Disney’s drone research eyes better parades and floating screens

We’ve seen drones used for all sorts of things from film production to package delivery. Now, it seems Disney may be looking to leverage the aerial vehicles for its theme parks. The company has applied for three patents that employ the remote-controlled gadgets for floating projection displays and airborne marionettes. That latter option is meant to boost hovering parade characters that have been limited to gas-filled balloons with little mobility, while the former uses UAVs to float a screen over park visitors. The third scenario is one where the individual drones each carry a lighting rig to achieve the desired effect. Something like fireflies after dark, we’d surmise. All three projects would be commanded from a “ground control station” to coordinate flight paths. Of course, with this being an application, there’s no guarantee that you’ll encounter the compact flying vehicles at Disneyland anytime soon, but the outfit’s R&D department has a knack for coming up with awesome ideas.

Filed under: Misc

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Via: Gizmodo, MarketWatch

Source: Patent App (1), (2), (3)

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Companies will pay you to give up privacy on your devices

You may have good reason to safeguard your privacy these days, but would you hand over the goods if someone paid you? For some people, the answer is “yes.” Companies like Luth Research have been paying willing subjects a modest amount (in Luth’s case, $100 per month) to track their devices’ locations, web histories and app usage to improve advertising and shopping. Ford, for example, used the technology this year to see how prospective buyers research a car; it could tell if participants bought a vehicle after visiting its site, or if they were using their phone to research alternatives in the showroom. These monitoring schemes are hardly low-profile, either. Verizon recently launched a voluntary program that promises rewards if you share your positioning and web info.

These companies don’t usually want everything (messages are often safe), and there are frequently security measures like virtual private networks (VPNs) that reduce the chances someone will take data without your permission. You can typically drop out of these tracking systems very easily if you’re nervous. Still, it’s easy to understand why you might not want to fork over sensitive info, no matter what your pay may be. You’re giving someone else valuable information and trusting that they won’t either misuse it or lose it to a data breach. And future collection methods may make you uncomfortable, even if you don’t mind putting information out in the open — Luth is developing ambient audio recording that would help it figure out exactly what you’re doing at a given moment.

[Image credit: Shutterstock]

Filed under: Cellphones, Desktops, Laptops, Tablets, Internet, Mobile, Verizon

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Source: MIT Technology Review, Luth Research

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Casio’s newest G-Shock has a giant dial for (complicated) music control

Casio continues to inch its G-Shock series towards something a little smarter, while holding onto a simple monochrome LCD display and that distinctly G-Shock styling. The “G’mix” GBA-400 improves on the typical digital watch feature list through Bluetooth, a pair of dedicated apps (one for the watch part, one for the music playing part) and your smartphone, whether it’s iOS or Android. Oh and there’s a giant dial control on the side and it’s really satisfying to play with.

See? Once you’ve linked the G-Shock to your smartphone, the dial can be setup to adjust volume, skip tracks, and even cycle through several different equalizer settings. You can also make your own custom equalizer profiles within the companion music app — and even decide which modes get added to the watch-based selector. To cycle through those menus, however, you need a depress another button. Bluetooth syncing is assigned to yet another button, while the third button does illumination and the fourth cycles through digital watch features like stopwatch and alarm.

For a digital watch with a few tricks up its sleeve, it’s unfortunately not all that intuitive. There’s a lot of buttons, and a lot of scrolling to get what you want done — we had to ask multiple times for driving instructions, inadvertently changing equalizer settings when we simply wanted to skip a track. We also don’t quite get the reasoning for two mandatory app downloads: surely Casio could integrate the watch features into the music app?

The G’Mix’s best trick is its music recognition integration, courtesy of SoundHound. With two scrolls upwards on the rotary switch, it’ll kick your smartphone into action, listening to the music. While it’ll offer up artist and purchase details within the phone app, it’ll also send a basic line of song information to the watch face itself — it all works without you having to touch the phone at all. From our brief testing with Casio’s team, it had no problem picking up a couple of ’80s hits — and it was all relatively easy to initiate.

Through the same Bluetooth connection, the new G-Shock can also sniff out your phone and ring it, when it’s somehow hidden itself. (Last year’s models apparently packed the same skill.) Unlike a lot of Casio’s watches, there’s no solar charging here, but the battery is rated for two years, which factors in using the mobile link feature for about two hours a day. Obviously, two years per battery change sounds much better than current smartwatch mileages — even the skill set of the Casio model is a severely reduced one. The watch goes on sale in Japan first, priced at 23,000 yen (roughly $220), but it’ll roll out globally after that — Casio expects to offer the model in the west later this year.

Filed under: Wearables

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‘All Together Now’ is a Fox sitcom about friends who unplug

Time spent with friends is supposed to be cherished. Nowadays, however, the existence of things like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter make those moments a little less special for some people, namely because they keep their eyes hooked to whatever device they have near them. To that end, according to Deadline, Fox has green-lit a TV sitcom called All Together Now, which features a plot based on six friends in their late 20′s who are keen to unplug from their mobile devices and interact with one another “for as long as they can stand it.” All Together Now is set to be produced by Alec Sulkin and Julius Sharpe, who most recently worked with Fox on Dads, a show canceled last May, after only one 19-episode season, due to very bad reviews. The new sitcom still hasn’t begun production, so it’ll likely be a while before it premieres — hopefully it’s enough time for you to gather your thoughts and realize that this is really happening.

[Image credit: Associated Press]

Filed under: Cellphones, Home Entertainment, Tablets, Mobile

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Via: The Verge

Source: Deadline

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