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Samsung Gear VR will set you back $199 USD
goTenna, the gadget that allows off-the-grid texting
NASA’s Swarmie Robots to Mine Asteroids Like Ants

Samsung Gear VR will set you back $199 USD

Posted: 08 Sep 2014 07:00 AM PDT

Samsung jumps into the VR race with its own set of goggles, which we now know will cost $199 USD.

The Galaxy Note 4 will have quite the companion device with the Samsung Gear VR, a virtual reality headset created by partnering with the Oculus VR team. Both the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 and the headset are scheduled to launch later this year, costing $199 USD for the headset and up to $799 for the phablet off-contract, which could go down to $299 with a two-year agreement.

The rumor goes that the Gear VR price would be translated as-is to Europe, where it would end costing $199 euros instead, marginally steeper than its overseas counterpart. This headset, albeit cheap, will only work paired with the Note 4 so it is not an alternative to the Oculus itself (that is, unless hackers have something to say about it) which by the end represents quite a sum, but sadly, such is the cost of being the first to dip your toes into an emerging technology.

Via Venturebeat

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goTenna, the gadget that allows off-the-grid texting

Posted: 08 Sep 2014 06:00 AM PDT

Having so much technology and connectivity all around us is easy to get used to. That is, until you realize you can’t access it because of your location.

We’ve grown so accustomed to our technology and having the constant support of the internet and our loved ones thanks to our smartphones that it’s really noticeable when our gadgets’ signals drop to zero. This device goTenna is a solution for those who find themselves in that situation frequently. Put simply, goTenna allos device-to-device communication without needing to tap into any central connectivity. By using a BluetoothLE connection, devices that are goTenna-enabled can detect each other and communicate using long-range radio waves.

Basically, users can detect and communicate with their friends easily without having to depend on the main grid, as long as they are in range, even if they are in airplane mode. The idea came up as the creators were trying to find each other in New Orleans during the events of Katrina, tragedy which served as the inspiration for the device. The product isn’t out yet, but there’s no crowd-funding involved in it: you can straight up pre-order two devices for $149 USD at their official website.

Via The Epoch Times

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NASA’s Swarmie Robots to Mine Asteroids Like Ants

Posted: 07 Sep 2014 01:50 PM PDT

There’s a lot of money in asteroid mining, and James Cameron is not the only one who knows that. NASA developed Swarmie robots, which are meant to forage asteroids in a manner that makes them similar to ants.

There are two main benefits to mining asteroids. First of all, some of them contain several times the amount of metals or water found on our beloved Terra. Secondly, it would be terribly counter-productive to get water and metals from Earth and transport them to our outposts in space. Google’s Eric Schmidt and film maker James Cameron are two of the key partners of Planetary Resources, a company that intends to identify and mine the commercially viable asteroids. NASA, on the other hand, is also confident that asteroid mining could take Earth’s economy to new heights, and proceeded to developing Swarmies, robots that resemble ants in the way they’re foraging.

Kurt Leucht, one of the engineers who developed NASA’s Swarmie robots, pointed out that “For a while people were interested in putting as much smarts and capability as they could on their one robot. Now people are realizing you can have much smaller, much simpler robots that can work together and achieve a task. One of them can roll over and die and it’s not the end of the mission because the others can still accomplish the task.”

Project lead Cheryle Mako noted that “This would give you something smaller and cheaper that could always be running up and down the length of the pipeline so you would always know the health of your pipelines. If we had small swarming robots that had a couple sensors and knew what they were looking for, you could send them out to a leak site and find which area was at greatest risk.”

Small at the moment, the Swarmie robots will need some rescaling in order to prove viable on asteroids. They’re packed with nothing more than a Wi-Fi antenna, a GPS system, and a webcam, so they’re not that impressive from that point of view. Still, it’s their “group mind” that sets them apart from other robots, and their capability of interacting with one another. In other words, the perfect recipe for the rise of the machines. We might have to say “Goodbye, Earth!” in a way we didn’t mean to.

As a bonus, here are a few infographics you should check if you want to learn about the potential of asteroid mining.

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