pillow,
Elnaz Davoudi, a design consultant at Cre8 a Couch, says having Vizera in the store makes it easier for them to visualize how the fabrics theye considering will look on a real couch.
#A Headset Meant to Make Augmented reality Less of a Gimmick Andrew Maimone thinks augmented reality hasn been much more than a gimmick so far.
Maimone, a Phd student at the University of North carolina at Chapel hill, is developing a new kind of head-worn display that could make augmented reality hereby digital objects
While it possible to use a smartphone or tablet to, for example, conjure a virtual character
and place it onto a real world table viewed on a smartphone screen, this just sn very compellingsays Maimone. he experience doesn occur in one own vision,
he says. t acts as a little more than a small window into the virtual place. Conventional augmented reality glasses use lenses, beam splitters, waveguides, reflectors,
and other optics to relay an image to the eye, and place the image at a distance where the eye can focus on it.
Together with three other researchers from the University of North carolina and two from Nvidia Research
Maimone device, called a Pinlight Display, does not use conventional optical components. It replaces these with an array of bright dots dubbed pinlights. transparent display panel is placed between the pinlights
and the eye to modulate the light and form the perceived image, says Maimone. ince the light rays that hit each display pixel come from the same direction,
they appear in focus without the use of lenses. In this configuration small fragments of the image are flipped and superimposed,
so the team has compensated for this by performing some image manipulation in software. ne could think of Pinlight Displays as exploiting how the eye sees an image that is out of focus,
says Maimone. he resulting hardware configuration is very simplehere are no reflective, refractive, or diffractive elementso we do not run into the trade-off between form factor
rather than something that exists only on external screens. There may be other potential benefits to the team approach. ince part of the image formation process takes place in software,
we can adjust parameters such as eye separation and focus dynamically, says Maimone. Therefore we can imagine incorporating the pinlights into the corrective lenses
or ordinary glasses, creating a display that looks like ordinary glasses with the addition of an LCD panel.
Anyone paying attention knows that his or her Web searches, Facebook feeds, and other online activity isn always safee it from the prying eyes of the NSA
or those of the companies providing a social networking service. While a substantial chunk of the populace finds all this tracking creepy and invasive,
though, there a demographic that collectively shrugs at the notion of being mined for data. Some startups hope to exploit this by buying access to your Web browsing
and banking data (see ell Your Personal data for $8 a Month. Luth Research, a San diego company
is now offering companies an unprecedented window into the private digital domains of tens of thousands of people who have agreed to let much of what they do on a smartphone, tablet,
or PC be tracked for a $100 a month. Luth Q Intelligenceservice collects and analyzes data from preselected participantsphones and computers via a virtual private network connection.
Data is routed through the company servers where it is collected and analyzed for trends. The company doesn view the contents of messages,
but what it does gather includes where smartphone users are given at any moment, what websites they are visiting,
what queries they are feeding into Google, and how often they check Twitter. The program participants are asked also to answer questions about their behavior.
Luth current and former clients include Subway, Microsoft, Walmart, the San diego padres, Nickelodeon, and Netflix. The information it collects can help companies decide where to spend advertising dollars.
Advertisers want better targeting because click-through rates for online ads now stands at less than. 01 percent.
Luth did a project for Ford motor company this yearord wanted to better understand customersath to purchase.
The company rounded up research subjects in the market for a car and then tracked the journey they took from researching to finally buying.
A customer might drive to a dealership, browse other automakerswebsites while there, and research financing options later.
All of that behavior can be analyzed to help Ford figure out where to best spend its advertising dollars.
If it turns out that consumer review sites are a prominent part of the process, for instance,
Ford can focus on commissioning reviews, partnering with the sites, and buying ads there. Ultimately, Luth found that
by the time a customer actually visits a car manufacturer website, theye most likely ready to buy a car. hat a big deal,
says the company senior executive for marketing, Becky Wu. e didn know that until this project.
If you know that person is really ready to buy, it a hot lead. If it also sounds annoying and intrusive, youe probably not the best candidate for ZQ Intelligence.
But as many as 20,000 PC users and 6, 000 smartphone users are given, at any time,
subjecting themselves to such scrutiny in exchange for $100 a month or so, depending on how many surveys they fill out.
Luth hawks that data to the highest bidder. Wu says her company approach is especially valuable
because clients can ask participants follow-up questions about their behavior. Luth founder and CEO Roseanne Luth, says participants can uninstall the software anytime they want (though theyl stop earning any money at that point.
eople are willing to be tracked as long as theye in control, Luth says. In a survey of 1, 100 smartphone users by Punchtab, an advertising company, in April 27 percent of respondents said they would allow themselves to be tracked by retailers on mobile devices
as long as they got something in returnuch as coupons or sales alerts. Big communications companies are figuring that out, too.
Last month, Verizon announced a new loyalty program for its 100 million U s. wireless customers,
offering them mart Rewardsfor allowing some of their location and Web browsing behavior to be tracked
and sold to marketers. This kind of tracking will only get more sophisticated. Luth says it is working on a program that will incorporate the audio in a person environment with the data being collected to try to determine what theye doing.
Any new insight into the way we think is valuable it seems, at least to someone h
#U s. Warrants for Overseas Data Trample Foreign Privacy Laws U s. Internet companies and indeed all multinationals with a presence in the United states appear to be trapped between the data access requirements of U s. law enforcement agencies
and foreign privacy laws. Microsoft is involved in ongoing litigation against a search warrant issued in December 2013 by a U s. magistrate authorizing the search
and seizure of e-mail accounts hosted by Microsoft. The company objected to the warrant with regard to data stored at its data center in Ireland claiming that U s. courts are authorized not to issue warrants for extraterritorial searches.
Microsoft also argued that if it turned over data stored abroad to the U s. government it would be more difficult for the company to resist requests by foreign governments for data stored in the U s
. But on April 25 the magistrate judge who issued the warrant found in favor of the government.
On July 28 Judge Loretta A. Preska of the U s. District court for the Southern District of New york affirmed that decision.
These two decisions turned on the question of whether the search warrant constitutes an extraterritorial search and seizure.
Microsoft argues that it does since it directs the company to produce information stored outside the United states. The government's argument is that
because Microsoft is subject to U s. jurisdiction it must turn over data it controls regardless of where the data is stored.
This may be the first case in which a company has opposed formally a U s. search warrant concerning data stored abroad.
But it is not surprising that other major companies (like Apple AT&T and Verizon) have supported publicly Microsoft's position.
The revelations of Edward Snowden have put them all under increasing pressure to resist U s. requests for data access.
The disclosures have intensified also their awareness of conflicts between foreign privacy legislation and the demands of U s. law enforcement.
Dozens of countries around the world grant broad privacy protection to data processed for commercial purposes (the U s. is one of the few that do not.
They generally do not allow data to be transferred to foreign authorities without the approval of local regulators.
because they are subject to U s. data access requests. For example in June the German government cancelled a contract with Verizon for Internet services.
Many more companies have a commercial incentive to contest these cross-border requests for data. The issues raised in the Microsoft case are relevant to all companies subject to U s. jurisdiction not just those in the Internet sector including companies based abroad but active in the U s. market.
Microsoft has stated that it will appeal Judge Preska's decision and sources in the U s. legal community tell me that the case could eventually go all the way to the U s. Supreme court
. But while Microsoft s argument that the case has major policy implications is compelling the U s. government's position may be difficult to overcome under the current state of the law.
What is disappointing about the discussion in this case so far is that it concentrates on the respective interests of companies and law enforcement.
The privacy expectations of the Internet users whose data may be accessed have received little attention. The best way to resolve this conflict would be to make changes to U s. legislation that balance the interests of companies and law enforcement while taking the privacy expectations of individuals into account.
However the current gridlock in Washington seems to make that impossible. An international treaty being negotiated between the United states
and the E u. known as the Umbrella Agreement might provide some relief by establishing formal rules about data sharing.
And the privacy of individuals whose data is held by companies with a U s. presence will remain largely unconsidered.
Christopher Kuner is senior privacy counsel with Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati in Brussels and associate professor of data protection law at the University of Copenhagen n
#Wireless Power for Minuscule Medical Implants Medical implants like pacemakers deep brain stimulators and cochlear implants could someday be joined by still more bioelectronic gadgets devices that regulate insulin levels control
or treat brain injuries (see Nerve-Stimulating Implant Could Lower Blood pressure). But before we re all riddled with electronics researchers have to figure out how to power it all.
Pacemaker batteries are too clunky for tiny devices saddled up to nerves and existing wireless methods such as those used for cochlear implants won t work with devices buried deep in the body.
That s where electrical engineer Ada Poon and her team at Stanford university say they might be able to help.
The group has developed a new method of sending magnetic fields well below skin level to power devices that would
otherwise need batteries. Wireless systems like the one used in cochlear implants sit permanently on the skin
and derive power from electromagnetic induction in which a current running through a coil of wire generates a magnetic field that then induces a current in a nearby device.
The problem is that a field generated this way decays exponentially with distance from the generating coil so it only works with devices close to the skin s surface.
Poon and her team found a way to use electromagnetic induction through biological tissue without that exponential decay.
They call the technique midfield wireless powering (as opposed to near-field which refers to the exponentially decaying radiation and far-field
which refers to the kind of radiation emitted from a cell tower). The key Poon says is that instead of using a coil of wire they use a flat plate adorned with a specially designed four-line pattern of conductive material.
When they send current through the plate that pattern produces a magnetic field capable of propagating through biological material without decaying over a short distance.
The plate would most likely sit on the skin providing constant power to an implant.
Morris Kesler vice president of research and development at Witricity a Massachusetts-based company that develops wireless powering systems says Poon s technique would be particularly useful for powering tiny devices.
To test their new powering scheme the Stanford group implanted a pacemaker about the size of a grain of rice in a rabbit
and then powered the device using a plate about six centimeters on a side. The setup worked with about 0. 1 percent efficiency meaning that nearly all the energy sent from the conductive material to the pacemaker was wasted.
Nonetheless Poon says that is sufficient for this kind of low-power medical device. It also met safety regulations limiting the amount of radiation delivered to a given amount of tissue in humans.
In the future Poon says the group plans to develop flexible versions of the plate that will be more comfortable against skin.
One of her graduate students is also designing plates that will penetrate materials other than biological tissue.
Kip Ludwig the program director for neural engineering at the National Institute of Neurological disorders and Stroke at the National institutes of health says Poon s method is promising but years from any clinical application.
Still there is so much promise in bioelectronics he says and the powering issue needs to be addressed d
#How to Break Cryptography With Your Bare Hands With enough technical savvy, simply touching a laptop can suffice to extract the cryptographic keys used to secure data stored on it.
The trick is based on the fact that the roundelectrical potential in many computers fluctuates according to the computation that is being performed by its processorncluding the computations that take place
when cryptographic software operates to decrypt data using a secret key. Measuring the electrical potential leaked to your skin
when you touch the metal chassis of such laptops, and analyzing that signal using sophisticated software,
can be enough to determine the keys stored within, says Eran Tromer, a computer security expert at Tel aviv University.
The remarkable result is described in this paper due to be presented at a conference in South korea next month,
but it was demonstrated Tuesday at a cryptography conference in Santa barbara, California. A signal can be picked up by touching exposed metal on a computerchassis with a plain wire.
Or that wire can make contact anywhere on the body of an attacker touching the computer with a bare hand (sweaty hands work best.
The ground signal can also be measured by fastening an alligator clip at the far end of an Ethernet, VGA,
or USB cable attached to the computer, or even wirelessly with sensitive voltage-detection equipment.
The catch is that contact must be made as data is unlocked with a keyuring decryption of a folder or an e-mail message, for instance.
Tromer says his research team has used all those methods to extract encryption keys based on widely used, high-security standards, 096-bit RSA keys and 3, 072-bit Elgamal keys.
The work contributes to a growing body of evidence that regardless of the software protections people place on computers
there are indirect ways to extract datao-called ide channelattacks. Previous research efforts have found, for example,
that analyzing the power consumption of a computer can reveal cryptographic keys. The good news is that analyzing subtle trends in power usage can also reveal
whether a computer is being attacked (see iny Changes in Energy use Could Mean Your Computer Is Under attack. verall,
there are likely tens of undiscovered hardware-related side channelsnd we are likely going to hear more from these authors
and others, says Radu Sion, a computer security expert at Stony Brook University. Tromer says he doesn know of anybody performing a ground-potential attack to steal real data
but he has notified cryptography software makers. It is possible to avoid such attacks by adding random data to computations.
The developers of one popular free cryptographic software package, Gnupg, incorporated such a patch into the latest version of their software a
#A New Chip Could Add Motion Sensing to Clothing A company called mcube has made a new kind of accelerometer, the device that senses motion from inside a smartphone or fitness monitor.
The component is small and cheap enough to lead to smart electronics in clothing and sports equipment.
The new accelerometers are a millimeter across, less than half the size of conventional ones. The company says they are more accurate, more power-efficient,
and cheaper to make. ou could embed it into your clothing so that you don even know it there,
says mcube CEO Ben Lee. ou could put them in your golf shirt and pants,
so immediately after you swing you can get an analysis on your smartphone. Accelerometers are made usually of two chips:
a mechanical device that detects movement, and a microchip that makes sense of the signal from the first chip.
By integrating those components on a single chip, mcube has reduced not only the size of the device
but achieved a higher-quality signal. In fact, the company says its new accelerometer is sensitive enough to replace the gyroscope in a smartphone.
This could perhaps bring sophisticated motion-sensing capabilities to even the cheapest smartphones, some of which lack gyroscopes.
Nearly 70 million of mcube sensors have already been shipped to electronics manufacturers in China for use in smartphones.
The company recently raised $37 million in venture funding and it has plans to scale up production
and expand to other markets. Mike Rosa, a project manager at Applied materials, which makes manufacturing equipment for electronics companies that compete with mcube,
says its customers are interested also in integrated, single-chip accelerometers. Rosa says Applied materials is, in fact, developing a process for making such chips using the latest materials,
including silicon germanium. Embedding motion sensors in clothing, mcube long-term goal, would require better ways of powering the devices
and having them communicate. But several experimental options for energy harvesting or wireless charging might eventually make that possible (see Batteryless Sensor Chip for the Internet of Thingsand obile Gadgets That Connect to Wi-fi without a Battery w
#Longer-Lasting Battery Is Being tested for Wearable devices A type of battery that could eventually store twice as much energy as a conventional one could be about to move beyond niche applications to wearable devices phones and even electric cars.
Solid-state batteries as they re called have been available for a while and are used in some wireless sensors
but they have been too expensive to use elsewhere. Applied materials one of the world s biggest equipment suppliers for the semiconductor and display industries says it can make these batteries much cheaper.
This could clear the way for slimmer longer-lasting smart watches as well as electric cars with a range similar to gas-powered ones.
In solid-state batteries the liquid electrolytes normally used in conventional lithium-ion batteries are replaced with solid ones
which makes it possible to replace conventional electrodes with lithium metal ones that hold far more energy.
Doing away with the liquid electrolyte which is flammable can also improve the safety of batteries
which leads to cost and size savings particularly in electric vehicles by reducing the need for complex cooling systems (see TR10:
Solid-state Batteries. The manufacturing tools shipped so far by Applied materials which perform extremely high-precision deposition of materials over large areas will be used initially for prototyping and demonstrations of solid-state batteries.
Making high-quality electrode and electrolyte materials over large areas has been one of the challenges to making the solid-state batteries economically.#
#The batteries are made by successively depositing electrical contacts electrodes and the solid electrolyte that separates them in much the way that the many layers of a display are deposited.
If the solid electrolyte has gaps it can lead to short circuits. Applied materials says it can overcome this as well as other manufacturing challenges.
The thing that s holding solid-state batteries back is materials processing and the cost says Andy Chu head of product marketing for energy storage solutions at Applied materials. We re addressing these problems.
That will allow you to take this to high volume. Applied materials says customers are using its equipment to make batteries
but it won t disclose who those customers are. The company says however that one of the first commercial applications of its equipment will likely be making batteries for wearable devices such as smart watches where size is a serious limitation.
Solid-state batteries can also easily be made in different shapes because you don t have to worry about containing a liquid electrolyte making them easier to pack inside a watch for example.
Thin solid-state batteries could even be incorporated into a flexible watch band. Applied materials hasn disclosed t how much solid-state batteries made using its technology would cost how much energy they would store
or how quickly they could be recharged. One perennial challenge with solid-state batteries has been that the solid electrolyte
which isn t as conductive as liquid ones tends to limit power output. Applied materials says it is working on ways to improve that conductivity by doping the solid electrolyte
much as you would dope semiconductor materials for chips. The company is also working on ways to deposit the energy-storing materials faster to enable thick layers that store large amounts of energy r
#China s Shale gas Bust China is finding it harder than it expected to unlock a shale gas boom like the one in North america,
calling into question its lofty goals to use natural gas to help clean up its air and control the growth of greenhouse gas emissions.
Citing complicated geology and high production costs, the Chinese government has cut its ambitious 2020 target for shale gas development roughly in half.
In 2013 China became the third biggest user of natural gas behind the United states and Russia, consuming 166 billion cubic meters (bcm).
By 2019, the International Energy Agency expects China annual natural gas consumption to grow 90 percent, to 315 bcm.
Half of that increase is expected to be supplied by domestic gas production, which would come from multiple sources,
including shale reserves. That IEA estimate for gas consumption is much lower than the production target China had set for itself:
420 bcm of natural gas annually by 2020, with hydrofracturing, or fracking, being used to get 60 to 80 bcm from shale.
China is estimated to hold the largest technically recoverable reserves of shale gas in the worldearly twice as much as the U s
. But the shale industry in China has struggled to get off the ground. Most projects are still in the exploration Phase in many cases the formations that hold gas are deeper than in North america
and more expensive to reach. Further, Chinese shale tends to have more clay in it,
which is an obstacle to extraction (see hina Has Plenty of Shale gas, But It Will be Hard to Mine.
These challenges led the government last week to reduce the 2020 shale gas target to 30 bcm.
Even that would represent a huge increase. Of the 117 bcm of natural gas that China produced in 2013,
only 0. 2 bcm came from shale. If China is going to meet its goals for using natural gas,
it probably will have to rely more on imports. It plans to rapidly build up the infrastructure for transporting
and storing imported natural gas r
#Turning a Regular Smartphone Camera into a 3-D One Microsoft researchers say simple hardware changes
and machine learning techniques let a regular smartphone camera act as a depth sensor. Just about everybody carries a camera nowadays by virtue of owning a cell phone,
but few of these devices capture the three-dimensional contours of objects like a depth camera can.
Depth cameras are quickly gaining prominence for their potential in pocket-sized devices, where the idea is that
if our phones capture the contours of everything from street corners to the arrangement of your living room,
developers can create applications ranging from better interactive games to helpful guides for the visually impaired.
Yet while efforts like Google Project Tango are adding depth cameras into mobile gadgets, new research from Microsoft shows that with some simple modifications
and machine-learning techniques an ordinary smartphone camera or webcam can be used as a 3-D depth camera.
The idea is to make access to developing 3-D applications easier by lowering the costs and technical barriers to entry for such devices,
Microsoft modified camera A group led by Sean Ryan Fanello Cem Keskin, and Shahram Izadi of Microsoft Research is due to present a paper on the work Tuesday at Siggraph, a computer graphics and interaction conference in Vancouver, British columbia.
To modify the cameras, the group removed the near infrared filter, often used in everyday cameras to block normally unwanted light signals in pictures.
along with a ring of several cheap near-infrared LEDS. By doing so, they essentially made each camera act as an infrared camera. computer with Microsoft image of person's face e kind of turned the camera on its head
Izadi notes. The Microsoft team says it wanted to use the reflective intensity of infrared light as something like a cross between a sonar signal and a torch in a dark room.
The light would bounce off the nearby object and return to the sensor with a corresponding intensity.
Objects are bright when theye close and dim when theye far awayntuitive to us when it comes to visible light.
But the group needed to train the machines (in this case a Samsung galaxy Nexus smartphone and a Microsoft Lifecam Web camera) on that relationship,
modeling human hands and faces, not all kinds of objects and environments. After building up a set of training data,
which included images of hands, the group found it could measure a person motions at a speed of 220 frames per second.
While the training data focused on faces and hands, the group wasn actually training the machines to recognize hands or faces,
The huge amount of training data allows the machine to build enough associations with the data points in the pictures that it can then use additional properties of the image to estimate the depth.
Microsoft chose skin since it has so many implications for navigating Xbox and Windows environments, but Kohli points out that the machine learning techniques could transfer anywhere. he only limitation is
what sort of training data that you give it, he says. he approach in itself can be tailored to work on any other scenario. n
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