Hasta La Gadget!

If you’ve ever wondered how blind people play tabletop and RPG games, here’s your answer. Braille dice. A lack of sight doesn’t have to keep you from enjoying a good game of D & D. These cool dice were created by Jack Berberette as part of his Dots RPG project, which is all about making tabletop gaming more inclusive to the blind.

You can find the 3-D printing shapefiles for free HERE, or you can purchase finished dice several colors and sides from his Shapeways shop. Dice collectors will want to get their hands on these too. They come in all of the dice varieties that you need to play your games: D6, D10, D20 and everything in-between.

They look pretty sci-fi to me. One thing’s for sure, you won’t be able to fool your blind friends anymore by telling them they rolled a different number. You’re terrible for doing that by the way. Now they are going to wonder why their game is getting so much better, and it was all your fault. Jack really did a good job on these. They are very easy for blind gamers to use, and with a bit of learning the rest of us can figure it out too.

[via Boing Boing via Geekologie]

Facebook has stealthily launched a service similar to Onavo Protect, its vampiric psuedo-VPN that claims to protect users’ privacy but actually collects and analyzes their data. This time it’s worse—Facebook is targeting teens to install a similar app via third-party beta testing services, in possible violation of…

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Alps Alpine has been working on an indoor navigation system that would enable a very precise location acquisition, good enough to let autonomous drones fly accurately and safely for monitoring missions, among other things.

Indoor navigation is one of these technologies that have been promised but never delivered commercially to consumers, so anything that seems to go in the right direction is of great interest.

This system from Alps Alpine is based on a mesh/network of RF (radio-frequency) positioning module that broadcasts positioning information. You can think of it as an indoor GPS system because the fundamental idea is the same: using the location of several nodes, it is possible to compute a precise position.

The specifications say that the precision can be as high as ~30cm and that in theory, it was possible to trade precision for higher coverage. But for now, and in this specific context, 30cm is what the technology is aiming for.

You can imagine that flying a drone through a door entrance does require this kind of precision, but a store location application for Shopping Malls may do just fine with a 1-2 yards accuracy. It just depends on the situation.

The positioning module be embedded in the drone uses an ultra-low power technology, somewhat similar to Bluetooth at an RF level, but not at a protocol level. While it’s is excellent from a power consumption standpoint, the relatively short range means that the positioning network nodes density has to be relatively high.

We praise the use of low-power technology,but it’s very likely that the electricity consumed by the drone to fly will dwarf by several orders of magnitude the power used by this location system.

We’re not quite sure what the cost of deploying a mesh is since this is still under development, but in the past, mesh density has been a limiting factor for real-world deployments of various indoor technologies.

Yet, this is one of the most advanced systems we’ve seen, and we think that it is possible to use it for particular applications that may require laying a network on a specific path, and not a complete volume of a building for example.

Also, it might be possible to lower the precision if the drone was smart enough to guide itself visually for very close-proximity obstacles such as doors. Also, it seems inevitable to have some kind of proximity sensing (visual, radar or lidar) to handle things that are not in the indoor map database.

Would this make it to a mall or a warehouse soon, and what will the real use cases be? We’ll keep an eye on this technology.

Alps Alpine Indoor Positioning For Drones , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Apple is launching 58 new Today at Apple sessions to beef up its in-store education offerings for people who want to explore Apple’s products. The sessions, which cover video, photography, accessibility, coding, music, health and more, are free to attend and available at all of Apple’s retail stores across the world.

For the unveiling, Apple brought a group of reporters to its Apple Park campus in Cupertino last week. Throughout the day, Apple took us through sample Today at Apple sessions across Apple’s three categories: Skills, Walks and Labs. Skills are quick, 30-minute sessions designed to teach you new techniques, Walks are actual physical walks with certain Apple products and services and Labs are 90-minute sessions where you create a project.

“So I think of Skills, Walks, Labs almost as, you know, Spanish 1, Spanish 2, Spanish 3,” Apple SVP of Retail Angela Ahrendts told a group of reporters at Apple’s spaceship campus last week. “I mean, most things have green diamond, blue diamond, red, black diamond, I mean, there’s always levels.”

When Today at Apple first launched, it was a bit more open. Now, it’s a lot more structured, Ahrendts said.

Beats, art and jump-cuts

First up, I participated in a Garage Band Skills session, where we learned how to quickly create a beat using the beat sequencer. This session is geared toward people who are new to Apple’s tech and may need an introduction to the product or the software.

That is designed to prepare you for the next level of sessions, Walks. At Apple’s campus, we did a photo walk using the iPad Pro with Pencil and digital illustration app Procreate. The task at hand was to walk around Apple’s spaceship campus, snap photos of colorful scenes, capture that color in Procreate and then use the app’s numerous drawing tools to create a portrait. Here’s my masterpiece.

Walks, Apple Senior Director Karl Heiselman said, has been the most popular type of session.

“We think the reason why they’re so popular is you can’t do them on the internet,” he said.

Last, but not least, we did a Lab where we learned how to create jump-cuts in the Clips app.

All of these sessions are entirely free to attend. Since launching Today at Apple almost two years ago, Apple has hosted 18,000 sessions per week. Millions of people have attended the sessions, so far, but it’s hard to get a totally accurate number, Ahrendts said.

“If you sign up, we have a number but the minute the session starts around the big screen, usually three times more people, you know, kind of hover over it,” Ahrendts said.

Apple’s in-store sessions are a way for the company to build brand loyalty and differentiate itself from the likes of Google and other hardware companies. While Apple’s online store is geared toward purchasing products and receiving customer support, its retail stores are designed to be focused on people and their experiences, Ahrendts said.

“If you’re taking the time to come into a store, we’re assuming you want a much more human experience,” she said.

Today is the biggest launch of sessions to date, with Ahrendts likening the update to its in-store sessions to updates to Apple’s digital software, “but you could assume there will always continue to be updates on our store software forever.”

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