Russian startup Nettle , which is based in the Skolkovo Tech City area , is showing off a $28, 000 holographic gaming set-up at TechCrunch Disrupt SF’s Hardware Alley. The Nettlebox rig consists of a 3D plasma display, with four fisheye lens infrared cameras at the corners to track the position of the gamer who wears a pair of 3D glasses with two infrared lights onboard. The game itself is powered by a Windows PC built into the table. The set up tricks your brain into seeing a real-time holographic image of the game as you play. The holographic scenery appears sunken into the table, rather than standing out proud above the surface. Most importantly, the 3D illusion is sustained as you change your position so you can move around to get the best vantage point. “With this technology users can see a 3D screen from all viewpoints, from all angles, and see a 3D object in front of him. The brain believes that it’s a real object because the illusion is very strong, ” says co-founder Andrei Desyatov. “We are tracking the user’s position very fast.” The Nettlebox’s proprietary cameras run at 1, 000 fps. That high frame rate is required to enable a “stable illusion” when the user changes their physical position, he adds. The camera range (i.e. the distance between the user and the table) is up to around 1.5 meters in the brightly lit (“noisy”) environment of the Disrupt conference hall but can extend up to 5 meters when using the Nettlebox in darker rooms, according to Desyatov. After a brief hands on — or eyes on — I can confirm it certainly works, and that the effect is pretty immersive, though it did feel like it could become rather disorienting. And possibly end up inducing a headache/motion-sickness style nausea. But that’s likely to depend on your sensitivity to this sort of stuff (speaking as someone who had to quit playing Minecraft because mining its 3D blocks left me feeling too queasy). At $28, 000 the Nettlebox itself is not about to become the next great leap forward in home videogaming, but Nettle is targeting this device at the presentation/exhibition market. It is also working with real-estate companies on developing showroom/presentation use cases by, for instance, allowing architects to walk around a hologram of a model building. After that, it does have videogaming in its sights. ”The next step for us is gaming. We are going to create a gaming machine for amusement parks, ” says Desyatov. “And then the last step is for videogames like strategies like Starcraft and so on.” Pushing the Nettlebox into the home gaming market is going to require some serious squeezing of its price tag but Desyatov reckons it will be possible to build something that is “affordable for most users.” Nettle is bootstrapping at present and launched the Nettlebox in Russia a few months ago. It’s got five customers so far and is looking to expand that customer base internationally, eyeing the U.S. market. “We’re thinking about looking for external funding to increase the speed of entering the gaming industry, ” he adds.
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Nettlebox Is A $28,000 Hologram Rig That Lets You View Real-Time 3D From All Angles
With every new iPhone, most of the discussion centers around its look and not what comes inside. But, according to multiple reports , Apple has designed a new 64-bit dual-core A7 system on a chip for the iPhone 5S . It is supposedly 31 percent faster, representing a serious slowdown in spec improvement. It proves that the smartphone market may have matured and that existing smartphone owners won’t feel the urge to upgrade to a new model anymore. When it comes to smartphone chips, Apple is a lone ranger. It has been designing its own ARM-based chips for a couple of years. It outsources production to Samsung and other manufacturers. But the important part is that only Apple devices use Apple chips. So far, this strategy has proven to be successful. The iPhone 4S was twice as powerful as the iPhone 4, and had nine times the graphics processing capabilities. The iPhone 5 was once again twice as fast as the iPhone 4S, with twice the graphics performance. That’s why this year’s 31 percent performance boost is lackluster. If the new iPhone is indeed called the iPhone 5S, the ‘S’ will certainly not stand for ‘speed’. A 31% CPU speed increase sounds like a huge failure to me, specially considering previous generations showed ~100% improvements.— Paul Haddad (@tapbot_paul) August 26, 2013 On paper, Android phones are more powerful. Right now, the Snapdragon 800 and Tegra 4 both come with at least 4 cores and more raw power . It seems that Apple doesn’t want to compete in the spec game anymore, without giving any explanation. The main advantage is that Apple can optimize the A7 for its own set of APIs, making it feel faster than it actually is. Even though Snapdragons have more GHz, iPhone apps are still fast because Apple takes advantage of its chip architecture like no one else. The gap isn’t as wide as expected. Moreover, Apple’s custom design strategy improves battery performance. Apple needs to reduce both component costs and R&D costs Yet, why were the A6 and the A5 much faster than their predecessors? Because smartphones were not as fast as Apple wanted them to be. If you want to use Siri or play nice games, you need the iPhone 4S. If you want to use the upcoming AirDrop feature, you need the iPhone 5. Now it’s not the same story. Apple probably thinks that the iPhone 5 can run everything perfectly fine, and there is no need to put more raw power. In other words, smartphones have matured. As smartphones get more widespread, Apple needs to reduce both component costs and R&D costs. The company can’t invest as much money in developing its new chips if smartphones become more and more commoditized products . The company wants to avoid hurting its margin more than it needs. The A7 needs to be future-proof. While the iPhone 5C will not receive the A7 at first, entry-level iPhones will eventually get those chips. It needs to be powerful enough and cheap enough so that Apple doesn’t have to develop yet another chip next year for its cheap iPhones. If Apple judges that current chips are becoming fast enough to power iOS for years, iPhone users shouldn’t expect speed increases. Instead, the company will bet on new features and software updates. With market maturation coming soon, Apple faces a nearly overwhelming challenge as well. How do you convince your customers to upgrade their phones? The same thing happened for the iPod — they got lighter and lighter. In 2001, the original 5GB iPod was 6.5 ounces (184 grams). In 2004, the iPod mini was 3.6 ounces (102 grams). In 2005, the iPod nano was only 1.5 oz (42 grams). At this point, if you already had an iPod and used it as a portable music player, there was no real incentive to upgrade to a new one, except more gigabytes. The same thing is true for your microwave — you only buy a new one if your old one breaks. Yet, there is one last thing that can be improved again and again on the iPhone — the camera. Everybody uses their phone as their primary camera. It’s the camera that you always have in your pocket. While it has greatly improved over the years, there’s still room for improvement — especially now that HiDPI displays are getting more popular. This single spec upgrade will make people upgrade. That’s why the most interesting news of the day isn’t the A7, but the new dedicated chip for video capturing. In addition to helping for image stabilization, it could allow you to take 120 fps videos. If the iPhone 5S can shoot smooth slow-motion videos, it could be the feature that stands out and steals the show at Apple’s event. In fact, the ‘S’ could stand for ‘slow motion’. (Image credits: Ascii.jp , Wikimedia Commons ) 
Plug just launched a Kickstarter campaign for its $69 adapter. It will transform your USB drives into a personal Dropbox for all your devices. Thanks to a deep integration in your filesystem, you won’t have to move your files to a special folder or a virtual hard drive. After launching Plug’s app, everything is transparent and you won’t have to change your workflow. Except that all your devices will now have the same files. Very much like TechCrunch Disrupt alumni Bitcasa , you can cache some folders and files on your local hard drive or stream them from Plug. The only limit in Plug’s case is the amount of storage space you have on your USB drives. Behind the scene, Plug is a small Linux-based machine that creates a VPN network. Then, if you want to access your files from your iPhone, Plug’s client will silently connect to the network and show you all your files. It looks a lot like Dropbox’s app, except that your files are stored at home and you don’t pay a subscription fee. You could say that it’s pretty similar to a network-attached storage device, but with a software trick to replace your entire filesystem. “Our innovation with Plug is a software innovation more than a hardware innovation, ” co-founder and CEO Séverin Marcombes told me. “We could have designed this system in the cloud if it weren’t so expensive and so slow, ” he continued. After launching the app, all your files will go through Plug. With a USB 2.0 connector and an Ethernet 100 port, it could be a bit slow to stream movies, especially if you have multiple drives plugged into the adapter. That’s why you can cache your files. Even though Plug claims that you can use your files just the way you used to do, this new paradigm will probably take some time before getting used to it. Marcombes compared the caching feature with Spotify’s offline playlist feature, a button that Spotify users already know well. The Kickstarter campaign just started but its goal is pretty low. At $69, 000, the Paris-based team will certainly attract a thousand backers to reach its goal. You’ll just have to wait until December before getting your hands on the device. 
In the world of self-driving cars and autonomous vehicle technology, Google gets most of the attention, but it’s far from being the only player in the field. Earlier this month, Mobileye , the Israeli and Dutch maker of advanced driver assistance technologies, claimed that self-driving cars “could be on the road by 2016.” Rather than Google cars’ array of radar, cameras, sensors and laser-based range finders, Mobileye wants to offer autonomous driving capability at a more affordable price point by using mainstream cameras that cost only a few hundred dollars. While cars using Mobileye’s systems, like the Audi A7 , aren’t quite as “autonomous” as Google vehicles, they could help advanced driver assistance technology make it onto the road long before 2025 — the date industry experts expect driverless cars to go mainstream. With its intelligent, camera-based “traffic assist” technology expected to begin arriving this summer thanks to partnerships with five major automakers, the automotive A.I. company is looking to take advantage while its stock is still high, so to speak. Mobileye announced today that it is selling $400 million in equity to “five unaffiliated” financial investors, which include “some of the largest U.S.-based global institutional asset managers and a leading Chinese government-affiliated financial investor, ” according to a statement released this morning . The transaction, which values the company at $1.5 billion (pre-money) and was overseen by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, is expected to close in August. The company attributes the timing, in part, to the current regulatory support and progression of global safety standards, which have helped encourage automakers to accelerate integration of intelligent driver assistance technologies. Mobileye has been around since the 1990s, and like Google, is more interested in being an artificial intelligence company and, specifically, improving the intelligence of cameras to assist with autonomous driving, than being an automaker itself. The company’s technology has been tested in a number of capacities, but mostly it’s focused on helping drivers avoid collisions. According to The New York Times , in the past, its tech has been used by companies like Volvo to detect pedestrians or vehicles up ahead or crossing in your blind-spots, alerting drivers when they get too close to those objects, for example. The newer version of Mobileye’s system that arrives this summer aims to help steer the car in stop-start situations, though drivers are still required to keep their hands on the wheel. Coming up next, and expected to be street-ready by 2013, is a more advanced system that will allow for hands-free driving. The company plans to begin experimenting with and adding to the number of onboard cameras in vehicles to improve the efficacy of its technology in autonomous driving cases and presumably push it closer to the kind of hands-free, full autonomy promised by Sergey Brin and Google in the years to come. 
My ID classmate kept getting burgled. His second-storey East Village apartment was broken into multiple times, and in frustration he signed a year lease on apartment 6B of a six-flight walk-up. He reasoned that no thief would be willing to haul a television down six flights of stairs. But within a month, he was robbed again—this time they broke in through the roof door. And my TV-less buddy spent the next 11 months going up and down six flights of stairs every day. Six storeys (some say seven) was the maximum height they’d build residential buildings in New York, prior to the elevator. No resident was willing to climb more stairs than that. After Otis’ perfection of the elevator, that height limitation was gone, and within a century we had skyscrapers. Then the new height limitation was building technology. Advanced construction techniques have since skyrocketed, if you’ll pardon the pun; as the World’s Tallest Building peeing contest continues, it is rumored that Saudi Arabia’s Kingdom Tower will be a kilometer high . But the new height limitation is the thing that smashed the old one: Elevators. Steel cable is so heavy that at its maximum elevator height of 500 meters, the cables themselves make up 3/4s of the moving mass. You can stagger elevator banks to go higher, but the heaviness of steel cable makes long-haul elevators prohibitively expensive to run. Finnish elevator manufacturer Kone believes they have the answer. After ten years of development they’ve just announced the debut of UltraRope , a carbon-fiber cable that’s stronger than steel, lasts twice as long, and weighs a fraction of the older stuff: (more…) 
Disrupt NY 2013′s Startup Battlefield competition is underway, and now New York native Keen Home is taking the stage to present its first-round pitch. Keen Home is a home automation startup, which aims to follow in Nest’s footsteps by building remote vents for your central air conditioning and heating systems that can be controlled from your smartphone to optimally direct air where you actually need it — and away from places you don’t. Keen just launched its crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo . Keen Home is the brainchild of Ryan Fant and Nayeem Hussain, both of whom have experience founding companies in the home real estate and property-management space. The two believe their startup can appeal to consumers who want both more convenience in managing their home’s HVAC systems, and who want to save money and conserve energy. Keen Home’s debut product, the Keen Vent, accomplishes both. The idea came from Fant noticing that when vents were closed in other rooms, heating and cooling the one he was currently in became much easier. The problem is that those vents generally operate separately, and manually, in most homes. Even with some systems that provide a remote, like Activent, they aren’t centrally controlled in a way that makes them individually manageable from an existing device like a smartphone. “We found that just by closing four vents in an average-sized home, we’ve reduced the run time of the furnace by about 30 percent,” Fant explained in an interview. “So not only were we redirecting air to rooms that were actually in use by intelligently closing vents, we were increasing efficiency, as well.” Keen believes that the focus is always on the thermostat when it comes to home heating and cooling efficiency solutions, which is good but it ignores other parts of the problem. The Keen Vent solves that, by providing both a user-guided and automated way of opening and closing vents to change how air flows through a home. A homeowner can set a schedule for individual vents, too, and it can plug into weather data to respond intelligently to changing conditions. Fant says the Keen Vent can provide up to 32 percent reduction in run time for HVAC systems, which means lower monthly bills and less toll on the environment. Most heating and cooling vents in households are around 60 years old, Keen Home said on stage during their Disrupt Battlefield presentation on Monday. Individual vent covers will cost around $40 per vent, Keen predicts, with a $150 charge for the system in total. There’s also a recurring fee of around $4 per month for access to the cloud-based management platform, which also provides monthly reports. But Fant and Hussain plan to partner with utility companies and homebuilders to try to offer the tech initially at a discount price, perhaps with, say, six months of service rolled into a new construction. It’s the same model that satellite radio provider Sirius/XM uses to sell subscriptions with new cars. Keen Home is launching its Keen Vent product on Indiegogo today, and believes that seeking crowdfunding, as well as traditional investment, will help it get the word out and prove product viability. Its biggest challenges will be proving to users that a recurring subscription around centralized vent control is worth the cost, and in making sure that legacy players like Honeywell don’t swoop in and simply build their own similar systems. The team says that being aggressive with partnerships with big utility companies, the way others like Nest and thinkeco have done in the past, will be the key to making sure it can overcome both. Keen said on stage that the majority of its audience would be people who don’t know what a smart home is, so they tried to make sure it was as easy to install as possible. That’s why they’ve made the install process as simple as possible, and setting up the online dashboard involves only entering a code and then doing a roughly 15 question survey. In addition, they’re planning to partner with HVAC contractors to take care of more complicated installs. Battery life is expected to be around a year for the vents, so it’d be roughly equivalent to changing the power source on devices like smoke and carbon monoxide detectors. 
Seagate will be shipping a 4TB hard drive that has the distinction of being the world’s first to include a 1TB per platter design. This basically means that each spinning disk in the hard drive has a capacity of 1TB, and that there are four of them. It’s not everyday that you can claim to that have something that’s the “world’s first”, so don’t be too hard on Seagate. This certainly isn’t the first hard drive to have a 4TB capacity, but apparently the new 1TB per platter design significantly increases the hard drive’s performance over the competition. It consumes 35 percent less power than comparable drives on the market with 4TB capacities, and at 145MB/s, it has the highest average data rate as well. But most importantly, the new design will also bring down costs. A hard drive in an external casing can be had for $212, while just the bare drive will cost around $190. Bring on the terabytes, Seagate. My body and my illegally downloaded movies are ready. 
redletterdave writes “After a French civil court ruled on Jan. 24 that Twitter must identify anyone who broke France’s hate speech laws, Twitter has since refused to identify the users behind a handful of hateful and anti-Semitic messages, resulting in a $50 million lawsuit. Twitter argues it only needs to comply with U.S. laws and is thus protected by the full scope of the First Amendment and its free speech privileges, but France believes its Internet users should be subject to the country’s tighter laws against racist and hateful forms of expression.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
Gaikai’s Dave Perry took the stage at the PS4 event today to describe how Gaikai would be adding cloud gaming elements to the PS4, which will make it possible to jump in and try games in the PlayStation store, make sharing with your friends a snap, and also invite spectators and get friends to help you by remotely taking over your game. The PS Vita will also finally get a lot more useful, thanks to Remote Play. Perry said that the team has dramatically reduced transmission times, turning the PS4 into a server and the Vita into a client allowing for remote play of titles run on the PS4 direct to the Vita. It’s exactly like the Wii U, but with a controller you can walk away with and use as a standalone mobile console. The ability to easily jump right into PS4 games and try out titles via streamed gaming is a huge addition for Sony, which had more limited demo capability in the PS3 PlayStation store which required sizeable downloads when it was even available (which wasn’t for every title). Inviting players to join and watch your game also includes the ability for spectators to chim with with on-screen comments as you play, and the ability to take over your controller to help you out if you run into trouble. It’s a much more social version of Nintendo’s handholding modes in recent releases. Will gamers opt to call a friend, so to speak, instead of jumping on GameFAQs? That’s a good question, but clearly the company is doing everything it can to try and build a real social network, instead of the loosely affiliated group of often crude, sometimes racist anonymized gamers that made up the PlayStation Network of the past.