Obi-Wan Kenobi has reached its conclusion and I feel super weird about it. It’s that feeling you get after you finish a movie, show, or book you’ve been waiting forever for and it hasn’t quite processed yet. You know that it’s over, the mysteries are solved, and yet, you can’t believe that it happened. Obi-Wan Kenobi was kind of…
It seems like magic: In millions of operations scattered around the globe (some big, some very small), waste is transformed into energy. Landfilled garbage, sewage, and farm effluent are processed into burnable biogas, which can be used as a substitute for natural gas, a fossil fuel. Unlike natural gas, which sits in…
Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet company is on a collision course with 5G. That’s what SpaceX wants you to think, anyway.
If you’ve seen Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, you know the Marvel hero faces a bevy of villains—Gargantos the tentacle monster, the mentally unbalanced Scarlet Witch, and even an extremely evil version of himself. But in his jaunt through the multiverse, Strange managed to create a new foe—one that…
Gillum faces 21 federal charges related to a scheme to seek donations and funnel a portion of them back to him through third parties.
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a camera system that can seemingly detect sound vibrations with a level of precision that makes it possible to recreate the audio without inference or a microphone. A team from CMU’s School of Computer Science’s Robotics Institute (RI) built the system, which has two cameras and a laser. It can detect “high-speed, low-amplitude surface vibrations” that the human eye can’t see, the university said in a press release.
The system features regular cameras rather than high-speed ones used in previous research, which should lower the cost. “We’ve made the optical microphone much more practical and usable,” Srinivasa Narasimhan, an RI professor and head of the Illumination and Imaging Laboratory, said. “We’ve made the quality better while bringing the cost down.”
An algorithm compares speckle patterns captured by a rolling shutter and a global shutter. It uses the differences between the patterns to calculate the vibrations and recreate the audio. A speckle pattern (which is created by the laser in this case) refers to the behavior of coherent light in space after it’s reflected off of a rough surface. That behavior changes as the surface vibrates. The rolling shutter rapidly scans an image from one end to the other, while a global shutter captures an entire image at the same time.
“This system pushes the boundary of what can be done with computer vision,” assistant professor Matthew O’Toole, a co-author of a paper on the system, said. “This is a new mechanism to capture high speed and tiny vibrations, and presents a new area of research.”
The researchers say they were able to isolate the audio of guitars that were being played simultaneously. They claim that the system was able to observe a bag of chips, and use vibrations from that to reconstruct audio being emitted by a nearby speaker with higher fidelity than previous optical microphone approaches.
There are a lot of potential applications for this tech. The researchers suggest, for instance, that the system could monitor vibrations from machines in a factory to look for signs of problems. Sound engineers could also isolate the sound from an instrument to improve the mix. In essence, it could help eliminate ambient noise from audio recordings.
NASA announced in May that its InSight Mars lander—a spacecraft that has spent nearly four years investigating Martian geology and seismic activity—would likely cease scientific operations in mid-summer and terminate all operations by the end of the year, due to low power levels. Now, the agency plans to stretch …
The star said the experience left him feeling “pretty foolish in the end.”
Amazon has faced lots of public scrutiny and backlash for the dangerous working conditions in its warehouses. And rightfully so. Amazon warehouses seem like bad places to work. As a consequence, there’ve been hints that the company is struggling to find enough people to fill all the warehouse jobs.
For a lot of us, day-to-day computing involves using more than one computer—and sometimes more than one computer operating system too. That can mean a lot of wires and a lot of swapping between keyboards, mice and trackpads, but there are now multiple hardware and software options for sharing one set of input devices…
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