Fairphone 2 Launched as 'World's First Modular Smartphone'

Fairphone, the company behind the first 'open sourced smartphone'  unveiled back in 2013, is out with its new smartphone known as Fairphone 2. The latest product from the company is acclaimed to be the 'first modular smartphone', something Google has been working on for years now with Project Ara. Google back in August slowed down on the launch of its highly anticipated Project Ara modular smartphones until 2016.

Retailed at EUR 529.38 (approximately Rs. 38,000), the Fairphone 2 will start shipping out December. Olivier Hebert, Chief Technology Officer, Fairphone, said that the company built its second  range smartphone as "a robust phone designed to last as long as possible." The company emphasized on the modular construction for "easy dis/assembly" of the Fairphone 2. The company specifically said that the handset was designed for use and service in Europe only.

"We first looked at the key drivers that make people to replace their devices
on a regular basis and looked critically at the basic features of conventional
smartphone architectures that trigger those drivers. After compiling a range
of improvement features, we selected a subset of items that could be addressed
with clever engineering in a reasonable time frame,and explored the tradeoffs
that were inherent with those various options," added Hebert while
explaining the architecture of the Fairphone 2 in a blog post.

Fairphone also announced that it is collaborating with Jolla to support the
operating system for the Fairphone 2 smartphone. Jolla and Fairphone will
release a customised version of the Sailfish OS for the handset. Till then,
 the Fairphone 2 will ship with Android 5.1 Lollipop out-of-the-box.

For specifications, the Fairphone 2 features a 5-inch full-HD (1080x1920 pixels)
LCD TFT display with Corning Gorilla Glass. It is powered by quad-core
Snapdragon 801 processor clocked at 2.26GHz coupled with 2GB of RAM.
It packs 32GB of inbuilt storage.The dual-SIM based handset supports 2G,
3G, and 4G LTE. The smartphone sports an 8-megapixel rear camera and
a 2-megapixel front camera. The handset was backed by a 2420mAh battery.
It measured 143x73x11mm and weighs148 grams.
It included ambient light, proximity, compass, accelerometer,
and gyroscope.

A vest that allows you feel words which could help deaf people

A prototype vibrating vest may alter the way deaf people understand speech by opening a new path to the brain, has been developed by researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas.

The device works on the principle of sensory substitution - looking for alternative ways for one sense to be experienced by another - and is fitted with a series of mobile phone motors which vibrate in particular patterns depending on what is heard.

Highly-sensitive laser camera able to see round corners in real time

You may not see what’s around the corner — unless you have an advanced camera designed by researchers at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland. This device is designed to take high resolution photographs that is able to detect small reflected lights off objects beyond its field of vision. The resulting product is a camera that sees round corners in real time.

The single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) camera depends on a type of echo mapping. You can refer to it as a radar, but with light. This part is not something new — other projects have managed to do similar things.This camera is very sensitive that it can snap photos every second. So,you can observe an object moving using the SPAD camera even when it’s physically out of sight.

To facilitate this, the researchers used a laser ranging technology to produce photons.The laser pulse generated is fired at a surface beyond the corner similar in direction to where the camera faces. When it strikes the surface,the light is reflected in all directions. The camera catches this propagation of photons, then it waits for a response — an echo. The wave will eventually strike the out of site object and reflect back, but feebly. The laser is especially fast,firing as much as 67 million times per second. This streams a lot of information into the camera since it can detect a single photon passing through its field of vision.

You may not have a photo-realistic rendering of the out of site object, but the SPAD does reveal plenty of data. The photons received by the camera may be used to calculate the size, speed, and location of the object approximate to a centimeter or two. It may even manage to identify multiple objects based on the scattering of photons.

Doctors May be Able to Print Micro-Organs with New Technology

Earlier 3D printers only print plastic articles,scientists say 3D-printed objects stuffed with embryonic stem cells may enable doctors print micro-organs for transplant patients in the nearest future.

Embryonic stem cells,collected from human embryos, can grow into any type of cell in the body like brain tissue, heart cells or bone. This ability makes them good for use in regenerative medicine — repairing and replacing damaged cells, tissues and organs.

Scientists usually experiment with embryonic stem cells by loading them with biological instructions that makes them  develop into specific type tissues — a process known as cell differentiation. This process starts with the cells forming spherical masses called embryoid bodies — an activity that resembles early stages of embryonic development. [7 Cool Uses of 3D Printing in Medicine]

Earlier research revealed that the best way to grow embryonic stem cells is not in flat lab dishes, but in 3D environments that resembles how these cells develop in human bodies. Recently, scientists developed 3D printers for embryonic stem cells. A 3D printer operates by depositing layers of material, just as ordinary printers lay ink, only it can also lay  flat layers on top of one another to make 3D objects.

Before now, 3D printers used for embryonic stem cells only produced flat arrays or simple mounds known as "stalagmites," of cells. Recently,researchers said,for the first time,they were able to develop a way to print 3D structures loaded with embryonic stem cells.

"We were able to use a 3D-printing method to grow embryoid bodies in a controlled manner to make highly uniform blocks of embryonic stem cells," study co-author Wei Sun, a professor of mechanical engineering at Tsinghua University in Beijing and Drexel University in Philadelphia,told Live Science.

In theory, these blocks can be used as Lego bricks to build tissues"and even micro-organs," Sun added.

In experiments, the researchers simultaneously printed out mouse embryonic stem cells with a hydrogel, the same type of substance from which soft contact lenses are made from. Since embryonic stem cells are relatively fragile, the scientists made sure to protect the cells as much as possible — for example, by locating the most comfortable temperature for them and increasing the size of the nozzle used to print them.

Nearly all the cells survived the printing process, according to the new study. The cells combined to form embryoid bodies within the hydrogel scaffolds and generated the kind of proteins that would be expected from healthy embryonic stem cells, the researchers said. The scientists also noticed that they could dissolve the hydrogel to harvest the embryoid bodies.

The size and uniqueness of embryoid bodies can greatly affect the types of cells they turn into. The researchers said their new technology resulted in better control of embryoid body size and uniformity than previous methods could achieve.

"The grown embryoid body is uniform and homogenous, and serves as [a] much better starting point for further tissue growth," Sun said in a statement. "It was really exciting to see that we were able to grow embryoid bodies in such a controlled manner."

"Our next step is to find out more about how we can vary the size of the embryoid body by changing the printing and structural parameters, and how varying the embryoid body size leads to 'manufacture' of different cell types," study co-lead author Rui Yao an assistant professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, said in a statement.

In the long term, the researchers would like to print different kinds of embryoid bodies side by side. "This would promote different cell types developing next to each other, which would lead the way for growing micro-organs from scratch within the lab," Yao said in a statement.

The scientists detailed their findings online Nov. 4 in the journal Biofabrication.

'X-Ray Vision' Employs Radio Waves to 'See' Through Obstacles

"X-ray vision" able track people's movements behind walls employing radio signals could be the next for smart homes, gaming and health care, researchers hinted.

A recent system built by computer scientists at MIT is able to beam out radio waves which bounce off the human body. Receivers pick up the reflections, which are processed using computer algorithms to track people’s movements in real time, they added.

Unlike other motion-tracking devices, however, the new system takes advantage of the fact that radio signals with short wavelengths can travel through walls. This allowed the system, dubbed RF-Capture, to identify 15 different people through a wall with nearly 90 percent accuracy, the researchers said. The RF-Capture system could even track their movements to within 0.8 inches (2 centimeters). [10 Technologies That Will Transform Your Life]

Researchers say this technology could have applications as varied as gesture-controlled gaming devices that rival Microsoft's Kinect system, motion capture for special effects in movies, or even the monitoring of hospital patients' vital signs.

"It basically lets you see through walls," said Fadel Adib, a Ph.D. student at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and lead author of a new paper describing the system. "Our revolution is still nowhere near what optical systems can give you, but over the last three years, we have moved from being able to detect someone behind a wall and sense coarse movement, to today, where you can see roughly what a person looks like and even get a person’s breathing and heart rate."

The team, led by Dina Katabi, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, has been developing wireless tracking technologies for a number of years. In 2013, the researchers used Wi-Fi signals to detect humans through walls and track the direction of their movement.

The new system, unveiled at the SIGGRAPH Asia conference held from Nov. 2 to Nov. 5 in Japan, uses radio waves that are 1,000 times less powerful than Wi-Fi signals. Adib said improved hardware and software make RF-Capture a far more powerful tool overall.

"These [radio waves used by RF-Capture] produce a much weaker signal, but we can extract far more information from them because they are structured specifically to make this possible," Adib told Live Science.

The system uses a T-shaped antenna array the size of a laptop that features four transmitters along the vertical section and 16 receivers along the horizontal section. The array is controlled from a standard computer with a powerful graphics card, which is used to analyze data, the researchers said.

Because inanimate objects also reflect signals, the system starts by scanning for static features and removes them from its analysis. Then, it takes a series of snapshots, looking for reflections that vary over time, which represent moving human body parts.

However, unless a person’s body parts are at just the right angle in relation to the antenna array they will not redirect the transmitted beams back to the sensors. This means each snapshot captures only some of their body parts, and which ones are captured varies from frame to frame. "In comparison with light, every part of the body reflects the signal back, and that's why you can recover exactly what the person looks like using a camera," Adib said. "But with [radio waves], only a subset of body parts reflect the signal back, and you don't even know which ones."

The solution is an intelligent algorithm that can identify body parts across snapshots and use a simple model of the human skeleton to stich them together to create a silhouette, the researchers said. But scanning the entire 3D space around the antenna array uses a lot of computer power, so to simplify things, the researchers borrowed concepts from military radar systems that can lock onto and track targets. [6 Incredible Spy Technologies That Are Real]

Using a so-called "coarse-to-fine" algorithm, the system starts by using a small number of antennas to scan broad areas and then gradually increases the number of antennas in order to zero in on areas of strong reflection that represent body parts, while ignoring the rest of the room.

This approach allows the system to identify which body part a person moved, with 99 percent accuracy, from about 10 feet (3 meters) away and through a wall. It could also trace letters that individuals wrote in the air by tracking the movement of their palms to within fractions of an inch (just a couple of centimeters).

Currently, RF-Capture can only track people who are directly facing the sensors, and it can't perform full skeletal tracking as traditional motion-capture solutions can. But Adib said that introducing a more complex model of the human body, or increasing the number of arrays, could help overcome these limitations.

The system costs just $200 to $300 to build, and the MIT team is already in the process of applying the technology to its first commercial application — a product called Emerald that is designed to detect, predict and prevent falls among the elderly.

"This is the first application that's going to hit the market," Adib said. "But once you have a device and lots of people are using it, the cost of producing such a device immediately gets reduced, and once it's reduced, you can use it for even more applications."

The initial applications of the technology are likely to be in health care, and the team will soon be deploying the technology in a hospital ward to monitor the breathing patterns of patients suffering from sleep apnea. But as the resolution of the technology increases, Adib said, it could open up a host of applications in gesture control and motion capture.

"We still have a long path to go before we can get to that kind of level of fidelity," he added. "There are a lot of technical challenges that still need to be overcome. But I think over the next few years, these systems are going to significantly evolve to do that."

Adobe upgrades Photoshop, Premiere Pro, adds stunning Fuse CC 3D character-creation tool

Adobe is really measuring up to its standard of good bargain for Creative Cloud subscribers that it would continuosly add value to its tools on a regular basis. Once again this year, Adobe not only updated its Creative Suite applications with new features, but also added a cool new application — Adobe Fuse CC.

Adobe Photoshop Updates November 2015

While not as drastic as the Photoshop update earlier this year, this new version brings a major user interface change with a fully customizable tool palettes. I believe nobody uses all the tools in the palette, but everyone has to go through the whole set to pick out the ones they need.You can drag and drop the tools you use frequently into sets of your own making, or just remove the ones that get in the way. The customization box provides real time view of the changes which are hardly necessary, is quite good. As with everything you customize in Photoshop, you can save different tool palette layouts for numerous uses.

Workspaces can also be customized. The new Design Space capability comes with an HTML5-based layer on top of the Photoshop engine, for easy and quick design of artboards — useful for quick creation of layouts usable on mobile devices. SVG-format files can now be used directly in Photoshop. The UI has also been mopped up a bit, with improved support for touch with an option to show larger tabs and a soft keyboard for modifier keys, as well as extra touch gesture support. These additional capabilities are mostly useful for users of Microsoft Surface tablets.

For those editing images for the Web, or for clients, the Export As… command continues to get faster and more feature rich. Adobe want to completely remove the need for the Save for Web… command over time, although the older version is still available for now.

For graphic artists and designers, many of the same improved features are echoed in updated versions of Adobe Illustrator and Adobe InDesign. In addition InDesign now features a tool for quickly converting print layout documents to online formats. There is also an amazing new tool, Adobe Portfolio which allows photographers to easily create websites for themselves.

Adobe Fuse CC: Adorable Character Generator

You can easily create fairly-lifelike 3D characters from scratch with almost no work. You can choose different looks for different parts of the body, the hair, and clothes simply by pointing and clicking.That is not pretty strange,the ease of customizing every aspect of your character by selecting it and then changing properties (through direct manipulation) allow you create any person you can think of without knowing anything about either anatomy or drawing.

Close Photoshop integration

Previously, animating characters needed the use of an online service (like acquired by Adobe) or a different application. Now, Photoshop users can use directly the characters created in Fuse. Just save them to your Adobe Library from Fuse, and then drag them into a Photoshop document. The character appears as a new layer with the rest of your content. The good part is ,Adobe has taken all the very cool animations from Mixamo and add them to Photoshop, so you have a guitar-playing rock star, or kick-boxing action hero, with just a few clicks of the mouse.
Just like any 3D object in Photoshop, your character can be moved around in a number of ways, for close integration into your overall design. Photoshop’s lighting tools are also available for you to customize the final look of your scene, coupled with the ability to move the virtual camera around. 

Video-handling updates throughout the Creative Suite

Users of Adobe’s increasing number of other tools are not left out. There are lots of goodies across the board, with particular emphasis on uses for UX designers and video editing. For example, Adobe Stock now has over a million HD video clips in addition to still images and graphics. It also features closer integration with Adobe’s Library feature for a more-streamlined workflow.

As promised, Premiere Pro now comes additional support for Ultra HD and HDR video, and has been optimized for use with touch-enabled devices. It has also included an Optical Flow Time Remapper that allows better fast-and-slow motion special effects and frame rate conversions.

Adobe’s mobile video editing app, Premiere Clip, has also been updated to version 2.0, and made available on Android. It lets you not only edit traditional video clips, but quickly make a “Ken-Burns-style” slideshow — complete with automatically-selected or your own music — from your images. .

More still to come

Adobe still has more to come from the list of features it promised at MAX — some later this year, and some next year. One of the coolest new tools — Project Comet — is still in the “teaser” stage, but it promises to be a very powerful UX design system when it comes out in 2016. In the meantime, there is something for everyone in this update for Adobe’s Creative Suite. The updated versions are available for download to Creative Suite subscribers through the App Update feature in Adobe’s Creative Cloud application.

Which is better Xbox One or PlayStation 4 ?

Two years ago Xbox One and PS4 were unveiled in the U.S. In that time, they’ve both earned their status as the origin of new generation game consoles. Microsoft found out after fews months of release,it require a $400,competitive retail price version in-comparison with the PS4 that lacks the Kinect camera, and has since rectified.

Afterwards both Xbox One and PS4 have sold quite well, with Sony on the winning side, although January’s $50 price slash for the Kinect-less Xbox One assisted Microsoft in the run up.The two companies have launched numerous bundles that unbalanced the price advantage in one direction or another depending on the consumers need in a given bundle. How can we actually compare the two consoles with each other? If you’re aiming to purchasing one of these consoles–you need to know these.

Unlike earlier console generations, the PS4 and Xbox One are very similar in the hardware-sense. With both powered by x86 AMD APU , the Sony and Microsoft consoles are wholly PCs — their hardware types, and performance, can be likened in the same way as you would compare two x86-based laptops or ARM-based Android tablets. 

Processor

For the PS4 and Xbox One way back in 2013, Microsoft and Sony both went for a half-custom AMD APU — a 28nm part fabricated by TSMC that posseses an eight-core Jaguar CPU, coupled with a Radeon 7000-series GPU. The PS4 and Xbox One CPUs are totally identical, except that the Xbox One is clocked at 1.75GHz, while the PS4 is at 1.6GHz.

The Jaguar CPU core itself isn’t particularly excellent in performance. In PCs, Jaguar was used in AMD’s Kabini and Temash parts, targeted at older-generation laptops and tablets accordingly. If you need a reason for good comparison, CPUs powered by the Jaguar core are roughly similar to Intel’s Bay Trail Atom.Having eight cores (as opposed to two or four in a regular Kabini-Temash setup), both the PS4 and Xbox One have huge amount of CPU power , even if they are not up to the standard you can get from a PC. The high core number makes both consoles to work well when multitasking — necessary for modern living room and media center use scenario.Although the Xbox One have a slightly faster CPU, it makes little  or no difference to both console’s comparative game performance.

Graphics

By virtue of being an AMD APU, the Xbox One and PS4 GPUs are technically identical — with the small difference of the PS4 GPU being larger in size. In PC terminology, the Xbox One has a GPU that’s comparable to the entry-level Bonaire GPU in the old Radeon HD 7790, while the PS4 is fitted with the medium range Pitcairn that can is found in the HD 7870. In figures,the Xbox One GPU posseses 12 compute units (768 shader processors), while the PS4 posseses 18 compute units (1,152 shaders). The Xbox One is a little bit ahead on GPU clock speed (853MHz as against 800MHz for the PS4).

In essence, the PS4’s GPU is on paper,has 50 percent more power than the Xbox One. The Xbox One’s slightly higher GPU clock speed reduces some of the disparity,in-actual fact, the PS4’s 50-percent-higher compute unit count is a great advantage for the Sony side. Games on the PS4 have more graphics power available, and that comes up in real-world terms. Putting aside clock speeds and core counts both GPUs are identical. They are based on the Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture, and thus have support for OpenGL 4.3, OpenCL 1.2, and Direct3D 11.2.

RAM and bandwidth

At this junction the hardware features of the Xbox One and PS4 begin to differ, with the RAM having the most remarkable difference.Both consoles are fitted with 8GB of RAM, the PS4  fitted with 5500MHz GDDR5 RAM, while the Xbox One have PC-like 2133MHz DDR3 RAM. This results in a huge bandwidth surplus on  PS4 side. The PS4’s CPU and GPU posses 176GB/s of bandwidth allowance to system RAM, while the Xbox One come with just 68.3GB/s.

On Microsoft’s side, the Xbox One has 32MB of ultra-fast embedded SRAM (about 102GB/sec in each direction, for a total of 204GB/sec of bandwidth). When ESRAM is used acordingly, as a cache ,the enormous difference in main system RAM bandwidth can be accomodated.

Storage

Both the Xbox One and PS4 comes with 500GB internal hard disks and Blu-ray optical drives together with 1TB drives for each one as alternatives. The Xbox One’s 1TB drive is a hybrid, with a solid state portion together with a spinning disk so as to have higher access speeds, although real-world tests do not come up as  a huge difference as you would consider on paper.

Gaming

It is good to be able to rate hardware specs in a quick manner,most especially if you belong to the PlayStation camp, as it knocks out the Xbox  One on paper.It depends how game developers use the hardware.For a start,games on the PS4, with its higher GPU and simple memory is usually a bit less cumbersome and more attractive. And we’ve witnessed this from different titles that display slightly bad performance on the Xbox One, including new titles such as Metal Gear Solid V and Assassin’s Creed Syndicate. Even so, both consoles deliver amazing  graphics,if you have used an older-generation console.

Even with the difference in resolution and upscaling, there is visually no significant difference between the Xbox One and PS4. By the fact of being based on the same GPU architecture, games on both consoles will always look similar — same lighting, same textures,same smoke, and so on. If you are playing games at a distance e.g 10 feet — you may not see much difference between the consoles. Nonetheless, gamers will prefer the PS4 for its better 1080p output and, on occasion, higher frame rates.

Gaming and Other Online Services

The remaining differences between the two consoles are well known beyond this point, such as design of the controller — the PS4 obviously has the edge — and availabillty games. The biggest such as Grand Theft Auto 5, Metal Gear Solid V, and Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare is normally platform independent, but there are exceptions. Both systems have some compelling peculiarities. Notable peculiarities on the Sony includes Until Dawn, Dragon Quest Heroes, Bloodborne, and Second Son, while the Xbox One has Halo 5: Guardians, Rise of the Tomb Raider, and Forza Horizon 2. The PS4 performs better on the indie game side, though, which is a strategic advantage.

Both models work well as multi-purpose entertainment devices. The Xbox One is the foremost media set-top box substitute, thanks to its HDMI port and live television capabilities, but most buyer’s don’t care about that, and the Ps4 has obviously moved up on the streaming service front. You can have a premium Xbox Live Gold and PS Plus subscriptions for $60 and $50 per year, respectively.

In all, the Sony PlayStation 4 remains the foremost for two years, thanks to its price ramp up and improved controller.The games are the most important: If there a particular game you are excited about playing, it’s good you buy that peculiar console; the differences in hardware just do not matter and is not important anymore.