HTC Ocean: Could ‘Sense Touch’ feature come to the HTC 11?
Concept video from HTC designer shows dual-camera phone with touch-sensitive frame.
It’s not often we get an early look at a phone maker prototyping features for an upcoming handset, but that, it seems, what we have here. First spotted by Evan Blass, the personal site of HTC motion designer Danelle Vermeulen was recently updated with a sizzle reel showing “HTC Ocean,” a phone with dual rear cameras that looks like a cross between an HTC 10 and a Google Pixel. The focus of the video: A new feature called “Sense Touch,” which apparently lets you use touch-sensitive areas of the outer frame to perform certain actions in apps.
The video is described on Vermeulen’s site as “a great example of a typical project within HTC; a quick turnaround creating a sizzle reel as an answer to a call to pitch a conceptual idea for CEO buy-in.”
It introduces the device as “Ocean with Sense Touch,” demonstrating how a touch or swipe on the outer frame can activate certain features. From the home screen, a tap on the right edge appears to activate Google’s voice-based assistant.
A swipe on the same spot in a music app changes the volume. Later parts of the video show the bezel of the display lighting up as voice commands are activated, though it’s not clear whether this is intended to be a feature of the phone, or just a bit of visual flair for the video.
Change volume levels, adjust exposure or launch specific apps by tapping or swiping the side of the phone.
As for the phone itself, it’s also unclear whether this design is based on any possible future HTC phone, or whether it’s a generic stand-in for the purpose of the video. The lack of any HTC branding (or buttons for that matter — though maybe that’s the point of Sense Touch!), suggests we perhaps shouldn’t read too much into it. Then again, the design is far from generic, with HTC 10-style chamfers, the aforementioned dual-camera setup and a stylized USB port down below. So who knows.
It’s also worth noting that “Ocean,” if it is anything beyond a concept, is most likely a codename and not anything that’s supposed to be public-facing.
So will we ever see Sense Touch in a future HTC phone? We’re left guessing at this point, and we’d hesitate to read too much into what’s probably just a pitch video for higher-ups at the Taiwanese company. For what it’s worth, other parts of the designer’s site are littered with wacky phone concepts, and lifestyle photos showing at least one of HTC’s aborted tablet designs.
But an HTC 11 where the entire frame of the device is basically a touchpad? That sounds pretty neat to us.
Would you like to see a feature like Sense Touch in a future HTC phone? Hit the comments and let us know!
How to get the most from your Chromebook touchpad
It may only be one big button, but the multi-touch touchpad on your Chromebook can do just about anything you would ask of it.
Your Chromebook’s touchpad is simple to set up and use, and a couple of handy features make it more than just a way to move the mouse pointer. With multi-touch gestures, you’ll be able to navigate web pages and apps easier as well as see everything you’re working on at a glance. And yes, you can move the mouse pointer, too.
The touchpad on current Chromebooks is a one piece unit missing the buttons you might be used to with other laptops. Instead, the touchpad itself is a button, and multi-touch — being able to register multiple actions at once — takes care of the rest. Because you might be used to having buttons for right and left clicking, we’ll start with the basics. To begin, have a look at the settings page, and you’ll find where you can adjust the pointer speed and a section for touchpad settings where you can enable tap to click, swapping your primary mouse button and using Australian scrolling.
- Tap to click, is a setting that lets you tap your finger on the touchpad to do the same thing as a click would do on a regular button. If you want to use gestures you’ll want to keep this enabled.
- Swap your primary mouse button, does the same thing it would do with a mouse or a trackpad with actual buttons. It switches actions that need a left click into actions that need a right click, and vice versa.
- Australian scrolling, is having the screen scroll the opposite direction your fingers are moving on the touchpad. Traditional scrolling moves your view up the page when you scroll up, and Australian scrolling moves your view down the page when you scroll up.
When you’re done adjusting your settings, click OK to save them.
Next, we’ll cover the basics of pointing, clicking and navigating. If you’re used to using a mouse, these will take a bit of time to get used to. Alternatively, you can use a mouse with your Chromebook if you would rather. It’s still worth learning how to use the touchpad for those times when your mouse batteries are dead and that drawer in the kitchen with a fresh or charged set seems miles away.
- To move the pointer, move one finger across the trackpad in the direction you want the pointer to move.
- To click on something, tap or press down on the lower half (the half closest to your body) of the touchpad with one finger.
- To right click, tap or press down on any spot of the touchpad with two fingers.You can also right-click by pressing the Alt key then tapping or clicking with one finger.
- To middle click, tap or press anywhere on the touchpad with three fingers.
- To drag and drop, tap or press the thing you want to drag with one finger and move the pointer while holding down. Let go when your pointer is where you want to drop it. You can also press and hold with one finger then move the pointer with a second finger.
Gestures are that little extra which can make an experience better. Some apps may have their own gestures, but there are three common ones that work with everything you do on your Chromebook.
- To scroll, drag two fingers on the touchpad.
- Scrolling right and left, acts as forwards and back buttons. The faster you swipe the faster you will navigate. This setting is universal and works anywhere you can move horizontally.
- Scrolling up and down, moves the window content up and down. See Australian scrolling above for an option.
- To see all open windows. swipe up or down with three fingers on the touchpad. If you have Australian scrolling enabled, swipe up. Otherwise, swipe down.
Most of these are along the lines for features you find in any laptop with a good touchpad or trackpad, with or without buttons. They’re not too revolutionary. They do make working with the touchpad on your Chromebook as easy as using a mouse!
Chromebooks
- The best Chromebooks
- Should you buy a Chromebook?
- Google Play is coming to Chromebooks
- Acer Chromebook 14 review
- Join our Chromebook forums
Grab this five-pack of Micro-USB cables for just $3!
Right now you can pick up a five-pack of Aukey’s Micro-USB cables for just $3 at Amazon with coupon code AU5CABLE. The cables come in a variety of sizes, including (2) 1-foot and (3) 3.3-foot cables. Whether you need some extra cables for the car, your office, or just to have around, this deal makes it extremely affordable to take them everywhere you could imagine. And thanks to its durable TPE coating these cables should be able to withstand some use and abuse.
Remember, you’ll need coupon code AU5CABLE for the full savings on these cables. Picking some up? Let us know in the comments!
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Want to capture 360-degree VR footage? The Kodak PixPro 4KVR360 could be your affordable all-in-one solution
If there’s a buzz in the tech world for 2016 then it’s virtual reality, or VR. But you don’t need to be a whizz or an ultra-rich kid to capture such footage these days. The Kodak PixPro 4KVR360, which is due out in early 2017, is an all-in-one dual lens unit that can capture and auto-stitch 360-degree 4K footage all in camera. That’s potentially ideal for VR device playback.
At this year’s Photokina show in Cologne, Germany, we sampled a prototype model of the 4KVR360, which sits above the company’s earlier SP360 model, to see how Kodak is pushing things forward in the world of affordable VR creation and action cameras.
At this stage in time the PixPro 4KVR360 isn’t an operational unit, it’s merely a mock-up designed to show the size and design of the model. It’s a pretty dinky dual lens unit, compared to some of the competition out there, as you can see from our handheld shot. It’s larger than a GoPro Hero, but then the Kodak dons dual lenses and dual sensors – so obviously it needs a touch more space.
Pocket-lint
The dual lenses aren’t both the same, though. The more bulbous one is the wider-angle, delivering a 235-degree angle of view, while the slightly less bulbous one delivers a 155-degree angle of view. The two don’t need to be as wide as one another, as the overlap is ample to create two videos that can be stitched together.
The reason for having the two lenses is that, when used for conventional capture, they deliver different views onto the world: whether a half hemisphere, or simple a wide-angle 4K video. And with 20-megapixel sensors used (not the 12MP ones of the SP360), there’s the ability to crop in and capture 105- and 135-degree angles of view too.
It is possible to control the 4KVR360 by using the buttons on the device itself, while a small screen lets you know what’s going on. The more comprehensive way to control it, however, is via the associated app – which means clearer visuals, capture preview and so forth. We didn’t get to see the app working at this moment in time, but it will be an extension of the current SP360 device’s controls.
However, the 4KVR360 isn’t quite perfect in spec terms: its 360-degree 4K capture (which is two lots of 3840 x 1920) can only be auto-stitched in-camera at 15 frames per second (fps), which isn’t really good enough for fast action. Stitch the footage outside of camera via the included software, however, and 24fps is achievable. Still, though, we’d like to see a higher yet frame-rate.
Presumably a higher frame-rate isn’t plausible because of heat dissipation. We were told that the device is a white finish to help avoid soaking up the sun’s rays and getting hot, for example. So while a higher frame-rate would be desirable, it’s not achievable here. There’s no slow-motion options either, including at lower resolutions.
Pocket-lint
The thing that really ought to sell the Kodak PixPro 4KVR360 is its expected sub-£500 price point. That’s still a lot of cash, but for an all-in-one – and especially in a world where two SP360s, as required for 360-degree capture, cost £800 – it’s a price point that will give the competition something to think about.
Of course, right now, we’ve not seen the device in action, the resulting footage, nor the stitching capability, so just how good the PixPro 4KVR360 will be remains to be seen. It’s definitely an interesting prospect in the world of affordable VR creation, though, while being versatile enough to act as an action camera too.
You can fit more than 26,000 RAW files on this one 1TB SanDisk SD card
In this time of rising megapixel counts and 4K video, storage is also rising to keep up. And company’s like Western Digital, which owns SanDisk, is having to rip up the rulebooks when it comes to SD card capacities.
During Photokina this week it unveiled a 1TB SDXC card, just 16 years after it introduced a 64MB card for the first time.
The 1TB SanDisk Extreme Pro SDXC UHS-I memory card is just a prototype for now, but it was shown during the camera convention in Cologne to prove it exists. SanDisk current makes a 512GB version that’s on sale for consumers.
In fact, that version gives a clue as to how much a 1TB card might cost you when it becomes commercially available. The 512GB card retails for around £300, so the 1TB edition will be considerably more than that.
- Photokina 2016: All the best new cameras from the 2016 show
That’s why it’ll be more for professionals who need the capacity for more than 26,000 RAW image files or hours of 4K video footage. But like with all of the storage cards and formats available, it’ll drop in price in time.
After all, you can buy a 64GB SanDisk Extreme Pro card for less than £30 these days. They were well over £100 when originally unveiled.
ICYMI: Finally, cars can finally morph into robots!
Today on In Case You Missed It: A Turkish company says that for millions of dollars, it’ll make you your very own Autobot (called a LeTrons) and while whether the car is actually driveable may be in question the video is still fairly incredible. No less an advancement for conductive thread, a $34 million grant from the National Science Foundation is letting a group of doctors, scientists and fashion designers create clothing that at-risk pregnant women can wear to track their health.
If you’re into augmented reality, this Pong game should get you going. As always, please share any interesting tech or science videos you find by using the #ICYMI hashtag on Twitter for @mskerryd.
MIT ‘radio’ uses wireless signals to identify emotions
You can lie to your partner, your best friends and even your mom, but you can’t lie to EQ-Radio. It’s a device out of MIT”s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) that can tell how you truly feel by bouncing wireless signals off your body. Yep, you don’t need to be connected to the device with ECG patches and wires. EQ-Radio has algorithms that can extract your heartbeat from the signals your body reflects. It then analyzes each heartbeat and compares it to your previous measurements.
According to the team, the device is 87 percent accurate with your measurements on file, but it’s still up to 70 percent accurate without them. “Just by generally knowing what human heartbeats look like in different emotional states,” team member and PhD student Mingmin Zhao said, “we can look at a random person’s heartbeat and reliably detect their emotions.”
It sounds like the perfect lie detector for people who tend to hide their feelings, but it has a number of other potential applications. Film companies can use it during test screenings to get a deeper look at how their movie affects people, while connected homes can adjust lighting, heating and other components based on their residents’ moods. More importantly, doctors can use it as a non-invasive method to keep an eye on patients with depression, anxiety issues and other medical conditions.
“By recovering measurements of the heart valves actually opening and closing at a millisecond time-scale, this system can literally detect if someone’s heart skips a beat,” Fadel Adib, another team member explained. “This opens up the possibility of learning more about conditions like arrhythmia, and potentially exploring other medical applications that we haven’t even thought of yet.”
Source: MIT CSAIL
Microsoft hopes AI will find better cancer treatments
Google isn’t the only tech giant hoping that artificial intelligence can aid the fight against cancer. Microsoft has unveiled Project Hanover, an effort to use AI for both understanding and treating cancers. To begin with, the company is developing a system that would automatically process legions of biomedical papers, creating “genome-scale” databases that could predict which drug cocktails would be the most effective against a given cancer type. An ideal treatment wouldn’t go unnoticed by doctors already swamped with work.
Microsoft is also teaming with the Knight Cancer Institute on AI that would personalize those drug mixes on a patient-by-patient basis. They’re primarily focused on acute myeloid leukemia, where you might end up battling multiple leukemias at once — machine learning could identify just what you’re dealing with and treat it accordingly. Another effort would lean heavily on computer vision to understand how a tumor is reacting to treatments. Human doctors can easily identify tumors, Microsoft notes, but they can’t always tell how tumors are changing or how they’re affecting the health of nearby cells.
The Redmond crew is even more ambitious than that. It’s embarking on a “moonshot” that would rely on AI to program cells for fighting cancer and other diseases. You could create a “molecular computer” that could watch out for diseases and trigger a response, tackling the illness only when it reaches a given part of the body. Many current cancer treatments are indiscriminate, killing healthy cells alongside cancerous ones.
It’s a far-reaching initiative, and it may well help by making both sense of once-overwhelming amounts of data as well as developing more precise responses to cancer. However, it’s easy to understand if you’re skeptical. As cancer researcher Dr. Brooke Magnanti observes on Twitter, this comes across as the classic example of a tech company thinking that it can solve major societal issues by throwing enough data at the problem. Cancer is a “group of diseases” that you can’t easily fix, she says. She adds that modern computers are only faster at accomplishing tasks, not smarter — they aren’t likely to discover things that humans don’t already know. This isn’t to say that Microsoft’s efforts are a waste, just that it may be overly optimistic about its ability to thwart diseases that have stymied the medical field for decades.
Cancer is a group of diseases not one thing to be miracle-cured. Also, Big Data will not save you. That is all.
— Dr Brooke Magnanti (@belledejour_uk) September 20, 2016
Via: Bloomberg
Source: Microsoft, Project Hanover
China’s first space station will burn up in late 2017
Officials in China have conceded that Tiangong-1, the nation’s first space station, has now settled into a decaying orbit. That’s a sanitized, polite way of saying that the 18,753 pound craft is now hurtling towards Earth with no way of controlling its descent. The vessel is expected to begin burning up towards the end of 2017, although there’s a couple of caveats that may not music to anyone’s ears.
Reading between the lines, Popular Mechanics believes that China cannot anticipate where the burn up and re-entry will take place. The thinking goes that most controlled descents are planned to take place over the ocean, where there’s little to no risk of harming people. An uncontrolled descent means that any debris that survives re-entry could strike a populated area, and if you’ve seen Armageddon, you know what that means.
At least Tiangong-1 has made its home nation proud up to this point, since it was only designed to operate for two years. It actually wound up being in operational orbit for 1,630 days — more than twice the planned duration. Wu Ping, deputy director of China’s manned space engineering office said that the station had “comprehensively fulfilled its historical mission.” Let’s just hope that all the components get turned into ash before they reach the ground.
Via: Popular Mechanics, Space.com
Source: Xinhua News
Engadget giveaway: Win an Apple Watch Sport courtesy of F-Secure!
The world is burgeoning with IoT devices and we’re in a state of constant connectivity. Occasionally hopping on random WiFi networks isn’t unheard of and checking in on your home via internet-facing devices is pretty standard stuff. Just as you lock down your front door, it’s wise to consider some digital security. F-Secure’s Freedome provides a virtual private network to help keep your online life and devices safe. With the service, trackers and advertisers won’t see your activity, plus you can bypass regional content restrictions while traveling. Even over public WiFi, your traffic is encrypted. Freedome’s protective web also fends off against malicious sites, bad apps and hackers. The app works with the Apple Watch, providing protection with the push of a button, and helps you monitor potential threats from your wrist. This week, F-Secure has provided an Apple Watch Sport (42mm) and a year’s subscription for one luck reader. All you need to do is head to the Rafflecopter widget below for up to three chances at winning this wearable and security combo.
a Rafflecopter giveaway
- Entries are handled through the Rafflecopter widget above. Comments are no longer accepted as valid methods of entry. You may enter without any obligation to social media accounts, though we may offer them as opportunities for extra entries. Your email address is required so we can get in touch with you if you win, but it will not be given to third parties.
- Contest is open to all residents of the 50 States, the District of Columbia, and Canada (excluding Quebec), 18 or older! Sorry, we don’t make this rule (we hate excluding anyone), so direct your anger at our lawyers and contest laws if you have to be mad.
- Winners will be chosen randomly. One (1) winner will receive one (1) Apple Watch Sport (MJ3T2FD/A – Apple Watch 42mm S Gry AI Blk Sport), two (2) watch straps (MJ4M2ZM/A White SM/ML & MLDL2ZM/A Blue SM/ML) and a one (1) year subscription to F-Secure Freedome.
- If you are chosen, you will be notified by email. Winners must respond within three days of being contacted. If you do not respond within that period, another winner will be chosen. Make sure that the account you use to enter the contest includes your real name and a contact email. We do not track any of this information for marketing or third-party purposes.
- This unit is purely for promotional giveaway. Engadget and AOL are not held liable to honor warranties, exchanges or customer service.
- The full list of rules, in all its legalese glory, can be found here.
- Entries can be submitted until Sept. 21st at 11:59PM ET. Good luck!
