iris
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Researchers reconstruct 3D environments from eye reflections
Researchers at the University of Maryland have turned eye reflections into (somewhat discernible) 3D scenes. The work builds on Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), an AI technology that can reconstruct environments from 2D photos. Although the eye-reflection approach has a long way to go before it spawns any practical applications, the study provides a fascinating glimpse into a technology that could eventually reveal an environment from a series of simple portrait photos.
AZIO’s gorgeous Iris keyboard is inspired by vintage cameras
AZIO is a company that makes keyboards that look as good as they feel when you type on them, and at Computex it was showing off the prototype for its next device. The AZIO Iris draws inspiration from the design of old-fashioned rangefinder cameras, from Leica and Fujica / Fujifilm, with unashamedly analog dials and switches. It may not be going on sale until the end of the year at the earliest, but I'm already in love.
Lowe's smart home device platform shuts down March 31st
Lowe's tried to become a mainstay of smart home technology with its Iris system, but it wasn't successful enough and unveiled plans to leave the category in November. Now, it's ready to bow out in earnest -- the hardware store has announced that it's shutting down the Iris app and services on March 31st, 2019. It stopped charging paying customers as of January 31st, and it's issuing Visa prepaid cards to eligible customers to help them migrate to other smart home platforms.
Iris scanner AI can tell the difference between the living and the dead
It's possible to use a dead person's fingerprints to unlock a device, but could you get away with exploiting the dead using an iris scanner? Not if a team of Polish researchers have their way. They've developed a machine learning algorithm that can distinguish between the irises of dead and living people with 99 percent accuracy. The scientists trained their AI on a database of iris scans from various times after death (yes, that data exists) as well as samples of hundreds of living irises, and then pitted the system against eyes that hadn't been included in the training process.
Samsung's Galaxy S10 may include an in-display fingerprint reader
The Galaxy S9 may have been a modest evolution of its predecessor, but you might not get to level that accusation against the S10. Korean financial news outlet The Bell claims that the Galaxy S10 (codenamed "Beyond") will include an in-display fingerprint reader similar to devices like the Oppo Find X or Vivo Nex. You wouldn't have to lift up your phone and hunt for the reader on the back. It's reportedly "considering" an iPhone X-style face recognition system at the same time, so you might even have a choice of cutting-edge biometric sign-ins.
The Galaxy S8 iris scanner can be hacked with aging tech
Biometrics are becoming our next de facto security measure, and they're supposed to be a vast improvement on easily-forgotten and hackable passwords. Yet a point-and-shoot camera, laser printer and contact lens is all it took for German hacking group Chaos Computer Club to crack the Samsung Galaxy S8's iris scanner. "By far [the] most expensive part of the iris biometry hack was the purchase of the Galaxy S8," the group wrote on its website. They pulled it off by taking a photo of the target from about five meters away, and printing a close-up of the eye on a laser printer — made by Samsung, no less. A regular contact lens was placed on top of the print to replicate the curve of an eyeball. When the print was held up to the smartphone, the S8 unlocked.
Lowe's smart home system can call 911 for you
If you own a smart home system, here's the worst case scenario: You're away, something has genuinely gone wrong and you need to contact the emergency services. That involves a frantic phone call and some worrying about how swiftly your phone's notification came through. Lowe's Iris has a different approach -- if you sign up for its premium plan, the system will monitor your home and call emergency responders automatically. You'll be notified through the app, of course, and in some cases be able to cancel or confirm before someone from the police or fire department is sent out.
Our fingerprints, eyes and faces will replace passwords
Passwords are a pain in the ass. They're either easy to crack or hard to remember, and when breaches occur you have to come up with a whole new one. So people are trying to do away with passwords altogether, and so far, fingerprint scanners are doing the job nicely.
An FBI 'pilot' collected over 434,000 iris scans since 2013
Don't freak out, but the FBI has been quietly collecting the iris scans of nearly half a million people in the US -- as part of a "test" program focused on biometric data. According to a confirmation given to The Verge, the San Bernardino Sheriff's Department alone has been collecting an average of nearly 200 iris scans each day from arrestees since the pilot began in 2013.
Lowe's updated connected home system is built for your phone
While most connected home devices on the market were introduced as mobile-first solutions, the Lowe's Iris system on the other hand, required new users to set it up via a browser. After set up -- while the mobile app was able to share status information and access features like turning items on and off -- it was still a desktop-heavy setup. Today the hardware store-turned developer is fixing that with a new platform built from the ground up with a mobile-first strategy and updated devices.
Intel's 'Skylake' CPU family includes an unlocked laptop chip
To say that Intel has been dragging out the launch of its Skylake-based processors would be an understatement when it didn't even reveal full details after it started shipping the first CPUs. Most of that secrecy is coming to an end today, however, as the semiconductor giant is officially launching the wider 6th-generation Core family. You'll soon see mainstream Core i3, i5 and i7 chips in desktops and laptops, as well as updated Core M processors in ultraportables, convertible PCs and tablets. As you'll see in a minute, though, this isn't just a straightforward refresh.
Watch the first full-color HD videos of Earth from space
It's no longer a challenge to get astonishingly sharp photos of the Earth from space, but video? That's another matter. UrtheCast is about to open the floodgates, however. It just released the first batch of full-color, high-definition video of Earth recorded from the International Space Station. In many ways, the extremely sharp footage (with detail down to 3.3 feet) of Barcelona, Boston and London is like an internet mapping site come to life -- all those pathways are suddenly full of moving boats and cars. The Iris imaging system that recorded these movies won't be fully operational until the summer, but the preview suggests that its customers will get plenty of insights into traffic and other activity that's harder to track from the ground.
Japanese smartphone gets iris-scanning for mobile payments
The common objection to using your phone for purchases is that any sufficiently-motivated criminal could lop off your thumb and go on a spending spree. That's one of the reasons why Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo and Fujitsu have teamed up to unveil the Arrows NX F-04G. The pair say that it's the world's first smartphone with iris recognition technology that can be used to both unlock a device and certify mobile wallet payments.
3D Robotics is building the drones that just about anyone can fly
The FAA might not know what to do with drones, but UAV technology is moving so fast we're thinking more "when," not "if" the skies will be filled with quadrocopters. To help more people jump into the future, 3D Robotics SVP of Sales and Marketing Colin Guinn joined us at Expand to show off the company's drone tech that makes the learning curve easier. He brought along the Iris+ drone, which expands upon the original model released last year by adding more autonomous smarts. Not only can it can take off and land by itself, but it can also orient around you for a third-person chase cam/drone selfie, or follow a predetermined, GPS-guided path to take aerial photography. It packs a GoPro-ready mount, datalink that lets you fly it from your PC/Android/iOS/etc. and is available now for $750. It can fly for a little over 20 minutes on a charge and just needs its propellers screwed on to work out of the box. If you've wanted to get into drones, but were concerned your first flight could be your last, the Iris+ was made with you in mind. Check out the full demo and discussion after the break to find out just how easy handling one of these can be.
Iris Screen Recorder: A fast way to grab Mac screen videos
Whether you're teaching others about how to use their Macs or creating podcasts, you may find that capturing a video of what you're doing with your machine is the best way to show people what's going on. Iris Screen Recorder (free, with US$19.99 in-app purchase to remove watermark) does the job perfectly, making screen video captures easy and fast. Once you've installed Iris from the Mac App Store, launching the app puts a tiny camera iris in your menu bar. That's your only indication that Iris is ready to go. When you're ready to capture video, you can either select the recording option from the menu or use a keyboard hot key that you've set up in the preferences. You can choose whether or not to have a countdown before the recording starts -- for doing screencasts, I find that this is a great way to get prepared to start speaking. You can hide all but the active application before recording by checking a box in the app preferences, and the app uses hardware acceleration by default. If you'd like to hide your desktop (perhaps it's littered with folders and files), you can select an image or a color to hide your desktop with. During your recording, you'll probably want to call out your mouse clicks and drags, so you can select a highlight type and a highlight color to make sure your viewers see what's going on. You don't have to record the entire screen; if you're trying to focus on a specific window or app, you can shrink the capture area down to its size. Recordings can be set to start and end on a timer, perfect if you're trying to capture something that's being streamed to your Mac at a particular time. You can also set up Iris to capture a "talking head". That's usually the person behind the keyboard, and it's a great way to let people who are watching the video actually see who's doing the narration. Once again, you can toggle the talking head on and off, so the face doesn't need to be on the screen constantly. As I say in the screen capture/review embedded above, I like Iris a lot and found it to be a smooth, fast, and non-disruptive app for doing screen videos. However, I think the price might be a bit high and would suggest to the developer that he look into cutting that price in half. You can see that Iris works well with the current beta version (GM) of OS X 10.10 Yosemite, so I have the funny feeling TUAW readers might be seeing a lot of the fruits of this app in the near future.
Samsung plans to bring biometric security to its low-end phones
The Galaxy S5 was widely tipped to launch with iris-scanning capabilities. When the crunch time came, Samsung played safe with only fingerprint sensor support. According to the Wall Street Journal, the eye-centric tech is still on the company's radar and could soon debut in new high- and low-end phones alike. "We're looking at various types of biometric [mechanisms] and one of things that everybody is looking at is iris detection," Samsung executive Rhee In-jong admitted today, adding that it would likely be included in flagship smartphones first. Like fingerprint recognition, iris scanning would likely form another link in Samsung's Knox platform, putting it in good stead with big organizations like the US government. Samsung's desire to "follow the market trend" often causes it to beat rivals to market with features that customers rarely use. Iris scanning could well be the next example.
Intel flaunts 8-core Extreme Edition Haswell with support for DDR4 memory
Since Intel's next Haswell chips are aimed squarely at enthusiasts, what better place to unveil them than at the Game Developer's Conference? Aimed at power users, the 4th-gen Core-i7 Extreme Edition CPU will feature eight unlocked cores and 16 threads, trumping the last model's six cores. It'll also support the latest DDR4 memory standard for much higher transfer speeds and lower power drain than DDR3. Also arriving soon is an unlocked 4th-gen "Devil's Canyon" Core chip for overclockers and a "Black Brook" reference all-in-one PC packed with tech like the RealSense 3-D camera (see the video after the break). Finally, Intel revealed that its 5th-gen Broadwell 14-nanometer processors will be available unlocked and with Iris graphics. While those chips were delayed, the new 4th-gen CPUs will arrive in mid-2014 -- so it might be prudent to put off any upgrades. Update: Intel has informed us that the unlocked 4th-gen chips are code-named "Devil's Canyon," not the Extreme Edition CPU. We've updated the post to reflect that.
Apple unveils Haswell-based MacBook Pros with Retina display, starting at $1,299 (update: non-Retina 15-inch is gone)
If you've been waiting for the MacBook Pro with Retina display to get a big processor upgrade, today's your lucky day. Apple has just refreshed its high-end portable line with Intel's Haswell chips, delivering Iris graphics and battery life improvements much like those from the recent MacBook Air update. The 13-inch model manages nine hours of battery life, and the 15-inch unit can last for eight hours on a charge. Both computers carry faster PCI Express solid-state drives, Thunderbolt 2 ports and 802.11ac WiFi, while a higher-end 15-inch variant ships with dedicated GeForce GT 750M video. Either new Mac costs less than its predecessor, too. The 13-inch system starts at $1,299 for a model with a dual-core 2.4GHz Core i5, 4GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD; its 15-inch counterpart starts at $1,999 with a quad-core 2GHz Core i7, 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. Both laptops are available today. Update: Apple has quietly axed the non-Retina 15-inch model; you can still buy its 13-inch sibling (unchanged since its early 2013 update) at a lower $999 price.
ASUS ET2321 Haswell all-in-one flashes slim design, optional NVIDIA graphics
ASUS AiO PCs have run the gamut from pretty versatile, like the dual-boot Transformer AiO, to pretty functional like the articulating ET2300. But pretty, period? Perhaps not so much. That is not until a video of the above ET2321 popped up on the company's official YouTube channel. The short marketing clip emphasizes the slim styling as much as the 4th-generation Intel CPU and optional NVIDIA 740M or Iris graphics. The rest of the specs include a 23-inch, 1,920 x 1,080 IPS screen with a 178-degree viewing angle, Windows 8, SonicMaster audio tech with built-in speakers and 802.11ac WiFi. There's no sign of it yet on ASUS's site, but we'll have to assume the design tweaks are a direct response to the (visually) striking competition it faces in the all-in-one space.
3D Robotics launches Iris quadcopter, for pre-assembled drone action
3D Robotics has made it pretty clearly that it's all about the maker community. But what about those who can't tell their Arduino from a Raspberry Pi? The Chris Anderson-run company today announced the release of Iris, an out-of-the-box, user-friendly quadcopter experience. The drone can be controlled with an Android device (iOS coming soon), including single button takeoffs and landings. There's an ARM Cortex-M4 processor and a built-in data radio on-board, the latter of which will help you check out flight paths in real-time. There's also a spot for a GoPro Hero3, though that, naturally, will cost you ($400) extra. The configurable copter starts at $730. It's set to ship on September 16th.
