Brilliant Weekend Edition
Brilliant Weekend Edition
Stick-figure surveillance, butt-sucking robots, one-handed gamer chow and more!
Brilliantly Bad Ideas
Camera turns people into stick figures
University of Michigan eggheads invented a way to surveil while assuring the privacy of the surveilled. Called PrivacyLens, the camera system uses both a regular camera and a heat-sensing camera. The heat sensor detects a human, then turns that warm-blooded mammal into a stick figure in the captured video. (Here’s how: Internal software creates two masks — one for heat-producing elements and the other for cold ones. Once the human outline is established, the pixels in that silhouette are replaced with pixels from the background, then the stick figure is superimposed on the center of the silhouette.) Because stickfigurization happens on device, no video of the surveilled is transmitted or stored. It’s perfect when you want to know what people are doing without knowing who’s doing it.
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Robot picks up cigarette butts (so smokers don’t have to)
Robotics researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Genoa developed a quadruped robot named VERO (Vacuum-cleaner Equipped Robot) that picks up cigarette butts. The robot is from Dynamic Legged Systems Lab, and it’s been outfitted with a vacuum cleaner on its back, with a suction hose on each of its four legs. A neural network identifies cigarette butts on video captured with a video camera. Once a butt has been identified and located, software maneuvers the robot to step right next to it, and the hose sucks it up. The solution is the second best technology for keeping public spaces free of cigarette butts (after the #1 technology of not throwing cigarette butts on the ground).
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Finally: One-handed gamer chow
Japan’s Nippon Ham Corporation hired a gamer-developer to develop a ramen product for gamers. The goal was to create food that could be eaten with one hand, while the gamer’s other hand remained on keyboard or controller. The result is “Boost Noodle” — soup in a bag. Specifically, the product is a “spout pouch” containing short-cut noodles, roast pork and bamboo shoots intertwined with a jelly-like rich seafood and pork bone soup. It’s food you can chug.
Shameless Self-Promotion
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