Soft robotic gripper

Robots are getting faster and stronger all the time, but for the power and cunning engineered behind all those servos and actuators, the subtle elegance of picking up an object is still a tricky thing in robotics. Designing a conventional grasper that pinches together and lifts items is the traditional approach, but it might not be the best. A new type of vacuum-powered gripper called the Versaball is now commercially available.

This device was originally devised a few years ago as part of a collaboration between researchers at Cornell, University of Chicago, and iRobot (with funding from DARPA). The Versaball is able to grab hold of things using a property called jamming transition. The Versaball is a serious piece of robotics gear, but the concept can be illustrated with regular household items.

Small granular materials that are packed into a rubber housing like the one at the end of the Versaball have an almost fluid consistency. If you press the bulbous shape down on something, the material flows around it. Jamming transition is applied when the air is evacuated from the rubber membrane. This causes the granular particles to be pulled closer together and act more like a solid, thus locking the object into place. It’s the same phenomenon you might have experienced with vacuum-packed goods like coffee grounds — they’re hard as a rock until you open the package. In fact, an early version of the Versaball used coffee grounds in a regular balloon.

The Versaball, sold by Empire Robotics, is much more advanced than a party balloon filled with coffee, but the principal is the same as it ever was. The super-durable rubbery bulb is pressed into an object, allowing the granular material to fill in around it and solidify when the air is pulled out (in under 0.5 seconds). The business end of the Versaball has a beanbag-like consistency and comes in three-inch and six-inch varieties. Assuming a solid grip, the Versaball can lift up to 20 pounds.

This approach is appealing because it has what roboticists call high error-tolerance. When dealing with a mechanical grasper, the operator has to very carefully align the device to pick something up. Jamming transition is just more forgiving — the head doesn’t have to be right on the money to attach firmly to something, and the surface doesn’t have to be smooth or regular. For systems relying on robot vision, this is even more desirable.

Empire Robotics sees the Versaball having applications in robots, of course, but also in assisted living, prosthetics, and handling hazardous material. The first batches of Versaball kits are expected to ship later this month.

5K TVs

With 4K UHD TVs the most visible stars of CES, including Sony’s new X-tended dynamic range models, of course someone had to up the ante with a 5K set. Toshiba was showing off this model that doesn’t have any more vertical resolution than a 4K set, but is wider, allowing full-screen display of cinematic content (which generally has a wider aspect ratio than normal wide-screen displays).

Photosynth 3D

When Blaise Aguera y Arcas (then of Microsoft Research, but now at Google) demonstrated Photosynth at TED 2007, it became an immediate hit and has since become one of the most-watched and discussed tech demos of all time. While the original iteration of Photosynth was certainly cool, the new version — Photosynth 3D — will blow your mind.

The Photosynth project was started almost a decade ago for the purpose of “reinventing the whole enterprise of photography for ordinary people,” says Agüera y Arcas said. The first iteration of Photosynth, released in 2007, stitched together thousands of photos — cobbled together from all over the web — to create a seamless 2D image that you can explore. It was basically a clever computer vision algorithm combined with a “gigapixel” panorama builder/viewer. While the underlying tech was undoubtedly cool, it was the slickness of the interface that really wowed people. The original Photosynth video is embedded at the end of the story.

The new version, Photosynth 3D, takes that clever computer vision algorithm and incredible interface slickness into the third dimension. Photosynth can now take a bunch of photos and turn them into four different 3D views: Spin, Panorama, Walk, and Wall. The best way to demonstrate these four views is to watch the video, or to play around with some of the embedded synths below.

As you can see, all of these views are very similar to the original Photosynth, but now it’s also possible to move in space, rather than just panning and zooming a 2D plane. The 3D Panorama and Wall views are actually very similar to the original Photosynth, but the addition of 3D parallax makes it feel like you’re actually there, or that you’re watching a video.

Spin is a new mode that basically turns the panorama inwards, towards an object. Instead of turning on your feet to shoot a panorama of a scene, a Spin view is created by walking around a subject and taking dozens of photos. The Walk view, as the name implies, is basically a series of photos captured while you walk forward, and stitched together to create a 3D space. For all four modes, remember that when you stop the camera, you have full access to the original high-res images — it’s still like a gigapixel panorama in that regard. (Read: Autodesk Catch: Make a 3D print of anything, just by walking around it with a camera.)

Technologically, while the original Photosynth used computer vision to align a large number of images in two dimensions, Photosynth 3D uses the spacial gap between each image to generate 3D models of the objects in each scene. Then, depending on your position in the scene, textures (which have been cut out of the original photos) are overlaid on those objects. It’s fairly ingenious, and the new, mega-slick Photosynth viewer really adds to the experience. If you get a chance, try hitting the “c” or “m” keys while in the new Photosynth viewer; C reveals the 3D interpretation for each image, while M shows you the (scarily accurate) reconstructed path taken by the camera.

The future of Photosynth

As exciting as the original Photosynth was, we never really saw the tech come to fruition. In theory it is built into Bing Maps, allowing it to bring up geo-tagged synths, but it never really hit the critical mass required. For the most part, the Photosynth website seems to be Yet Another Gigapixel Panorama repository. (Read: Ricoh Theta: The first camera that can take spherical 360-degree panoramas.)

With these new 3D views, though, it’s easy to see the correlation between these new 3D views and competing services such as Google’s Streeview — especially when you consider that the Photosynth team moved from Microsoft Research to the Bing Maps department a few years ago. For now Photosynth 3D is just a tech preview, but hopefully Microsoft can find a way to bring it to the mass market. The tech is simply too cool to keep hidden away in the vaults. Copyright issues aside, imagine if Microsoft just left a few hundred Photosynth servers running in the background, joining up all of the photos on Flickr and Facebook to create a 3D panorama of the entire world…

T-Mobile buys Verizon’s Lower 700MHz spectrum to enable broad-coverage 200Mbps LTE

On Monday, T-Mobile announced that is acquiring Verizon’s Lower 700MHz A block spectrum for $2.365 billion and some AWS/PCS spectrum in some markets. With this acquisition, T-Mobile is finally able to start offering LTE broadly on highly-desirable low-band spectrum.

The Lower 700MHz A block is part of the Lower 700MHz band that AT&T also uses. However, due to how the 700MHz LTE device ecosystem developed, the Lower 700MHz band was unnecessarily fragmented in such a way to prevent the usefulness of the A block for years.

Over the last few months, the situation has been changing for the better. Back in September, AT&T agreed to switch from Band 17 to Band 12 for its Lower 700MHz ecosystem if the Lower 700MHz E block rules were modified to lower the acceptable transmit power from towers. Dish Network (primary owner of the Lower 700MHz E block) said that it would accept those terms if the FCC agreed to allow it the option to convert its AWS-4 spectrum to downlink-only (which means another band would be required to be able to have phone-to-tower communications). At the end of October, the FCC adopted an order that solidified this conditional solution. In late December, the FCC adopted another order that granted Dish the optionality on AWS-4 it requested.

Because of the progress made on full Lower 700MHz interoperability, T-Mobile is acquiring Verizon Wireless’ Lower 700MHz A block spectrum (which it does not use for LTE at all) so that it can start building the kind of LTEnetwork that AT&T and Verizon offer today and thatSprint can offer soon with ESMR. There is one major obstacle, though: Digital TV Channel 51. Several of the major cities still have digital TV stations operating next to the spectrum, and within the range of the TV station, no LTE can be deployed on the Lower 700MHz A block. Most of urban California, New York, Connecticut, Michigan, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Kansas City, and Boston cannot have LTE deployed on the spectrum because they reside in “exclusion zones” that prevent deployment until the TV stations leave channel 51. However, a large portion of the licensed area is clear of channel 51 and can have LTE deployed immediately, especially in the rural areas surrounding many of the major cities under exclusion zones. The exclusion zones are expected to disappear in 2015 after the FCC conducts auctions for the 600MHz band.

Currently, in many of the markets T-Mobile is acquiring 700MHz spectrum, it can already offer up to 150Mbps of downlink throughput through the 20+20 MHz LTE network it will have in place in those areas. Band 12 (Lower 700MHz A+B+C blocks) and Band 4 (AWS, 1.7/2.1 GHz) can be combined using LTE-Advanced carrier aggregation to further enhance downlink throughput up to 200Mbps with a combined 25MHz of downlink spectrum.

T-Mobile and Verizon expect the deal to close by the end of the first half of the year, allowing for T-Mobile to rapidly deploy the spectrum throughout the third quarter of 2014 in time for the first set of devices from T-Mobile with Band 12 to arrive in the fourth quarter. However, T-Mobile has beaten its own estimates before, and perhaps we will see devices introduced earlier and the network deployed much more quickly than expected.

Dell pro-grade 22-inch monitors with dual stand

If you’ve been looking to step into a dual monitor setup on a budget, this deal is for you — and it won’t last long. Right now you can grab two Dell P2213 22-inch monitors and Dell’s own adjustable dual monitor stand for just $278.24 with free shipping, a massive 48% discount.

The P2213 may not have the sexy attributes of some of the new ultra-thin or ultra-high resolution displays, but it has all the right specs to get the job done. The 22-incher serves up 1680×1050 resolution via an LED-backlit LCD. It will connect to most any modern PC via VGA, DVI, and DisplayPort inputs, along with a two-port USB hub for convenient port replication.

Not only do you get two of these little beauties in this deal, but you get Dell’s MDS14 dual monitor stand. It has a u-shaped base that gives you a little more flexibility in your desktop arrangement and allows for both vertical and horizontal adjustment of the monitors.

As a professional grade monitor, the P2213 also enjoys Dell’s generous three-year advance exchange warranty. During those three years of coverage, should you need warranty service Dell will send you a replacement and you just drop the unit to be repaired in their box and ship it back on their dime. When you consider how much it will cost to ship and properly package (because you totally saved the original box) a monitor, you won’t want to buy a monitor without this type of coverage.

Normally Dell charges $539.99 for this bundle, but right now you can stack instant and coupon savings to drop the price down to an amazing $278.24 with free shipping. This is a discount of such magnitude that it may even be a price mistake, so don’t wait long if this is making your deal senses tingle.