San Francisco airport can now record all visitors’ license plates

When you drive to the airport, you expect a certain amount of tracking, if just from security cameras. However, San Francisco International Airport might be taking things a step too far. The travel hub recently received approval from the Airport Commission to collect the license plate info for everyone who uses its roads and garages, storing that data for over 4 years. It’s ostensibly meant for collecting revenue from parking and commercial drivers like taxis, but SFO has permission to release that info to both local law enforcement and the FBI. Needless to say, that’s raising eyebrows among privacy advocates. The ACLU’s Matt Cagle warns KQED that the airport could become a “honeypot” for police wanting to collect information about anyone paying a visit, whether or not they’re suspected of committing a crime. Also, it’s not clear why SFO needs to preserve all that license plate data for so long. If there isn’t reason to hold on to plate info (whether for crime reports or long-term parking), shouldn’t it be erased within a matter of days? In theory, this is legal: the airport implemented its new policy in response to a law that required public disclosure and security measures for license plate data collection. The very act of scooping up license plates is theoretically legal, then. The question is whether or not SFO is managing that info in a responsible way, and it’s not clear that this is the case. About 53 million passengers go through the airport every year, and many of them drive to get there. While this could help catch car thieves and terrorists, it could also help less scrupulous authorities track the movements of activists and other innocents. Via: SFist Source: KQED News

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San Francisco airport can now record all visitors’ license plates

Dance moves turn into music with BeatMoovz

There are plenty of gadgets out there for making music on your mobile device , but they’re relatively sedentary affairs. BeatMoovz turns things arounds with a music tool that gets you up and dancing: instead of moving with the music, you dance and create a soundtrack using your steps, spins and sashays. Developed by Daigo Kusunoki, a competitive dancer with a background in mechanical engineering, BeatMoovz is a pair of Bluetooth bands you wear on your wrist or ankles. You pair them up with the iOS or Android app, and then you’re ready to start making music. It’s attuned to how fast you go and how you move — a gentle rocking may produce a slow groove versus a faster beat you get from breakdancing. Multiple sets of bands can be hooked up to one app: the demo at Toy Fair involved Kusunoki and another dancer both wearing two sets of bands, with them bouncing, waving and kicking to produce a variety of techno and hip hop jams. Different sounds can be assigned to each bracelet for a fuller piece of music. It’s easy to imagine a street dancer using this to put on performances, as well as kids competing to create the most interesting compositions. The app isn’t limited to a small set of instruments — there are 400 different options from a whole variety of music genres, from rock to pop to jazz. There are even sounds inspired by science fiction, video games and action films. The BeatMoovz will recognize your movements and apply the appropriate audio effects — you can do the robot with all the appropriate mechanical shifting and clinking or, if you’re not into dancing, it’s also great for some physical humor as you pretend to shoot fireballs at your friends. Each set of bands will cost $70 when they’re released in August. They’ll come in blue, black, red, green, yellow or orange, so you’ll have no problem matching them to your favorite dance attire.

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Dance moves turn into music with BeatMoovz

Smoother movements help robots save a lot of energy

Eliminating the herky-jerky movements of robots isn’t just good for comforting nervous humans… it helps the robots, too. Researchers have developed smooth movement algorithms that slow the acceleration and deceleration of robots, saving as much as 40 percent of the energy they’d normally use. The trick is to order tasks in a way that lets robots move at their own pace without colliding into each other. Factory robots typically rush through tasks in a rigid order, only to wait for their fellow automatons to catch up. Here, they’re more flexible as to when and how quickly they get things done. You may see these more graceful robotics sooner than you think. General Motors is one of the partners in the project, and it has a vested interest in saving as much energy as it can. Robots use roughly half of the electricity at a vehicle assembly plant — if GM can save a lot of money using nothing more than code, you know it’s going to leap on that opportunity. While it’ll likely take a long time before robots ship with smoother movements from the get-go, it won’t be surprising if the underlying algorithms eventually become ubiquitous. [Image credit: Oscar Mattson, Chalmers University] Filed under: Robots , Science Comments Via: Geek Source: Chalmers Tags: algorithm, chalmers, ChalmersUniversity, factory, generalmotors, gm, robot, robotics, science, video

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Smoother movements help robots save a lot of energy

This 1,000 FPS Projector Perfectly Matches the Movements of Any Surface

Researchers at Ishikawa Watanabe Laboratory, the University of Tokyo, and Tokyo Electron Device have developed a high-speed projector system that can track and flawlessly match the complex movements of whatever surface it’s projecting on. Read more…

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This 1,000 FPS Projector Perfectly Matches the Movements of Any Surface