Hasta La Gadget!

Me, riding the Winglet…

We’ve reported about the Toyota Winglet earlier this week but since then, I have been able to test-drive one of those cool personal electric vehicle, so here are my impressions: at a very high level, it’s like a Segway, which you may or may not have seen in the real world, but it’s fair to say that most people would naturally be inclined to draw that comparison. It’s the same idea, but the designs are quite different: the Winglet is smaller and would probably beat the Segway in terms in slalom and sharp turn, while Segway may be better for uneven surface and rougher environments. (more…)

Test-Drive: Toyota Winglet Mobility Device original content from Ubergizmo.

[CEATEC 2013] It is not every day that you see a DeLorean DMC-12, but on the CEATEC showfloor this year, this is exactly what we saw. This particular ride will not be able to help you perform some time travel shenanigans, and neither is it going to accelerate to 88 miles per hour (141.6 km/h) in order to activate the flux capacitor simply because there is none to begin with. In the original Back to the Future trilogy, it was mentioned that time travel required that exact speed, in addition to an enormous amount of power. Just how much? Well, the three films had consistently mentioned “one point twenty-one jiggawatts”, which actually matches the standard prefix and the term for power of “one billion watts”:, that is, a gigawatt. That is never going to happen with the DeLorean on the showfloor, as it showcases a li-ion battery that offers 150V of performance.

Whilst time travel is still out of reach, at least it shows that one is able to retrofit an existing ride with a battery to turn it into an electric vehicle. Of course, it remains to be seen just how much money such a conversion will cost to transform a gasoline-powered ride into a fully electric one, but hopefully it will be affordable enough so that even those living in poorer countries are able to make the switch for a greener future.

DeLorean DMC-12 Gets A Li-Ion Battery original content from Ubergizmo.

[CEATEC 2013] We took a look at the Mazda Connect when CEATEC kicked off officially yesterday, and here we are with the Heads Up Cockpit from the Japanese auto manufacturer. The first commercially available Mazda vehicle that will see the implementation of the Heads Up Cockpit would be the Mazda AXELA, where this particular system will hopefully be able to make driving more pleasurable as well as informative for the driver – all without having to turn one’s glance or eyes away from the road so that total concentration on what’s ahead can be maintained while having access to the relevant information on hand.

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Mazda Heads Up Cockpit original content from Ubergizmo.

While in CEATEC/Japan, we took the opportunity to get a ride at small demo track inside the Makuhari convention center in Tokyo. The goal was to look at how the automated Nissan car would react to different road situations. Recently, the Japanese government has considered approving tests on the Japanese roads, so it is pretty exciting to see what these vehicles had evolved since last year. Nissan’s goal is to have a “multiple and affordable” autonomous cars by 2020. Given that Japanese automakers have always been great at bringing new technologies such as EV to the market, we should pay attention to what Nissan has to show. To put things in perspective, by “autonomous car”, Nissan really means that the driver will provide “less inputs” to the car, and that is very different from “no inputs”. (more…)

Nissan Autonomous Drive: Hands-On! original content from Ubergizmo.

Elliptic Labs has already spruced up a number of tablets by adding the ability to gesture instead of make contact with a touchpanel, and starting this week, it’ll bring a similar source of wizardry to Android. The 20-member team is demoing a prototype here at CEATEC in Japan, showcasing the benefits of its ultrasound gesturing technology over the conventional camera-based magic that already ships in smartphones far and wide. In a nutshell, you need one or two inexpensive (under $1 a pop) chips from Murata baked into the phone; from there, Elliptic Labs’ software handles the rest. It allows users to gesture in various directions with multiple hands without having to keep their hands in front of the camera… or atop the phone at all, actually. (To be clear, that box around the phone is only there for the demo; consumer-friendly versions will have the hardware bolted right onto the PCB within.)

The goal here is to make it easy for consumers to flip through slideshows and craft a new high score in Fruit Ninja without having to grease up their display. Company representatives told us that existing prototypes were already operating at sub-100ms latency, and for a bit of perspective, most touchscreens can only claim ~120ms response times. It’s hoping to get its tech integrated into future phones from the major Android players (you can bet that Samsung, LG, HTC and the whole lot have at least heard the pitch), and while it won’t ever be added to existing phones, devs with games that could benefit from a newfangled kind of gesturing can look for an Android SDK to land in the very near future.

Mat Smith contributed to this report. %Gallery-slideshow99597%

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Google

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Source: Elliptic Labs