Audi and NVIDIA work together on AI-powered cars

NVIDIA isn’t just content with making an artificial intelligence platform for cars and waiting for someone to use it. The company has unveiled a partnership with Audi that has the two working on AI-powered cars. You’ll first see the fruits of their labor in an experimental Q7 SUV that has learned to drive itself in three days (it’ll be putting around CES’ Gold Lot), but their plans are much bigger. Ultimately, their goal is to have Audis with Level 4 autonomy (that is, full autonomy outside of extreme situations) on roads by 2020 — that’s only 3 years away, which is fairly aggressive compared to other German automakers.

There’s still a lot we don’t know. What’s the roadmap in between now and then? Which streets, exactly? And will these be cars you can buy, or just test mules? Even if it’s not quite as earth-shattering as NVIDIA makes it out to be, though, it represents a milestone for the company’s ambitions in driverless tech. While Audi is an obvious partner given its history with NVIDIA (the companies have collaborated a few times before), it’s telling that the automaker is willing to stake the future of its autonomous vehicles on NVIDIA’s hardware.

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Polaroid has a Nest Cam-like security camera, too

There are a number of options when it comes to wireless home security cameras that beam footage to your phone in a similar fashion to Nest Cam. Polaroid got into video a couple years ago with the tiny Cube and now it’s showing off the Hoop camera that watches over your house at CES. The company touts ease of use as a key feature for the $199 unit, so hopefully your parents won’t nag you to come over and install it. Like Nest and other cameras, Polaroid says the Hoop can distinguish between humans and pets with ease and it will also stop recording when you get home.

The minimal design of the Hoop means you can easily tuck it away without it becoming an eyesore. It captures video in 1080p at 30 frames per second and has a 140-degree field of view. What’s more, the Hoop can be positioned both indoors and out, storing captured footage in the cloud for later access.

Yes, there’s an app where you can get alerts, take a live look at your home and more. We took a quick look at the software and it seemed plenty capable of controlling the camera and letting you view clips from afar. Polaroid is expecting to ship the camera in Q2.

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The Ellipse smart lock allows you to securely share your ride

The sharing economy took a turn towards the two-wheeled at CES in Las Vegas on Thursday when Lattis “the smart city company” introduced its new Ellipse Smart Bike Lock. As its name implies, the Ellipse packs as many IoT features as it can into its solar-powered frame. That includes an accelerometer to monitor for sudden stops (ie, you crash or get hit by a car) and Bluetooth connectivity to push theft attempt alerts to your smartphone as well as remote unlocking.

Pairing the Ellipse to your phone enables it to send out location alerts to your contacts should the lock register a crash. It will also send an alert to the user if someone tries to cut the lock and steal your ride. What’s more, this connectivity enables users to share access to their bike with anyone they want using virtual keys — similar to how the August smart home lock works. The Ellipse even offers a Find My Bike feature for those times when you can’t remember where you parked it.

The lock itself offers “military grade” construction and a small solar panel to keep its battery charged throughout the day. According to Lattis, the lock needs just an hour of sunlight to keep it going for a full week and a 12-hour charge is enough to keep it powered for a month. And if you ride primarily at night, the lock can be charged via its microUSB port.

Lattis also announced that it is launching is own bike share program designed to enable organizations to share bikes amongst their members without the need for bulky and expensive hubs like what we see with Citi Bike or Bay Area Bike Share. The Ellipse lock is available right now for $200 on Lattis.io. The sharing program is expected to roll out at some point in the first half of 2017.

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Griffin connects your toast to your phone

It seems like no one really needs a connected toaster. For decades you’ve been able to adjust just how dark you want your bread with a knob or lever. But maybe we’ve been missing out on perfect toast because we didn’t have the opportunity to really fine tune the cooking experience. That’s where Griffin comes in with its Bluetooth-enabled gift from the breakfast gods.

The $100 “Connected Toaster” (not exactly swinging for the fence in the name department are we Griffin?) uses BLE to connect to a companion app that has different types of bread and a slider to adjust how much you want to burn your bread. Once you’ve pinpointed the perfect combination, individuals can then save their toast-cooking profile.

Oh, but it doesn’t end there. The app will throw a notification to your phone when the delicious sliced carbohydrate is finished. The notifications also works with the company’s Connected Mirror so if you buy into the whole ecosystem, you can be alerted while you’re brushing your hair the exact moment the most important part of your breakfast is ready.

Sure you can argue that a regular toaster will ding when the bread is ready. And the adjustments on your bread cooker have worked just fine without an app. But think about it. You’re already looking at your phone nonstop and how many times have you burned a meal because it was really important for you to post that cat video?

The Connected Toaster is making a bit more sense now isn’t it?

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Source: Griffin

The Gryphon is stylish way to keep your family safe online

As a group of raunchy former young people, we know all too well the sorts of shenanigans a youngster can get up to on the internet. There’s no shortage of companies that want nothing more to protect those wee tykes from themselves, but Gryphon is special. The company has built a full-featured (not to mention stylish) wireless router that uses machine learning to help keep would-be intruders at bay. Throw in sophisticated parental controls, dead-simple management from an iOS or Android app, and the ability to build a mesh network without having to break out a manual and you’ve got a seriously thoughtful bit of networking gear.

That the Gryphon works well as a wireless router was probably a matter of course. The company was co-founded by John Wu, a Novatel Wireless veteran who’s responsible for creating (among other things) the MiFi hotspots that make this very post from the bowels of a hotel/casino/resort possible. That kind of wireless know-how explains the laundry list of crucial features: the Gryphon uses six antennas to maintain its connections packs support for 802.11acm and leans on beamforming antennas to more intelligently direct data.

Really, though, the main hook for most people here will be those parental controls. If your kids try to visit, say, cheaplingeriebyterry.com, you’ll get a notification on your phone requesting access. You can easily accept or deny that request, but here’s the really neat bit: if a particular website is accepted by 80 percent of parents who get the request, the Gryphon can be set up to automatically whitelist them. It’s that sort of extra control that makes this router more palatable to parents than Google’s own WiFi router, and the all-in-one networking chops obviate the need for external hardware like Circle by Disney. And did I mention it looks neat?

The Gryphon has already completed a Kickstarter campaign and is currently in the midst of a pre-order campaign on Indiegogo, so parents wracked with paranoia can still nab an early unit.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2017.

Dosime is a personal radiation tracker for the worried well

One of the problems with building sensors to detect ubiquitous dangers is that those dangers remain, you know, ubiquitous. Despite this, a company called Dosime has built a portable radiation meter that will warn you about the invisible killer. The ovoid device either clips to your lapel or docks in a wall socket-mounted cradle and will sniff the milirems in the local atmosphere. If it detects that the levels of radiation have become unsafe, it’ll let you know with a smartphone notification.

According to the company’s representatives, Dosime is a consumer-level startup borne out of the industrial nuclear power company Mirion. Scientist Sandy Perle added that the unit contains the same silicon diode radiation detector that’s currently used in the safety systems in 90 percent of the world’s power stations. The device is designed to detect ionizing radiation — X and Gamma rays — that has the greatest propensity to harm human health.

When in use, Dosime will push data to your smartphone over Bluetooth low energy, sniffing the air every four seconds. But in addition to real-time radiation checks, the app also offers trend analysis based on an hourly graph of exposure. So, should you spend a day at your local hospital and you’re too close to the X-Ray machine, you’ll be told that you need to alter your lifestyle habits the next.

One of the questions that you may be asking is why you would want, or need, to know about the local radiation levels. Company CEO Thomas Logan’s maxim is “anything that you can measure, you can change,” urging people to alter their lifestyle. Although I’d wager that, for most people, the bulk of your risk will come from events you can’t alter, like trips to the hospital or where you live.

For instance, what about poor people who’ve wound up renting a home on irradiated land where economics dictate their continued exposure? Sandy Perle believes that if you know about the risk of nuclear exposure, you can take proactive steps to clean up your home and surrounding environment.

I’m not sure that I’m the right target market for the device, however, since if I started worrying about radiation, I’d never leave the house. But if your capacity for terror is greater than mine, you’ll be able to pre-order Dosime from Amazon in the next few days for $250.

Jessica Conditt contributed to this report.

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NVIDIA made a self-driving car with its Xavier supercomputer

At NVIDIA’s CES 2017 keynote address, CEO Jen-Hsun Huang announced his company’s plan to turn your car into “your most personal robot.” Specifically, Nvidia announced the company’s AI car supercomputer called the Xavier — an auto-grade, 512 core Volta GPU and AI platform that’s capable of learning how to drive by watching a human driver. To show it off for the CES crowd, Nvidia installed Xavier in an autonomous Lincoln called BB8 and let it loose on the streets of Silicon Valley.

What sets Nvidia’s Star Wars-inspired vehicle apart is that it learns on its own through observation and deep learning, backed up with HD map data in the cloud. According to Huang, this lets the vehicle figure out how to adapt to constantly changing real world conditions or learn tricky situations like how to navigate down a narrow, overgrown driveway. For now though, the system can also drive an Nvidia engineer to Starbucks:

Nvidia has actually been testing the system in several different versions of its self-driving vehicles, but this latest production iteration is the company’s most powerful yet. In addition to the autonomous supercomputer, the new platform also comes with a backseat driver that can keep an eye on your driving and you should be able to buy an Audi with Level 4 autonomy by 2020.

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Source: NVIDIA

Fujifilm’s FinePix XP120 is a sporty, rugged point-and-shoot

Unlike Nikon and Panasonic, Fujifilm isn’t making any major announcements at CES 2017. That said, the manufacturer is introducing a camera here in Las Vegas, the FinePix XP120, the latest member of its rugged point-and-shoot series. Naturally, the main highlights here are that it’s waterproof (65ft) and shockproof (5.8ft), as well as dustproof and freezeproof. Aside from this, the XP120 sports a decent 16.4-megapixel CMOS sensor, 3-inch LCD and 1080p at 60fps. These specs won’t blow anyone’s mind by any means, but the $230 camera could appeal to (at least) a few outdoor buffs when it launches in February.

As a bonus, Fujifilm also announced new “Graphite” editions of its high-end X-T2 and X-Pro2, which are set to hit stores later this month for $1,800 and $2,300, respectively.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2017.

Bose is building ride-smoothing tech for autonomous cars

Bose dabbles in a lot of different things, but the most left-field product could could be its ride-smoothing trucker seats. The company is about to demo similar tech for autonomous cars at its “Beyond Sound” CES experience in Las Vegas. Specifically, it’ll show off a (simulated) autonomous vehicle equipped with Bose Ride suspension seating that “isolates passengers from road vibrations, shaking and unwanted motion,” the company said in a press release.

The idea is that if you’re going to be driven around by a robot anyway, why not feel like you’re in your living room or office, rather than a lurching car? “Our personal suspension technology is already proven, and it can dramatically enhance the passenger experience,” Bose Automotive VP Marc Mansell said in a statement, referring to the Bose Ride truck seats that debuted in 2010.

Bose actually started dabbling with the tech way back in the 1980s. Founder Amar Bose wanted to improve the ride in cars, and actually invented a full active suspension system that was pretty far ahead of its time (see the video below). That eventually led to the truck seats, which smooth the ride in notoriously rough big rigs, reportedly leading to reduced fatigue and back pain in drivers.

Bose says it’s adapting the single-axis tech used in heavy trucks to a multi-axis design more appropriate for passenger vehicles. Though it’s just a concept for now, it should be interesting to try, even in demo form. We’ll try to give it a whirl and let you know how it goes.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2017.

Simplehuman made a trashcan you can open with your voice

Simplehuman’s a pretty household name in, uh, households across the country, what with its sensor mirrors, stainless steel dish racks and automatic soap dispensers. Now it’s come up with yet another innovation; a trashcan you can activate with your voice. Known as the Sensor Can with Voice Control, you can open it just by saying “open can” and “open sesame.”

It sounds pretty silly at first, but it’s actually potentially pretty useful if you have both hands full of food scraps. Of course, you could also just get a trash can with a foot pedal, but maybe you don’t like those for aesthetic or design reasons. The Sensor Can also has motion sensors so you can also wave your hand over it to open it and pretend you’re a Jedi (These are not the orange peels you’re looking for), and those sensors also prevent the lid from closing if you’re not done tossing stuff away.

Simplehuman’s voice-activated trash can #ces2017

A video posted by Nicole Lee (@nicolenerd) on Jan 4, 2017 at 8:15pm PST

Simplehuman’s already made a Sensor can with just a motion sensor, but this is their first with voice control. There are two versions of the Sensor Can with Voice Control — one is a single bin, while another has two bins for separating out the recycling. We tried it out here at CES, and it actually worked pretty well despite the loud din of the crowd. You can also say “close can” to shut it.

The single bin trashcan will be available for $180 while the double bin version will retail for around $250. Both should be on store shelves in March. According to a rep we spoke to, the controls can be localized to different countries, so the command might “Abierto” in Mexico, for example. It doesn’t look like you can change the command yourself though, which is a bummer, because I’d love to be able to say “Open the pod bay doors, Hal” to throw away the trash.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2017.