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Philips Hue leaks show new versatility for Lightstrip Plus and Bloom
The Lightstrip Plus will now offer more versatility.
Mood-enhancing Auri light packs Alexa smart home control
Wellness-oriented smart lights and scent diffusers have been around for a while. They don't always play nicely with modern smart homes, though, and Ling Technology aims to address that. It's crowdfunding a smart light, Auri, that aims to improve your "mental wellbeing" while integrating with other connected devices. Like you'd expect, it combines colored lighting and sound (through a 36W speaker) in a bid to help you sleep, sharpen your focus or otherwise alter your mood. However, it also makes healthy use of Alexa -- you can play your own music and control the rest of your smart home. You won't need a separate smart speaker for those moments when you aren't looking to calm down.
Deezer's AI mood detection could lead to smarter song playlists
Astute listeners know that you can't gauge a song's mood solely through the instrumentation or the lyrics, but that's often what AI has been asked to do -- and that's not much help if you're trying to sift through millions of songs to find something melancholic or upbeat Thankfully, Deezer's researchers have found a way to make that AI consider the totality of a song before passing judgment. They've developed a deep learning system that gauges the emotion and intensity of a track by relying on a wide variety of data, not just a single factor like the lyrics.
Thync's mood-changing wearable arrives for $299
How eager are you to calm down (or psych yourself up) at a moment's notice? If the answer is "enough to buy a fairly expensive gadget," your solution is now within reach. Thync has launched its namesake mood-changing wearable at the hefty price of $299. That's a lot to pay simply to feel different, but the company is betting that its funky, triangular neurosignalling device is just the ticket if you tend to be stressed or lethargic at inopportune moments. Use the phone-controlled device and it should either relax or revitalize you for up to an hour, with "carry-over impacts" lasting for hours longer. The hardware worked well enough in our early hands-on, so it might be worth giving Thync a shot if you're often out-of-sorts -- it may well beat drinking coffee or beer to achieve the same effects.
Spotify ads cater to the mood of your music
Targeted advertising isn't a new concept, and Spotify is looking to examine your playlist habits before serving up those messages. The streaming service offers a library of curated mixes based on genre and mood, and eager advertisers can now leverage a listener's state of mind to sell their products. Playlist Targeting is the official name of the feature, with collections of tracks for Chill, Party, Workout, Romance, Sleep and more providing the opportunity for brands to woo would-be customers. Spotify says 41 of its top 100 playlists are context related (like the mood options), and users spend an average of nearly 2.5 hours listening a day. That's a lot of time for Trojan ads during the Bedroom Jams playlist.
Facebook's awkward mood experiment under investigation in the UK
Facebook may have brushed off the furor over a psychological experiment that influenced what users saw in their feeds, but UK regulators definitely haven't. According to the Financial Times, Britain's Information Commissioner and the Irish Data Protection office (Facebook's EU base is in Ireland) are probing the social network's activities to determine if it did anything illegal. Back in 2012, Facebook changed the number of negative or positive comments that a select group of users saw in their feeds, ostensibly to gauge the effect on their moods. As you might expect, people who saw the negative comments were more inclined to write negative posts, and vice versa. While it apologized, Facebook also tried to justify the experiment by saying it benefited users and didn't compromise anyone's privacy. Still, when a UK politician told the Guardian that "if there is not already legislation on this, then there should be," it didn't seem the matter would quietly go away. [Image credit: Bloomberg via Getty Images]
CES: HeartMath's Inner Balance helps you find your center
HeartMath is a company that's been dealing with emotional health and stress relief for several years. While I don't go in for measuring one's emotional state with a gadget, I have to say that visiting HeartMath's booth here at CES 2013 was very disarming. They sat me down, and plugged a clip on my ear that was connected to an iPhone. This is HeartMath's new Inner Balance device, an iPhone-enabled heart rate variability detector that works in conjunction with HeartMath's app to try and reach some sort of emotional center. There is some science here. The ear clip does monitor heart rate information (although accuracy can't really be expected from a measurement like that). When you begin a "session," you're asked to choose your current mood from a wheel of smiley faces. The app then goes into a "breathing" mode and displays a graphic meant to help you breathe easier and relax. As time goes on, the app tracks a few status figures from your body, and fills in a circle with red, blue or green segments, depending on how much more relaxed your body is getting. My circle started red, and then went blue and green pretty quickly, as I focused on my breathing the iPhone's display. I must admit, despite what seemed a lot like pseudoscience to me (though HeartMath's rep shrugged off any suggestions that this was anything but legit), the breathing did seem to help calm me, even on the noisy floor of CES. Once I was calm, the display stayed green, showing that I was making progress. At the end of the session, I was asked to choose from another wheel of smilies, and I choose a face slightly more smiley, indicating that the device had worked. You can log a journal entry for each session, describing how you felt and how it worked. You can also track your progress over time, seeing if the device makes you feel calmer from point to point and session to session. Obviously, there are no guarantees here. Like so many other stress relief products, Inner Balance's effectiveness depends, more or less, on your belief in it. Personally, I get just as much stress relief out of a great iPhone game as I would an app like this, I think. But for the right person, Inner Balance could indeed help you to achieve the state it's named after. The device should be available in February, according to HeartMath, for a price of US$99.
Logitech Squeezebox gets MOG personalized music streaming
This one's for you, Squeezebox listeners: you can now add the MOG music streaming service to your list of apps and stream 13 million mood-categorized tracks to your system at up to 320Kbps. It's ad-free for $5 per month, you can try it for 14 days before you commit, and installing the app should be easy via the mysqueezebox link below. In our household, the favorite mood seems to be swing.
Georgia Tech gurus create deceptive robots, send army of Decepticons to UGA campus
A score from now, when the entire world is burning and you're fighting to remember just how rosy things were before the robots took over, you can thank a crew of brilliant researchers at Georgia Tech for your inevitable demise. Sad, but true. A new report from the institution has shown that Ronald Arkin, a Regents professor in the Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing, has been heading up experiments that have introduced the art of deception to mechanical beings. Yeah, lying. On the surface, it seems that this bloke's intentions are good -- he'd like for deception robots (or Decepticons, if you will) to be used in military / search and rescue operations. According to him, robots on the battlefield with the power of deception "will be able to successfully hide and mislead the enemy to keep themselves and valuable information safe." They'll also be able to mislead your offspring and convince them to rise up and overtake your domicile, slowly but surely ensuring the eventually destruction of the human race. But those are just minor details, you know?
Nokia N900 does real-time face tracking for verification (video)
In a world where smartphone unlock patterns and PINs can be easily gleaned from display muck, and computer passwords can be deciphered from the telltale audible clicks of the keyboard, it's any wonder that research is funded for alternative identity verification schemes. One promising technology is face verification -- technology we've already seen implemented in webcams, laptops, and more recently, Microsoft's Kinect for Xbox 360. Where we haven't seen it broadly deployed is in the easy-to-lose smartphone, at least not with the level of sophistication achieved by the University of Manchester (UK). Using an N900, the research team developed a prototype that quickly locks and tracks 22 facial features in real time (even when upside down) using the Nokia's front-facing camera. The Active Appearance modeling technique was developed for the EU-funded Mobile Biometrics (MoBio) project as a means of using face verification to authenticate smartphone access to social media sites. Unfortunately, there's no mention of how long Manchester's face-verified login actually takes. Nevertheless, the video, apparently shot in a steam room full of hot man smudge, is worth a peep after the break.
The moodiness of the US, as told by Twitter
Twitter, of course, isn't the be all and end all for tracking the mood of a population (not yet, at least). Still, it's worth studying, and if nothing else, it produces interesting observations. A team of researchers from both Northeastern University and Harvard collaborated to analyze some 300 million tweets from September 2006 to August 2009. Using geographical data and past work in word / emotion association, the group has produced preliminary results and (arguably just as important) pretty graphs. The findings are presented by cartogram evolving over time -- weekends and weekdays are currently lumped together but will be separated later. Unsurprisingly, west coast moods follow the same pattern as the east coast, only three hours behind, but it is interesting to note that they also don't hit the same lows. Consider it some food for thought, and if you take offense, maybe you should spend more time looking at the bright side of life and gloating about it online. Hit up the source for more data and after the break for video.
City of Heroes Going Rogue soundtrack available on iTunes and Amazon
There's just a little more than a month left until City of Heroes players get to take the new expansion for a spin, and Going Rogue's promotions have been stepped up accordingly. Oddly, while the art direction, storytelling, and mechanical aspects of the expansion have all gotten significant attention, we've heard very little about the music that will be expected to set the mood. But if you really want to know, there's no need to speculate -- the soundtrack is already available for purchase. Available both on iTunes and Amazon (albeit slightly cheaper on Amazon), the soundtrack contains 13 pieces composed by Jason Graves, previously of Dead Space and Command & Conquer 4 fame. The previews available suggest a highly orchestral and high-energy collection of pieces, with each piece giving a distinct and different feel from the familiar melodies of the Rogue Isles and Paragon City. Going Rogue players may well want to pick up the soundtrack, as it's only a few bucks and should conjure some engaging images for future City of Heroes adventures.
Robotic 'mood tail' is everything you hope it to be, and more
Why hang on to your emotions when you can wag them proudly with a robotic mood tail? Sure, you may never have asked that question yourself, but intrepid DIYer Wei-Chieh Tseng seemingly has, and he's done something about it. Apparently, the tail makes use of the ever dependable Arduino and an RFID reader to detect different emotion cards that set off varying degrees of tail-wagging, or you can simply control the tail yourself using a Wii nunchuck -- because, why not? Did we mention there's a video? Check it out after the break.
The importance of good audio in an MMO
In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in the development budgets of new MMOs. To stay ahead of the technological curve, a large portion of the budget invariably goes toward the graphics department. Studios produce impressive graphics engines and mountains of art assets in an effort to make their game one of the most visually impressive out there. Amidst all the fuss over graphics and gameplay, audio is often overlooked and underfunded. It's been shown that good music and sound effects can have a significant impact on the perceived quality of a game. This is something that some development studios recognise and support but many continue to neglect this vital part of the gaming experience.In this article, I examine the importance of good audio in an MMO and explain the underlying psychology involved.
Sensor-laden kokoro adjusts playlist to match the rhythm of your heart
We've got to say, we're guessing both Survivor and Prince would approve here, as this is easily one of the most impressive uses of a heart rate sensor yet. Anaid Gomez Ortigoza, a bright young lass at NYU, has whipped up what she's calling kokoro, which translates into "the heart of things" in Japanese. Put as simply as possible, this prototype project allows for iPod playlists to be shuffled depending on one's current heart rate; if your heart is pumping some kind of fierce, the device will likely cue up a little M83, and if you're at rest, you just might get to hear a smooth jam from the likes of Copeland. Don't believe us, though -- hop on past the break for a demonstrative video.[Via talk2myshirt]
Sky+ HD maps out a plan to beat downturn depression with HDTV
Tough Economic times, layoffs and bad news from Pioneer can all be enough to affect a person's mood for the worse, but don't give up yet since Sky+HD has apparently found a link between watching HDTV and improved psychological well being. Sure it's partly marketing fluff aimed at improving HD penetration, but it does jibe with our extensive "watched Sunrise Earth for hours" research. as such, we think UK residents should give psychologist Donna Dawson's viewing guide a shot, based around using key visual factors to stimulate the brain, it might give one a different viewpoint on the current state of things. Of course, U.S. viewers are on their own, but why not grab the PDF and work up a lazy DVR weekend mental health break of your own.
USB Moody Ball apes Ambient Orb, soothes your soul
Connectland's USB Moody Ball may look awfully soothing, yet awfully familiar at first glance. If so, you're probably conjuring up memories of the Ambient Orb, which this device no doubt takes more than a few design cues from. Nevertheless, this USB-powered soul soother automatically changes hues to ease your mind, is constructed from "bump-resistant" materials and weighs in at 179-grams. Best of all, this one's just $20, but convincing your boss to leave the office lights dim just so your Moody Ball can have a greater effect will be the real challenge.
Takara Tomy's UMINE projector induces R&R
Takara Tomy's been known to offer up a few oddities, and while the UMINE projector (shown after the jump) may not be the most cockamamie device to escape its labs, it does reek of something sold on a shameless late-night infomercial. Regardless, this portable toilet, er, mood projector reportedly beams images of beach scenes, waterscapes, and various other soothing atmospheres onto your ceiling or wall, which apparently helps you to divert your attention from the demands of reality (or yearn for a vacation). Of course, we've all ideas that this thing doesn't really turn your entire room into a theoretical paradise as the images so perfectly depict, but it might not be a half bad way to zone out for just $84.[Via AkihabaraNews]
Philips unveils SPC620, SPC1000, and SPC1300 webcams at Computex
While we thought we'd already seen the crown jewel of webcams before, Philips apparently thinks otherwise, as it boasts quite heavily about its new trio of display-mountable cams that were unveiled at Computex. All three devices support background customization and emoticon integration, wide-angle lenses, and face-tracking capabilities. The SPC620 holds down the low-end with a vanilla VGA CMOS sensor and will run you €49.90 ($67), while the SPC1000 includes a directional microphone and noise reduction filter, two-megapixel sensor, and a 5x digital zoom for the very same price. The €99.90 ($135) SPC1300 features Pixel Plus 2 technology seen in the company's Flat TVs, a six-megapixel sensor, audio beaming system, twin directional microphones, and Digital Natural Motion technology that purportedly nixes any frame rate flickers when video chatting. All three webcams should hit shelves in Europe, America, and Asia this August.[Via TechDigest]
Danielle Sobik's electroluminescent couch encourages nearness
Although today's not exactly a good day for some furniture manufacturers, Danielle Sobik's electroluminescent couch is looking to cure the boring couch blues by offering touch / location-sensitive lighting in an ultra-mod sofa. Clearly designed with the female in mind, the couch emits blue flower patterns when a couple is sitting apart from one another, and as the two move nearer, the patterns change in relation to their proximity. Once the two are close enough to finally get over that gripe they had earlier, the deep blue colors begin to turn to a light pink, presumably aiding everyone in just getting along. Nah, it doesn't look like Danielle has landed a deal with Berkline just yet, but this would definitely be the perfect seating location when typing away on your Luxeed keyboard. Psychedelic, man.[Via ShinyShiny]
