Hasta La Gadget!

Here’s a cool little addition to the increasingly competitive world of home automation. Ube’s got a WiFi Smart Dimmer that utilizes multitouch functionality to control the lights in your house — use one finger to turn off a single light, or use two to turn off a set. The company picked SXSW as the venue to announce the forthcoming launch of customized gestures for other smart devices — in the example given to us by CEO Utz Baldwin, a user can input a “W” to turn on the sprinklers — or an “A” plus up swipe to turn on an alarm and an “A” plus a down swipe to disable it.

Sadly, the functionality won’t be available for the launch of the first generation, though it’s likely to come in time for the second generation, along with a software update for early adopters. Interested parties can support the company via Kickstarter right now — Ube’s a bit over halfway to its goal of $280,000, with 24 days to go. You can also watch Baldwin discuss the product and today’s news in a video after the break.

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Source: Kickstarter

The best way to get the attention of a bunch of sleep-deprived, possibly hungover SXSW Interactive attendees? Coffee-slinging robotic arms, naturally. GE’s fully embracing Austin’s caffeinated food trick culture with a pair of Barista Bots, arms that operate similarly to your standard 3D printer, moving along the X, Y and Z axes to extrude coffee through a syringe, atop a latte’s foam. The process starts when one of the robot’s human barista counterparts takes a shot of an image with a webcam, digitizing it on a nearby computer. Then the arm goes to work.

It’s an imperfect science, of course. For one thing, foam is a really difficult canvas to work on, what with all the unevenness of constantly popping bubbles. There’s also an awful lot of wind in Austin today, and with all those people inside, the van did a little bit of rocking. We saw some more complex images that didn’t come out particularly well (facial scans, for one thing), so we decided to throw something a simpler at the ‘bot, drawing our “e” logo on a sheet of paper.

Filed under: Household

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When we spoke to Gary Stern way back in January at CES, the pinball exec let it be known that his was the only company currently producing pinball machines — and while that may be accurate so far as actual shipping systems go, there are a handful of startups looking to get into the game. One of the more compelling examples we’ve seen is the offering from Multimorphic, an Austin-based company showcasing a prototype at SXSW Interactive’s Game Expo.

The P3 is interesting for a number of reasons. First, and arguably most importantly, is the modular nature of the machine. If you take a look at the (still-unfinished) sides of the cabinet, you can see a big slit down the center, where the top can be lifted off and replaced — since the machine is targeted toward home users, there’s no concern about vandalism there. The idea is to essentially offer a platform to both developers and at-home hackers to create their own games atop what is essentially a clean slate.

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Source: Multimorphic

GlassUp is a wearable computing project that turns a pair of glasses into a head-mounted secondary display for your smartphone. A projector beams images onto a glass panel baked into the right-side lens, theoretically letting you read texts, tweets and emails on the go. We got to try a very early prototype here at CeBIT, which pushed microfilm slides onto the yellow-and-black, 320 x 240 display. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to see anything too clearly, or get its touch controls to work properly, so while we like the concept, we’re not sure if we’re sold on the implementation just yet.

The company is planning to release two versions, one with Bluetooth 4.0 and one with Bluetooth 3.1 to ensure a wide range of compatibility with Android and iOS devices, and GlassUp is aiming to have finished versions ready for the Augmented World Expo in June. At the same time, it’ll take to Kickstarter to generate the funds necessary for a pre-sale, priced at $399 / €299, so if you’d like to see if you should start saving, check out the video after the break.

Filed under: Wearables, Mobile

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Somehow we missed this at Mobile World Congress last week. We were so busy playing with Fujitsu’s GPS cane and 5-inch F-02E phone that we didn’t even notice the company introduce a waterproof, dustproof Android tablet. As you can see in that shot above, the Stylistic M702 is more than just water-resistant: it meets the standards for IPX5, 7 and 8, which is to say it can withstand immersion in one meter of water for up to 30 minutes. (That, and the occasional jet stream.) A close inspection of the tablet will show that all the ports are sealed with rubber-coated doors, which should keep out liquid as well as dust particles.

Other than that, this more or less has all the specs you’d expect on a high-end Android tablet, including a 1.7GHz quad-core Tegra 3 processor, a 10.1-inch, 1,920 x 1,200, IPS display, 2GB of RAM, NFC, Bluetooth 4.0, MHL, dual 8MP / 1.2MP cameras and LTE connectivity. The built-in storage tops out at 32 gigs, but fortunately there’s a microSD slot to give you more leeway. Out of the box it will run Android 4.0, but an upgrade to Jelly Bean is coming. Interestingly, there’s also a small door housing an antenna, but that’ll only be offered on the Japanese model; the European config we handled here at CeBIT had just a blank slot. Most impressive of all, potentially, is the claimed battery life: the 10,000mAh cell is rated for 15 hours of runtime, which would be a coup indeed. And at 590g (1.3 pounds) the tablet isn’t even that heavy, considering the gigantic battery squeezed inside. It’s available now in Europe, Africa, India and the Middle East for €999, which is expensive, sure, but perhaps it’s a price corporate customers can swallow anyway.

Filed under: Tablets

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