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Walabot wall sensor calls for help if you fall down
Many people injure themselves from falls in the home, but most people unsurprisingly don't want to wear a watch, pendant or another device just to get help in case there's an injury. You might not have to make that sacrifice in the future. Vayyar Imaging has launched Walabot Home, a wall-mountable gadget that uses low-power radio waves to detect falls without the hassle of a wearable. You just have to place it in a location where you think you might fall, such as the bathroom -- if there's a tumble, it can call an emergency contact all on its own.
Sensor tech predicts when senior citizens are at risk of falling
Falls are dangerous for anyone, but they can be particularly worrying for senior citizens whose bodies aren't as resilient as they used to be. University of Missouri scientists may have a way to prevent those slips. They've developed a sensor system that measure changes in your gait speed and stride length to predict likely falls up to 3 weeks before they happen. If you slow down or shorten your stride in a significant way, it can alert health care workers (complete with imagery) so that they can take action before there's an injury.
Researchers are helping robots avoid expensive face plants
Why are robot tumbles comedy gold? Unlike humans, they make no effort to protect themselves, resulting in flailing, extra hard falls (bottom). But the high-g impacts are hell on the extremely expensive, often one-of-a-kind machines, so researchers from Georgia tech developed algorithms to give them some sense of self-preservation. They made them copy exactly what we do instinctively -- stick out a limb to break the fall. "(That way), every time you make contact with the ground, some of the energy is dissipated," said Georgia Tech professor Karen Liu.
The Daily Grind: Are you obsessed with jumping?
I suspect that if you polled players about their biggest Guild Wars pet peeves, the lack of a jump ability would be toward the top. The game world just isn't built with a Z-axis. Even if you could jump, there'd be nowhere to go. ArenaNet has been quick to assure fans that the sequel will in fact have jumping. Jumping! You'd think there were no other important mechanics, like crafting or travel or guilds! Besides, if you build your world for jumping, you also build your world for falling... like off of City of Heroes' tall buildings or those obnoxious Kelethin tree platforms in EverQuest (seriously, learn2railings, Wood Elves!). Still we crave our spacebar jumping, so much that we demand it even in 2-D sidescrolling crafting sandboxes like Glitch (where jumping neither decreases aggro nor makes you harder to target in PvP, sadly). Are you one of those obsessed with jumping in MMOs, and if so, why? Is it a nervous twitch? A way to immerse yourself in the gameworld? Do you jump for attention? Or is jumping merely shorthand for an interactive three-axis world? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
TUAW's Daily App: The Incident
The Incident makes for one of the best reasons to be a gamer and own an iPhone -- it's a purely indie affair, with excellent pixel graphics and game design by Neven Mrgan and Matt Comi and terrific chiptunes by Cabel Sasser. And it's a wacky little concoction that doesn't sound like it will work, but of course does, and well. You play a little guy who, standing in the street one day, is suddenly assaulted by falling objects from above. There's a little bit more to uncover, but that's really all you need -- you can tilt the iPhone back and forth to move your guy around in 2D, and tap on the screen to jump out of the way of falling objects above, marked by a warning flash on top of the screen. It sounds strange, and it is, but it works. The controls are responsive, the graphics are colorful, and the game perfectly captures that "one more try" feeling as you ascend through the seven levels, climbing up on the fallen objects all the way to the top of the sky. There are lots of coins, med packs, and extra lives to collect as you go, but the tough part is just staying out of the way -- three hits on the noggin costs you a life (and gives you a trophy to remember what wacky object killed you). There are many, many objects in the game, too, and you'll undoubtedly be surprised by what falls on you next. It's a great game, worth every cent of the US $1.99 they're selling it for in the App Store. Terrific little indie games like this are what make the iPhone platform really shine.
Toughbook plummets from helicopter, narrowly misses future Toughbook user
So, check it. You're out and about with mum and dad on a beautiful Sunday afternoon, eager to get whatever's on the grill into your own grille. You're pondering the origin of wildflowers, the middle name of America's 18th president and how humanity functioned prior to the invention of Mighty Putty. You're only ten years old, but your young eyes have lived to see a lot... so much, in fact, that you're semi-seriously considering penning your own novella. Bang. Three inches to your left lies a mildly deformed swivel-screen laptop, and all you can think about is the gush of air that's still rustling your fauxhawk. Turns out, a medical helicopter departing St. Cloud Hospital in Minnesota forgot to bring their Panasonic Toughbook onboard before heading out, and if fate were feeling just a bit more cruel, that shock-mounted hard drive may have left you out for the count. But as it stands, you've got a fairly stupendous show-and-tell to deliver in class this week, and who knows -- maybe that DIMM will work in your Nickelodeon Edition Mini 10.
BlackBerry credited with saving skier's life, serendipity left hanging
Not that we haven't heard a few miraculous gadgets-saving-lives stories before, but this one is in a league of its own. According to the always-embellishing Sun, one David Fitzherbert is thanking his smartphone after coming entirely too close to falling 700 feet to his death. As the story goes, he got wedged between a pair of rocks after losing control of his skis in the Matterhorn, and while we aren't quite sure why he chose RIM's BlackBerry over -- say, chap-stick, car keys, his wallet or a fattening breakfast -- he credited it with adding just enough width to his person to keep him wedged. Two hours after finding himself between a rock and a hard place, rescue crews arrived and flew him to a hospital where he used the "0.5-inch wide" phone to tell his wife that he had survived a nasty spill. We still say David owes a round of thanks to genetics, luck and Zeus, but hey, what do we know?
Legends of the fall damage
Ever since Mario missed the jump from the pipe to the floating platform, video game characters have been falling to their deaths. Falling in WoW is very annoying, since not only do you lose 10 percent durability and have to run back to your body, your body has often fallen into a less-than-accessible place. Plus, there's the humiliation of a totally avoidable death. As a rogue and then a paladin, I've been spared a lot of falling deaths, but the times I have died are memorable. It almost makes me wish that there was a list of Azeroth's most dangerous drops, like there is for dangerous mobs and most looted items. So after consulting with friends and guildmates, here's the Top Five List for falling deaths in WoW. The Aldor Rise, as evidenced by the huge pile of skeletons beneath it. "Hmm, guess I wasn't on my flying mount after all." The Undercity elevator, which keeps magically dropping people straight through it to their deaths. The floor of this elevator must be as ghostly as the city's inhabitants. The Telredor elevator in Zangarmarsh -- the Alliance version of the UC elevator. Let's see, the Draenei have built two messed-up elevators, but the Tauren ones in Thousand Needles and Thunder Bluff work okay. Midair, anytime you accidentally click your mount macro or button or start casting a spell if you have auto-dismount on. My mount button is the scroll wheel of my mouse, so I find myself falling quite a bit. And, last but not least, that stupid mine shaft in Searing Gorge. The worst of it is when you fall down the mine shaft during a corpse run from Thorium Point to any of the Blackrock Mountain instances, making anywhere from four to thirty-nine other people wait for you as your ghost desperately tries to remember how to get out of the Slag Pits. Do you fall to your death often? What equipment or abilities do you use to live through great falls? What are the most dangerous heights in WoW?
Death by elevator
Don't lie now. Darksavior on Norgannon does a humility check: raise your hand if you've been killed by the Undercity elevator.*Raises hand.* For some reason, my characters are particularly suicidal. Or maybe just accident prone.And it's not just UC-- Azeroth is filled with crazy death contraptions. Have you died jumping off the Zepplin, or falling down off of Thunder Bluff (or that elevator)? I died once by walking off the top of one of those plateaus in Thousand Needles, and once by falling into Un'Goro crater. I even died in the Gnomeregan elevator, and a friend and I jumped off of the Stonewrought Dam just for fun (although that time, I think we lived because we fell in the water). I'm pretty sure that, way back on the first time I ever played this game, I even died (maybe even for the first time) by jumping off that tall tower in the Night Elf starting area.And Outland is no exception-- have you jumped off of Outland yet? I have. I don't think the elevator in the Mechanar has killed anyone, but there are a few good drops in Nagrand, and the drop off of Hellfire Citadel is trouble. And if you didn't finally buy your flying mount at 70, fly up as high as you could, and unsummon it just to see if you could summon it again on the way back down, you're a better man than I am. What other ignoble deaths have you suffered from-- or should I say strangely enjoyed?
TVs can kill, study says
A study by the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas says that falling TVs pose a significant risk to kids, with many having been injured and some even killed as a result of unstable television sets. According to the study, some 2,600 children under the age of five were treated for injuries in emergency rooms in 2005 alone, and from a sample of 26 cases at Children's Medical Center Dallas they found that 14 of the children received head injuries and nine required hospitalization. Now, 26 cases from a single hospital is a pretty small sample size for a poll of any sort, but they nonetheless interviewed the parents and found that eight-five percent of them didn't realize TVs could cause such injuries (we're guessing none of them have tried moving a CRT bigger than 27 inches -- they defy the laws of gravity we tell you). So, apart from buying an LCD or Plasma TV that can be hung out of reach on a wall, they're suggesting that parents secure TVs with straps to prevent them from falling over, and are also calling for warning labels to be placed on TVs to warn of the potential dangers. In fact, here's one now: do not kick, jostle, shove, bump, or otherwise disturb large, heavy, stationary equipment. This Engadget PSA brought to you by common sense.[Via Techdirt]
