Raking robot鈥檚 insta-art at the beach
No, it鈥檚 not alien art. A robotic beach artist has created giant drawings in the sand. Developed by Paul Beardsley from Disney Research Zurich and colleagues at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, the wheeled robot can recreate a drawing sent to it from a phone or tablet. It computes a path across the sand that approximates the artwork and sets off. A rake attached to its rear etches the pattern in the sand. Each drawing takes about 10 minutes, and the idea is that the robot could be controlled remotely, allowing a beach to be turned into a digitally controlled sketchbook. It was presented at Techfest in Mumbai, India, in late December.
鈥淎fter this talk, politicians will presumably wear gloves when talking in public鈥� Hacker Jan Krissler, aka Starbug, speaking at the Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg. He claims to have copied the fingerprint of a German politician from photos of her hands
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Map an entire room through a keyhole
A laser imaging technique could let spies map a room in secret. Chenfei Jin of the Harbin Institute of Technology in China and colleagues measured the three-dimensional shape and position of three cardboard letters in a room, spelling HIT, by firing lasers through a 2-centimetre-wide hole in a wall. Laser pulses bounced off walls to hit the letters before passing back through the hole and scattering into a camera, revealing the details (Optics Letters, ).
10.8m The number of smart watches that the Consumer Electronics Association expects will be sold in 2015. The association runs the Consumer Electronics Show, held in Las Vegas this week
