Fly along with Rotor Riot teams’ quest for the World Drone Prix.

Competing at top drone racing tournaments takes teamwork, practice, tinkering skills, a taste for speed and a knack for virtual reality. But according to Steele Davis and his Rotor Riot teammates, fervor for the lightness of being and commitment to fun are the real secrets to being a successful drone racer.

A relaxed, open mind makes for a faster pilot.

“I try not to take competition or life too seriously,” Davis said as his team prepared to compete against 100 racing teams in the qualifying rounds at the World Organization of Racing Drones Prix in Dubai 2016.

“I like watching funny videos and goofing off with my friends. If you take things too seriously, what’s the point?”

That keeping-it-real state of mind helped Davis and his teammate Chad Nowak finish the in the top 10 in the round of 32 teams competing in the World Drone Prix.

At the event, the largest global drone race to date, with a prize pool totaling US $1 million, the biggest sum yet for drone racing, drones take to the skies March 11-12.

Commissioned by the crown prince of Dubai, Hamdan Bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, a drone racer and adventure sports enthusiast, the race’s global breadth and investment are proof that professional drone racing has hit the big time.

To make it to Dubai, teams had to win qualifying events, which were held in Los Angeles, South Korea, Germany and cities across China. Teams include a pilot to control the drone, a navigator to communicate the surroundings of the drone, a technician to keep the aircraft running, a pit stop leader and a team manager.

The competition evolves from rounds of 32 teams down to 16, two semifinals of eight teams, then the finals to determine the winner.

Members of Rotor Riot shifted pilots and roles to create three different competing teams: Rotor Riot Steele, Rotor Riot Nowak and Charpu FPV (led by Rotor Riot pilot Tommy Tibaja). Even though they pilot races as individuals – they could face one another in the final four – knowledge is shared openly across teammates.

The qualifying track is indoors and is one-third the size of the main outdoor finals track. Kept somewhat secret until the tournament began, the main track was rumored to have moving gates, special lanes and special bonus obstacles. The 591-meter outdoor aerial course was custom-built to challenge the world’s top drone pilots, and according to organizers, there has never been a more tech-infused course.

Womak said the difference between the small indoor and huge outdoor tracks in Dubai was major challenge for all pilots, requiring a different type of drone build or modification so the drone is optimally tuned for each track. Not to mention that Dubai was experiencing the worst rain storm in the past 10 years, making it tough for pilots to even practice.

“Ultimately it comes down to the pilot and his or her ability to adapt to uncontrollable variables like weather (wind), track dynamics and radio frequency signal interference,” said Nowak.

Eye on the Prize with Teamwork

Snatching some of the $1 million prize money would be nice, but most of Rotor Riot’s attention focuses on fun.

“I love meeting up-and-coming flyers,” said Davis who, at 26, is slightly younger than the average drone racer.

“There are kids here at Dubai that are serious competitors at only age 14,” he said.

“What’s really awesome about this race is that all of us get to meet people we’ve known online for years but are only here seeing each other in person for the first time.”

Davis will use a Dubai Edition Team BlackSheep Crossfire, which he said provides excellent R/C range, something that will come in handy to tackle the most challenging track ever built.

The Rotor Riot teams are using 260-270MM quad copters, which is the diagonal span from one propeller motor across the body to the next propeller motor. Each propeller is six inches long and made of glass reinforced nylon. The drones are equipped with cameras, electronic speed controllers, rechargeable batteries, flight controllers programmed using a laptop, and powered by three motors capable of reaching 36,600 revolutions per minute at full throttle.

Always immersed in the moment, Rotor Riot team members are fond of friendly pranks and mischief. Davis, in particular, is notorious for his spontaneous syllogisms that freeze time for a split second while teammates hover around his words looking for simple or deeper meaning before erupting in laughter. It’s become a signature of their YouTube series.

Davis, known as “Mr. Steele,” is an electronics engineer who worked in a hobby shop for years and has a vast knowledge of remote control technology.

His teammates include Australian Chad Nowak, aka “FinalGlideAUS,” who started out competing in full-sized glider planes; Carlos “Charpu” Puertolas is an expert in FPV drones; and Tommy “Ummagawd” Tabajia is a well-known DJ in the Hollywood, Pasadena and Las Vegas club circuits.

Rotor Riot came together in 2015, when executive producer Chad Kapper of Flight Test fame pulled together these four eclectic drone pilots to star in a new drone lifestyle video series on YouTube.

Rotor Riot brings drone fans along for the ride as they share tips and tricks, but the real magic comes through their whimsical, intelligent commentary and genuine comradery.

Tips for Future Drone Racers

Davis’ first drone was a Team Black Sheep Discovery Pro, a bigger and heavier drone compared to multirotor drones he builds and flies now. He’s only been flying drones for a couple of years, moving from 3D helicopters to multirotors — UAVs powered by multiple propellers.

“I’ve built more drones than I can remember.” he said. “Many are the same exact model but with different specs for different purposes, like track racing or freestyle flying.”

His yaw, pitch and rolls are more than drone maneuvers, they’re forms of self-expression for Davis.

He also likes to keep his hardware as clean and simple as possible.

“A messy build leads to a part failure, which leads to a system failure, which leads to a crash, potentially costing me a lot of time and money,” Davis said.

Davis is also diligent about training and a bit rebellious. He flies up to 40 three-minute runs each a week and avoids spending time watching other people’s videos.

“I have always been an innovator and to do so you need to keep your mind open and free from conformity,” Davis said. “My advice to someone just starting out is to spend time getting to know other people who love this hobby.”

Nowak said that in Dubai, hijinks and pranks are part of every moment on and off the track.

“Every racer here is here for the fun of it and to build friendships around our common interest in flying.”

The post How to Be a Pro Drone Racer appeared first on iQ by Intel.

Teens awarded more than $1 million for scientific innovations at the 2016 Intel Science Talent Search, and for the first time in the event’s 75-year history more than half of the finalists were female.

The creation of software that helps drug makers develop new therapies for cancer and heart disease. A cost-effective filter that removes a common contaminant from stormwater systems. A low-cost, smartphone-based lung function analyzer that diagnoses lung disease as accurately as expensive laboratory devices.

These projects scored three teens — Amol Punjabi, Paige Brown and Maya Varma — top honors, including $150,000 each at the 2016 Intel Science Talent Search (Intel STS), held at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., on March 15.

Intel STS is the country’s oldest and most prestigious pre-college science competition, and has launched the careers of 12 Nobel laureates, two Fields medalists, 17 MacArthur Foundation Fellows, and 11 recipients of the National Medal of Science or Technology.

Some 1,750 high school seniors applied for this year’s event; only 40 made the final cut. These finalists traveled to the nation’s capital for a week to present original research to panels of esteemed judges and compete for Medal of Distinction awards in three categories: Basic Research, Global Good and Innovation.

In addition to two of the three top winners being female, it was the first time in the event’s 75-year history that more than half of the finalists were female.

“This milestone is an inspiring sign of progress toward closing the gender gap in technology and engineering,” said Rosalind Hudnell, vice president in Human Resources, director of Corporate Affairs at Intel Corporation, and president of the Intel Foundation.

“We hope these finalists’ outstanding work will inspire young people from all backgrounds to develop their interests in these fields.”

Here are the winners:

Medal of Distinction for Basic Research

This award recognizes finalists who demonstrate exceptional scientific potential through depth of research and analysis.

First Place: Amol Punjabi, 17, of Marlborough, Massachusetts

For his computational biology and bioinformatics project, Punjabi developed software to help drug makers develop new therapies for cancer and heart disease. He is the lead author of a paper on nanoparticles published in ACS Nano and co-author of a paper on a related topic in Nanoscale.

Second Place: Meena Jagadeesan, 17, of Naperville, Illinois

Jagadeesan investigated an object in algebraic combinatorics, or the mathematics of counting, to reveal a novel relationship between classes of graphs.

Third Place: Kunal Shroff, 17, of Great Falls, Virginia

In his research, Shroff discovered new relationships between the key protein associated with Huntington’s disease and the biological processes of cellular death that cause Huntington’s symptoms. His work may lead to new treatments.

Medal of Distinction for Global Good

This category rewards finalists who demonstrate great scientific potential through their passion to make a difference.

First Place: Paige Brown, 17, of Bangor, Maine

Over the course of two years, Brown studied the water quality of six environmentally impaired local streams with high E. coli and five with high phosphate contamination levels. She is currently developing a cost-effective filter largely made of calcium alginate strands to remove the phosphate from stormwater systems.

Second Place: Michael Zhang, 18, of Berwyn, Pennsylvania

Zhang engineered tiny virus-like particles to deliver gene-modifying proteins to target cells for medical therapy by altering the genome of those cells in a controlled way.

Third Place: Nathan Charles Marshall, 17, of Boise, Idaho

Marshall studied a marine sediment core sample and related it to present-day climate change, concluding that Earth can recover from current climate change trends if action is taken soon.

Medal of Distinction for Innovation

This category celebrates finalists who demonstrate problem-solving aptitude through innovative design and creativity.

First Place: Maya Varma, 17, of Cupertino, California

Concerned about the lack of access to medical intervention for lung diseases in the developing world, Varma created a low-cost, smartphone-based lung function analyzer. Using just $35 worth of hobbyist electronics and free computer-aided design tools, her device diagnoses lung disease as accurately as expensive devices currently used in medical laboratories.

Second Place: Milind Jagota, 18, of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania

As a less costly alternative to the transparent conductors now used in touchscreen devices, Jagota studied the performance of random nanowire networks.

Third Place: Kavya Ravichandran, 17, of Westlake, Ohio

Ravichandran studied the use of nanomedicine to destroy potentially fatal blood clots that can cause heart attacks and strokes.

Winners One and All

Second-place winners won $75,000, third place winners, $35,000, and the remaining finalists received $7,500 each.

In total, more than $1 million was awarded to finalists, semifinalists and their schools through the competition.

“The Society congratulates Amol, Paige and Maya,” said Maya Ajmera, president and CEO of Society for Science and the Public and alumna of the Science Talent Search.

“They and the rest of the top winners of Intel STS 2016 are using science and technology to help address the problems they see in the world and will be at the forefront of creating the solutions we need for the future.”

The post How These U.S. High School Students Hit the Big Time appeared first on iQ by Intel.

Education and med-tech startups among the winners of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship contest.

Lab4U, a startup based in Santiago, Chile, is the 2014 Intel Global Challenge winner, taking the grand prize at this showcase for international startups.

The company, which makes a mobile app that enables schoolchildren to perform hands-on science experiments at schools that don’t have funds for pricey lab equipment, won $50,000.

“I’ve always believed that through science we can improve and solve the problems of the world today,” said 25-year-old CEO Komal Dadlani, who’s finishing her master’s in biochemistry at the University of Chile while running her year-old company in shared office space provided by Santiago startup incubator Socialab.

Dadlani said that as young scientists-in-training, she and her co-founders experienced first-hand what it was like when their schools didn’t have enough equipment for them to perform experiments. “Even at our university … there was a lack of equipment,” she said.

Lab4U’s software uses sensors that are already standard on mobile phones to let students conduct experiments. And the company is developing a crowd-learning web platform so students and teachers can analyze and share their lab results.

This year’s competing entrepreneurial teams were selected for the IGC finals from more than 20,000 applicants from 60 countries and six continents.

To get to the IGC stage in Silicon Valley, teams went through the equivalent of playoffs, competing in regional tech, science and business contests held worldwide.

Twenty-six finalists from 20 countries reached Intel’s final competition held November 3 through 6. They pitched ideas across a diverse range of products and services, with innovations they propose for education, telemedicine, agriculture, communication and social networks, finance, scientific research, water treatment, assistive devices and social enterprises.

“Competitions are a way to inspire students and young entrepreneurs and inventors to have an end point that they’re reaching for,” said Staci Palmer, an IGC finals judge and Intel’s director of global strategic initiatives and marketing, which ran the competition. “It gives them a way, when they have accomplished a goal, to be able to celebrate it, to be able to share it with others and to get feedback.”

She added that Intel considers education, and equal access to education, critical for maintaining a skilled workforce and a vibrant economy.

In addition to Lab4U, three other winning IGC teams were announced in the following categories, receiving $15,000 each.

Internet, Mobile and Software Computing

Servtech, a Taiwanese company that makes a small diagnostic device that interfaces with factory machines to diagnose operating problems and improve machine efficiency through customizable apps.

Computing for Social Innovation

Karisma Kidz, a United Kingdom startup that makes mobile games that teach young children ways to improve their emotional intelligence.

Internet of Things and Hardware

Neuron Guard, an Italian company developing a portable medical device that will fit stroke patients like a collar, reducing brain temperature so that neurological damage is minimized during transport to a hospital and during treatment.

“This is amazing — it’s beyond our wildest dreams to come out to San Francisco and to be surrounded by so many amazing teams and then come away with a top prize. We’re delighted,” said Karisma Kidz CEO and “Chief Superhero” Erika Brodnock. “The whole experience has been totally amazing. To go to Zynga and learn from some of the top business minds in our field, mobile gaming, is totally inspirational.”

The finalist teams were given a crash-course on Silicon Valley — they were exposed to the experimental culture at IDEO and got insights from high-tech startups like AirBnB.

They came to learn how to get bigger and compete for better market share and new investors. “(The IGC) gives you visibility and opens up a more international network,” said Neuron Guard’s Enrico Giuliani. “We had a medical network, we had an Italian business network, but we didn’t have an international network.”

The young entrepreneurs “don’t just go home having won a prize,” said Intel’s Palmer. “With or without a prize they’ve developed a new network of potential future investors and also likeminded friends and role models they can partner with — as well as new skills.”

Lab4U’s Dadlani and her two cofounders came up the idea with for their company last year when they met at a startup brainstorming session at their university last year. “I’ve learned a lot,” Dadlani said. Just a year ago, “I had no idea what a VC was, I had no idea what the term ‘seed’ meant, I had no idea what a startup was.” Now, Lab4U is operating on $240,000 in seed money from angel investors and in government grants.

The Lab4U app can measure magnetism, solution concentrations and the speeds of moving physical objects with just a smart phone or tablet. The company is now developing several other science experiments and a curriculum

“The winners were the teams that did the best job of understanding their customers and how to use innovation to help them,” said Andre Marquis, Executive Director of the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, who oversaw the judges. “The most interesting thing about the finalists is how they were working on very different startups in very different regions. It shows the opportunities for entrepreneurs are truly endless worldwide.”

The winners of this 10th annual IGC were announced Thursday night after a day of pitching and judging at UC Berkeley. Since 2004, Intel has offered this multiple-day competition, with the support of the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of California, Berkeley. Intel has helped more than 125,000 startups scale their inventions.

William Harless contributed this story.

The post Emerging Entrepreneurs Face Off at Intel Global Challenge appeared first on iQ by Intel.

Mobile computers, particularly a 2-in-1 laptop, allow a digital music artist to capture original sounds while on the streets and out in the wild.

Ho-hum sounds most of us ignore everyday are just the things Fresh Big Mouf records and mixes into his mesmerizing rhythmic repertoire.

Truck tires, machine shop tools and just about anything he can bang on becomes fodder that he edits together to create irresistible, pulsating and swirling beats.

The stranger the setting, the more he enjoys the work.

“I’m the most creative when I’m in an unfamiliar location,” he said.

“It’s during those experiences that I’m most fired up.”

This creative energy is the vehicle for “The Fire,” a new video by Kina Grannis.

Rather than deep base and electronic drums, the beat is created entirely from firework sounds captured and syncopated by Fresh Big Mouf.

Fresh Big Mouf recorded the fireworks in the hills of Trona, Calif., a small town north of Los Angeles, on the outskirts of Death Valley National Park.

To create the fireworks beat, Intel equipped Fresh Big Mouf with a 2-in-1 device powered by the new Intel Core M processor, which he used as a recording device and mixing board.

It’s the same kind of thin touchscreen laptop that transforms into tablet, and is available later this month.

“If I’m collecting sounds and my phone or tablet runs out of batteries, then my day is over, even if I don’t want it to be,” he says.

“It’s only recently that technology has caught up to our creativity. The more powerful my tablet is, the longer battery life it has, and the more thin and mobile it becomes — I can do even more creatively.”

Born Aaron Hatch, Fresh Big Mouf works as a producer and musician in Los Angeles. A few years ago, while working with a folk-musician friend, he got the idea to record the musician playing a song in the desert and then layer some of those sounds to create an original song.

Thus, the “Beat Scout” concept was born. In August, 2013, Fresh Big Mouf posted on YouTube a version of “Ho Hey” by the Lumineers, made entirely with sounds he recorded at a hamburger stand.

He’s since recorded songs using sounds collected in a church, at the beach and riding in and banging on a Chinese box taxi.

“Everything around you — the rocks, the trees, that pole — seems generic, but there’s music in them,” he said. “Anyone has the power to tap into that, taking the ordinary and turning it into something wonderful.”

These technological advances mean that artists can easily bring their creative work out of the studio and closer to their points of inspiration.

“I think that’s the point that all of us, as creatives, are trying to get to,” says Fresh Big Mouf.

He said the performance of the Intel Core M processor is something that allows him to come up with something on the spot, when and where inspiration strikes.

“It’s got the power of the things that are in my home and studio — but I’m out here with it right now, so why do I have to wait to go there?”

The post Fresh Big Mouf Makes Music Out of Anything with Portable Studio appeared first on iQ by Intel.

More than 52 percent of the world’s population is under the age of 35, but new research showing why and how this generation is changing traditional shopping experiences could have bigger implications.

Like a swarm, millennials — those 18- to 33-year-old digital natives who intertwine their online and offline lives — are about to become the world’s most influential spenders.

Recent research shows this generation is bending preconceived notions of consumerism, causing big name and smaller brands to innovate in order to remain relevant.

It’s a shift sure to impact the traditional holiday shopping season, when so-called omnichannel shoppers, those who shop online, via mobile devices and in stores, will spend an average of $592 on gifts, which is 66 percent more than shoppers who only buy inside stores in the United States, according to a recent report by Deloitte.

Despite having the ability to browse and buy almost anything online anytime, young omnishoppers don’t miss out on the busiest shopping days of the year. Seven out of every 10 shoppers in the United States, aged 18 to 33, surveyed by New York-based research firm YPulse said they’re hitting the stores on Black Friday and websites on Cyber Monday this year.

One of the two biggest trends driven by omnishoppers is the blending of online and real-world shopping experiences, said Jamie Gutfreund, CMO of Deep Focus and lead researcher on the Cassandra Report: Consumed. The report is based on insights derived from a survey of 1,300 millennial consumers in the United States.

“They don’t even go online, they already are…they’re always online,” said Gutfreund.

“Separating the real world from digital world is an old concept. Younger people experience brands as a whole, so they expect online inventory to match what they’ll find in store. They want that brand experience to match wherever they are.”

There are 2 billion millennials living in the world today, and according to some estimates this group already accounts for half of the retail spending.

The Cassandra Report expects millennials to purchase $2.5 trillion dollars of goods and services in the year 2020, and by 2025 this generation is projected to make up 75 percent of the workforce.

But their influence is enormous now, said Jose Avalos, worldwide director of retail and digital signage at Intel.

“Young people are using technology to solve problems or create more engaging relationships and experiences,” said Avalos. “They want to have a say in shaping their favorite brands, what those brands stand for and how they will evolve.”

That desire to influence has stores introducing new technologies to interact with and keep customers engaged. Avalos sees it in places like Lego stores, which uses augmented reality to allow parents and kids to see what inside boxes before they buy.

Even American Apparel is using technology to make sure online inventory matches what shoppers will find inside stores.

While 63 percent say they are loyal to particular brands, the manifestation of the loyalty is much different than any other generation, according to Gutfreund.

The second big trend she points to is the shift away from buying and ownership toward renting and experiences.

“Young people are not into consumption as much as collaboration,” said Gutfreund. “They can pin [to Pinterest] or post [to Facebook, Instagram or Twitter] a brand and that gives them the same benefit and status as owning a product from the brand. It used to be you had to have the bag or shoes, but now it’s all about access.”

She mentioned Rent the Runway, Relapse Clothing and the Next Suite Company as examples of new kinds of clothing outlets for people who would rather rent then buy clothes.

“This model has taken off, especially for travelers, holidays and events like weddings,” she said.

Rent the Runway has become so popular that it now is one of the largest users of dry cleaning.

The Rise of Fauxsumerism

So-called acts of browsing, wishlisting and pinning often precede and even take the place of purchasing new items, according to the Cassandra Report.

While mobile devices have made the world increasingly transactional from almost anywhere in the world, they are also redefining the notion of window shopping. One-third of 13- to 34-year-olds consider browsing to be more fun than buying and just as exciting.

“My generation is demanding and impatient when it comes to consumption,” said Meredith, a 31-year-old woman who participated in the Cassandra Report.

“The Web is responsible for this dynamic, because just about anything you could desire is not only accessible, but can be delivered directly to your door. There is massive competition in both price and aesthetics which makes today’s consumer more selective than ever before.”

Even the notion of being more selective means something different to this generation.

“People are so concerned with their image that 50% say they think about what they will wear based on how it will be seen by a camera [which are everywhere thanks to smartphones],” said Gutfreund

NOwners

This generation has also given rise of the sharing economy, as characterized by Uber, Airbnb, Spotify and even Netflix. The Cassandra Report shows that most millennials don’t feel a need to own things. This presents tremendous challenges to the traditional relationship between buyers and sellers.

But as this new sense of “nownership” becomes better understood, brands can potentially enter into richer relationships with their customers, ones that can last beyond one season or one product’s brief life cycle.

“The concept of owning does not seem necessary anymore because there are so many better alternatives to owning things nowadays,” said Natalie, an 18-year-old participant in the Cassandra Report. “You don’t need to be an owner of something to have access to it.”

Interestingly, when young people do buy, 45 percent consider resale value before making a purchase.

They turn to sites like ThredUp, the Kelly Blue Book of fashion, to see how the value of things will hold up over time, said Gutfreund.

Or they look for products that will last for a long time, things of quality craftsmanship and that have an interesting story behind them.

“If you can shop [anytime] and find amazing prices on great stuff, why would you settle for mediocre?” asked Gutfreund.

Gutcheck Anyone?

The Cassandra Report shows that making a purchase is no longer a solo act but rather a collective decision for many young shoppers.

While there may be more product and service options than ever, there are also more second and even third opinions to be found before deciding to buy.

The dressing room selfie with “Should I get it?” shared on Instragram is increasingly common for young shoppers. That instant feedback from friends and followers is likely already backed by online reviews or confirmation from Pinterest that the item is popular.

MEtail and Relationships

The always connected millennial has also sparked a new type of merchant.

Whether it’s via a Craigslist garage sale-style purge, an Ebay auction or the creation of a handcrafted good for Etsy, the millennial blurs the line between shopper and merchant as they are increasingly becoming a merchant themselves.

Companies like Shapeways will print and sell anyone’s 3D design, allowing individuals to outsource production and fulfillment of their ideas. It’s something the Cassandra Report calls MEtailer.

An interesting side effect of the MEtail phenomena is allowing those with big social media prowess to shape shopping experiences at well-known brand name stores. Target asked three top pinners to design limited-edition party collections and Aeropostale enlisted top YouTuber Bethany Mota to launch the Bethany Mota Collection.

On the flipside, there’s the notion of de-branded.

“It’s the idea that we don’t want to be a signpost for brands,” said Gutfreund. “Eighty percent of people told us they want to customize what they’re wearing. They want to put their own stamp on it and make it identifiable.” She said Hermes and Vans are doing this — covering the higher and lower end of the consumer scale.

While shopping may or may not make the world go around, it’s helping to define what Gutfreund calls a Global Consuming Class.

“These young people are growing up with the same brands, the same access to tech and living arrangements, so when they connect they’re having more in common,” she said.

Could these shopping behaviors reflect how millennials will also break down cultural barriers and spark new kinds of relationships in our increasingly interconnected world?

“Thirty-five percent of people surveyed said they have relationships with people they don’t know,” said Gutfreund. And sometimes those online relationships are more meaningful than real-life ones.

While shopping is closely tied to self awareness and identity for millennials, the ability to share experiences, tastes, styles and desires through social media is allowing them to find others around the world with common interests.

It’s clear that shopping is about more than ownership of stuff for millenials. It’s about access and interconnectedness, building a relationship with whatever they consume — be it information, experiences or a pair of new-to-me shoes.

Todd Krieger contributed this story.

The post The Future of Shopping: How Millennials are Changing the Holidays appeared first on iQ by Intel.

For two years, Intel has worked to upgrade Stephen Hawking’s computer system, a pioneering assistive technology project that will have far-reaching benefits for the disabled.

Professor Stephen Hawking is arguably as famous for his computerized voice as he is for his ground-breaking work with general relativity and black holes. Intel has been working with Hawking since 1997, helping to maintain and improve the assistive computer system that enables him to interact with the world.

As Hawking’s motor neurone disease has advanced, his ability to communicate has slowed to one word per minute.

Intel’s challenge was to keep Hawking talking.

Hawking’s computer system uses a rudimentary timed interface. A cursor automatically scans across an on-screen keyboard, and whenever the renowned physicist blinks, he triggers an infrared sensor on his cheek. This stops the moving cursor and selects whatever key or option the cursor was highlighting at the time.

It’s not perfect, and if Intel’s engineers could build a new assistive system from scratch, it would probably look very different. It might use cutting-edge eye tracking technology or an electroencephalogram (EEG) approach, which translates brain activity into simple commands. The problem was this: Hawking didn’t want a completely new system.

“Stephen has used the same interface for decades,” explains Lama Nachman, principal engineer at User Experience Research at Intel Labs (seated next to Hawking in photo above).

“He is very adamant about keeping it. So our task was to retain the familiar user experience, but make that experience more intuitive and powerful.”

It’s taken two years of trial and error, working closely with Hawking, to create an enhanced version of his original system. Nachman and her team have recoded the software from scratch, adding an array of new features.

One of the biggest improvements is a new word predictor. Just like a modern smartphone keyboard, the new system (based on the SwiftKey SDK) is capable of autocompleting words as they are typed in. It can also predict the next most commonly used word, dramatically reducing the number of ‘clicks’ it takes for Hawking to build words.

As they were unable to redesign Hawking’s computer interface, Nachman and her team looked for improvements they could make elsewhere. They started by observing how Hawking used his system, tracking ‘interaction flows’ that included: writing documents or emails, giving lectures, searching the web and reading PDFs. Once a flow had been identified, engineers then attempted to streamline it.

“If you’re using Microsoft Word, which Stephen uses a lot, there are a few sets of functions that you want to use most often — open a new document, save, edit, and so on,” explains Nachman.

“We added a lot of contextual menus to his system, so he can select one with a single click, rather than having to go to the mouse, then to the menu, then to select an option. We created a lot of these new contextual options throughout the system to speed up use.”

Professor Hawking has been using his new software for several months, while Nachman and her team have been debugging and fine-tuning it. It’s almost finished, and when it is, Intel plans to make the system available to the open source community.

It’s a move that will allow other people to take the platform and develop it further. Nachman and her team hope that their pioneering work with Hawking will go on to help people with similar disabilities and communication issues, advancing the assistive technology field.

Professor Hawking was diagnosed with motor neurone disease when he was 21 and wasn’t expected to live past the age of 25. With technology’s help, he has not only defied his illness, he has regained his independence and clung stubbornly to his identity, even if that has meant saying ‘no’ to some technology upgrades.

This story was contributed by Perveen Akhtar. 

The post How Intel Keeps Stephen Hawking Talking with Assistive Technology appeared first on iQ by Intel.

Online browsing may be the new window shopping, but in-store experiences have become product petting zoos that scintillate the senses of plugged-in shoppers.

This year, Black Friday and Cyber Monday broke beyond U.S. borders into places like the United Kingdom, France and China. As this end-of-the-year shopping frenzy goes global, it’s evident that more retailers are turning to tech to entice and engage smarter, more demanding consumers.

The National Retail Federation (NRF) estimated that 134 million people in the United States shopped during the Black Friday weekend, but weekend retail sales — both in-store and online — were down 5.2 percent from last year.

While Cyber Monday showed that online sales rose 8.5 percent in the United States compared with last year, it was slower year-over-year growth from the previous year, which showed growth of 20.6 percent, according to a report by International Business Machines Corp.

Still, NRF expects more than 1.3 billion people will shop this holiday season, spending a record-breaking $620 billion, a 41 percent bump from last year.

But there are riptide shifts in shopping trends caused by millennials aged 18-34 who shop by merging real and digital world experiences. Their attitudes and approaches to shopping are forcing retailers to go nonlinear, according to Joe Jensen, general manager of Intel’s Retail Solutions Division.

“Twenty years ago it was a very linear journey, where shoppers became aware of things through a national ad campaign, then they’d go to the store, maybe try samples, buy one and then become a loyal customer,” said Jensen.

“Now it’s a scattered journey. Not only that, it’s completely different for different people. Today most times people collect feedback from friends, family or online along multiple touch points on their path to making a purchase.”

Not only has the path to purchase changed, it appears more people are choosing shopping over sleep. According to Google, one third of all shopping searches in the United States happen between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m.

Millenials already account for half of the world’s population. The 2014 Cassandra Report: Consumed foresees this generation spending $2.5 trillion dollars on goods and services in the year 2020.

They tend to be cost conscious and brand loyal, but more than owning things they prefer access and experiences, according to Jamie Gutfreund, CMO of Deep Focus and lead researcher on the Cassandra Report.

To meet the digital and experiential demands of shoppers this holiday, retailers are turning to technology to bolster and intermix their online and in-store offerings.

“Synchronicity is important,” Gutfreud said.

“Seeing shopping as real world and digital world is old. People want to experience brand as a whole wherever they are. They want online inventory to match instore. They want the branding to match.”

Nordstrom’s in-store Pop-In Shop Gift & Go invites shoppers to check out “gifts as unique as the loved ones on your list.” Curated by the store’s director of creative projects, Olivia Kim, formerly of Opening Ceremony, these real life showcases are augmented with an online game to inspire shoppers.

Nordstrom also gets kudos from digital natives for marking items in their store that receive the most pins from the retailer’s Pinterest site.

One of Nordstrom’s best examples for fusing the online and real world experience is the touchscreen mirror in dressing rooms that tracks items brought into the room and can recommend other items available in the store.

Developed with help from eBay, the first “connected fitting rooms” debuted at Westfield’s Southcenter Mall in Seattle and Westfield’s Valley Fair in San Jose in time for the holidays.

These kinds of technologies are allowing retailers to use more data to provide better all-around shopping experiences, according to Jensen.

“It’s helping them get the right inventory online and in stores,” he said.

“Today about half the time shoppers find the right color or size they’re looking for on the store shelf. Young shoppers think anything’s possible, so they wonder why a retail store wouldn’t have exactly what they’re looking for.”

American Apparel found a way to get their online and in-store inventory right.

“Their RFID tagging system allows them to bump that up to 99.8% of the time,” said Jensen.

“And keep in mind that 60% of the time people are buying something that is not necessary [a.k.a. impulse buying].”

In addition to using technology for real-time inventory and to provide more personal in-store services, some stores are starting to use technologies that catch the eye, ears, nose and stomachs of store visitors.

“If you step inside an Urban Outfitters, there’s a lot going on. There’s shopping, a café and visitors can do other things inside,” said Gutfreund.

Costa Coffee is the number two coffee seller in the world. Working with Intel, they created a high-definition digital touchscreen coffee vending machine that brings the spoon and cup clinking sounds of a barista and fresh-coffee aroma to almost any venue.

“It’s like getting a real coffeehouse experience inside a store where you might be shopping,” said Jose Avalos, director of digital signage for Intel.

Avalos also mentioned McCormick’s, a 125-year-old food company based in Baltimore. It has a digital sign that lets shoppers play Guess That Spice, a game that tests the sense of smell.

Clever, sensational tactics and technologies might lure hard-to-please shoppers, but most know a bargain when they see one thanks to their online searches or smartphone notifications sent by Internet services or in-store beacons.

“Beacons are these low-power Bluetooth transmitters placed in stores that wake up mobile apps to inform shoppers on the spot,” said Jensen.

Macy’s, the 156-year-old clothing and accessories chain, is using beacons in its stores across the United States. The chain plans to send coupons, product videos and information to shopper’s phones.

“[Customers] are at the center of all our decisions, and our ongoing research and development will continue to help us understand how to personally engage with them,” said Macy’s CEO Terry J. Lundgren, in a statement published by ZDNet.

Along London’s 200-year-old Regent Street, some 130 stores are using sensors and wireless technology to send messages to shopper’s phones. The New York Times reports that part of a $1.6 billion improvement program for the famous shopping street was aimed at building stronger relationships with customers.

Beyond beacons, Jensen pointed to another technology that could improve retail experiences.

“Wearables that tap into a store’s security camera network to alert sales staff of what kind of help is needed,” he said. “Technology can help by observing just enough behaviors to help — then a store worker can help shoppers in a pleasant way.”

Avalos points to another promising technology: intelligent shelving.

“It integrates advertising with helpful information about products,” he said. “When the shelf understands the products it is showcasing, it can participate more fully in the shopping process.”

Todd Krieger contributed this story.

The post Shopping Experience Changing as Millenials Hit the Market appeared first on iQ by Intel.

Golden Globe-nominated star of “The Theory of Everything” visits Intel to test Hawking’s communication technology, which has the potential to improve lives of disabled people around the world.

Eddie Redmayne, a London-based actor who plays renowned physicist Stephen Hawking in the new movie “The Theory of Everything,” took time out of his recent press tour to get smart about technology in Silicon Valley. The movie was complete, but Redmayne hungered for better understanding of essential aspects influencing the physicist’s life.

Despite Hawking’s astonishing ability to calculate complicated physics equations in his head, he has grown reliant on a modified computer fitted with an infrared (IR) sensor that translates his cheek and eyebrow movements into letters and numbers.

This computer, which allows him to communicate with the world, was recently upgraded by a team at Intel.

“These people are among the most interesting I’ve ever met,” Redmayne said to USA Today tech reporter Jon Swartz while pointing to a pair of researchers at Intel Labs in Santa Clara.

The Tony Award winner may be best known for his screen performances in “Les Miserables” (2012) and “My Week with Marilyn” (2011), but many see Redmayne’s lead role in “The Theory of Everything” as a breakout for his career. His performance has won him SAG and Golden Globes nominations.

To prepare for the role of young Hawking, who today is 72, Redmayne voraciously read scientific works such as “Brief History of Time” and the romance-filled memoir of Jane Hawking, “Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen.”

“There’s a great love story,” he told Lama Nachman and Horst Haussecker, Intel Labs researchers who have spent that past several years helping refine the technology Hawking relies on to speak.

“We find that even if you don’t have the science or the interest and fascination with Stephen Hawking, a lot of people are gravitating to the romance of the film,” said Redmayne.

Learning the intricacies of Hawking’s theories was daunting.

“I’m an actor,” Redmayne said. “I gave up science when I was about 14. I’m the most technologically illiterate person in the world.”

He devoted time to meet with more than three dozen people living with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)-related diseases. Between five and 10 of every 100,000 people in the world develop ALS each year.

Motor neuron disease (MND), which is deteriorating Hawking’s voluntary muscle activities for speaking, walking, swallowing and body movement, has slowed the physicist’s ability to communicate to one word per minute.

Redmayne came to Intel after he learned that Hawking was getting an upgrade to the computer system he uses to communicate. He wanted to meet the people behind the technology.

“I started working on this just over three years ago,” said Nachman, principal engineer at User Experience Research at Intel Labs.

The original relationship started a few decades ago, when Intel co-founder Gordon Moore saw that Hawking wasn’t actually using an Intel-powered machine. Gordon suggested that he use Intel technology.

“We’ve continued to support him through the years,” said Nachman.

“Every couple of years we’ve given him a new machine with the latest technology and then set it up exactly with his same software and everything.”

Nachman, after Redmayne’s visit, pointed out something that Pete Denman, the user experience designer from Intel working on the project, once said. Denman had no idea of the struggles Hawking went through until he saw for himself.

“Watching Stephen, even four-times faster than his previous speed, it still took more than 10 minutes to resize and position a window so he could read it,” said Denman via email.

If Nachman, Haussecker and their team of engineers could build a new assistive system from scratch, it would probably look very different than the one Hawking uses today. They told Redmayne that others tried electroencephalogram (EEG) approaches, which translates brain activity into simple commands, but Hawking didn’t like it.

“We did try eye tracking and found it did not work for Stephen,” said Haussecker.

They investigated using BCI (brain-computer interface) with Hawking’s interface, but that “didn’t pan out,” said Nachman. “He had issues with the interface,” she said. “He actually joked that his carers thought it didn’t work on him because he didn’t have any brain waves.”

A big challenge, according to Haussecker, was this that Hawking didn’t want a completely new system.

“He had been using that system for two decades,” said Haussecker. “He got so used to the subtleties, even the failures of that system. He could overcome those, much like when you’re playing a game and something’s not working well, you just compensate for it. He has become so good at it that he predicted when the system would fail, down to milliseconds.”

Sai Prasad, Pete Denman and Nachman from Intel Labs worked closely with Hawking to create a made-to-order, enhanced version of his original system. It resulted in doubling Hawking’s rate of speech and improved his ability to perform common computing tasks by about 10 times.

In addition to the user interface system, Sangita Sharma, Yi Wu, and Oscar Nestares from Intel Labs developed a facial recognition system to replace Hawking’s existing sensor technology. Alex Nguyen and Alexnader Zaplatin developed a new infrared sensor board to detect his cheek movements.

Nachman pointed out that Prasad, who developed most of the software that was actually released to Hawking, can account to nearly 60 iterations to get to the final version of software currently used.

“The requirements came from observing him using his existing system, understanding the pain points and getting feedback from Stephen,” said Prasad, in an email after Redmayne’s visit. “The new system was built by phasing in features incrementally through each iteration. It’s funny how Stephen would find bugs or run into issues. We would jokingly refer to him as our ‘validation engineer.’”

Haussecker laughs at the irony this experience has brought to his career.

“I studied physics and wanted to go into cosmology,” he said. “Through twists and turns, my career has led me to imaging and computer vision, and now I’m doing this. I told him [Hawking] when I first met him that it might just be the case that by helping him, I contribute more to cosmology than if I had become cosmologist.”

Redmayne recalled his first meeting with Hawking. “I was so nervous that I literally spewed forth information about him to him for about 40 minutes,” he said.

“I was calling him professor. To stop me in my tracks, he said, after a long pause, ‘Call me Stephen.’”

“I went on saying, ‘Of course, Stephen, you were born on Galileo’s birthday, the 8th of January. I was actually born on the 6th of January, so we’re both Capricorns.’”

With that, Hawking went to his screen and about eight minutes later Redmayne was hit by Hawking’s iconic voice: “I am an astronomer, not an astrologist.”

“I was like, Stephen Hawking thinks that the guy playing him [on screen] thinks that he writes horoscopes.”

Redmayne, Nachman and Haussecker talked about how Hawking is fiercely independent. That determination is shared by others living with similar diseases. Nachman said the system they created for Hawking will be released to developers in early 2015.

“We’re taking it to open source to allow different researchers to innovate in their different areas,” she said, adding that it will spread faster to people all around the world.

“The system that we’ve built is very constrained with his existing interaction mechanism, but we’ve built it in a way where you could take a completely different user interface and plug it in, or take a very different word predictor and plug it in, or use a different sensor and plug it in,” said Nachman.

“We wanted to build something that you can easily morph to fit the needs of whoever is using that system.”

Redmayne said he developed a whole new appreciation for science and technology after making the movie.

“Every part of it was an education for me, especially since I gave up science when I was a kid,” he said.

“There are big questions of quantum theory and relativity…then there are the intricacies of technology,” he said, pausing to ponder the man acting has allowed him to emulate.

“The specifics of using science in the minutiae of Stephen’s day to day is riveting.”

Before leaving, he soaked up some Silicon Valley lore inside the Intel Museum.

He wandered through the years when Intel was just a start up in 1968 and the creation of the first microprocessor, the 4004, from 1971.

He stopped to ponder the collection of Microma smartwatches, which pre-date the Apple Watch by three decades.

He even got to play a bunny-suited chipmaker.

The post Stephen Hawking and Intel: Actor Eddie Redmayne Learns History appeared first on iQ by Intel.

Decorating Christmas trees in the Year of the Maker.

Many end-of-year traditions will never die, but some have an uncanny ability to get smarter thanks to human creativity and technology. Just look at holiday lights. In the past two decades, Christmas lights have evolved from thumb-sized color bulbs to white icicles to smartphone-programmable, multihued lights.

This being the Year of the Maker, as proclaimed by Make Magazine founder Dale Daugherty, rather than hunting for cutting edge, high-tech Christmas lights, go find a do-it-yourselfer. You know, a neighbor, friend or family member who always tinkers with things.

We hit up our talented maker pal in New York, Ricky Bacon. He may be separated by less than six degrees from actor Kevin Bacon, but Ricky is the real deal. Vice President of Engineering at Deep Focus by day, by night he’s a bona fide maker, known for building an Intel Galileo-powered moon night-light for his son and the Signal Fish, a flying robot that lights up whenever it senses a Wi-Fi signal.

Lucky for us, Bacon was bitten by the maker holiday decorations bug after seeing the Epoch Christmas Tree on Hackaday.

“I love the tradition of the holidays, but fitting a 10-foot tree into my apartment wasn’t going.”

So instead of a big tree, he opted to make a smaller but smarter tree powered by Intel Edison.

“It’s a three-foot-tall fir, and the lighting schema is where the smarts and uniqueness lie,” he said.

He used NeoPixels, available from Adafruit, a programmable RGB LED.

“They come in ready-to-use strips, but I was looking for the light to be less visible, so I bought the breakout version and soldered them together manually.”

This allowed him to weave the lights into the tree with greater ease.

But the magic happened after Bacon turned to Fadecandy, a hardware-software solution for doing visual effects.

Most Christmas-tree lights have one of two states: they are either on or off. For Bacon’s smart tree, it’s a constant state of interaction because of the built-in passive infrared (PIR) sensor. The sensor is placed in the tree and detects motion. Whenever the dog, cat, young child or brother-in-law nears the tree, it performs a light show.

Bacon took things to a new level by adding an audio sensor, allowing the tree to react to sound as well as motion. When the noise level in the room increases, the light show shifts as if it’s alive, feeding off of the vibe in the room.

But there’s more. Bacon trained the tree to do something spectacular even when nobody’s around. That’s because, as the song goes, “He knows when you’ve been bad or good so be good for goodness sake.”

So in addition to reacting to motion and sound, the tree has LED lights that do a dance interpretation of what Bacon considers the best Christmas movie ever, “Die Hard.”

That’s Christmas geekery!

Bacon dubbed it Nakatomi Tree. Film nerds might know why.

Next he plans to connect the tree to a web server so it can be controlled remotely via Bacon’s smartphone.

Todd Krieger contributed this story.

The post Makers Hack Holidays with DIY Programmable Christmas Lights appeared first on iQ by Intel.

Hit with that question on the streets of Europe, people improvised some wickedly witty responses.

If there’s one thing people have in common — and often it’s also what sets us apart — it is their personal computing devices. While everybody may have a favorite model or function, when asked exactly how it all works … well, most people rely on imagination.

Recently on the streets of London, passersby were asked by Intel a series of seemingly simple questions:

“What makes your device work?”

“What powers it?”

“What keeps information on your device secure?”

You won’t believe what happened next.

A mix of nine men and women — couples, friends and individuals — each did their improvisational best to describe the inner workings of tablets and 2 in 1 computers.

Simple questions about battery life or device security yielded stream-of-consciousness answers that were factually inaccurate but undeniably witty and entertaining.

Results were captured on video in London, Barcelona and other European cities for a series called #howitworks, and they’re flat out hilarious if not inspiring.

A leather jacketed female rock fan in Covent Garden flailed her arms about and said “a big spider beast with light tentacles.”

That’s how she described the circuitry that governed a tablet.

When stopped in Camden, Leopold Kucharzyk and Ronak Raj described the microprocessor as if they were an old time stand-up comedy duo.

One began saying, “It’s a network of canals,” to which the other replied, “No, it’s more like a brain. A pink brain with neurons.”

They quickly agreed that the neurons are like tiny electronic messages that are light gold. No, light blue.

“They collate together and that forms whatever you ask the tablet to do,” they concluded.

Then there was the question: What powers the device?

Many answers painted a world inside devices not unlike the world outside. There was the idea that a device is powered by beings with “nanobyte coffees” or by a little man who eats a healthy diet of vegetables and runs on a mini-hamster wheel. Yes, that’s what keeps the device going!

But when it comes to the questions of security, that’s where things got crazy.

One man talked about “soldiers with little spears” keeping enemies at bay while others riffed about a square-headed man and his six henchmen protecting against bad intrusions.

Taken as a whole, these videos underscore that despite how much people love their personal devices most know little about how things work.

Despite not knowing their inner workings, people use their devices to connect with others and get more out of life every day.

One described how a 2-in-1 computer, which can be used as a laptop or tablet, is like a mini “me manager.”

After the last question, these passersby got to hold a tiny Intel microprocessor in their hands.

“Is that what makes this thing work?” asked one participant. “That’s ridiculous!”

Or crazy, beautiful science.

Learn more about how Intel technology brings performance to tablets.

Todd Krieger contributed this story.

The post How Do Tablets Work? The Answers to this and More appeared first on iQ by Intel.

Predicting what will define 2015, technology experts see a wide variety of advancements leading to a more interconnected world.

Each New Year we recharge our hopes for finding better, more rewarding ways of doing things. This year, more than ever, that hope hinges on significant technological advancements.

Key tech advancements for 2015 called out by industry analysts and experts from Intel indicate that computing devices and digital services will become more integral, immersive and naturally integrated in our daily lives.

Reflecting on recent years, that may be no surprise, but what’s clear from these predictions is that some of the problems we have today will soon only exist in the past.

Come Together, Right Now, Seamlessly

Today, in the United States and Untied Kingdom, each household has eight connected devices, according to Martin Garner, analyst at CCS Insight.

The dream of having one device that can do everything seems impossible when you look around and see the growing number of people using mobile phones, tablets, laptops and Internet-connected TVs. But as Garner sees it, in 2015 people will realize that services are more essential to our daily lives than devices.

“These devices lead us to the many services we access every day, but these services are becoming more important than the devices themselves,” said Martin. “The services have become the things you use, and our devices now just serve them up to us.”

Garner said that for anyone upgrading to a new laptop or tablet these days it has become critical that new devices easily access all of their services — from entertainment, personal banking and shopping to photos, videos and documents stored in so-called cloud services.

Software and Screens

As the types of devices evolve and become smart and connected, they become a natural extension of the way people live their lives, according Doug Fisher, vice president and general manager of Intel Software and Services.

“With the number of touch-points and communication paths increasing, software helps to create a unified interface and simplify that interaction,” he said.

Devices and software bring the real and digital worlds together, expanding experiences we get via computing devices to an even broader array of screens and objects.

“We’re currently living in the world of the ‘screenification’ of computational power,” said Brian David Johnson, Intel’s Futurist.

“As we move into 2015 however, we will see the next age of computing,” said Johnson. “It will be the ‘non-screen’ age of computing, where computational power will reside in the objects around us, such as GPS watches and connected home appliances. As consumers, we will capture this data and move it to a platform with a screen to analyze and draw value from it.”

Ben Wood, chief analyst at CCS Insight sees a touchscreen user interfaces becoming even more pervasive.

“It’s already rare to bump into a screen you can’t swipe,” he said.

He said the cost of touchscreen panels are dropping dramatically. He remembers the original Microsoft 30-inch surface tabletop computer from 2007, which cost more than $25,000.

“Today, an all-in-one PC is something people can buy for $500,” he said.

More affordable touchscreens could make coffee table computers more common in people’s homes, but Wood said it also means we could see more touch panels on walls and windows, on the back of seat headrests inside planes, trains, buses and cars.

The Internet of Me and Things

Big data, personalization and smart devices will grow together, according to Genevieve Bell, vice president, Intel Labs; Intel Fellow and director of User Experience Research.

“The Personal Assistant app is the next interesting arena in how we encounter the structure of the Internet, bringing the conversation all the way back to personalization,” she said. “People will stop thinking of these tools as a service, and see their device as a partner to their day.”

But the biggest challenge in 2015 is interconnectivity, according to Imad Sousou, vice president, Software and Services Group and general manager of the Intel Open Source Technology Center.

More people want to access their digital worlds regardless of device type, operating system or Internet connection.

“People are wondering what’s next,” Sousou said. “It isn’t a single platform. It’s everything. It’s the connected world.”

The Internet of Things (IoT) is one aspect driving integration, promising to bring efficiencies to everything from manufacturing, home and building management to government services, including public transportation.

“Over the coming years we’ll see the rise of the smart city, with the management of people at its core,” said Bell.

“Enterprises will need to be mindful of competing interests and maintain the correct balance of profit versus what is right for the citizen. Smart cities will be about asking better questions of how things are currently done and optimizing services that benefit everyone.”

Johnson sees wireless, Internet-connected technologies bringing new ways for managing essentials in our life, like food.

“Agriculture will be an industry benefitting from the connected future. Data from sensors and drones will help optimize fields and dairies, and subsequently the yields, and quality of the crop too.”

Better Connected to Health

Other areas speeding this era of integration include wearable technologies and computer vision. Advancements in these technologies could lead to a major medical breakthrough, according Wood.

Wood sees personal biorhythmic data collected from personal health trackers as potential fodder for tackling diseases and possibly pandemics, if they could be amassed and quickly analyzed by datacenters or even supercomputers.

“We don’t need to give away all of our personal data, but what if we could crowdsource some and have it mined to find cures?” he asked.

He pointed out a 2014 project that is linking wearable, cloud and data center technologies to better manage Parkinson’s disease.

There is a lot of work around alternative ways to interact with wearables to help them be less obtrusive in our daily lives, according to Michael Bell, vice president and general manager, New Devices Group at Intel.

“Touch isn’t necessarily the right interface for every wearable,” he said. “A more intelligent voice control interface could be very interesting.”

Voice commands could make it easier for more people to actively track their health, but there’s also advancements on big, number-crunching computers that run internet services and power medical research.

This year there will be dramatic reductions in the time needed to sequence and analyze a person’s genome thanks to parallelization, acceleration and better software frameworks, according Eric Dishman, Intel Fellow and general manager of Intel’s Health Strategy and Solutions Group.

“Expect new database technologies to enable vast scalability for joint analysis across large samples of human data (genomics, clinical and images),” he said, adding that industry partners will have to work together to bring this vision to life.

Technology is becoming an extension of us, driven by the fact that significantly more people are designing for computational devices, said Johnson.

“This is already happening in healthcare, where we’re building applications to help take care of the people we love.”

Editor’s Note: For more on this and other stories from the 2015 International Consumer Electronics Show, watch the replay of Intel CEO Brian Krzanich’s keynote address.

Ruby Au contributed to this story.

The post Intel’s 2015 Tech Trends to Watch: A New Era of Integration appeared first on iQ by Intel.

Analysts explain why advances in wireless router and built-in camera technologies will be a big deal this year.

Year after year, digital devices seem to get smarter but not always enough so to justify replacing our trusty gizmos. There are three essential technologies worth upgrading this year.

“There are some real no-brainers that people should upgrade in 2015,” said Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy.

Most installed home routers today were designed to handle three simultaneous connections, each providing up to 1mbps Internet line, he said.

“With the addition of phones, tablets, streaming services, wireless speakers and thermostats, the number of devices connecting to home routers is skyrocketing.”

Each household in the United States and United Kingdom operates eight connected devices, according Martin Garner, analyst at CCS Insight, who sees “Connected Home” and “Internet of Everything” gaining massive momentum in 2015.

All of this requires a router or gateway to connect to the Internet.

“Most routers in world today need to be replaced,” he said.

They’re overloaded with more devices than ever before, but new routers are built with better technologies that can take advantage of higher download and upload speeds being offered by many internet services providers.

New wireless routers are built with technology called 802.11ac, which is three times faster and more stable than the now outdated 802.11bgn wireless technology.

Also called 5G Wi-Fi, 802.11ac was introduced in 2012 and provides up to 1733Mbps of wireless connection speed. It works with new and older Wi-Fi-equipped devices.

“A router is something that you buy when you absolutely have to, and we often get something on the low end that just works,” he said.

That needs to change.

“Spend as much as you can reasonably you can afford otherwise it’s like buying a car and not paying attention to the engine,” said Garner.

Having a new modem can lead to a much better system overall, said Garner, because they are smarter and provide quality services by giving the optimal connect speed to particular devices. They can watch how each app loads and tune for best overall performance.

“Some even have cloud services behind them for storage and accessing with different devices,” he said.

He recently bought the Netgear R700, which is a dual-band router that PC Magazine called “one of the top 802.11ac routers currently on the market for heavy-duty throughput tasks.” As of late December, it was selling for about $190.

Negear’s R8000 is among the top-of-the-line modems built to handle many devices at once. As of late December was priced at about $280.

It’s designed to handle multiple devices on one network. It puts out a tri-band of Wi-Fi rays designed to give older devices 2.4Ghz connection that reach up to 600Mbps speeds.

There is also a 5Ghz ray reaching speeds of up to 1.3Gbps for dual-band devices and third ray for 5 GHz for new dual-band AC Wi-Fi devices, which can also reach data speeds of up to 1.3 GHz.

Garner expects to see 900 different networking gear companies showing off new routers at the year-starting 2015 International Consumer Electronics Show, more than past years.

The other technology that could spur desires for device upgrades focuses on built-in cameras that are bringing human vision to laptops and even tablets and all-in-one PCs.

Camera tech is evolving beyond the race for more megapixels into the world of 3D, said Wood.

“It’s not just a camera anymore; it’s another sensor,” he said. “These technologies have the capability to really advance the experience you can get.”

These cameras provide enhanced photography capabilities such as focus changing and the ability to measure heights and distances unlike today’s built-in cameras, said Wood.

“Dell Venue 8 tablets will let you use the camera to measure things so you can see if a couch can fit into a particular room.”

Growing consumer interest in 3D printing means these devices can be used to create 3D renderings that can be printed out.

These 3D cameras may be one reason to upgrade an old laptop, but Moorhead points out another.

“If your PC is three to four years old, you should seriously consider upgrading,” he said.

“That next notebook could be two to three-times more powerful, depending on the workload. It could be 40 percent thinner, half the weight with twice the battery life and could convert into a large tablet. That’s a powerful value proposition.”

The post Tech You Need in 2015: Router Upgrades and More appeared first on iQ by Intel.

Autonomous flying aircraft remains controversial, but drone advocates believe the sky’s the limit.

This year’s must-have holiday gift may be next year’s big-data opportunity. That’s the real potential for drones, according to Chris Anderson.

“With drones, essentially we’re putting big data sensors in the air,” said Anderson in an interview with iQ. The author of The Long Tail and Makers: The New Industrial Revolution, Anderson is the former Wired Magazine editor-in-chief who founded DYIDrones before becoming co-founder and CEO of 3D Robotics, a maker of drone systems.

For him, drones are destined to be much more than flying robotic toys or even sophisticated military tools. They can benefit everything from farming and building construction to search and rescue missions, ecological studies and so much more.

These miniature airplane or helicopter models are remote controlled, often via apps on smartphones, tablets or laptops. Many are programmed to autonomously follow their owner using GPS.

They’re bringing new perspectives to Hollywood filmmakers and video-selfie enthusiasts, but they have much greater potential: the ability to help us better understand our environment.

Like a growing number of drone advocates, Anderson sees airspace as a mostly untapped area for life-changing innovations that could result in a completely new economy.

Opportunities Arise

Just before Christmas, Bloomberg reported that Amazon was on track to sell 10,000 drones a month and that Atlanta Hobby, one of the country’s largest civilian drone suppliers, was experiencing a 10-fold increase in business over the past five years, reaching $20 million annually.

“The military market is about $18 billion, and the [U.S.] consumer market is now about $1 billion,” said Anderson in a recent interview with GeekWire. “And then we’re about to see the launch of the commercial market, which I think will be bigger than both of them combined.”

The commercial market in the United States remains stalled by federal regulations, but unmanned aircraft are expected to be integrated into national airspace in 2015, if not soon after. The Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International believes that once new regulations are in place, drones will have an economic impact surpassing $13.6 billion in the first year, reaching more than $82 billion and accounting for more than 100,000 new jobs by 2025.

Commercial drone use has made more headway in places like Japan, Australia, the United Kingdom and Canada, according to Mario Mairena, AUVSI’s senior government relations manager. He told iQ that, for decades, farmers in Japan have been using unmanned helicopters to assist them with precision irrigation, fertilizer and pesticide application and crop inspection.

Popularity of Personal Drones

The Federal Aviation Administration requires proper authorization for unmanned aircraft systems but allows hobby and recreational use of drones up to 400 feet.

In December, the FAA teamed with drone-industry organizations to launch Know Before You Fly, a website to teach drone hobbyists how to operate their drones safely and keep them in compliance with federal drone law.

Eddie Codal got into drones about two years ago. During that time, the livestreaming video specialist has flown his HD video camera-equipped quadcopter over many landscapes, including the Nevada desert during Burning Man in 2013.

“While two years is not very long, it is a lifetime in the development of consumer drone technology,” he said.

Cheap, easy, ready-to-fly quadcopters have proliferated because most drone components are commodities these days, Codel said.

“Anyone can build their own drone with a little bit of research and not much money.”

He recently built a 250 quadcopter.

“DJI and 3D Robotics are the ones innovating right now,” said Codel. “DJI has the consumer market share, while 3D Robotics has the flight control system platform that startups and hackers use to build upon. Parrot and GoPro are ones to watch.”

MEMs, or microelectromechanical systems from the 1980s, played an initial role in miniaturizing computing components, but Anderson pegs the boom in drones to the rise of smartphones in 2007, which increased competition and lowered the cost for hardware components.

“That was the year the planets converged,” he said. It was when wearable company FitBit was born, along with the term Internet of Things, the maker movement, and when Ardruino technology and Make magazine took off.

“Everything accelerated like never before because of economies of scale.”

Now anyone can buy stand-alone components, such as accelerometers and tiny cameras. What would’ve cost $100,000 less than 10 years ago costs less than $10 today, he said.

“Industries around drones are being transformed by Moore’s Law,” said Anderson. “It was too expensive to do this before, but today we are able to capture a half a terabyte per hour per drone using standard camera to capture pictures and videos.”

Today, 90 percent of consumers with drones use them to make personal videos, he said.

“It’s the Golden Age of personal videography. The only tool [movie director Steven] Spielberg has that we don’t is a camera boom, but that’s what a drone does.”

Just how YouTube sparked the GoPro camera craze, Anderson sees GoPro cameras feeding the consumer drone phenomenon because it gives people better angles and more creative views.

Potential for Good

Because drones are “cool” now, they’re a good way to attract young people to science, said Chad Jenkins, a computer science professor who heads Brown University’s Robots, Learning and Autonomy Lab, which develops software for controlling robots remotely via the Internet.

Jenkins said he was amazed recently to see five different types of drones being sold in an airport electronics shop. They ranged from just $40 to about $300.

“If we can make these tools accessible and cheap enough that everybody can use them, I think that could be a huge win for our nation’s science education efforts, including the workforce that we actually need,” said Jenkins.

Gizmag recently listed some surprising uses for drones in different parts of the world. Some examples included monitoring for malaria in the forests of Maylasia and the Philippines, delivering medicine to remote areas in Germany, detecting landmines in Bosnia-Herzegovina and spotting poachers of endangered animals in Africa and along the coast of Belize.

Steve Cousins, a former Xerox PARC lab head, is now the CEO of Savioke, a company that makes personal robots for the service industry. He is also part of a group of robot enthusiasts called Robots for Humanity, which devises ways to help disabled people use robots.

Cousins took part in a TED talk last year, along with Brown University’s Jenkins and a California resident named Henry Evans — a former chief financial officer in Silicon Valley who became mute and paraplegic after a stroke in 2003.

The talk showed how Evans uses both a drone and a personal robot on wheels to do things around his house that he can’t do alone. The first thing Evans did when he launched his drone was send it to his garden, giving him a virtual view of it.

“He’s in a wheelchair — he can’t go inside the garden and look in it,” Jenkins said.

Then Evans sent the drone to inspect the solar panels on his home’s roof. Evans controls the drone using a camera and piloting mechanism that works by tracking Evans’ eye movements.

Drone innovation is tapping into the new world of wearable technology.

Christoph Kohstall and his company Nixie recently won Intel’s Make it Wearable contest, a competition held in 2014 to encourage inventors to create innovative wearables using Intel’s Edison technology. The Nixie, when it’s finished, will be a tiny quadcopter drone with a camera built into it that you wear on your wrist like a bracelet. When you flip your wrist, the drone will take off, take a photograph of you, and fly back.

With a drone, “You can interact physically with the world around you in a much wider circle,” Kohstall said. “You can interact with the world beyond your own reach. This is the beauty of drones.”

What’s Next for Drones?

Anderson and Codel believe drones need to get smarter.

“Object detection and avoidance is the holy grail of consumer drone tech,” said Codel.

“Manned aircraft have numerous systems to detect objects around them, but those systems are currently much too expensive to outfit on a typical consumer quadcopter or even higher end heavy lifter octocopter drones.”

To be autonomous, drones have to have better computer vision, said Anderson.

“They need better sensors and more powerful processors and algorithms,” he said. “They are all connected as part of the Internet of Things, so will all of that computing be done on the drone, across multiple drones, in the cloud or on smartphones?”

While battery innovation is moving slowly, at about 8 percent per year, Anderson said you can do a lot in 20 minutes in the air

“You can capture a lot of footage in 20 minutes. When batteries run out, just pop in new ones and put it back into the sky,” he said.

Drones are a magnet for all sorts of regulatory issues and privacy concerns, not unlike other new tech that introduces new ethical and legal challenges.

Anderson points to the early days of smartphones, satellites and the advent of Google Maps and Facebook. “Privacy is not static,” he said. “It changes one generation to the next and is influenced by location. No one size fits all.”

In order for the United States to catch up to other parts of the world, Anderson suggests having fun and remaining diligent.

“We all have an obligation to show what being responsibility means,” he said.

Smarter, Safer Drones

In his keynote kicking off the 2015 International Consumer Electronics Show, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich show how Intel RealSense 3D camera technology can help drones become more autonomous.

A team from Ascending Technologies joined him on stage to show how a drone build with an Intel processor and Intel RealSense technology could fly without a pilot’s radio controller. As it flew around, the team played drone pong, showing how the drone can avoid objects by always finding a middle space between two people as one or the other approached.

Krzanich also played his own version of King of Drones, showing how smarter, better visually equipped drones can fly through an obsticle course without bumping into walls and even finding narrow passage ways.

Here is a flight through a California Redwood forest in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

William Harless contributed to this story.

Photo credits: Eddie Codel on San Francisco rooftop by Doctor Popular. Chris Anderson flying drone is by 3D Robotics. Codel at his desk with 250 quadcopter by Scott Beale of Laughing Squid. Codel building drones at Science Hack Day by Matt Biddulph.

Editor’s Note: For more on this and other stories from the 2015 International Consumer Electronics Show, watch the replay of Intel CEO Brian Krzanich’s keynote address.

The post The Future of Drones: Market Prepares for Takeoff appeared first on iQ by Intel.

Analysts believe wearable technologies have to move beyond geek chic into truly fashionable, functional devices in order to have a spectacular year.

Looking back on 2014 gives Ben Wood everything he needs to determine that this is the year of wearables.

He should know. After all, he’s somewhat of a swashbuckler known for toting his sizable collection of wearable devices that he uses prolifically. He likes comparing them to new devices at industry events, such as the upcoming International Consumer Electronics Show.

Wood, chief analyst at CCS Insight, was just ranked #2 top influencer in wearable tech landscape to watch in 2015 by online measurement company Onalytica.

“Sure, we’ll see a lot of mediocrity from the Shenzhen [China] ecosystem and me-too knock offs with basic functions at low prices,” he said.

“But in 2015, we’ll see things shifting away from devices designed by and for middle-aged males, and things made of plastic, to more desirable, fashion-designed wearables like the MICA bracelet and items from designers such as Fossil.”

Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, stays ahead of the curve by getting his hands on gadgets and gear soon after they hit the market, including wearables such as last year’s Basis watch.

He said 2015 will be the year to see if wearables can commercially and successfully get beyond health and fitness into what he calls “horizontal” wearables with commercial applications.

“I believe that the most successful wearables in 2015 will be focused on narrow commercial use cases, more than likely a commercial use case,” he said.

He’s watching how eye wearables pan out in medical, law enforcement, assembly and maintenance applications.

Shipments of smart wearables are expected to grow from 9.7 million in 2013 to 135 million in 2018, according to CCS Insight’s new global forecast. The forecast predicts that wrist-worn devices will account for 87 percent of wearables to be shipped in 2018 — comprising 68 million smartwatches and 50 million smart bands.

Wood said 2015 will bring better technology and more diversity in designs to everything from clothing to jewelry and eyewear. These innovations will move wearable technologies out of the geek niches into more widely acceptable consumer areas, beyond health trackers.

“Google Glass has been experiment but in vertical markets there are huge implications for consumers,” said Wood.

Experimenting with new industrial uses from military to medical can help refine design and functionality. Wood mentioned a “connected police” wearable technology that showed promise, and sees great potential in heads-up displays like the Recon Jet.

“Wearable computing is a major, accelerating phenomenon that re-defines how we use and interact with information,” said Mike Bell, vice president and general manager of the New Devices Group at Intel Corporation in a statement last year after Intel Capital invested in Recon Instruments.

The innovation race is accelerating and broadening, and this will lead wearables to become more fashionable, individual, invisible and just better technology, said Wood.

“Looking back five or so years ago when smartphones were hitting the mainstream, it was common for people to ditch their watches, since all they’d have to do was look at their phones,” he said. “But watches are back in a big way in 2015 with the rise of so-called smartwatches.”

Wood believes the Apple Watch could be perceived by many as a status symbol, which could potentially make it the most desirable piece of gadgetry we see in 2015.

“Yet I’m still not convinced why I would need to spend $400 on one,” he said. “But it certainly will contribute to a rising tide in wearables space. If you’re an Apple user, it could be right for you. If you’re an Android user, you’ll look elsewhere.”

Wood is watching for wearables that will contribute to a major medical breakthrough in 2015 or soon after. Biorhythmic data collected from personal health trackers could be crowdsourced and analyzed by datacenters or even supercomputers to find new treatments or even cures.

“Look at what’s going on around Parkinson’s, where wearables, cloud and data center technologies are being used together in search of better ways of managing the disease.”

Sure there will be heart-tracking smart bras and other clothes fitted with invisible intelligence that connect with smartphones and online accounts, but Wood is balancing his expectations after wearables captured maybe too much attention at last year’s CES show.

“We must not lose sight that we’re in the Stone Age of wearables,” he said. “There’s a lot of experimentation still going on to find what problems these things can really solve.”

One thing’s for sure, they’ll have to be desirable.

“I want to look at these and see WOW, so they have to look beautiful at CES,” he said. “That’s most important this year.”

Editor’s Note: For more on this and other stories from the 2015 International Consumer Electronics Show, watch the replay of Intel CEO Brian Krzanich’s keynote address.

The post Wearable Market Forecast: Will 2015 be the Year of Wearables? appeared first on iQ by Intel.

New brains for computing devices are at the center of many big announcements at world’s largest consumer electronics show.

The “badass brains” that will power your next PC. That’s what Gizmodo writer Eric Limer said about new 5^th generation Intel Core processors just after they were unveiled at the 2015 International Consumer Electronics Show.

The new computer processors with embedded graphics, which join the previously released Intel Core M processor line for super thin mobile computers, contain 1.3 billion transistors, which is 35 percent more than the previous generation.

Limer pointed out that the new transistors measure 14 nanometers, much smaller than the 22-nanometer transistors used for the fourth generation, resulting in better performance and energy consumption.

“Moore’s law at work!” he wrote.

They’re actually the world’s first processors built on 14-nanometer process technology, which has led to unprecedented levels of versatility and efficiency, bringing PC-level performance even to ultra-mobile devices.

The new technology will be inside many new laptops, 2 in 1 laptop-to-tablet devices, Chromebooks, all-in-one desktop PCs and mini PCs being introduced at CES 2015. Branded Intel Core i3, i5 and i7, 5^th generation designs will also be used to make new Pentium Celeron-branded processors.

ASUS is using Intel Core M processors, based on the same architecture as the 5th Gen Intel Core processors, to power their new Transformer Book Chi, a 2 in 1 with a removable keyboard, turning into the world’s slimmest Windows tablet.

“Power consumption keeps dropping, power production keeps increasing,” wrote Vlad Savov of The Verge about the 5^th generation Intel Core technology. “Better graphics and much better battery life are leading to the best laptops we’ve yet seen.”

Lenovo is using it in what it dubs the world’s lightest 14-inch performance Ultrabook.

“At 2.88 pounds, it’s decently light, and with a 5^th generation Intel Core i7 processor, it’s certainly built to perform” wrote Pete Pachal in Mashable, about the new Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon, released at CES in celebration of the 100 Millionth ThinkPad shipped.

Acer is using new 5^th generation Intel Celeron in its new stylish and sturdy Chromebook 15, what Acer dubs the first Chromebook with a large 15.6-inch display, starting at less than $250.

“The Chromebook 15 looks like an attractive option with plenty of processing power and real estate to get stuff done, especially for home use,” wrote Mark Spoonauer, LAPTOP Editor in Chief.

In Mashable, writer Rex Santus points out that “The Chromebook 15 has a fifth-generation Intel processor, as well as 15 hours of battery life… [and] has the largest touchpad available on any Chromebook device.”

Fast Facts About 5^th Generation Intel Core

Compared with the previous generation, the size of the 5^th generation Intel core chips are 37 percent smaller, but contain 35 percent more transistors, for a total of 1.3 billion.

Battery life on laptops can extend as much as 1.5 hours longer than laptops using 4^th generation Intel Core technology.

3D-graphics rendering has improved by as much as 22 percent, while performance in its traditional strength of video encoding has leapt up by 50 percent.

Intel Hyper-Threading Technology allows the processors to handle more tasks at once, while Intel’s WiDi wireless streaming feature can now stream full 4K video.

Anyone planning to refresh a 4- or 5-year-old PC will also notice significant improvements: 12 times improved graphics performance, video conversion speed up to 8 times faster, productivity performance up to 2.5 times faster, wake times 9 times faster — all with up to twice the battery life.

Built for Now and the Future

When paired with Intel RealSense 3D technology, no wires and no passwords capabilities, and voice assistants, the 5^th generation processors enable more natural and interactive user experiences.

Intel RealSense 3D technology brings features like gesture control, 3D capture and edit, and innovative photo and video capabilities to devices. With a vision for a “no wires” experience, Intel Wireless Display (WiDi) v.5.1 and WiGig wireless docking provide users more control over their experiences by allowing them to compute and share from virtually anywhere without the clutter of wires and cords.

Intel’s voice assistant technology allows the users to control thier PCs using voice commands, and now includes Wake on Voice5 technology, which awakens your PC with just the sound of your voice.

Editor’s Note: For more on this and other stories from the 2015 International Consumer Electronics Show, watch the replay of Intel CEO Brian Krzanich’s keynote address.

The post New Intel Processors Make Waves at 2015 Consumer Electronics Show appeared first on iQ by Intel.

Highlights from Intel CEO Brian Krzanich’s keynote.

On January 6, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich delivered the official kick-off keynote at the 2015 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. On the blue-lit stage, amid buzzing drones, tables that charge laptops, a bracelet that flies and a guy handling raw chicken, Krzanich gave a relaxed, entertaining introduction to all the intelligent devices in store for 2015.

Building on what he presented last year, Krzanich explored the people and technologies shaping our future.

He covered themes that were also organized into experiences attendees could have at the Intel booth, which was the “Most Eye-Catching” booth at CES 2015, according to Find The Best in Time magazine.

“Only one space in all of CES is both foreign and inviting, like a time capsule from the future that instantly feels right at home,” stated the article, describing Intel’s booth, which led the top 20 list. “To walk through Intel’s corner is to experience the very best version of the show — the most eye-catching booth at CES.”

In his keynote, Krzanich talked about the Wearables Revolution, Intelligence Everywhere, Accelerating Diversity in Technology, and The New Computing Experience.

He talked about how computing experiences will be changing dramatically this year.

You will become your password as new True Key technology lets you simply and safely log into devices, even your front door, using facial dimensions.

A lot of these new experiences will come from the fact that devices will have more human-like senses, so they can see the world in 3D.

He showed how Intel RealSense 3D camera technology will be used in new tablets and watched as a chef prepared a skillet fried chicken meal following an online recipe while using hand gestures to control his laptop so he could keep his hands on the messy ingredients.

Krzanich highlighted new wireless charging plans with Hilton, Jaguar Land Rover, San Francisco International Airport and Marriott, all of which will roll out pilot programs soon so people can experience wireless charging at airports, cafes, hotels and other public places.

The technology can be easily fitted under existing tables or counter tops, which essentially make them wireless charging pads.

He demonstrated how a personal computer, in this case a 2 in 1 laptop-to-tablet device, can be placed on table and start charging. The first laptops with wireless charging will come out later this year.

“Imagine a world where you can charge your devices wherever you are,” says Krzanich.

He also revealed the very first prototype of the Intel Curie Module, which is tiny, mighty technology that will help bring wearable innovations to life.

He explained that wearables require computing intelligence to fit inside all sorts of things, magical things of different shapes and sizes, even beyond our imagination.

Curie is for product designers from the world of sports, fashion, travel and other areas who may be embedding computer technology for the first time or want to scale and go to market quickly.

He showed that the button-sized technology wasn’t a phony by revealling that the Curie prototype was sending live pedometer data to an app on his smartphone.

Nixie founders Christoph Kohstall and Jelena Jovanovic demonstrated the wristband-turned flying camera for the first time in front of a large public audience.

“Lets make this the biggest Twitter moment of CES,” said Krzanich.

Thousands of people in the audience sat at the edge of their seats — and countless others watched live via the Internet — as Kohstall tossed his Nixie into the air. It immediately took flight, propelling forward before turning around and snapping a photo of the three. That photo was quickly displayed on the big screen for all to see.

No remote control required. It was fully autonomous.

Nixie was the first-place winner of Intel’s 2014 Make it Wearable challenge, a worldwide competition to encourage inventors to create innovative wearables using Intel’s Edison technology, a small computer chip and hardware platform Intel designed specifically for wearables and Internet of Things devices.

The $500,000 top prize is helping the Los Altos-based Team Nixie build the product.

Krzanich went on to say that Intel will sponsor the Intel “Make it Wearable” challenge again in 2015.

There were a lot of flying things at CES this year, but Krzanich said they could all become smarter, safer and autonomous with Intel inside.

Equipped with six Intel RealSense cameras and an Intel processor, a flock of Asctec Fireflys joined Kzranich onstage during his keynote address and demonstrated the drone’s ability to maneuver autonomously and even push away from approaching people.

Demonstrating this drone-human dance, Krzanich joined in for a lively game of drone ping pong then he provided play-by-play analysis of his own Game of Drones, where a Intel RealSense equipped drone flew autonomously through a maze outside the keynote hall.

But RealSense isn’t limited to things. It can also help people see.

A wearable, environmental sensing system, which uses Intel RealSense 3D camera technology, made its public debut during Krzanich’s keynote. He said there 39 million blind people in the world and 250 million people with impaired vision who could potentially benefit from this technology in the future.

Krzanich invited to the stage Darryl Adams, a technical project manager at Intel who was diagnosed with Retinitis Pigmentosa (RP) nearly 30 years ago. Photoreceptors in Adams’ eyes are declining, weakening his peripheral vision and ability to see in dim light or at night.

During an emotion-filled few moments on stage, Adams described how the technology helped him. The Oregonian called it the most compelling technology demonstration during the keynote.

There’s another way to help people and that’s by investing in them. Krzanich said Intel is committing $300 million over the next five years to a Diversity in Technology Initiative.

Last year he talked about conflict minerals, but this year he emphasized inclusion.

“It’s not enough to say we value diversity and then have our workforce not reflect the diversity,” he said.

Krzanich said the company has set a goal to reach full representation in every area of its workforce by 2020.

“What that means is to significantly improve our hiring of women and minorities,” he said. “We’re going to tie our leaders’ pay to our progress in this. This is going to be difficult to achieve, which is why we’re making a significant investment to support diversity. Over the next five years we will invest $300 million. This isn’t just good business, this is the right thing to do.”

After leaving the stage, Krzanich was photographed talking with the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Sr., one of America’s foremost civil rights, religious and political figures for the past forty years.

But before leaving the stage, Krzanich ended by playing a video interview of Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel known for Moore’s Law, which observes that the number of transistors on a chip nearly doubles roughly every 18 months.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Moore’s Law. It is often considered the engine that has driven technology innovation for decades.

The video ended with a call to action for everyone to keep extending Moore’s Law.

“Remember, anything that has been done can be outdone,” he said.

Keynote photos by Walden Kirsch.

The post Intelligent Devices Everywhere At CES 2015 appeared first on iQ by Intel.

Smart Spider Dress, powered by Intel Edison, blends fashion with robotics and wearable technology to express the wearer’s emotions and protect their personal space.

Call it a smart cocktail dress with a kick, an outfit with built in self defense.

Experimental designer Anouk Wipprecht’s latest Spider Dress unabashedly blends beauty with a bite, or better said, a poke.

This creepy and captivating couture is her latest exploration into what can happen when the worlds of robotics, wearable technology and fashion collide. It made it’s public debut at the 2015 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, NV today.

The Dutch designer is known for creations such as the brainwave-monitoring Synapse dress, Smoke Dress, Intimacy 2.0, 3D-printed outfits for Cirque du Soleil and the dress Fergie wore during the Black Eyed Peas live performance at Super Bowl 2011.

She came to Intel last fall to work on projects that inspire innovation in wearable technologies beyond wrist and eyewear. She calls her one-of-a-kind Spider Dress “badass” for how it pushes and bends the boundaries of social norms. In collaboration with architect Philip H. Wilck of Studio Palermo and the New Devices Group at Intel, this new design saw daylight last December.

“Fashion and tech are merging at the moment, beyond blinking dresses or cute skirts. I’m showing how fashion can be thought provoking, something that pushes people to think and share their feelings.”

Her latest creation is a 3D-printed experimental dress crowned at the collar with robotic spider legs.

It’s a violent thing of beauty, at once mesmerizing, provocative and intimidating. The legs constantly move, reacting to real-time biometrics based on pre-programmed social norms and violations.

“Spider Dress acts as the interface between the body and the external world,” said Wipprecht. “It uses technology and the garment as a medium of interaction.”

The so-called animatronic arachnid limbs on the Spider Dress know exactly when someone is invading the wearer’s personal space. The legs are driven by computer and sensor technologies that allow it to be autonomous, but assistive and adaptive to the owner’s emotions and desires.

“Since the system based with mechanic spider legs is literally hosted on the shoulders of the wearer and attacks using the same viewing angle as the wearer, the system knows how you feel and adapts to those feelings,” she said.

Using wireless biometric signals, the system makes inferences based on the stress levels in your body. It can differentiate between 12 states of behavior. Wipprecht calls it an interesting interplay between co-control and education of your own body and mind.

“When approached at an aggressive pace, the system answers in a territorial attack mode,” she said. “But when you walk up to the dress in a more cautious, friendly symbiotic way, you can almost get the dress to invite you closer, as if to ‘dance’ with you.”

She calls it her most complicated dress so far because of the depths she explored around human-system interactions.

It also brought out her rebellious side.

“This dress is created with the aim to give more power and ‘psychological thrill’ to the sugar sweet character that performative wearables often have,” she said.

“What is there to learn from a system that bows and agrees to everything we do?” she asked defiantly.

“Often you see electronic fashion that only bleeps and blinks. I like to think of creating intelligent agents that live with us, on the notion of extremes, in the hope we can find new ways of interfacing with the world around us.”

The embedded Intel Edison module brings computing intelligence the dress. Wipprecht said that she was originally measuring behaviors using external sensors, but embedding Edison in the dress has allowed her to store and measure data from anybody wearing the dress.

“Intel’s Edison technology allowed me to upgrade my [original prototype from 2013] design to a mature version, one that is fully 3D printed, mechatronic and extra sensory,” she said.

Today microprocessors, microcontrollers and other modules that bring computing, communications and Internet access to things are shrinking in size and can run on little power. Wipprecht said these kinds of technology allow her to rethink where, and in what situations, computing is possible and desirable.

“Now I can create designs that quickly compute complicated sets of signals, optionally store them and interconnect wirelessly to displays, and understand input data all at once in a more advanced and intelligent way.”

She said cool, new technologies come and go but the module she used is the ‘heartbeat’ of Spider Dress. It’s the central part that needs to lead and control everything fluidly, without delay.

“When my mechanics are responding a few seconds too late, it does not convey an engaging message.

Wipprecht, who has always been interested in robotics, says by using behavior adaptation, you’re essentially creating a robot that becomes a part of you, instead of something separate that stands beside you.

The technology gives Wipprecht a playful way to leverage personal data, according to Todd Harple, an experience engineer at Intel’s New Devices Group.

“Whereas the Synapse dress measured EEG brain activity and heart rate in real time, Spider Dress uses proximity and breathing,” said Harple. “It will almost immediately react differently when heavy breathing vs. calm.”

By understanding the body’s limits, the dress might be able to sense rising stress levels even before the wearer realizes what’s happening.

“It’s an interface that acts on behalf of the wearer but also considers its own opinion based on the logic and data programmed through social studies and environmental psychology,” explained Wipprecht.

She believes that if mechanics like this can challenge or prompt a person, it might bring healthcare benefits, such as alerting a person to sit down before vital signs reach heart attack levels.

“The position that technology has in our society — the role to please us — will get more and more intimate,” says Wipprecht, adding that technology can encourage interactivity and shouldn’t just be about people glancing at screens. “As technology crawls closer to the skin we will need to rethink and recreate the relation that we have towards technology.”

Details of the Design

The dress shoulder plates have nine degrees of freedom.

It’s equipped with 20 servos for movement.

The design uses proximity sensors that measure up to 23 feet around the body.

There’s a built-in respiration sensor that connects to the skin, which sets the programmed behavior to a ‘friendly fire’ mode.

The dress was digitally designed and 3D printed using a Selective Laser Sintering method.

It was created out of pearly white nylon and took more than 60 hours to print the complex geometries.

There are 40 parts that screw or press fit together.

Editor’s Note: For more on this and other stories from the 2015 International Consumer Electronics Show, watch the replay of Intel CEO Brian Krzanich’s keynote address.

The post Robotic Spider Dress Powered By Intel Smart Wearable Technology appeared first on iQ by Intel.

#FlyNixie quickly became the third highest trending topic on Twitter.

Even where mind-blowing innovations are found at every turn, the flying wearable camera known as Nixie pulled off a dazzling snapshot of the future during Intel CEO Brian Krzanich’s keynote to kick off the 2015 International Consumer Electronics Show.

Nixie founders Christoph Kohstall and Jelena Jovanovic demonstrated the wristband turned flying camera for the first time in front of a large public audience.

“Lets make this the biggest Twitter moment of CES,” said Krzanich.

Thousands of people in the audience sat at the edge of their seats — and countless others watched live via the Internet — as Kohstall tossed his Nixie into the air. It immediately took flight, propelling forward before turning around and snapping a photo that was quickly displayed on the big screen for all to see.

No remote control required. It was fully autonomous.

Within minutes, #FlyNixie was the number three trending topic on Twitter as people shared on Twitter their own photos and the one shot by Nixie.

The Nixie team sees this as a natural evolution of technology, something that can make photography easier to do.

“We want to be the next point-and-shoot camera, one that gives you an amazing perspective because it can fly,” said Jovanovic

We all use pictures to capture our moments, but Nixie lets you capture the moment as it happens, she said.

Nixie was the first-place winner of Intel’s 2014 Make it Wearable challenge, a worldwide competition to encourage inventors to create innovative wearables using Intel’s Edison technology, a tiny computer chip and hardware platform Intel designed specifically for wearables and Internet of Things devices.

The $500,000 top prize is helping the Los Altos-based team build the product.

Krzanich went on to say that Intel will sponsor the Intel “Make it Wearable” challenge again in 2015.

Here is how that moment was shared by people on twitter:

Wearable FLYING camera @intel keynote!! #CES2015 #flynixie https://t.co/r60BGkTK8H

— Todd Krieger (@tkrieg) January 7, 2015

Nixie takes a pic on stage. #flynixie #CES2015 @intel pic.twitter.com/TG1F8Ck60f

— Chippy (@chippy) January 7, 2015

MT @CNET: The winners of @Intel Make It Wearable contest: Nixie, a selfie-drone-camera #Flynixie at #CES2015 pic.twitter.com/D3xvuKynD4 — Rohan Kamra (@rohan_kamra) January 7, 2015

.@flynixie takes the first ever flying photo on stage at #CES2015 pic.twitter.com/cKD1PMllYX

— Intel (@intel) January 7, 2015

Jelena and Christoph, founders of Nixie, with @intel CEO @bkrunner – taken with a Nixie during the keynote! #flynixie pic.twitter.com/BeV55dpjUv — Fly Nixie (@flynixie) January 7, 2015

Well that was fun – for a while there, #flynixie was trending at #3. #isthisreallife? pic.twitter.com/3oAmI0zo8f

— Fly Nixie (@flynixie) January 7, 2015

Editor’s Note: For more on this and other stories from the 2015 International Consumer Electronics Show, watch the replay of Intel CEO Brian Krzanich’s keynote address.

The post Nixie Wearable Camera Delivers Biggest Twitter Moment at CES 2015 appeared first on iQ by Intel.

Wearable prototype uses Intel RealSense technology to bring better awareness to people with low or no vision.

What started off as a not-so-simple challenge last August in a tiny lab inside Intel headquarters quickly evolved into a promising portable prototype that has the potential to help blind and vision-impaired people gain a better sense of their surroundings.

The wearable, environmental sensing system, which uses Intel RealSense 3D camera technology, made its public debut at the 2015 International Consumer Electronics Show. Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said that 39 million blind people in the world and 250 million people with impaired vision could potentially benefit from this technology in the future.

Krzanich invited to the stage Darryl Adams, a technical project manager at Intel who was diagnosed with Retinitis Pigmentosa (RP) nearly 30 years ago. Photoreceptors in Adams’ eyes are declining, weakening his peripheral vision and ability to see in dim light or at night.

During an emotion-filled few moments on stage, Adams described how the technology helped him. The Oregonian called it the most compelling technology demonstration during the keynote.

“If we can bring vision to PCs and tablets, why not use that same technology to help people see?” asked Rajiv Mongia, director of the RealSense Interaction Design Group, referring to Intel RealSense technology, which is becoming available in new computing devices hitting the market.

Mongia, along with Chandrika Jayant, Robert Cooksey and Sarang Borude (pictured at top), is part of a multidisciplinary team of design, human-computer interface, human factors and prototyping experts that have been focused on finding natural, intuitive and immersive ways to use the RealSense 3D camera technology.

“Computing and sensing together can give people awareness of their environments while they’re moving around inside or outdoors.”

In the early days of development, the team experienced a Star Trek moment when Mongia remembered the episode featuring a blind woman wearing a smart dress that gave her computer vision: ‘Star Trek’ – Season 3, Episode 5 — “Is There In Truth No Beauty?”

Getting the RealSense technology to work on the human body meant Mongia’s team had to create customized clothing fitted with the camera and a computing module that connects wirelessly to eight thumb-sized vibrating sensors: three across the chest, three across the torso and two near the ankles of each leg.

“In the first prototype, we positioned the camera so it sees a person’s normal front-face field of vision,” said Mongia.

It is able to ‘see’ objects within a couple yards of the user, and it is able to tell the user approximately where the object is located: high, low, right or left and whether the object is getting closer or moving away.

When the wearer is walking and approaches an object, such as a wall or another person, the sensor boxes vibrate. Vibrations intensify the closer you get to the object.

But there is much more work to be done, like how to graduate the intensity of vibrations and how it can be tuned for people who have different needs or preferences. These are only a few things the team are exploring as they continue to test the gear with people walking around various Intel campuses.

Mongia said that people who’ve tried it say the prototype has promise, that it augments their senses and helps them feel the environment around them.

“When you see it help someone, you get the sense we have something valuable here,” he said.

One of those people is Adams.

“I’m enthusiastic about what it can do,” Adams said after his third day of testing it.

“My visual field is limited to less than 20 percent of a normal visual field,” he said. “A primary issue for me is that I miss the majority of visual stimuli that occurs in my near vicinity…the area where most social interaction occurs.”

He often misses handshakes or other subtle social cues, and often people just seem to appear out of nowhere.

“Because I don’t see them approach, I am surprised and am not ready for that informal social interaction that would be the norm.”

Building the Prototype

In recent years, a variety of computer vision technologies have been used by others to experiment with ways of bringing computer vision to help who can’t see. Most have been bulky, too expensive, low quality or unreliable.

Intel shrunk the sensor components and reduced the power requirements so that the RealSense cameras can be integrated into many types of devices.

“This system is high resolution,” said Adams. “It’s like sonar telling you something is in your way, but this one sees more details.”

The first prototype consists of a backpack to hold the Intel Core processor-powered module that computes what the cameras sees and triggers the haptic vibrations on the wearer’s body.

Mongia said that the system could also be programmed for facial, body skeleton and object recognition.

“But overall it must remain simple and responsive,” he said. “It must avoid cognitive overload on the wearer.”

And it needed to work inside and outdoors.

What It Can Do

The critical space around a person can be measured at arm’s length, said Adams, because that’s our personal space. Things out of periphery are less important.

“This system could allow someone like me to focus on social interactions versus environmental aspects,” he said. “It would lessen the tradeoffs I have to make whenever I’m multitasking.”

The prototype removed his need to be constantly looking for changes in his immediate surroundings because vibrations alert him that something has changed.

“It augmented my visual limitation with a well-established sense of touch,” said Adams.

The system identified objects in blind spots and then described what it sensed by a specific vibration. Adams said this allowed him to remain engaged and in the moment.

“It gave me a sense of increased confidence concerning my ability to make sense of and appropriately respond to the immediate world around me.”

Adams imagines how people could use the information in addition to a cane or guide dog to gain a deeper, higher-resolution understanding of their environment.

Adams and Mongia talk about how the system could be programmed for object recognition and even people or facial recognition. They discuss other output types beyond vibration.

“Audio could be used to identify an approaching person by name,” said Adams.

Mongia shared a few other ideas for the technology.

“Imagine its use in autonomous machines or in sports, providing a rearview mirror for cyclists or runners, but doing so in a way that doesn’t cause interference.”

In Krzanich’s keynote address, he finished his segment with Adams by talking about how RealSense and wearable technology can change people’s lives and that Intel is committed to bringing these types of solutions to people everywhere.

“We’ll be making this wearable technology openly available to the broader ecosystem later this year,” Krzanich said. “We’ll make the source code and the design tools publicly available so developers can extend and improve this platform. Anyone can use this to help the visually impaired and build upon it.”

Editor’s Note: For more on this and other stories from the 2015 International Consumer Electronics Show, watch the replay of Intel CEO Brian Krzanich’s keynote address.

The post Assistive Technology for Visually Impaired Uses Intel 3D Cameras appeared first on iQ by Intel.

Industry standards come together to simplify and speed the proliferation of wireless charging, leading airports, hotels and other locations to trial battery refueling technology.

Soon, leaving home without all those different power cords for your phones, tablets and notebooks could become a problem of the past.

Similar to how the Wi-Fi revolution in 2003 let people connect their mobile computers to the Internet without wires, new wireless charging technologies aim to free people from having to rely on their power cords at all.

At the 2015 International Consumer Electronics Show this week, two wireless charging technology standards groups merged, making it simpler and potentially quicker for this technology to be widely adopted.

The Alliance for Wireless Power, which supports a technology called Rezence or magnetic resonance, and Power Matters Alliance joined forces to help build momentum for wireless charging, something research firm IHS expects will generate $8.5 billion in revenue by 2018. That’s up from $216 million in 2013.

Wireless Power or Magnetic Resonance is where electricity transfers safely between two objects through metal coils. Magnetic Resonance technology provides positional flexibility, charges through most tabletops, and can simultaneously charge multiple devices of various sizes and power levels.

More certified products will become commercially available in 2015, according to IHS. The research firm expects number of wireless charging receivers based on so-called loosely coupled technology, such as magnetic resonance, will overtake those which use other wireless charging technologies in 2017 when the total market is expected to grow to be worth over $7.5 billion.

IHS sees wireless charging as a big thing in future wearable devices. The research firm believes total market revenues will rise from $14.5 million in 2014 to over $1.1 billion in 2019, when over 200 million units are expected to be shipped.

In his keynote kicking off CES, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich highlighted new wireless charging collaborations including Hilton, Jaguar Land Rover, San Francisco International Airport and Marriott.

He said these collaborators are developing and deploying wireless-charging pilots at Marriott, which plans to install wireless charging capabilities across the Marriott portfolio of brands, including JW Marriott, Marriott, Renaissance, Courtyard and Residence Inn.

He demonstrated how a personal computer, in this case a 2 in 1 laptop-to-tablet device, can be placed on table and start charging.

“Imagine a world where you can charge your devices wherever you are,” says Krzanich. “That’s the world I want to live in.”

Wireless charging stations could soon become common in airports, cafes, hotels and other public places. The technology can be easily fitted under existing tables or counter tops, which essentially makes them wireless charging pads.

Place a laptop, 2 in 1 device, tablet or smartphone on the table or counter and the device begins recharging wirelessly. The first laptops with wireless charging will come out later this year.

The technology will also show up in tablets with Intel chips later this year, said Kirk Skaugen, senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s PC Client Group, in an interview with ComputerWorld just ahead of CES.

Skaugen said that wireless charging technology could appear in all kinds of places, including entertainment spots, but it will take a few years for it to really proliferate.

“We want to strip away the complexity and friction of computing forever and enable an entirely new way of interacting with technology,” said Sanjay Vora, vice president and general manager of User Experiences at Intel.

He said that people carry multiple cables, chargers, backup chargers and adapters for their mobile devices that can be more than double the weight of their devices. If the average is five personal computing devices and three or more devices at work for the typical person in the United States, that’s a lot of cables that could be left at home.

“We have talked to thousands of computer users across many countries,” said Vora. “We wanted to know what is it about computing devices that people like and don’t like. We got a lot of insights.”

More than 40 anthropologists, enthnographers and design researchers visited 45 countries to conduct thousands of interviews. The aim was to identify current pain points or frustrations people have when using their personal computing devices, ranging from desktops and laptops to tablets and smartphones.

Four of top 10 pain points were tied to wires.

“They told us that they have to carry so many different wires, cords and plugs when traveling or going from place to place because every device has its own cord, plus USB and even display cables,” said Vora. “They don’t want to carry these around, and many want these wires out of their sight.”

Of those surveyed, 76 percet said they were frustrated by lack of interoperability, or requiring a specific wire for each device, and 68 percent dislike seeing wires clutter their space.

“We saw people get excited when there’s something new and unique that makes your life easier or changes the way you do things,” said Vora. “Presenting people with wireless charging elicited emotional responses, like the sense of freedom.”

Vora remembers how Intel Centrino Mobile Technology and the hotspot revolution that hit the market in 2003 eliminated at least one wire.

“The impact of just removing the LAN cable and having WiFi everywhere has really freed us to access the internet anywhere without needing a LAN cable.”

Martin Garner, analyst at CSS Insight, said that wireless charging has been hampered by different standards, so now that there are fewer competing standards it could make the technology more common.

“My understanding from the smartphone area is that people loved the wireless charging pads,” he said. “The technology was successful then because people bought two – one at home and work. If you can extend wireless charging to coffee shops and other publish places it could be a really good thing.”

Garner’s colleague Ben Wood, chief analyst at CSS Insight agreed.

“It makes more sense for everyone to come together,” he said. “It’s a fantastic technology. I’m starting to try a small array of charging plates, and they’re very useful. I can image the technology being built into coffee shops, desks, furniture, and even cup holders in vehicles.”

Editor’s Note: For more on this and other stories from the 2015 International Consumer Electronics Show, watch the replay of Intel CEO Brian Krzanich’s keynote address.

The post Wireless Charging Ready to Cut Power Cords in Public Places appeared first on iQ by Intel.