Hasta La Gadget!

We’ve seen a couple of prototypes that enable or at least emulate touch-sensitivity on everyday objects. But as wearable technology continues to flourish, we’re going to need a simple and portable solution. Augmented reality company Metaio thinks they may have an answer with Thermal Touch, a technology that emulates touch-sensitivity using “the heat signature left by a person’s finger when touching a surface.”

Right now the hardware needed to pull off the feat is quite bulky. In the demo video below, Metaio used a tablet, a standard camera and a rather large infrared camera. The company hopes that in the future, all of the necessary hardware can be included in a wearable device similar to Google Glass, like so:

Here’s the demo video:

Sorry zombies, I guess you’ll be stuck with voice commands. Good luck with that.

[Metaio via TechCrunch]

Ever since I found out about Tactus a couple of years ago I’ve been looking forward to trying out its tactile touchscreen technology. It looks like that time is close at hand. Tactus’ first consumer product is a case for the iPad Mini that adds its retractable buttons to the tablet.

The image above does not show the upcoming iPad Mini case; it’s a screenshot from Tactus’ 2013 CES demo, which you can watch below.  According to Business Insider, the iPad Mini case will have a switch that lets it “push out transparent, physical buttons over the iPad’s standard keyboard. The keys can appear and disappear almost instantly.”

If you’re hoping for Tactus’ technology to appear on other touchscreen devices as well, don’t worry. The company is working to have its product appear on as many devices as possible. Check out their 2014 CES concept video to see what they hope to accomplish:

Tactus’ iPad Mini case will be released later this year and will cost around $80 to $100 (USD). VentureBeat reports that Tactus will release its own tablet as early as next year.

[via Business Insider & VentureBeat via BGR]

Facebook is a powerful tool when it comes to connecting with people that you’ve met, as well as being arguably the most important social networking site on the planet. This can be both good and bad, and while I’m not sure if I want to share my location at all times on my timeline, I’m sure that it could be useful in some cases.

Facebook’s new Nearby Friends feature is disabled by default. It allows you to get alerts when some of your FB friends are nearby. It could definitely makes things easier when you’re out on the town, in the same general area, but have trouble actually locating your friends, something that actually happened to me today.

While I can also see the possible problems of such a feature, when it comes to stalkers, etc, at least it’s fully optional, and defaults to being switched off. The problem is that a lot of people aren’t going to remember to switch back off when they don’t want it running. They’ll just leave it on once they set it and forget it. At least you can choose who you do and don’t share your location with, so that should help some.

What do you think of this feature? Are you going to enable it on your phone?

[via Facebook]

There are already portable battery packs that have solar panels for recharging. The Trinity is a new kind of portable charger that uses a different renewable source of energy: the wind. It recharges its 15,000 mAh battery through its built-in wind turbine. Although it’s quite promising, I don’t think you should support it just yet.

Trinity weighs just 4lb. and when collapsed it’s just 12″ long, so it’s fairly portable. It has three aluminum legs that can either stay in a tripod arrangement or lie flat. Inside Trinity is a 15W generator and its battery. The current prototype has a 5V/1A USB charging port, although inventor Skajaquoda is considering adding an additional 5v/2A USB port for more power hungry devices like tablets. Here’s where it starts to get iffy. Skajaquoda also added a miniUSB port that’s meant to charge Trinity’s battery… via an outlet.

Why would they add a way to charge the battery that doesn’t use the built-in wind turbine? If you’re going to plug it in to charge it you might as well get a conventional battery pack that’s much smaller. The only reason I can think of for the addition of the mini-USB charging option is that Skajaquoda isn’t confident about Trinity’s charging speed through the wind turbine. Commenters on the fundraising site are asking the same question: How fast does it charge through wind power? Sadly, Skajaquoda didn’t include that vital data on their Kickstarter page and on their pitch video.

Breeze on over to Kickstarter to find out more about Trinity. The device can be yours for a pledge of at least $249 (USD), but again I don’t think you should back the project yet. I’m not saying this is vaporware or a scam. It’s an interesting and promising invention,  but at the same time there are important details about it that need to come to light before you plunk down your hard-earned cash.

[via GadgeTell]

It might have taken some extra time, but Samsung quickly adopted biometric security on their new S5 flagship Android phone. However, it didn’t take hackers long to figure out a way to defeat it.

Apparently, the fingerprint scanner of the S5 isn’t hard to spoof. SRLabs have been able to spoof it using a lifted print. It took them only a few minutes to create a dummy finger to allow them access to the phone. This is also true of the scanner on the iPhone 5s, however the iPhone 5s has got a password to allow access to the scanner, which the Galaxy S5 doesn’t have yet.

Hopefully, a quick software update will patch this vulnerability. PayPal has already reacted with a statement, saying that there are plenty of additional safeguards that will allow users peace of mind when using biometric security. With any luck, your money is still safe.

[via BGR]