Electric rollerblades go offroad with tank treads

Polish inventor Jack Skopinski recently debuted his latest electric people-mover: a set of battery-powered “off-road” rollerblades that handle dirt trails as well as they do city streets. Each boot is outfitted with a 350 W DC motor that propels the rider for up to 12 miles at speeds topping 9 MPH. Rather than proper wheels, these rollerblades sit atop rubber treads enabling riders to scoot across grass, gravel and dirt tracks with ease, if the promotional video (below) is any indication. The entire system is controlled by a wired, hand-held remote.

The boots are pretty pricey for a last mile commute solution given their $1,400 price tag. Plus, at 11 pounds for the pair, these blades are going to be a pain to haul around should you deplete their charge before reaching your destination. That said, Skopinski is reportedly planning to adapt this tech to traditional, 2 x 8 rollerblades in the near future.

Via: Gizmag

Source: EV4

Sonos product head Marc Whitten has left the company

Sonos announced a round of layoffs earlier this month, and now a turbulent March continues. The company has confirmed that chief product officer Marc Whitten has departed the company after a two-year stint. During his time at Sonos, Whitten oversaw two of the company’s most important product launches in its history: the excellent new Play:5 speaker and the speaker-tuning TruePlay software. A company spokesperson gave us the following statement: “Marc Whitten has decided to leave Sonos, and his last day was Friday, March 25. We thank Marc for this hard work and meaningful contributions over the past two years.”

While both of those products had successful launches, it sounds like Sonos is getting ready to do a pivot of sorts. In his blog post confirming the layoffs, Sonos CEO specifically cited the Amazon Echo as new competition for the company in the connected speaker space and said that Sonos was looking into how to bring “voice-enabled music experiences into the home.” He acknowledged that was new territory for the company and implied that the layoffs could be due to that transition. While there’s no word on why Whitten left, it’s entirely possible that the change is related to this new area of focus for Sonos.

Prior to his time at Sonos, Whitten was the chief product officer for Xbox and oversaw the (somewhat troubled) launch of the Xbox One. Since he left, Phil Spencer took over and guided Microsoft through some tough times and refocused the console on its core gaming experiences. Whether Whitten ends up back in the games industry, the tech industry in general or something entirely new remains to be seen. Whitten hasn’t posted on his Twitter account since March 15th, and his LinkedIn and Twitter profiles still say he’s working for Sonos.

Via: Tech Insider

Instagram says it’s not changing your feed… yet

The internet flung into a panic today as users prepped for Instagram to change how images display in its feed. Earlier this month, the filter-driven photo app announced that it would switch from a chronological order of photos to an algorithm-based approach like Facebook does with the News Feed and Twitter’s option for organizing Timelines. The idea is to push things the software thinks you’d like to see more to the top, but, of course, this means you’re likely to miss out on some things, too. Based on the high level of panic and the service being inundated with posts begging followers to turn on notifications, Instagram took to Twitter to assure us that nothing is changing yet.

When the timeline tweak was first announced, Instagram said the feature would roll out in the “coming months.” However, a select few were privy to the new algorithm’s handiwork on their timelines as its still in testing. And of course, that meant mass panic. Today, after the rage set in, the company reiterated that it would make a formal announcement when the change takes effect for all users.

We’re listening and we assure you nothing is changing with your feed right now. We promise to let you know when changes roll out broadly.

— Instagram (@instagram) March 28, 2016

Source: Instagram (Twitter)

Drawing drone mimics your sketches

Ever wondered what a drone would draw if it had an artistic side? MIT is happy to show you. It recently developed a Flying Pantograph drone that, as the name suggests, translates whatever you draw on a table to its own drawings on a vertical canvas. It’s not a faithful mirror of your art, as the drone bobs and weaves while it tries to catch up with your vision. However, the researchers say the shaky result is on purpose — think of it as the robot adding its own flair to a collaborative work.

Right now, the Flying Pantograph exists largely as a cool “what if” exploration of the interactions between humans and machines. However, the implications for practical uses are big, in more ways than one. For a start, it could open the door to more forms of art from people who can’t stand. It’d also let artists draw on surfaces that are either too distant or too large to cover, like the sides of buildings. If so, you could see far more personal art dotting the urban landscape in the future.

Via: Popular Science

Source: MIT Fluid Interfaces (Vimeo)

Cooking app maker wants a standard for smart kitchen devices

There are plenty of smart cooking devices to help you bring masterpieces to the table. However, they don’t usually talk to each other — your sous vide tool doesn’t know the weight of the ingredients you measured on a scale just a couple of feet away. SideChef wants to fix that. The cooking app developer is building a platform that lets kitchen gadgets work in unison. Once you pick a recipe, every device would know what to do. Your oven would start pre-heating, for instance, while your mixer would run at just the right speed to blend everything together.

This isn’t just wide-eyed optimism on SideChef’s part, as it’s talking to “several hardware brands” about making this a reality. Just how well it’ll work is up in the air, though — it’ll depend on getting the right partners (such as big appliance companies), building sufficiently open code and otherwise avoiding the pitfalls that come with trying to create standards.

Xbox One grabs 360 games ‘Halo Wars’ and ‘Soul Calibur 2 HD’

The Xbox One is beefing up its library via backwards compatibility, allowing players to boot up some of their favorite games from the Xbox 360. This week, Xbox One users get Halo Wars, Soul Calibur 2 HD Online and The King of Fighters ’98: Ultimate Match. It’s a fighting game fiasco with a side of real-time alien-shooting strategy.

Halo Wars is a real-time strategy game from Microsoft and Ensemble Studios, and it first hit the Xbox 360 in 2009. The game was largely well-received, though development was rocky and it ended up being Ensemble Studios’ final title. Ensemble founder Tony Goodman said in 2012 that the game wasn’t originally Halo-themed, but Microsoft thought it would perform better if it carried a recognizable name. Plus, Bungie, the studio that created Halo, was never into the idea of Halo Wars, Goodman said.

Current Halo developer 343 Industries and Alien: Isolation studio Creative Assembly are working on Halo Wars 2 for Xbox One and Windows 10. Last we heard, that one was due in fall 2016.

That’s enough about Halo.

Soul Calibur 2 is an immensely popular fighting game that debuted on consoles in 2003, and an HD version landed on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in 2013. That’s the version hitting Xbox One’s backwards compatibility lineup today: Soul Calibur 2 HD Online. The King of Fighters ’98: Ultimate Match is a remake of the original 1998 KOF ’98 game; it came out in North America in 2009.

Source: @majornelson

Oculus takes you into the colorful alien world of ‘Farlands’

High-end virtual reality is here, by way of the long-awaited consumer Oculus Rift. But to get the most out of that headset, you’re going to need entertaining VR experiences. Thankfully, Oculus has you covered. Along with the launch-day game lineup it revealed a couple weeks ago, at GDC 2016, the company’s now unexpectedly introduced Farlands. This virtual reality adventure, built with Unreal Engine 4 and designed specifically for the Rift, lets you visit and explore a planet filled with exotic life.

Once there, players are dared to explore the alien world’s landscapes, as well as discover new forms of life, including bugs, fish and plants, which you can then develop relationships with. According to Oculus, every day you play will bring a fresh opportunity to find strange creatures and, along the way, wander around previously unknown habitats. If you have your Rift already, you can download Farlands for free starting today.

Source: Oculus

New Horizons spots signs of a former lake on Pluto

The New Horizons probe isn’t just revealing details of Pluto’s highest heights… it’s also uncovering some of the dwarf planet’s hidden history. NASA has published an image form the spacecraft showing evidence of a former frozen lake. The remnants are relatively small (20 miles across at their widest), but the surrounding channels hint that the lake held liquid nitrogen at some point in the distant past. While we’ll need more data to draw any firm conclusions, this suggests that Pluto was considerably livelier “millions or billions” of years ago — it wasn’t the wasteland it appears to be today.

Via: Phys.org

Source: NASA

‘Contra’ for phones looks just as tough as the console versions

The Contra game series is notoriously tough (there’s a good reason it’s synonymous with the Konami code), and it doesn’t look like it’ll be any easier in its smartphone version. Konami and Tencent have released a trailer for Contra Mobile which shows that it’ll be just as frenetic as the console versions you’ve played in the past, complete with larger-than-life boss battles and turrets aplenty. There’s even a player-versus-player mode if you don’t think the AI is cutthroat enough.

The developers haven’t yet committed to a release date or even a US launch, but the mobile Contra be available on Android and iOS and (shocker) include microtransactions. Hopefully, that means paying for cosmetic features rather than must-haves like weapons and lives. It won’t be fun if you have to drop a few bucks just to make it past an arbitrarily difficult level, will it? Look at it this way, though: it’s good to see Konami doing something to maintain one of its famous game franchises.

Via: Polygon

Source: Contra: Neocity Warehouse (YouTube)

Apple’s encryption battle with the FBI is over, for now

The Department of Justice has dropped its case against Apple. After over a month of court motions, congressional hearings and public fights over circumventing the security of the iPhone 5C used by San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook, the government has decided it doesn’t need Apple after all. Instead, the third party brought in to break Apple’s encryption has been successful according to court documents.

The court vacated the original motion today after getting a status report. It states:

The Court has reviewed the government’s Status Report, filed March 28, 2016. GOOD CAUSE HAVING BEEN SHOWN, the Court hereby VACATES the Order Compelling Apple Inc. to Assist Agents in Search dated February 16, 2016.

This doesn’t come as a surprise. Right before both parties were to argue their case before magistrate judge Pym, the DoJ filed to vacate the hearing. According to that motion, a third party approached the FBI the weekend before the event with an alternative way to get into the iPhone. The government then had until April 5 to file a progress report on how the testing was coming along. That progress report was filed today and the case vacated.

In its motion the DoJ states:

The government has now successfully accessed the data stored on Farook’s iPhone and therefore no longer requires the assistance from Apple Inc. mandated by Court’s Order Compelling Apple Inc. to Assist Agents in Search dated February 16, 2016.

Apple was surprised about last week’s filing to vacate the hearing, but vowed that if the case progressed, it would seek information about the party and the method used to hack into the iPhone. Now that the Justice Department has backed out, it can’t file for information about the researcher or the method used. According to the Guardian, the government has deemed the exploit classified.

The government had earlier stated that only Apple could circumvent the iPhone’s security measures. When it announced it had found a third party to break into the phone, that argument became pretty worthless in its case against the company.

This doesn’t mean that Apple is in the clear. The DoJ could ask the company to circumvent the security within a newer iPhone and this whole thing will start over again. For now, this is a victory for Apple and other companies that don’t want to break the encryption of their products even if compelled by law enforcement.

Via: USA Today