Fire up the replicator this Thanksgiving and invite all of your friends and family to eat from this classy Star Trek Dinner Set. Of course, you should get several sets so everyone can eat off them. These pieces have a gold Starfleet insignia on them and would look at home both in a starship mess hall and in your very own home.
The set includes one dinner plate, dessert plate, bowl, and a mug for your Earl Grey tea or Romulan ale. Speaking of Star Trek and Thanksgiving, where the hell is my replicator technology? The damn turkey takes hours and hours to make. When do I get a turkey that appears out of thin air? I’m waiting. That would make things a whole lot easier.
Anyway, This is the classy way for geeks to eat their meals. Remember the wise words of Khan. “Revenge is a dish best served cold, but it doesn’t have to be. Just heat the damn thing up and serve it on a Star Trek plate!” Okay, I may have added that last part, but it’s true.
Kirk and Spock used these or something similar in Star Trek VI, I believe – or maybe they’re the plates they used when they opened that restaurant on the Enterprise…
Just a few years ago, Li Mengqi could not have imagined shopping on her own. Someone needed to always keep her company to say aloud what was in front of her, who’s been blind since birth.
When smartphones with text-to-speech machines for the visually impaired arrived, she immediately bought an iPhone. “Though it was expensive,” Li, a 23-year-old who grew up in a rural village in eastern China’s Zhejiang province, told me. Cheaper smartphone options in China often don’t have good accessibility features.
Screen readers opened a plethora of new opportunity for those with visual impairments. “I felt liberated, no longer having to rely on others,” said Li, who can now shop online, WeChat her friends, and go out alone by following her iPhone compass.
Reading out everything on the screen is helpful, but it can also be overwhelming. Digital readers don’t decipher human thoughts, so when Li gets on apps with busy interfaces, such as an ecommerce platform, she’s bombarded with descriptions before she gets to the thing she wants.
Over the past two years, Alibaba’s $15 billion R&D initiative Damo Academy has been working to improve smartphone experience for the blind. Its latest answer, a joint effort with China’s prestigious Tsinghua University, is a cheap silicone sheet that goes on top of smartphone screens.
Li is among the first one hundred visually impaired or blind users to trial the technology. Nothing stands out about the plastic film – which cost RMB 0.25 or 3.6 American cents each to produce – until one has a closer look. There are three mini buttons on each side. They are sensory-enabled, which means pressing on them triggers certain commands, usually those that are frequently used like “go back” and “confirm”.
“It’s much easier to shop with the sheet on,” said Li. Having button shortcuts removes the risk of misclicking and the need for complex interactions with screens. Powering Smart Touch is human-machine interaction, the same technology that makes voice control devices possible.
Alibaba’s $1 “Smart Touch” plastic sheet helps smoothen smartphone experience for the visually impaired. / Photo credit: Alibaba
“We thought, human-machine interaction can’t just be for sighted people,” Chen Zhao, research director at Damo Academy told TechCrunch. “Besides voice, touch is also very important to the blind, so we decided to develop a touch feature.”
Smart Touch isn’t just for fingers. It also works when users hold their phones up to the ears. This lets them listen to text quickly in public without having to blast it out through speakers or headphones. Early trials of ear touch show a 50 percent reduction in time needed to complete tasks like taking calls and online shopping, Alibaba claims.
Emotions also matter. People with visual disabilities tend to be more cautious as they fumble through screens, so Smart Touch takes that into account. For instance, users need to double-click on the silicone button before a command goes through.
At the moment, Smart Touch works only on special editions of Alibaba’s two flagship apps, e-commerce marketplace Taobao and payment affiliate Alipay . The buttons automatically take on different functions when users switch between apps.
But Zhao said she wanted to make the technology widely available. Some tinkering with existing apps will make Smart Touch compatible. The smart film requires more testing before it officially rolls out early 2019, so Damo and Tsinghua have been recruiting volunteers like Li for feedback.
“Unlike with regular apps, it’s hard to beta test Smart Touch because the blind population is relatively small,” observed the researcher, but embedding the technology in popular apps could speed up the iteration process.
There’s also the issue with distributing the physical sheets. According to state census, China had around 13 million visually impaired people in 2012. That’s about one in a hundred people. However, they are rarely seen in public, as a post on China’s equivalent of Quora points out.
One oft-cited obstacle is that most roads in China aren’t disability-friendly, even in major cities. (In my city Shenzhen, blind lanes are common but they often get cut off abruptly to make way for a crossing or a bus stop.)
Damo doesn’t plan to monetize the initiative, according to Zhao. She envisions a future where her team could give out the haptic films — which can be mass produced at low costs — for free through Alibaba’s expanding network of brick-and-mortar stores.
Time will tell whether the accessibility scheme is more than public relations fluff. Initiatives around corporate social responsibility have mushroomed in China in recent years. They have come under fire, however, for being transient because many merely pander to the government’s demand (link in Chinese) for corporate ethics overlook long-term impact.
“The technology is ready. It just takes time to test it on different smartphones and bring to users at scale,” said Zhao.
Smart speakers like the Amazon Echo, Google Home speakers, and Apple HomePod are becoming more and more common in houses. But more than just homes for smart assistants, these devices might very well become silent witnesses to crimes. That seems to be the reasoning leading to a ruling in North Hampshire where a judge has ordered Amazon to provide any … Continue reading
You might not know it, but Samsung has actually been making foldable phones for years now. And by “foldable”, we mean the original foldable phones, a.k.a. clamshell phones, a.k.a. flip phones. Long declared after the original X-Files run ended, Samsung continues to make such blasts from the past for one market alone: China. Though it sometimes does sell them in … Continue reading
Do you have an old Wii hooked up in the bedroom solely to watch Netflix? You might want to look for an alternative in the near future. Netflix has emailed customers and posted a notice warning that Nintendo will “suspend” Netflix and other streamin…
German auto giant Volkswagen is reportedly developing a cheaper electric car which it will sell of under 20,000 euros or $23,000. The company is also said to protect jobs in Germany by converting three of its factories to manufacture these cheap electric cars in the country.
If it’s able to put out an electric car that costs $23,000, it would undercut Tesla’s Model 3 by almost $12,000. The Model 3 is the cheapest electric car that Tesla sells. It’s the company’s first mass-market electric car.
A source familiar with VW’s plans told Reuters that VW’s cheap electric car plans are referred to as “MEB entry,” and the initial model may have a production volume of around 200,000 vehicles. The plan will reportedly be discussed at the company’s supervisory board meeting on November 16th. The meeting will discuss VW’s transformation plan to become a mass producer of electric cars from Europe’s largest manufacturer of combustion engine vehicles.
The source added that another Volkswagen electric car, the I.D. Aero, will be built in the factory where the company currently manufactures its Passat mid-sized sedan. Its I.D. Buzz electric van will reportedly be built at the company’s Hannover plant where the T6 Van is currently made.
This follows reports that Volkswagen and Ford are in talks for an alliance to develop self-driving and electric cars as well as to complement each other’s global product and sales footprints. The talks were said to be in an exploratory stage at that point so it’s unclear if and when a deal will be reached.
Fire up the replicator this Thanksgiving and invite all of your friends and family to eat from this classy Star Trek Dinner Set. Of course, you should get several sets so everyone can eat off them. These pieces have a gold Starfleet insignia on them and would look at home both in a starship mess hall and in your very own home.
The set includes one dinner plate, dessert plate, bowl, and a mug for your Earl Grey tea or Romulan ale. Speaking of Star Trek and Thanksgiving, where the hell is my replicator technology? The damn turkey takes hours and hours to make. When do I get a turkey that appears out of thin air? I’m waiting. That would make things a whole lot easier.
Anyway, This is the classy way for geeks to eat their meals. Remember the wise words of Khan. “Revenge is a dish best served cold, but it doesn’t have to be. Just heat the damn thing up and serve it on a Star Trek plate!” Okay, I may have added that last part, but it’s true.
Kirk and Spock used these or something similar in Star Trek VI, I believe – or maybe they’re the plates they used when they opened that restaurant on the Enterprise…
Just a few years ago, Li Mengqi could not have imagined shopping on her own. Someone needed to always keep her company to say aloud what was in front of her, who’s been blind since birth.
When smartphones with text-to-speech machines for the visually impaired arrived, she immediately bought an iPhone. “Though it was expensive,” Li, a 23-year-old who grew up in a rural village in eastern China’s Zhejiang province, told me. Cheaper smartphone options in China often don’t have good accessibility features.
Screen readers opened a plethora of new opportunity for those with visual impairments. “I felt liberated, no longer having to rely on others,” said Li, who can now shop online, WeChat her friends, and go out alone by following her iPhone compass.
Reading out everything on the screen is helpful, but it can also be overwhelming. Digital readers don’t decipher human thoughts, so when Li gets on apps with busy interfaces, such as an ecommerce platform, she’s bombarded with descriptions before she gets to the thing she wants.
Over the past two years, Alibaba’s $15 billion R&D initiative Damo Academy has been working to improve smartphone experience for the blind. Its latest answer, a joint effort with China’s prestigious Tsinghua University, is a cheap silicone sheet that goes on top of smartphone screens.
Li is among the first one hundred visually impaired or blind users to trial the technology. Nothing stands out about the plastic film – which cost RMB 0.25 or 3.6 American cents each to produce – until one has a closer look. There are three mini buttons on each side. They are sensory-enabled, which means pressing on them triggers certain commands, usually those that are frequently used like “go back” and “confirm”.
“It’s much easier to shop with the sheet on,” said Li. Having button shortcuts removes the risk of misclicking and the need for complex interactions with screens. Powering Smart Touch is human-machine interaction, the same technology that makes voice control devices possible.
Alibaba’s $1 “Smart Touch” plastic sheet helps smoothen smartphone experience for the visually impaired. / Photo credit: Alibaba
“We thought, human-machine interaction can’t just be for sighted people,” Chen Zhao, research director at Damo Academy told TechCrunch. “Besides voice, touch is also very important to the blind, so we decided to develop a touch feature.”
Smart Touch isn’t just for fingers. It also works when users hold their phones up to the ears. This lets them listen to text quickly in public without having to blast it out through speakers or headphones. Early trials of ear touch show a 50 percent reduction in time needed to complete tasks like taking calls and online shopping, Alibaba claims.
Emotions also matter. People with visual disabilities tend to be more cautious as they fumble through screens, so Smart Touch takes that into account. For instance, users need to double-click on the silicone button before a command goes through.
At the moment, Smart Touch works only on special editions of Alibaba’s two flagship apps, e-commerce marketplace Taobao and payment affiliate Alipay . The buttons automatically take on different functions when users switch between apps.
But Zhao said she wanted to make the technology widely available. Some tinkering with existing apps will make Smart Touch compatible. The smart film requires more testing before it officially rolls out early 2019, so Damo and Tsinghua have been recruiting volunteers like Li for feedback.
“Unlike with regular apps, it’s hard to beta test Smart Touch because the blind population is relatively small,” observed the researcher, but embedding the technology in popular apps could speed up the iteration process.
There’s also the issue with distributing the physical sheets. According to state census, China had around 13 million visually impaired people in 2012. That’s about one in a hundred people. However, they are rarely seen in public, as a post on China’s equivalent of Quora points out.
One oft-cited obstacle is that most roads in China aren’t disability-friendly, even in major cities. (In my city Shenzhen, blind lanes are common but they often get cut off abruptly to make way for a crossing or a bus stop.)
Damo doesn’t plan to monetize the initiative, according to Zhao. She envisions a future where her team could give out the haptic films — which can be mass produced at low costs — for free through Alibaba’s expanding network of brick-and-mortar stores.
Time will tell whether the accessibility scheme is more than public relations fluff. Initiatives around corporate social responsibility have mushroomed in China in recent years. They have come under fire, however, for being transient because many merely pander to the government’s demand (link in Chinese) for corporate ethics overlook long-term impact.
“The technology is ready. It just takes time to test it on different smartphones and bring to users at scale,” said Zhao.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
Smart speakers like the Amazon Echo, Google Home speakers, and Apple HomePod are becoming more and more common in houses. But more than just homes for smart assistants, these devices might very well become silent witnesses to crimes. That seems to be the reasoning leading to a ruling in North Hampshire where a judge has ordered Amazon to provide any … 
You might not know it, but Samsung has actually been making foldable phones for years now. And by “foldable”, we mean the original foldable phones, a.k.a. clamshell phones, a.k.a. flip phones. Long declared after the original X-Files run ended, Samsung continues to make such blasts from the past for one market alone: China. Though it sometimes does sell them in … 
Do you have an old Wii hooked up in the bedroom solely to watch Netflix? You might want to look for an alternative in the near future. Netflix has emailed customers and posted a notice warning that Nintendo will “suspend” Netflix and other streamin…
