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HoloLens co-creator leaves Apple after three years of AR projects
Avi Bar-Zeev, perhaps best known as a co-creator of Microsoft's HoloLens, has departed Apple in what may prove a setback for Apple's augmented reality ambitions. Before he left his role last month, Bar-Zeev had reportedly been working on the company's long-rumored, high-resolution AR/VR headset, which could arrive as early as next year.
Amazon expands its airborne shipping fleet to 50 planes
Amazon's famous drones have yet to deliver much of anything, but its jets are a different story. After launching Prime Air in 2016 with 40 jets, the company appears to have renamed it "Amazon Air" and added 10 more Boeing 767-300 cargo aircraft. It now flies Amazon Air out of 20 different gateway airports "making two-day shipping possible almost anywhere in the US," the company said.
Alphabet's Wing drones are heading to Europe
Wing, the drone delivery project of Google's parent company Alphabet, graduated from an X program to a fully-fledged business earlier this year. After testing burritos by drone back in 2016, the project expanded into rural Australia last year and now, after becoming a proper company, the service is rolling out tests in Finland. It's announced that from spring 2019, it'll start delivering goods across 10 kilometer distances in the cold capital of Helsinki.
Amazon's delivery drones could drop packages with parachutes
Amazon's much-anticipated (and long time coming) drone deliveries might technically finally be happening, but a new patent spotted by CNN suggests your next book or box-set might actually arrive via parachute. There are many practical, legal and technical challenges that drone deliveries present -- and getting the parcel on the ground is just one of them.
Amazon flashes Prime Air drone delivery in its Super Bowl ad
The game is over, but Amazon managed to stand out with a brief (if also disgusting) 10-second spot. Unfortunately, other than the voice-controlled shopping via Echo, it needed a disclaimer that "Prime Air isn't available in some states (or any really). Yet" but Prime Air is looking surprisingly realistic these days. Until then, though, it may be easier to prune your Super Bowl party guest list carefully.
ICYMI: Amazon made its first drone-powered delivery
try{document.getElementById("aol-cms-player-1").style.display="none";}catch(e){}Today on In Case You Missed It: Amazon has been testing drone deliveries for three years now, even having to move to the UK to keep it going once the FAA changed its UAV guidelines. The company released a video of its first fully autonomous drone delivery, which happened on December 7. Meanwhile a team of researchers from Los Alamos National Laboratory dug into what would happen if a sizable meteorite hit the ocean and the modeling shows a substantial amount of water vapor would get thrown into the stratosphere, which would not do great things for climate change. Finally, the Danish Neighborhood Watch came out with a robbery-preventing Christmas light and app combination to deter robbers-- and provide laughs for the rest of us. If you're looking for the dash cam video of an Uber car going through a red light, that's here. As always, please share any interesting tech or science videos you find by using the #ICYMI hashtag on Twitter for @mskerryd.
Amazon completes its first drone-powered delivery
It's already been three years since Amazon first revealed its somewhat audacious plan to make deliveries by drone. But the company is quite serious about this, and today it is announcing that it completed the first Amazon Prime Air delivery on December 7th. The shipment, which took 13 minutes from order to delivery, was sent to a customer in Cambridge, England, where Amazon is operating a custom-built fulfillment center.
Amazon launches 'Prime Air' with a cargo plane, not a drone
The first time we heard about Prime Air it was emblazoned on drones Jeff Bezos showed off for 60 Minutes in 2013. Now Amazon is revealing the logo on a flying machine that operates on a much larger scale. Amazon One is just one of its 11 dedicated planes, and the Boeing 767-300 will be flying this weekend at a Seattle airshow. The company says that maintaining its own air cargo network -- the planes are leased from shipping partners, with plans to expand to 40 over the next couple of years -- will help it keep shipping speeds up.
Amazon teams up with the UK to make drone delivery a reality
Amazon has found a staunch ally in the British government in its quest to use drones for delivery. This new partnership with the UK gives the company a chance to test its drones the way it can't in the US. For one, the UK is allowing Amazon to deploy beyond line of sight tests in both rural and suburban areas. In the US, Amazon can only fly drones if they're within the pilot's line of sight, which makes it impossible to deliver parcels to farther locations. The e-commerce company will also use this opportunity to make sure its UAVs' sensors can identify and avoid obstacles and to deploy operations wherein one person controls multiple highly automated drones.
Amazon explores using street lights as delivery drone perches
Amazon's Prime Air delivery drones already have a glaring problem: how do you keep them charged and sheltered when dedicated facilities are likely to be few and far between? The company has an idea. It recently received a patent for a "UAV docking station" concept that would offer a temporary perch for drones in need. If a drone runs low on battery or needs to take shelter from an impending storm, it would only have to travel to a station on top of a street light, cell tower, church steeple or another high-up location. The drone could even drop off a package for another drone, turning a delivery into an aerial relay race.
Amazon exec explains how Prime Air delivery drones will work
Amazon vice president Paul Misener doesn't know if the company already has a pricing scheme for its Prime Air service, but he knows everything else there is to know about the delivery drones. He talked about the project at length in an interview with Yahoo Tech, where he explained how it will work and how Amazon plans to solve the issues it's facing. The exec confirmed earlier reports that the online retailer is developing different types of UAVs for different locations.
Amazon and Jeremy Clarkson hint at the future of delivery drones
Former Top Gear co-host Jeremy Clarkson isn't just working on a new motoring show for Amazon... he's helping the internet giant pitch its vision for delivery drones, too. Amazon has unveiled a splashy new Prime Air ad where Clarkson shows off a new, more powerful drone design (with promises of a "whole family" of others) and outlines how these robots would ship a pair of running shoes. All you'd have to do is place your order and plunk down a marker to tell the drone where to land. From there, the robot would use its mix of horizontal and vertical propellers to ferry your cargo (up to 15 miles from its home base) in 30 minutes or less. You'd even get a heads-up when the drone is close, so you wouldn't have to worry about someone swiping your package the moment it arrives.
Amazon doesn't want states regulating courier drones
If you thought Amazon was already fighting tooth-and-nail for permission to fly delivery drones in the US, you haven't seen anything yet. The internet shopping giant has warned a House oversight committee that states and cities "must not be allowed" to regulate unmanned aircraft that get the Federal Aviation Administration's approval. There should be only one set of rules for airspace, purpose and qualifications, Amazon says. It's not hard to see why the company would be nervous -- it could be very tricky to run a nationwide courier drone service if some states have strict requirements or ban these services entirely.
Amazon tests courier drones in Canada to avoid US hassles
When Amazon said it would take its delivery drone testing abroad, it wasn't kidding. The Guardian has learned that the internet shopping giant is testing its robotic Prime Air couriers in Canada (the province of British Columbia, to be exact) to get around what it sees as frustratingly slow US approval. As Amazon's Paul Misener explains, the company isn't willing to wait until American regulators find an "impetus" to legalize these drones. It rejects the Federal Aviation Administration's portrayal of US airspace as uniquely complex. Canada and European countries also have a lot of air traffic, but they've still approved lots of testing and commercial drone flights.
Amazon threatens to take its delivery drone testing overseas
Amazon things, delivered by drone! The possible future! The project was first teased on 60 Minutes a little over a year ago, and while there's been some movement, it's apparently not progressing fast enough. Now Amazon's taken the Federal Aviation Agency to task, and told the FAA (and the media) exactly why. The aggrieved letter totals seven pages, plus appendices, as it's actually the part of the exemption application for Amazon's drone experiments. "Without approval of our testing in the United States, we will be forced to continue expanding our Prime Air R&D footprint abroad," Amazon's VP of global public policy Paul Misener, wrote in the letter. The company now aims to shift more of its drone testing outside of the US, unless regulators are able to give permission for the company's outdoor trials soon.
Amazon is hiring someone to oversee its courier drones
Want Amazon's Prime Air courier drones to enter service as quickly as possible? You can now do something about it... provided you have years of aviation experience under your belt, anyway. The online retailer is hiring a Flight Safety Manager that will oversee its drone flight tests and make sure these robots deliver their goods without a hitch. Amazon still has plenty of regulatory and technological hurdles to overcome before a position like this is more than a novelty, but its very existence is proof that the company is serious about unmanned aerial shipping. If you want to get a sense of what a drone safety job would entail, you can head below to check out 3D Robotics' flight demo from Engadget Expand.
Amazon asks the FAA for permission to play with its drones outside
Keep laughing at Amazon's Prime Air drone delivery video if you want to (cough, Netflix), but the company is moving forward as though it's serious. Bloomberg points to a letter filed today with the FAA asking for permission to take its unmanned flying machines out of their test facility, "to do what thousands of hobbyists and manufacturers of model aircraft do every day." The FAA is still putting tight controls on the commercial use of drones, but Amazon Global Public Policy VP argues that one day its Prime Air drones will be as common a sight as mail trucks on the road are today. He says that the company's indoor tests in Seattle have brought its "highly automated" small unmanned aircraft systems (sUAS, for short) to ninth-gen vehicles -- CEO Jeff Bezos told shareholders it was on the 5th and 6th gen in April. They can travel at 50mph carrying 5 lb packages (which covers 86 percent of Amazon's deliveries) easily, and have been tested for agility, flight duration, redundancy plus other factors. The FAA has yet to respond to the petition, but who knows, maybe soon area residents can keep an eye on the sky and go Blu-ray hunting.
Recommended Reading: Cool Tools review, drone delivery and more
Recommended Reading highlights the best long-form writing on technology in print and on the web. Some weeks, you'll also find short reviews of books dealing with the subject of technology that we think are worth your time. We hope you enjoy the read. Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities by Kevin Kelly This may well be the greatest catalog of all-time -- and given its Boing Boing connection (Cool Tools was cofounded by Boing Boing creator Mark Frauenfelder), you can be assured it's full of wonderful things. Want to draw a graphic novel, design a fabric, shoot a film on the cheap or survive in the woods during the coming apocalypse? There's a cool tool for each of those activities -- several, in fact. Each tool sports a quick description (from one to four paragraphs), the price and a URL where you can buy it. There's also a QR code by each, to save you precious seconds of typing time. Cool Tools doesn't actually sell any of the gadgets itself, so the massive tome comes with a fairly lofty $40 price tag, but for the person who thinks he has everything, here's nearly 500 pages to show them just how wrong they are. -- Brian Heater, Director of Media
Amazon Prime Air drones revealed on 60 Minutes, aim to deliver in half an hour (video)
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos took to 60 Minutes to reveal the company's latest delivery method: drones. In what is likely a cunning reminder of the e-tailer's upcoming Cyber Monday sales, these bots will apparently be capable of delivering packages up to five pounds (86 percent of orders are apparently less than that), with the aim of getting them to your house in under half an hour. The system is called Prime Air and the octo-copter drones, which wait, ready to deliver, at the end of conveyor belts, have a range of 10 miles. As Amazon puts it, "Putting Prime Air into commercial use will take some number of years as we advance the technology and wait for the necessary FAA rules and regulations" and Bezos himself added in the TV segment that it won't be before 2015 at the very earliest. While it sounds like they''ll take their time to get here (if they ever do), we've at least got a video of the drones in action -- it's right after the break.
