Hasta La Gadget!

The jury is largely still out on wearable gadgets like Google Glass that let you passively consume information that appears in front of your eyes, but Soulaiman Itani isn’t satisfied with just looking. Instead, his company — Mountain View-based Atheer Labs — has been working on a device that lets its users physically manipulate that information too.

Sounds like yet another load of sci-fi nonsense trickling into the real world, but the experience is much closer than one might think. Earlier today Atheer Labs kicked off an Indiegogo campaign for two new pairs of augmented reality glasses they hope will get developers and tinkerers excited about their vision of the future of computing.

“The digital world shouldn’t be limited to screens any more,” Itani told me. “It should be all around you and customized to you.

The vision highlighted in the company’s Indiegogo teaser video essentially depicts the intersection of Google Glass and “Minority Report”. In order to interact with any of the information or apps that appear before you, you reach out and manipulate it with your hands, thanks to sensors that track your hand movements and gestures in space.

We’re still quite a ways from being able to play with something that polished, but the groundwork has already been laid. Atheer first showed off its work at AllThingsD’s D11 conference last May, and very early demos of the experience seemed promising at best and kludgy at worst.

Don’t expect this sort of tech to come cheap though. The real star of the pair is the Atheer Development Kit (or ADK if you’re feeling jaunty), an $850 model that packs what Itani refers to as “everything that’s in your tablet”. By that he means a slew of sensors, WiFi and Bluetooth radios, and a–sadly undisclosed–Snapdragon chip to power it all. At first glance it may not seem like enough juice to deliver on everything that Atheer has promised, but Itani is adamant that the software that allows those gesture tracking sensors and displays to work in tandem is lean enough to keep things moving at a respectable clip.

And the end result? Something like holding a 25-inch tablet in front of your face at about half arm’s length, except you can reach into that tablet with fiddle with whatever you find.

Meanwhile, the less expensive Atheer One is meant to tap into an Android device you carry around on your person for its computing horsepower and content — Itani says it’s compatible with the full library of Android apps. As you’d imagine, that means there’s going to be a pretty hard limit on compatibility, but Itani says the only limiting factor is whether or not a device is capable outputting “very large images”.

“A three or four year old phone might not work,” Itani said. “But we’ve been testing with the Nexus 4, that’s more than enough.”

Despite all the work that’s gone into turning the Atheer concept into an actual pair of products that should see the light of day next year, deep down Atheer doesn’t want to be a hardware company. This initial run of developer devices are reference units that will, with any luck, inspire some dyed-in-the-wool hardware players to take a chance on creating devices that can help push Atheer’s wild-eyed vision forward.

Gift giving is very anticlimactic. You hand something over, the recipient tears it open, and you’re done. Maybe there are hugs exchanged, maybe some high fives. Whatever. Cheetos, beer, and football the rest of the night.

But get a load of the Timeless Box. It’s an $100 aluminum (or titanium) box that is locked shut for a period of time – between a few days and a year. You put something small inside it, lock it, and hand it over. Then, a month later or whatever, the recipient hears a little click and the box opens. You can be gone, dead, flying around the world, in deepest space, and they get a little memory of you that pops out as if by magic. Note: do not put live animals into the Timeless Box.

Blew your mind, right? Boom.

I asked the creator, Ignasi Giró, for some help in understanding this thing. Giró is co-founder of Honest&Smile, a design agency in Barcelona, and he seems pretty grounded in the deep truths of the universe.

TC: Why did you build this?
Giró: We live in an “ever-connected” and kind of “super empowering” society. But we end up sending poor “Happy Birthday” messages from airport waiting rooms. Or forgetting about what we really wanted to become one year from now. So, I really felt there was room for a sort of “anti gadget” that removed almost all power to its users… but gave back two very precious things: A re-gained perception of time passing by, neatly confronting something from years ago with your present time and an extremely simple and easy to use time-capsule object, that won’t get lost with time, or that you won’t need to call NASA to set up properly.

Having this in mind, adding to it all the wonderful literacy and storytelling about the subject (from Dr Who’s TARDIS references, to “time travel tales” and general relativity, too), the idea grew quickly and developed into what you are seeing today.

Oh, and there’s also a virtual version, here, to beta test virtual boxes, that is completely responsive for phones and tablets.

TC: Isn’t it kind of morbid?
G: Ha ha ha, well, maybe, yes.. Some people take it that way, and start considering extremely cruel uses for it. To punish their kids, for instance, by hiding their iPod inside for a few days. Also, someone told us he would give a 10 years locked Titanium Timeless Box to someone, and leave it… empty! Imagine, waiting 10 years for it to open, and then find nothing inside. But most of the people connect with that special moment they don’t want to miss, when their kid will turn 18, or when that good friend in Europe will get married. Furthermore, people consider using it to send messages to their future self, as a kind of reminder of what you wanted to accomplish. And, well, yes, we can’t deny it, the Timeless Box can become a very valuable tool for someone wanting to leave any kind of legacy or message to their loved ones, to be opened in some future moment when he or she feels won’t be there anymore.

TC: How secure is it? Can I crack it open?
It’s built into a two pieces of solid aluminum (and there’s a Titanium one, too). It’s solid, sure. Off course, its not unbreakable. But you certainly will have to be pretty mean and aggressive to get into it. We feel the best safety mechanism it has is it’s design: it looks to beautiful to harm it or destroy it. And, well, it’s also a game: you can always break the rules, sure. But then it’s not a funny game anymore.

That’s some pretty heady stuff in this season of giving. Pretty heady indeed. You can pledge to get a Timeless Box right here. I’m going to fill mine with cheese.

Toronto-based Bionym turned heads with its concept for wearable hardware that authenticates a user based on their heartwave signature, which could turn the whole world of digital security on its head. It’s a key tied to your person in a very intimate sense, meaning it can’t really be stolen or lost like even a current standalone unique passkey generator can.

We met with Bionym CEO and co-founder Karl Martin at their headquarters in Toronto, where the engineering team shares relatively limited space with the rest of the folks. The team is growing at a rapid clip, however, and the plan is to move into a more accommodating space in the near future. As it stands, however, it’s kind of nice to see people soldering and testing brand new circuit boards right next to those arranging future partnerships and doing developer outreach.

Martin filled us in on the progress his startup has made since launchings its pre-order campaign back in September, and it sounds as if things are on track. Final design is still mostly up in the air, but as you can see, things have come a long way from the original prototype that Martin and his co-founder Foteini Agrafioti developed first only roughly a year ago. It’s also very interesting to hear Martin articulate exactly where he sees Nymi’s tech headed – including a long-term goal where it becomes a wearable you won’t even notice you’re wearing.

Google Glass use cases are many, but one that inevitably comes to mind is facial recognition. Google already does a lot with reverse image searching and identifying faces in photos, so it would not be such a leap to imagine it doing something like comparing the faces of those you meet at networking events to publicly available photos from Google+ and other sources to make sure you never again forget a name. But Google has forbidden that kind of software in the official Glassware app store. Still, startup Lambda Labs and its founder Stephen Balaban are building that software anyway, for installation via sideloading.

That workaround means the app, called FaceRec, will only ever make it onto a fraction of Glass devices, and a Google spokesperson had this to say when contacted for comment as confirmation it’ll never get broad distribution through any official channels:

As our Glass Developer Policies make clear, we will not be approving any Facial Recognition Glassware.

A subset of the Explorer crop can’t add up to many installs, but that’s exactly who it’s intended for, Lambda tells Forbes. The app works by storing a record of every face that a user encounters while wearing glass, on a cycle that refreshes to capture new faces every ten seconds. In this early version, it can’t ID faces in real-time, and doesn’t have a reference database from which to draw. Instead, like with iPhoto and other services, you can tag pictures with names so that they’ll be recognized the next time you see them. Users can also roll their own script for mining data from their Facebook network for automatic identification, but it’s not built into the product since it violates Facebook’s rules of usage.

The first version of Lambda’s Glass facial recognition app might be limited, but it’s a first step to something more on par with what we might expect from sci-fi examples, where you glance at someone and get a profile of them, shared interests and more provided via a heads-up display. Which is great, because getting to know people the old fashioned way through conversation and a gradual deepening of mutual understanding is for the birds.

Seriously though, there does seem to be a general level of anxiety around the idea of Google Glass and facial recognition. But over time we’ve proven ourselves to be quite changeable on the definition of what is and isn’t acceptable when it comes to how much information we share with others via the web, and facial recognition could become something that people grow more comfortable with time. It definitely has a range of positive possible use cases, including for treatment of genuine medical conditions like prosopagnosia or the aftermath of strokes.

Google may eventually relax its privacy restrictions to make this kind of app officially supported on its Glass platform, but Lambda is also building its own Android-based wearable device called the “Lambda Hat” that will be available for pre-orders Friday. This and other platforms developed outside of Google likely won’t carry similar strictures about face recognition tech, so Balaban’s concept of a world where we can know people just by looking using computer vision might come to pass regardless of Google’s reservations, and the serious privacy implications such a concept entails.

This may be a particularly interesting example of unauthorized Glass software, but software outside the bounds of platform restrictions is nothing new. Apple has a far-reaching and active iOS jailbreak community, after all, and Android devs have created many apps that can be sideloaded but don’t make it into the Play Store. Glass is bound to play host to a few of those as well, but novel technology makes for novel takes on what constitutes ‘out-of-bounds’ software. None of these unauthorized apps really make it beyond outlier or curiosity status, unless policies change and they gain access to official channels, but they can still be worth watching as barometers of what users find interesting and/or acceptable in specific examples of mobile software.

Apple has just announced that its new Mac Pro computer, featuring that signature ‘Darth Vader’ design, will be available for sale starting tomorrow, Thursday Dec. 19 beginning at $2,999. There’s another version with better specs for $3,999, and a number of custom order options that will vary the prices upwards from there.

Orders kick off tomorrow online through Apple’s official web-based store, as well as in retail stores and at authorized resellers, according to Apple’s official announcement, so conceivably we could see the first customers actually take theirs home tomorrow, though it’s much more likely that orders will kick off first with stock arriving at locations gradually over the next few days.

The $2,999 configuration of the Mac Pro features a 3.7GHz quad-core Intel Xeon E5 processor, not one but two AMD FirePro D500 workstation GPUs with 2GB of dedicated RAM per unit, 12GB of system RAM and a 256 flash storage module. The $3,999 version boosts the processor to a 3.5GHz six-core version, provides 3GB of dedicated RAM to each of those workstation GPUs, 16GB of memory and 256GB of flash storage. Custom configurations allow for 8- or 12-core processors, AMD FirePro D700 GPUs with 6GB of RAM, a maximum of 64GB of system memory and up to 1TB of flash storage.

Apple first revealed the new Mac Pro back in June at its annual Worldwide Developer’s Conference. The sleek black cylindrical unity is assembled in the U.S., and features a design that maximizes cooling through a jet turbine-like system that funnels air through the top opening. It features an all-black aluminum enclosure, and comes in at under 10 inches tall. It dramatically reduces its size versus the previous version, and to do that, moves the modularity outside of the case thanks to six Thunderbolt 2 ports, as well as four USB 3.0 connections on the back. It can power up to three 4k displays, too, and also features two Gigabit Ethernet jacks and an HDMI 1.4 UltraHD out.

At Apple’s special event in October, we got the chance to go hands-on with the new Mac Pro, and found it to be incredibly silent while working, despite the amount of power contained under the hood. It features a number of impressive details like the back panel that automatically lights up when it detects the computer is being moved to help you see which ports are which, especially handy if you’re working in a darkened studio.

The price range of this new Mac Pro means that as its name implies, it’ll likely be most sought after by working pros who’ve been clinging to their aging silver aluminum models and holding out for something more, but it’s a device that shows Apple is still invested in its longtime bedrock of creative professionals. It’s also a demonstration device in terms of showcasing Apple’s hardware engineering, and a way for Apple to highlight its efforts to bring at least part of its manufacturing and assembly chain back home to the U.S. It’s definitely a machine we’re eager to test more extensively, and we’ll report back once we do.