Last year we saw a drone camera system that streamed live 3D video that can be viewed through the Oculus Rift headset. Diego Araos wrote a program that not only lets you use the Rift to view the feed from a Parrot AR.Drone 2′s camera, it also uses control the drone through the headset.
Diego’s program OculusDrone taps into the Rift’s head tracking feature to control the AR.Drone 2 remotely. However, you need to use a keyboard command to order the AR.Drone to takeoff (Enter) and land (Escape).
After creating a robot bird and dragonfly, automation company Festo shows off with another impressive animal replica. Like real kangaroos, Festo’s BionicKangaroo is not only great at jumping and keeping its balance, it can also store the energy generated from landing and use it for the next jump.
BionicKangaroo uses a combination of pneumatic actuators and electric servos to move and keep its balance.
According to Festo, the robot has an rubber elastic spring element that acts like an Achilles tendon: “It is fastened at the back of the foot and parallel to the pneumatic cylinder on the knee joint. The artificial tendon cushions the jump, simultaneously absorbs the kinetic energy and releases it for the next jump.”
To make the robot even fancier, Festo also made it so it can be controlled with gestures. The company uses the Myo armband to make BionicKangaroo move, stay or rotate in place. Watch BionicKangaroo hip hip hop and not stop:
It would’ve been way cooler if they made a BionicTigger instead. Check out Festo’s report (pdf) if you want to learn more about BionicKangaroo.
The very talented musician Imogen Heap and her colleagues at Mi.Mu are working on a glove that will allow you to make music by moving your fingers and hands. Think Minority Report, but instead of flipping screens around your movements create sounds. Air drumming is about to be legit.
Mi.Mu has an input and output board called x-OSC that connects the glove to a computer or multiple computers over Wi-Fi. It also has an accelerometer, a gyroscope and a magnetometer. Along with the flex sensors on the glove itself, the system can detect “the orientation of your hand, the “flex” of your fingers, your current hand posture (e.g. fist, open hand, one finger point), the direction (up, down, left, right, forwards, backwards) of your hand [and] sharp movements such as drum hits.”
You can map one or more of these movements to control music software with the help of Mi.Mu’s own application, which converts your movements to OSC or MIDI. This means you can use the glove with any software that can handle those two files. The video below shows Imogen performing (!) a song using only two Mi.Mu gloves to control the music:
As you may have noticed, the glove allows the wearer to activate multiple tweaks or sounds at once. You can also use gestures to switch between your saved mappings, which should reduce the number of movements you have to memorize for a given performance.
Who says that a wearable need to be something geeky like an eyeglass or big like a watch? This Ring input device shows that something so small can just be … Continue reading
Many gesture detection devices, including the Kinect and the Leap Motion, use infrared cameras to sense movement. They also have dedicated chips that process the data from the cameras. These components are power-hungry, especially if they’re turned on at all times. Researchers from the University of Washington have developed a gesture detection device that uses 1,000 to 10,000 times less power than its counterparts.
Bryce Kellogg, Vamsi Talla and their teacher Shyam Gollakota call the device AllSee. Instead of cameras and infrared light, it measures how the user’s hand affects ambient TV signals: “At a high level, we use the insight that motion at a location farther from the receiver results in smaller wireless signal changes than from a close-by location. This is because the reflections from a farther location experience higher attenuation and hence have lower energy at the receiver.”
The signal can also come from a dedicated RFID transmitter such as an RFID reader; future models may even use ambient Wi-Fi signals. The researchers even built prototypes that used TV signals both as source of data and as source of power, eliminating the need for a battery or plug.
Wave at your browser and go to the AllSee homepage for more on the device.
There was once a rumor that Apple would actually use a ring device for input to an Apple television. Neither of those gadgets exist yet, of course, but Ring is a Kickstarter project trying to fund a finger-based wearable that could enable the kind of controls envisioned in that Apple flight of fancy. The Ring is a hardware device that resembles an ordinary (if slightly chunky) ring, filled with… Read More
Wearables have largely revolved around smartglasses and smartwatches, but slowly other wearable items are cropping up, among them being the Bluetooth safety alert jewelry we saw yesterday and, as of … Continue reading
Total video game immersion might not be as far away as you think: The Oculus Rift is a huge step in the right direction, and it may have an optimal bedfellow in Thalmic’s Myo armband, the gesture control wearable that picks up on electrical impulses from your arm to deliver fine-tuned control over connected devices. While the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset can track head movements, and even now sense when you move forward or pull back, it still requires that you use a physical controller in most cases, which tends to dampen the realism to a degree. You’re not actually going to reach for that ladder run when climbing in-game, for instance, or grip that stock when you’re taking aim with your assault rifle. Oculus Rift and Myo are such a natural fit that it hasn’t escaped the notice of its investors. Spark Capital has a stake in both companies, and that’s no coincidence: A source close to the firm tells me that they considered the possible cross-device potential when they made their investment in each company, both of which were announced in June last year. Myo is marketing its devices as a much more broadly focused input mechanism, but the gaming segment is the fatted pig ready for market for investors, we’re told. The Oculus/Myo team-up isn’t just speculative, either. An email from Myo founder and CEO Stephen Lake confirms that indeed, development efforts are underway to link up the two pieces of hardware. “There are projects using both Myo + Rift,” he explained via email. “For example, there are developers in our Alpha program integrating both with Unity for various games. I think it’s a badass use case.”
For Oculus Rift, the key to success appears to depend at least in part on the headset’s ability to provide a convincing simulation of reality. Disconnects between what users are seeing in-game what they think they should be able to do in terms of character control and in-world interaction. For Myo, the big hurdle will be demonstrating a focused consumer use case that appeals to a big enough segment of the consumer market. In other words, Myo hooking up with the Rift is like chocolate meeting peanut butter, and it’ll be interesting to see how deep that relationship eventually goes.
Kinect may have been at it for years, but it’s taking most companies a fair old while to really get to grips with gesture control. Now, Samsung is planning to offer more fine-grained, finger-sensitive functionality in its 2014 smart TVs.
Samsung’s 2014 Smart TV line will be a step up from the 2013 models. The company described a few of the details in an announcement today, one of which is … Continue reading
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