Protótipo do Google Glass começou a ser enviado para parceiros

A Google tem procurado apresentar soluções e novas ideias que vão muitos longe do que existe e que se sabem ser necessárias. São vários os seus projectos que se preparam para melhorar a utilização de tecnologia e que melhoram a vida das pessoas.

O Google Glass é desses projectos viu a luz do dia e esteve vários meses a ser testado por vários utilizadores, até que foi terminado, sem qualquer certeza se algum dia voltaria a ser disponibilizado ou colocado no mercado para venda.

Mas alguns rumores agora apresentados dão como certo que a Google já tem os novos protótipos prontos e que estes estão já a ser enviados para testes para vários parceiros da Google.

O fim do projecto Explorer, onde o Google Glass estava a ser desenvolvido e testado, veio deixar dúvidas sobre o resultado dos desenvolvimentos deste dispositivo e se o mesmo seria terminado de vez ou se a Google iria recomeçar os trabalhos.

O seu responsável, Tony Fadell, revelou recentemente que o Glass só voltaria a estar disponível quando uma possível nova versão estivesse perfeita e de acordo com os desejos da Google. Esta sua ideia apontava para um possível adiamento nos seus desenvolvimentos.

Mas o site 9to5Google revelou agora que a Google poderá ter já um possível novo modelo em testes e que o mesmo já teria sido enviado a vários dos seus parceiros para que sejam iniciados as primeiras avaliações e os primeiros testes fora da empresa.

Esta informação contraria o que era esperado e que levava a crer que os desenvolvimentos do Google Glass pudessem sofrer um abrandamento e fossem atrasados para mais tarde.

Há ainda informações de que estes testes podem ter começado no final do ano passado, mas caso isso se confirme não seria com um possível novo modelo mas sim com uma adaptação do último que foi tornado público.

Existem muitas incógnitas sobre o rumo que os desenvolvimentos do Google Glass vão tomar. É certo que a Google quer dar continuidade e este seu projecto e torná-lo acessível a qualquer pessoa, mas para isso existe ainda algumas melhorias que precisam de ser realizadas.

Esta ideia revolucionária da Google sofreu alguns revezes na aceitação pública, sendo várias as razões para que fosse barrado ou impossibilitado de ser usado.

Será certo que a Google o lançará um dia, mas provavelmente será numa forma completamente diferente e sem a dependência de alguns elementos básicos, tornando-o uma peça que será integrada de forma subtil no nosso dia-a-dia.

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Self-driving cars are everywhere at CES

It's happening faster than we thought. Automakers like Volvo, VW, BMW, Audi and Mercedes are going full speed ahead, aiming for autonomous cars on the road by 2025.

Mercedes-Benz' F015 Luxury in Motion, which debuted at CES, was designed without a driver in mind. (Photo: Jim Motavalli)

LAS VEGAS—“In the future,” said Mercedes-Benz CEO Dieter Zetsche before a keynote audience at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), “the car grants access to private space and quality time.” What he meant was that people aren’t going to be driving, they’ll be sitting pretty in the back, playing video games, texting friends and reading the morning paper on their iPads.

A BMW ActiveAssist car, one of several that self-parked at CES. (Photo: Jim Motavalli)

The so-called autonomous car was everywhere in and around CES this year. Here’s a sampling:

This is the Audi A7 that traveled hands-free from Silicon Valley to CES in Vegas. The car in the background traversed the Hockenheim track in Germany at race speeds. (Photo: Jim Motavalli)

• Audi ran a specially equipped A7 from Silicon Valley to Vegas, a distance of 550 miles. That’s probably the longest sustained self-driving car trip to date. And it was on public highways, using only sensors on the car.

• Volvo is putting 100 auto-pilot “Drive Me” cars on the streets of Gothenburg, Sweden, in 2017. Some 30 miles of roads are being readied for self-driving, in a collaboration that includes Lindhomen Science Park and the Swedish Transportation Administration. Volvo’s Klas Bendrik predicted at the Telematics Update that self-driving cars would lead to 10 to 20 percent improvements in traffic flow and fuel savings.

• BMW and Volkswagen demonstrated valet auto pilot — your car drops you off, and then goes off and parks itself. These systems are likely to be the first to market, since parking often takes place on private property and is much easier to manage technically. Valeo’s version is called Valet Park4U, and it even sends you a smartphone notification when the car is safely tucked away (and charging, if it’s an electric car). In a crowded lot, the intrepid autopiloted vehicle will continue circling in search of a parking space until it finds one.

• Bosch and Delphi both have autopilot systems, Delphi’s aimed at urban jungle and Bosch’s at the highway traffic jam. Bosch formed its “Automated Driving” project team in 2011 in Palo Alto and Stuttgart, and in 2013 demonstrated its technology on German freeways. “The traffic of the future is electric, automated, and connected,” said Bosch Chairman Volkmar Denner.

During CES, the Boston Consulting Group released a report on autonomous cars with some bold predictions: self-driving cars will represent a roughly $42 billion market by 2025, when full autonomy will hit the road with a system sticker price of about $10,000. “Not cheap,” said Xavier Mosquet, North America leader of BCG’s automotive practice.

VW's Golf parking assistance demonstration. This one was with a driver in place. (Photo: Jim Motavalli)

The company said that partially self-driving cars with highway and traffic jam auto-pilot will be on the road “in large numbers” by 2017, and urban autopilot will hit in 2022. Here's that VW parking demonstration on video:

Read more: http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/transportation/blogs/self-driving-cars-are-everywhere-at-ces#ixzz3RxcQOUYv

Facebook knows you better than your friends

New research shows that just clicking the 'like' button reveals more about us than we realize.

Your Facebook likes reveal quite about bit about who you are. (Photo: Bloomua/Shutterstock)

n a moment of life imitating online life (wait, what's the difference again?) moments before I sat down to write this, a friend of mine on Facebook wrote the following as her status update: "I'm finding it a little disturbing that Facebook knows what I am looking up on Google and other sites not associated to FB. For example, hotels. FB knows the exact hotels I'm looking at on Google and other sites as it comes up on the right hand side of my news feed. It's kind of weird." Of course various people said she could erase her cookies and I suggested she could go into "incognito" mode while looking at Facebook (I'm not sure about all browsers, but I use Chrome, and it's an easy click to change modes). 

But yeah, it's creepy that Facebook seems to know more about you that you'd like (it may even predict if you'll get divorced) — but can it possibly know you better than your friends do? 

New research says yes. A study by scientists at the University of Cambridge and Stanford University looked at people's Facebook likes and compared them to the same group's answers on personality tests as well as tests done about them by their friends. With enough likes (about 300 was all that was needed), the computer program was a better predictor of people's personality than their friends or relatives were. (However, spouses knew the people best, even better than the program — phew!) 

“We know people are pretty good at predicting people’s personality traits, because it’s such an important thing in all of our interactions,” Wu Youyou, a PhD student in the Psychometrics Center at the University of Cambridge, told Time. “But we were surprised by how computers were able to do better than most friends by using just a single kind of digital data such as Facebook likes.” One of the reasons computers do such a good job at predictions is that they are unbiased and can base predictions of very large sets of data — people are more limited in the number of people they know well and also tend to remember more recent or emotional aspects of their friends or family (and to weigh those impressions more heavily). 

And your avatar is spilling the beans, too

Avatars (those little illustrated selves that are used in video games and on some other sites) are another online area where we are likely communicating more than we think. Another study, in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin looked at the "big five" personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. Half of those traits (extroversion, agreeableness and neuroticism in particular) could accurately be predicted through a person's self-chosen or self-created avatar. 

"Our data show that some traits are more easily inferred from avatars than others, avatars can communicate accurate and distinctive information regarding personality, and individuals with certain personality traits create avatars that are more likely to be perceived accurately," the scientists wrote in the study. 

It's not so crazy — after all, unlike the faces we are born with, our avatars are something we create (albeit from available options), so it makes sense that they can accurately predict some of who we are, though it's probably not something most avatar-creators are consciously aware of. 

If all this sounds disturbing, maybe it's not any more revealing than the way you present yourself in real life; and since "real life" and "online life" have merged, some of these hints about who we are — regardless of the venue — are simply offshoots of being human. It's amazing that we still end up revealing so much about ourselves when we feel so "hidden" behind the screen. Still creeped out? The upshot of us losing some of our privacy online is that in the end, we might learn more about what it means to be human. 

Related on MNN: 

• Dislike: Facebook makes you sad, says study
• How you use Facebook offers clues to your personality
• No Facebook for 99 days? New initiative dares you to try

Read more: http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/computers/blogs/facebook-knows-you-better-than-your-friends#ixzz3RxaOfiZP