Hasta La Gadget!

The announcement last year that Los Angeles would be replacing its high-pressure sodium streetlights—known for their distinctive yellow hue—with new, blue-tinted LEDs might have a profound effect on at least one local industry. All of those LEDs, with their new urban color scheme, will dramatically change how the city appears on camera, thus giving Los Angeles a brand new look in the age of digital filmmaking. As Dave Kendricken writes for No Film School, "Hollywood will never look the same."

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The streets are often empty in the dead of night, but they’re all still well-lit anyway. That makes sense, because I’d want it to be well-lit in case I find myself walking home in the wee hours of the morning. It’s definitely a huge waste of energy though, because no one’s around to actually make use of that light.

A neat concept that aims to solve this problem is Tvilight. Basically, these streetlamps will only light up when someone is around. If its wireless sensors can’t detect any people or vehicles nearby, then the lamps will switch to its dim light mode. The sensors are able to detect how fast a person or object is approaching, so it can flick the lights on quickly as needed.

The Tvilight is expected to cut typical carbon dioxide emissions by 80% and reduce maintenance costs by half. It’s definitely got huge potential for use in streets all over the world. What do you think?

[via Dvice]

ARM isn’t content with dominating the mobile space. It’s been by the far the most vocal about an Internet of Things where everything is connected — and to make that happen, it just established an industry forum in the UK that it hopes will establish common ground for all those internet-linked light bulbs, refrigerators and thermostats. Home energy firm Alertme, cloud-aware sensing outfit AquaMW, lighting maker EnLight and white space wireless guru Neul will start meeting with ARM from August 24th onwards to hash out our automated, eco-friendly future. There’s a certain urgency in this for the chip designer: it expects 50 billion devices on the grid by 2020. With IDC estimating a billion new connected devices just in 2011, the clock on that connected device transition is ticking very loudly.

Continue reading ARM forms UK group to foster an Internet of Things, put 50 billion devices online by 2020

Filed under: Household, Internet

ARM forms UK group to foster an Internet of Things, put 50 billion devices online by 2020 originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 26 Jul 2012 19:36:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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