Hasta La Gadget!

People had no chill — understandably.

There are plenty of card games out there that have players caption what you see on the cards or complete sentences for humor and fun. Deadpool fans wanting a new game to add to their game night shenanigans will want to check out Deadpool vs The World Card Game.

The game comes with 400 cards total. 100 of those cards have custom illustrations of Deadpool in strange and inappropriate situations, while the 300 remaining cards include partial captions with a dry-erase surface. The idea is to finish the captions to come up with the most offensive and outrageous explanations of why Deadpool is in those compromising positions.

Amazon has the game for $24, and it would be an excellent Christmas gift for fans of Deadpool and card games.

Seemingly every industry is finding ways to use drones in some way or another, but deep underground it’s a different story. In the confines of a mine or pipeline, with no GPS and little or no light, off-the-shelf drones are helpless — but an Australian startup called Emesent is giving them the spatial awareness and intelligence to navigate and map those spaces autonomously.

Drones that work underground or in areas otherwise inaccessible by GPS and other common navigation techniques are being made possible by a confluence of technology and computing power, explained Emesent CEO and co-founder Stefan Hrabar. The work they would take over from people is the epitome of “dull, dirty, and dangerous” — the trifecta for automation.

The mining industry is undoubtedly the most interested in this sort of thing; mining is necessarily a very systematic process and one that involves repeated measurements of areas being blasted, cleared, and so on. Frequently these measurements must be made manually and painstakingly in dangerous circumstances.

One mining technique has ore being blasted from the vertical space between two tunnels; the resulting cavities, called “stopes,” have to be inspected regularly to watch for problems and note progress.

“The way they scan these stopes is pretty archaic,” said Hrabar. “These voids can be huge, like 40-50 meters horizontally. They have to go to the edge of this dangerous underground cliff and sort of poke this stick out into it and try to get a scan. It’s very sparse information and from only one point of view, there’s a lot of missing data.”

Emesent’s solution, Hovermap, involves equipping a standard DJI drone with a powerful lidar sensor and a powerful onboard computing rig that performs simultaneous location and mapping (SLAM) work fast enough that the craft can fly using it. You put it down near the stope and it takes off and does its thing.

“The surveyors aren’t at risk and the data is orders of magnitude better. Everything is running onboard the drone in real time for path planning — that’s our core IP,” Hrabar said. “The dev team’s background is in drone autonomy, collision avoidance, terrain following — basically the drone sensing its environment and doing the right thing.”

As you can see in the video below, the drone can pilot itself through horizontal tunnels (imagine cave systems or transportation infrastructure) or vertical ones (stopes and sinkholes), slowly working its way along and returning minutes later with the data necessary to build a highly detailed map. I don’t know about you, but if I could send a drone ahead into the inky darkness to check for pits and other scary features, I wouldn’t think twice.

The idea is to sell the whole stack to mining companies as a plug-and-play solution, but work on commercializing the SLAM software separately for those who want to license and customize it. A data play is also in the works, naturally:

“At the end of the day, mining companies don’t want a point cloud, they want a report. So it’s not just collecting the data but doing the analytics as well,” said Hrabar.

Emesent emerged from Data61, the tech arm of Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, or CSIRO, an Australian agency not unlike our national lab system. Hrabar worked there for over a decade on various autonomy projects, and three years ago started on what would become this company, eventually passing through the agency’s “ON” internal business accelerator.

Data collected from a pass through a cave system.

“Just last week, actually, is when we left the building,” Hrabar noted. “We’ve raised the funding we need for 18 months of runway with no revenue. We really are already generating revenue, though.”

The $3.5 million (Australian) round comes largely from a new $200M CSIRO Innovation fund managed by Main Sequence Ventures. Hrabar suggested that another round might be warranted in a year or two when the company decides to scale and expand into other verticals.

DARPA will be making its own contribution after a fashion through its Subterranean Challenge, should (as seemly likely) Emesent achieve success in it (they’re already an approved participant). Hrabar was confident. “It’s pretty fortuitous,” he said. “We’ve been doing underground autonomy for years, and then DARPA announces this challenge on exactly what we’re doing.”

We’ll be covering the challenge and its participants separately. You can read more about Emesent at its website.

It’s 2018. A storm is raging down the Eastern coast of the U.S., my smartphone can do almost anything I ask it, and yet I’m still expected to physically haul myself down to the polls.

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SteelSeries is no stranger when it comes to gaming peripherals, and their latest foray does not lie so much in high tech hardware but something that often goes unappreciated or unnoticed: the humble mousepad. No matter how sensitive a particular gaming mouse’s sensor is, it’s performance can be helped through the proper mousepad. SteelSeries has just the thing in mind by expanding its iconic QcK mousepad range that comprises of the new QcK Edge, QcK Prism Cloth, and QcK Hard.

The QcK Prism will feature a cloth surface alongside dynamic two-zone RGB lighting, which will be powered by SteelSeries Engine for a personalized RGB lighting experience. You will be able to enjoy the extra large desktop size, and with the SteelSeries Engine via the PrismSync app, you will be able to customize multi-color lighting effects between all of your SteelSeries Prism-enabled gear easily. The cable is cleverly positioned out of the way on the left side, ensuring that your mouse’s cable will not get in the way of performance. Expect the QcK Prism Cloth to retail for $39.99 and $59.99 for medium and XL sizes, respectively.

As for the QcK Edge, this particular model will rely on the similar cloth surface as the rest of the legendary QcK mousepads, although it will now boast of a stitched edge that ensures there is no fraying or peeling. The line sports the iconic minimalism SteelSeries mousepads design, and it has a high thread count and smooth surface that optimizes mouse tracking accuracy regardless of whether you are rocking to optical or laser sensors. On the underside lies a durable, non-slip rubber base, specially designed to prevent movement. Expect the QcK Edge to arrive in medium, large and XL sizes for $11.99, $14.99 and $23.99, respectively.

Last but not least, the QcK Hard offers professional-level speed courtesy of a hard polyethylene surface that has been optimized for both low and high DPI tracking. It also has a multi-layer construction and solid polymer core that further increases durability, ensuring a consistent surface texture for the most dedicated gamer. There is only one size for the QcK Hard, measuring 320mm x 270mm x 3mm with an asking price of $29.99 apiece.

Press Release
[ SteelSeries expands QcK mousepad family with new models copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]