Just as Apple is set to show of their next round of iPhone devices with 4-inch displays – like the iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C, for example – word has it that they’re in testing with handsets as large as 6-inches. A report from the the Wall Street Journal today suggests that sources familiar with […]
With the Wacom Ciniq Companion Hybrid you’ve got one of two new drawing tablets made by the company to take the art to a new level. While the non-Hybrid version runs full Windows 8, this iteration utilizes Android for mobile greatness and full Mac OS and PC compatibility for all the stylus illustration work you […]
The team at Amazon behind the Kindle have refreshed the Kindle Paperwhite with a boost to both software and hardware, and all the way over in Berlin this week we’re having another look at it. This device looks – from all outward appearances – to be the exact same model as the original. It’s once […]
With the dawning of the age of touchscreen friendliness with Windows 8 in the PC world, HP has made more than one innovative move in filling every gap that appeared in usability options, this week with the HP ENVY Recline series. The ENVY Recline 23-k030 TouchSmart All-in-one, ENVY Recline 27-k050 TouchSmart All-in-One, and special Beats […]
Denmark’s The Eye Tribe is not an indigenous group that worships the ocular organ, but a startup that works in machine vision, specifically developing eye tracking tech for use in consumer electronics. In service of its goal of delivering gaze controlled games and software applications to users on a broad scale, The Eye Tribe today unveiled a $99 USB 3.0 hardware accessory for Windows devices, which provides eye tracking capabilities to any tablet, laptop or PC running Microsoft’s desktop OS.
The Eye Tribe Tracker, as it’s called, is aimed at developers, and ships with an SDK to help devs build eye tracking and control functionality into their existing software. Just a few lines of code are required, The Eye Tribe claims, resulting in a real-time feed on “on-screen gaze coordinates” which a software developer can use as an input mechanism or to collect data.
This initial batch of pre-orders is targeted specifically at developers, The Eye Tribe co-founder and CEO Sune Alstrup Johansen tells me, but the eventual goal is to ship to consumers, something Johansen says the company would “preferably” accomplish “together with an OEM.”
“We are determined to provide eye tracking for everyone,” he explained. “Finding a strong hardware partner that will bring this to market with us is the optimal way for us. However, we can and will do it ourselves, if we do not find the right partner in proper time.”
As for the current price point, which seems quite low at under $100 for The Eye Tribe’s advanced tech, Johansen wouldn’t say exactly whether the startup was making money or taking a loss on these dev units, but did say they expect pricing of Eye Tribe hardware to go down, and the cost of the tech itself being largely invisible to general users.
“We wanted this to be available for every developer out there, and our software can work with affordable components,” he said. “In the future prices will go down, as volume goes up. We want to earn money on licensing, not on hardware sales. We see this being integrated into tables, smartphones and laptop without any visible price changes for the consumers.”
Samsung and others are building similar tech into mobile devices, and other startups like Israel’s Umoove are anticipating demand from OEMs. Still, it’s hardly a crowded space just yet. If The Eye Tribe can get a jump on the market by seeding low-cost developer hardware, then it should stand a chance of becoming a go-to supplier, when and if eye tracking becomes a standard device feature.
The Dextrus hand is the working prototype resulting from Joel Gibbard’s Open Hand Project, an open source hardware initiative that aims to lower the cost of robotic prosthetics dramatically. Dextrus is a fully-functional robotic hand, with features and capabilities similar to leading advanced prosthetics, but at a small fraction of the cost.
A working Dextrus is available through Gibbard’s just-launched Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign for £700 for the full prosthetic version of the device, which is around $1,100 U.S. Compare that to $11,000 for the market-leading model back in 2010, for example. Gibbard is able to cut costs in a number of ways, from using less expensive materials in the construction to 3D printing component parts, as well as using existing artificial limb attachment hardware and mounts.
Gibbard, who’s based in Bristol, UK, says that after developing the original Dextrus while studying in school for a Bachelor’s of Engineering in Robotics from the University of Plymouth, and receiving numerous accolades for its design, he realized that making a material impact in the world would require more than just research. The Indiegogo campaign, which is seeking £39,000 in funding, is designed to finance work on the Open Hand Project for an entire year to help translate Gibbard’s academic research into reality.
To test and build the Dextrus, Gibbard has been working with amputee and Chef Liam Corbett, who says he’s already able to do much more with the prototype Dextrus than with the hook prosthesis he used previously.
“Liam’s the perfect candidate for the hand so I’ll be working with him throughout,” Gibbard says of the partnership between the two and their opportunistic meeting. “He’s been searching for a device like this for the last couple of years and got in touch with me through Facebook.” The Dextrus hasn’t yet been tested with other users, Gibbard says, but he’s had discussions with a prosthetist at Bristol’s Southmead hospital, who’s helping him find other good candidates.
To make the dream of an affordable, advanced prosthetic a widely-available reality, Gibbard says that he’d likely require a contract with Britain’s National Health service or similar, and that would probably entail raising at least another £10,000 or so in funding at least, which he says he’d look for from sources other than crowdfunding. The dream is both ambitious and worthy, so here’s hoping the Indiegogo campaign gives this entrepreneur a chance to get to that next stage.
With most-wanted features picked from both the Yoga and ThinkPad device families this season, Lenovo has unveiled the first Lenovo ThinkPad Yoga (bet you didn’t see that name coming). This device is made to bring on Windows 8.1 and up to 4th generation Intel Core i7 processors (that’s Haswell) along with touchscreen capabilities and the […]
While the team at Lenovo have made clear that they have no intention of ending their run of high-powered, best-in-class multi-mode touchscreen computers with their Yoga lineup, they’ve shown that they can keep it simple as well with the budget-friendly Flex 14 and Flex 15 as well. These devices work with a hinge that allows […]
When we reviewed the larger relative to this Lenovo Flex 20 earlier this year in the company’s infamous Horizon Table PC, we found that it was only the basics that were holding us back: it was just too big. Here with the Lenovo Flex 20, it would appear that the team behind that larger beast […]
This week the folks at Lenovo have introduced the Vibe X smartphone, a next-generation solution that takes what they introduced with last year’s K900 and gives it a full 2013 makeover. This device works with top-tier specifications like a 5-inch “20/20 Vision” IPS LCD display with 1920 x 1080 pixel resolution – that’s Full HD […]
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