BMW and Alpinestars team up for Tech-Air-based motorcycle gear

BMW and Alpinestars team up for Tech-Air-based motorcycle gear
BMW Motorrad and Alpinestars have just launched an exclusive
partnership  ШУУД ҮЗЭХ to develop

airbag safety clothing. The first product from the pairing will be a motorcycle jacket equipped with an airbag waistcoat based on Alpinestars' Tech-Air airbag technology.
Alpinestars touts its Tech-Air as the world’s first self-contained street airbag system designed to function without the need for sensors to be fitted to the motorcycle. This eliminates the need for any kind of installation or pairing with a specific bike. All the rider has to do is zip up their jacket and the system is activated.

An LED display located on the sleeve provides visual confirmation the system is active and displays the battery’s charging level. When fully charged, its battery pack should be good for 25 hours of continuous use, with Alpinestars adding that one hour of charging is sufficient for four hours of riding time.

The airbag is controlled by a small electronic unit housed in a durable, water resistant casing and uses an algorithm to detect imminent danger. This custom analysis software owes its sophistication to the experience harvested from MotoGP and the Tech-Air race airbag system developed by and for world champions Marc Marquez, Jorge Lorenzo and Dani Pedrosa.

The algorithm of the street version has been optimized to identify all possible danger situations, including low- and high-side collisions. It even detects accidents that occur when the motorcycle is stationary, such as a rear impact while waiting at the traffic lights, for example.

Depending on the accident type, the system will typically detect an impact within 30 to 60 milliseconds and deploy in the subsequent 25 ms, promising protection to the chest, kidney areas, back and shoulders.

Interchangeability is another strong selling point for the Tech-Air system. Although it can only be used in combination with specifically designed jackets, one airbag vest can be attached to different Tech-Air jackets depending on motorcycle type, weather conditions or simply the rider’s desire.

The BMW Motorrad jacket, which will carry branding of both BMW and Alpinestars and come in male and female versions, is set to make its public debut later this year.

The following video shows the Alpinestars Tech-Air street airbag system in action and outlines its functions.

What is 802.11ax WiFi, and will it really deliver 10Gbps?

What is 802.11ax WiFi, and will it really deliver 10Gbps?
Wireless standards tend to get proposed, drafted, and finally accepted at what
seems  ШУУД ҮЗЭХ like a glacial

pace. It’s been roughly 17 years since we began to see the first 802.11b wireless routers and laptops. In the intervening time, we’ve only seen three more mainstream standards take hold since then: 802.11g, 802.11n, and now 802.11ac. (I’m leaving out some lesser-used ones like 802.11a for the purposes of this story.)

Now a new standard looms over the horizon. And if you thought that your new 802.11ac router’s maximum speed of 1,300Mbps was already fast, think again. With 802.11ac fully certified and out the door, the Wi-Fi Alliance has started looking at its successor, 802.11ax — and it looks pretty enticing. While you may have a hard time getting more than 400Mbps to your smartphone via 802.11ac, 802.11ax should deliver real world speeds above 2Gbps. And in a lab-based trial of technology similar to 802.11ax, Huawei recently hit a max speed of 10.53Gbps, or around 1.4 gigabytes of data transfer per second. Clearly, 802.11ax is going to be fast. But what is it exactly?

What is 802.11ax WiFi?

The easiest way to think of 802.11ax is to start with 802.11ac — which allows for up to four different spatial streams (MIMO) — and then to massively increase the spectral efficiency (and thus max throughput) of each stream. Like its predecessor, 802.11ax operates in the 5GHz band, where there’s a lot more space for wide (80MHz and 160MHz) channels.

With 802.11ax, you get four MIMO (multiple-input-multiple-output) spatial streams, with each stream multiplexed with OFDA (orthogonal frequency division access). There is some confusion here as to whether the Wi-Fi Alliance and Huawei (which leads the 802.11ax working group) mean OFDA, or OFDMA. OFDMA (multiple access) is a well-known technique (and is the reason LTE is excellent for what it is). Either way, OFDM, OFDA, and OFDMA refer to methods of frequency-division multiplexing — each channel is separated into dozens, or even hundreds, of smaller subchannels, each with a slightly different frequency. By then turning these signals through right-angles (orthogonal), they can be stacked closer together and still be easily demultiplexed.

According to Huawei, the use of OFDA increases spectral efficiency by 10 times, which essentially translates into 10 times the max theoretical bandwidth, but 4x is seeming like more of a real-world possibility.

This lovely diagram shows you North America’s 5GHz channels, and where those 20/40/80/160MHz blocks fit in. As you can see, at 5GHz, you won’t ever get more than two 160MHz channels (and even then, only if you live in the boonies without interference from neighbors).

How fast is 802.11ax?

If we go for the more conservative 4x estimate, and assume a massive 160MHz channel, the maximum speed of a single 802.11ax stream will be around 3.5Gbps (compared with 866Mbps for a single 802.11ac stream). Multiply that out to a 4×4 MIMO network and you get a total capacity of 14Gbps. If you had a smartphone or laptop capable of two or three streams, you’d get some blazing connection speeds (7Gbps equates to around 900 megabytes per second; 10.5Gbps equates to 1,344MB/sec).

In a more realistic setup with 80MHz channels, we’re probably looking at a single-stream speed of around 1.6Gbps, which is a quite reasonable 200MB/sec. Again, if your mobile device supports MIMO, you could be seeing 400 or 600MB/sec. And in an even more realistic setup with 40MHz channels (such as what you’d probably get in a crowded apartment block), a single 802.11ax stream would net you 800Mbps (100MB/sec), or a total network capacity of 3.2Gbps. (Read: How to boost your WiFi speed by choosing the right channel.)

802.11ax range, reliability, and other factors

So far, neither the Wi-Fi Alliance nor Huawei has said much about 802.11ax’s other important features. Huawei says that “intelligent spectrum allocation” and “interference coordination” will be employed — but most modern WiFi hardware already does that.

It’s fairly safe to assume that working range will stay the same or increase slightly. Reliability should improve a little with the inclusion of OFDA, and with the aforementioned spectrum allocation and interference coordination features. Congestion may also be reduced as a result, and because data will be transferred between devices faster, thus freeing the airwaves for other connections.

Otherwise, 802.11ax will work in roughly the same fashion as 802.11ac, just with massively increased throughput. As we covered in our Linksys WRT1900AC review, 802.11ac is already pretty great. 802.11ax will just take things to the next level.

Do we need these kinds of speeds?

The problem, as with all things WiFi, isn’t necessarily the speed of the network itself — it’s congestion, and more than that even, it’s what the devices themselves are capable of. For example, even 802.11ax’s slowest speed of 100MB/sec is pushing it for a hard drive — and it’s faster than what the eMMC NAND flash storage in most smartphones can handle as well. Best-case scenario, a modern smartphone’s storage tops out at around 90MB/sec sequential read, 20MB/sec sequential write — worst case, with lots of little files, you’re looking at speeds in the single-megabyte range. Obviously, for the wider 80MHz and 160MHz channels, you’re going to need some desktop SSDs (or an array of desktop SSDs) to take advantage of 802.11ax’s max speeds.

Of course, not every use-case requires you to read or write data to a slow storage medium. But even so, alternate uses like streaming 4K video still fall short of these multi-gigabit speeds. Even if Netflix begins streaming 8K in the next few years (and you thought there wasn’t enough to watch in 4K!), 802.11ax has more than enough bandwidth. And the bottleneck isn’t your WiFi; It’s your internet connection. The current time frame for 802.11ax certification is 2018 — until then, upgrading to 802.11ac (if you haven’t already) should be a nice stopgap.

Ikawa: The smartphone controlled home coffee roaster

Ikawa: The smartphone controlled home coffee roaster
A London-based startup is looking to bring yet another level 
of  ШУУД ҮЗЭХ refinement to the

kitchens of coffee aficionados by launching a smartphone-controlled micro-roaster. Billed as the world’s first digital micro-roaster, the Ikawa countertop machine can roast green coffee beans in 3-10 minutes, ready to be dropped in your smartphone-controlled coffee machine. 

The beans are roasted using a cyclone system patented with the support of James Dyson. The process is started with a push of a button on the device itself, but can be adjusted using your iPhone or Android device. The app includes a number of different recipes you can use to change up your roast, controlling things like the temperature in your roaster, the duration of your roast, and the air flow to your beans during the roasting process. Depending on the blends of those factors, you’ll get a different flavor profile from your beans.

You can go beyond the built-in recipes to try out your own combinations, and if you stumble upon something good, you can share it with the community through the app’s built-in social network of sorts.

If you don’t have a spot to buy green, unroasted beans near you, Ikawa can deliver some to your doorstep. The company sources the beans from popular coffee destinations such as Burundi, Ethiopia, Brazil and Guatemala, and says that 10 percent of the sales of those beans will then be reinvested in projects that work with farmers to create better-quality beans and allow them to earn more money for their harvests.

Ikawa is currently raising money on Kickstarter for its first run of roasters and has already reached its funding goal. You can secure one of the first roasters off the assembly line for an investment of US$690. The first Ikawas are expected to ship in February of 2016.

ReFlow reuses grey water, saves fresh water

ReFlow reuses grey water, saves fresh water

"Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink." The famous line from the poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
by  ШУУД ҮЗЭХ Samuel Taylor

Coleridge rings increasingly true, as all over the world water shortages threaten the way of life people have grown used to. Climate change and overpopulation have compromised water sources, a threat that calls for ingenious solutions to reduce demand. One of these is the ReFlow G2RSystem (or Re-Flow for short), a system that recycles grey water from the shower or bath to the toilet tank to flush waste.

Designed by a Vancouver-based team, Re-Flow performs a simple task: recycling and re-using the grey water in the same room. The system consists of a compact, decentralized grey-water collection unit, which is claimed to save up to 30 percent of an average household's fresh water consumption.

The collector nozzle connects at the juncture of the overflow drain of the bathtub, to reclaim the drained water back into the ReFlow's water storage tank. This reclaimed water is fed through a filter and disinfected before it's gravity-fed into the back of the toilet tank.

 

The idea is similar to the OASIS Domestic Greywater Treatment System, a device that turns grey water from a range of domestic activities (including clothes- and hand-washing) into water for garden irrigation, toilet flushing, laundry and car-washing.

The main selling point of the Re-Flow system is its simplicity and unobtrusiveness. The designers say it takes one person and a screwdriver to install it, a job that takes less than one hour. The system can be fitted in and retrofitted to a number of bathroom types, so there’s no need for basement storage or renovation.

There are several benefits. Besides saving water (and reducing bills), it also relieves pressure on municipal sewage, sparing water systems and local ecology. In places like California, which is suffering from severe droughts, an installed ReFlow could come in handy to help citizens deal with the crisis at home.

The makers have developed a successful proof-of-concept prototype. Now they need to develop the components for the system to be mass-produced. The design complies with international planning codes and meets health standards for reclaimed water quality reuse.

The team behind the system is fundraising on Indiegogo to take the project to the next level. To get a ReFlow unit, funding options start at US$800. Delivery is estimated for November, assuming all goes according to plan.

 

The Airbus H160 Helicopter Is a Technological Tour de Force

The Airbus H160 Helicopter Is a Technological Tour de Force
Airbus unveiled the all-new Airbus H160 medium-sized helicopter—previously known as the X4—at a recent
industry  ШУУД ҮЗЭХ event in Orlando,

Fla., proudly claiming that it represents a new generation in cutting-edge design and operating efficiency. The aircraft’s fully composite airframe reduces weight without compromising strength, requires less maintenance, and resists corrosion and wear. The distinctive double-canted tail incorporates the biggest Fenestron shrouded tail rotor ever made, which reduces noise and vibration while enhancing stability and aerodynamic efficiency. Airbus says the H160 will use up to 20 percent less fuel than the current generation of similar-sized helicopters.
 Powered by two new fuel-efficient Turbomeca Arrano turboshaft engines, the H160 can carry up to 12 passengers at a cruising speed of about 185 mph for distances beyond 500 miles. Other features include an all-new biplane stabilizer that makes it easier for the pilot to maneuver during low-speed flight and while hovering, and Blue Edge main rotor blades that reduce exterior noise by 50 percent. The H160 is the first aircraft to be branded as an Airbus Helicopter, as the company leaves behind the Eurocopter brand to better reflect its global scope. First flight is expected later this year, with deliveries to start in 2018; the company has not yet announced a price.

Nvidia kills Icera soft modem, refocuses Tegra on automotive design

Nvidia posted its first quarter results yesterday, with strong growth in PC gaming and automotive sales. The GPU manufacturer also announced that it would cease all
business ШУУД ҮЗЭХ operations related

to its Icera softmodem technology, with the intent of wrapping up that segment by the second half of the year.
 Killing Icera brings an end to one of the more ambitious chapters in Nvidia’s quest for mobile market domination. When Nvidia bought the company in 2011, 4G and LTE support were just beginning to roll out across the United States. After several quiet years with relatively few design wins, Nvidia came out swinging in 2013, with the simultaneous announcement of Tegra 4, 4i, and the Icera i500 stand-alone modem.

In theory, Icera’s modems offered better power consumption and smaller die sizes compared with standalone parts from other companies, while the Tegra 4i’s mixture of 60 GPU cores and a quad-core Cortex-A9 with an integrated LTE modem was meant to serve as Nvidia’s answer to Qualcomm’s dominance of the modem industry. Nvidia foresaw, correctly, that having an integrated modem could be key to the future of smartphone and tablet sales. Unfortunately, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear — though we’ve heard rumors that Icera’s power consumption was much higher than the competition — neither Tegra 4i nor the Icera i500 ever caught on.

In May 2013, Nvidia announced it had actually delayed Tegra 4 to concentrate on bringing Tegra 4i to market, but this additional focus never appears to have yielded much fruit. Nvidia’s first Shield used Tegra 4 and the follow-up Shield Tablet tapped Icera’s i500 if you bought the LTE variant, but I’m not sure if any major US company tapped Tegra 4i or Icera for a large-scale product launch.

The ramifications of that failure were significant. Nvidia is just one of many broadband companies to bow out of the LTE ring, and it’s no accident that Qualcomm’s shadow has grown long in the wake of these departures. Samsung and Intel both have competing LTE solutions (Samsung ships its own modem in the Galaxy S6), but it’s not clear if either company can disrupt Qualcomm’s domination of the modem industry.

 

A recent report by Anshel Sag of Moore Insights & Strategy revealed how strong Qualcomm’s lead has become. The baseband modem powering the Snapdragon 810 drew significantly less power than the Exynos 303 solution in the Samsung Galaxy Alpha.

Nvidia predicts strong second half on Windows 10, 4K gaming

The Icera shutdown will cost Nvidia some cash, but the company is bullish on the long-term market. It expects a flat-to-down Q2, thanks to pending demand for Windows 10. With DirectX 12, Windows 10, and continued adoption of 4K all hitting more-or-less simultaneously in Q3 and Q4, Nvidia was fairly confident of increased product sales.

Earlier this week, we covered 30 Comments and the company’s announcement that it would bring an HBM-capable product to market this quarter. During Nvidia’s analyst call, investors asked Jen-Hsun if he had any comment on AMD’s roadmap or Nvidia’s own near-term plans to adopt technologies like HBM. Jen-Hsun acknowledged AMD as a strong competitor, but turned the question to an emphasis on Nvidia’s software, tools, and ecosystem advances rather than a strict head-to-head comparison. Nvidia is also expected to adopt HBM for its next-generation GPU, codenamed Pascal, and due in 2016.

Interestingly, however, when asked if Nvidia would be adopting 14/16nm technologies in the near future, Jen-Hsun replied that the company had never had process leadership, and that Maxwell demonstrated Nvidia was perfectly capable of wringing additional efficiency and performance-per-watt out of its hardware without needing a new node. Given Maxwell’s overall performance, it’s hard to argue with that logic.

Nintendo to release five ‘hit’ smartphone games by 2017

Nintendo to release five ‘hit’ smartphone games by 2017
Today, Nintendo released the financial results briefing for the end of the last fiscal year. It’s largely filled with graphs and boring business talk, but one point stood
out as ШУУД ҮЗЭХ particularly

noteworthy. We already knew that Nintendo is working with DeNA to release smartphone games, but it’s actually going a step further, and giving us a rough timeline for the releases.

On the third page of today’s investor relations release, Nintendo announced that it only plans on shipping approximately five mobile titles between now and March 31st of 2017. A line-up like that sounds incredibly sparse, and that leads credence to the idea that Nintendo isn’t totally on board with this whole “app store” thing.

After paying lip service to the phone games, the report immediately follows up with, “Nintendo continues to have strong passion and believes in the promising prospects for the future of our dedicated video game system business.” If you weren’t already sure, Nintendo‘s bread and butter is its hardware, so don’t expect that to change in the least. If anything, the promise of smartphone games seems to be a ploy to calm the nerves of antsy stock holders.

Interestingly, Nintendo opted to get out in front of the issue right away. In anticipation of criticism, Nintendo preemptively responds “you may think it is a small number, [but we] aim to make each title a hit…” It goes on to poo-poo idea of simply porting existing games onto phones, and emphasizes that Nintendo is only interested in making mobile games that make sense on the hardware. And considering Nintendo’s track record of using quirky (or gimmicky) hardware functionality in its titles, that’s not much of a surprise.

I have no doubt that Nintendo wants to leverage the massive smartphone install base to its advantage, but I’m skeptical about how dedicated it is to actually shipping meaningful games. Frankly, I think the partnersgip with DeNA is telling. If Nintendo enthusiastically wanted to make games for phones, there’s no way it’d be having a third-party do so much of the heavy lifting.

Also, it seems that Nintendo can’t bring itself to mention the phone games without bringing up the NX — the next-gen console currently being worked on in Kyoto. Nintendo clearly has no interest in leaving the hardware market, and all of this talk about smartphone games seems to be done through gritted teeth.

It’s not all bad news, though. On the upside, the Amiibos seem to be selling like hotcakes. Unfortunately, thr supply chain is having issues. Rarity is good to a certain point, but there is a limit. Just like we learned with the Wii, long-term supply problems leaves money on the table, and allows competitors to swoop in. Activision, Disney, and Lego are already players in the toys-to-life market, and it’s only a matter of time before it gets even more crowded. Nintendo needs to get its act together before the novelty wears off.

Microsoft demonstrates new HoloLens prototype, talks up dedicated Holographic processor

Microsoft demonstrates new HoloLens prototype, talks up dedicated Holographic processor
Microsoft unveiled new prototypes and details of its HoloLens project this
week, ШУУД ҮЗЭХ and the new

technology looks like it could have a profound impact on how we use computers in the future. Like the Oculus Rift, the HoloLens system is headset-based, but that’s where the similarities end. Where Oculus Rift creates entire 3D realms to explore (virtual reality), HoloLens is meant to create holographic overlays over existing objects and structure in the real world (Augmented Reality).
Microsoft had previously showed off its HoloLens technology, but the January demos relied on bulky equipment. The new prototypes are, dare we say it, rather sleek. The fact that HoloLens is only meant to augment real-life rather than completely replace it means that there’s no need for a screen and face-covering VR headset.

 Microsoft has been coy about the exact components inside the device, but the company’s blog claims that there’s no necessary markers, no external cameras, wires, no need for a phone, and no connected PC. Microsoft claims that the HoloLens contains significantly more processing power than your average laptop but doesn’t just rely on a standard CPU or GPU. The company claims to have invented a third piece of silicon — a “Holographic Processing Unit,” or HPU.” Details on what, exactly, the HPU is are scarce on the ground, but PCWorld reported earlier this year that the CPU and GPU are based on Intel’s Cherry Trail. This puts the claim that the platform packs more processing power than your average laptop into serious question.

 According to Redmond, “The HPU gives HoloLens the real-time ability to understand where you’re looking, to understand your gestures, and to spatially map the world around you. Conceived, designed, and engineered by Microsoft, the HPU is designed specifically to support the needs of HoloLens.” It’s devoted to processing data from specific sensors inside the unit and can reportedly be used by developers to create amazing experiences “without having to work through complex physics calculations.”

The goals of HoloLens can be gleaned from the mockup images Microsoft has released. The company clearly envisions a day when complex software can stretch beyond the monitor and into real life, giving content creators, gamers, and even day-to-day users the option to manage aspects of their virtual lives or worlds in the real world.

The future of Azure

Microsoft has yet to clarify how it is that the HoloLens can function without connecting to a smartphone or PC, and this is a non-trivial detail. While device manufacturers continue to iterate on products and create better experiences, there’s basically no way Microsoft can pack a top-end, smartphone-class battery, SoC, and cellular or WiFi radio into a diminutive headset. The alternative to doing that, of course, is to shift workloads and processing into the cloud.

By pushing the AR workloads over to Azure, Microsoft’s cloud platform, the company can use lower-end hardware on the “client” side. You need enough hardware to handle local processing and rendering, but past that point you can shift storage and application interfaces over the cloud. Some of Microsoft’s mockups show people using HoloLens to interact with a PC while performing 3D modeling, but that doesn’t mean Azure isn’t handling the back-end connections.

When Microsoft launched the Xbox One, one of the capabilities it teased was the option to move back-end rendering to a cloud platform, thereby augmenting in-game graphics from a distance. We haven’t seen any title take advantage of this capability to date, but HoloLens could be part of what Microsoft was talking about. Some of you may remember lllumiroom— a light projection system that could be added to a console to enhance its visuals. HoloLens might represent an evolution of that concept — the ability to play a game on a TV, but see aspects of the title projected around the primary display. Autodesk has also pledged to support the product with its Spark3D open-source 3D printing platform.

After being burned on multiple Next Big Thing interfaces, however, we’re a bit cautious on Microsoft’s ability to pull this tech off. Kinect garnered a great deal of praise before launch, but ultimately failed to make much of a difference in how people used their Xbox’s. Even the much-touted Wiimote and PlayStation Move did little for the gaming market as a whole. VR systems like Oculus Rift have caught the attention of a certain segment of the gaming industry and press, but have not yet demonstrated broad consumer appeal. Even 3D glasses and content failed to catch on with consumers as a whole, suggesting that how we consume and interact with content is fairly entrenched.

The feedback from journalists who have spent time with HoloLens suggests that Microsoft has something potentially great on their hands — but whether the company can capitalize on it effectively is yet to be seen.