According to The Information (paywalled), Meta plans to ship an extremely light mixed reality headset in 2027, codenamed Puffin. It follows a report that the company canceled a high-end headset planned for the same year, which previous reports speculated as being a Quest Pro 2. UploadVR reports: Puffin reportedly resembles “a bulky pair of glasses” and weighs less than 110 grams, yet is an opaque VR-style headset with pancake lenses and passthrough cameras. Its remarkably light weight is apparently being achieved by offloading both the battery and computing hardware to an external tethered puck, which Meta “hopes” will be small enough to fit in the user’s pocket.

If the report is accurate, Puffin will be significantly lighter than any other shipping fully functional VR headset to date. For comparison, Meta Quest 3 weighs around 400 grams without its straps and facial interface and around 515 grams with them. Of this weight, the battery is around 70 grams. The report describes Puffin as not including controllers, instead using the gaze-and-pinch input scheme introduced by Apple Vision Pro.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares that IPv6rs has debuted a new one-click self hosting system:

Everyone seemed like they were talking about self hosting, but we didn’t understand why it wasn’t more prolific. Thus, we conducted a survey to hear reasons. It turned out the two most common reasons were:

1. Lack of an external IP address
2. Too difficult to setup and maintain

Our service already solves the first issue. We set out with a self-hostathon to figure out what the blockers were in setting up and running a self-hosted server.

… writes IPv6rs on their blog.

We needed to make things easier, so we created Cloud Seeder, a one click installer that instantly launches a fully encapsulated server appliance that is externally reachable.
At the time of launching, the current version of Cloud Seeder supports 20+ different appliances – from Mastodon which federates with Meta’s Threads to Nextcloud which provides an enterprise-level, self-hosted alternative to the big-name collaboration suites.

It also automatically handles updates/maintenance.

We hope this will bring a new era to self hosting and, in turn, will bring the decentralized internet forest back.

Is the self hosting era making its return?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The chief of Emirates, one of Boeing’s largest clients, has said the crisis-stricken US aircraft maker should ensure its new chief executive has engineering experience to restore safety standards (non-paywalled link). From a report: A day after Boeing chief executive Dave Calhoun announced he would step down, Sir Tim Clark also said he backed efforts by the US group’s largest labour union to win a seat on the board. “To fix Boeing’s issues the company needs a strong engineering lead as its head coupled to a governance model which prioritises safety and quality,” Clark told the Financial Times on Tuesday.

“Some serious lateral thinking” was needed, the airline boss added. Boeing on Monday unveiled a wide-ranging reshuffle of its leadership in a bid to get to grips with an escalating reputational crisis after a 737 Max door panel blew off mid-flight in January. Calhoun, 66, is to leave at the end of the year, while board chair Larry Kellner said he would depart in May. Stan Deal, head of the commercial planes division since 2019, was immediately replaced by chief operating officer Stephanie Pope.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hasselblad is discontinuing its H-series medium format DSLRs to focus exclusively on mirrorless models. “The move leaves Pentax and Ricoh as the biggest remaining names in the rapidly diminishing DSLR space,” notes Engadget. “Hasselblad’s last H series launch was the H6D system in 2016.” From the report: “While we have been feeling this sting for over the last 18 months with lack of product, today we received official notice that the full product line of the Hasselblad H system has been officially discontinued,” Capture Integration wrote. “All [H system] products are now officially out of stock and Hasselblad will no longer take orders for anything in the H line.” The article continued, “The H system is still very strong and working in so many studios today. However, it’s time to look at replacements. We can’t even order new battery grips today.” The vendor notes that future repairs will likely take longer and grow in difficulty.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Cornell University researcher has developed sonar glasses that “hear” you without speaking. Engadget reports: The eyeglass attachment uses tiny microphones and speakers to read the words you mouth as you silently command it to pause or skip a music track, enter a passcode without touching your phone or work on CAD models without a keyboard. Cornell Ph.D. student Ruidong Zhang developed the system, which builds off a similar project the team created using a wireless earbud — and models before that which relied on cameras. The glasses form factor removes the need to face a camera or put something in your ear. “Most technology in silent-speech recognition is limited to a select set of predetermined commands and requires the user to face or wear a camera, which is neither practical nor feasible,” said Cheng Zhang, Cornell assistant professor of information science. “We’re moving sonar onto the body.”

The researchers say the system only requires a few minutes of training data (for example, reading a series of numbers) to learn a user’s speech patterns. Then, once it’s ready to work, it sends and receives sound waves across your face, sensing mouth movements while using a deep learning algorithm to analyze echo profiles in real time “with about 95 percent accuracy.” The system does this while offloading data processing (wirelessly) to your smartphone, allowing the accessory to remain small and unobtrusive. The current version offers around 10 hours of battery life for acoustic sensing. Additionally, no data leaves your phone, eliminating privacy concerns. “We’re very excited about this system because it really pushes the field forward on performance and privacy,” said Cheng Zhang. “It’s small, low-power and privacy-sensitive, which are all important features for deploying new, wearable technologies in the real world.” “The team at Cornell’s Smart Computer Interfaces for Future Interactions (SciFi) Lab is exploring commercializing the tech using a Cornell funding program,” adds Engadget. “They’re also looking into smart-glasses applications to track facial, eye and upper body movements.”

A video of the eyeglasses can be viewed here.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Looking back at 2022’s technology, the lead technology writer for the New York Times criticized Meta’s $1,500 VR headset and the iPhone’s “mostly unnoticeable improvements.”

But then he also predicted which new tech could affect you in 2023. Some highlights:

– It’s very likely that next year you could have a chatbot that acts as a research assistant. Imagine that you are writing a research paper and want to add some historical facts about World War II. You could share a 100-page document with the bot and ask it to sum up the highlights related to a certain aspect of the war. The bot will then read the document and generate a summary for you….

That doesn’t mean that we’ll see a flood of stand-alone A.I. apps in 2023. It may be more the case that many tools we already use for work will begin building automatic language generation into their apps. Rowan Curran, a technology analyst at the research firm Forrester, said apps like Microsoft Word and Google Sheets could soon embed A.I. tools to streamline people’s work flows.

– In 2023, the V.R. drumbeat will go on. Apple, which has publicly said it will never use the word “metaverse,” is widely expected to release its first headset. Though the company has yet to share details about the product, Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, has laid out clues, expressing his excitement about using augmented reality to take advantage of digital data in the physical world. “You’ll wonder how you lived your life without augmented reality, just like today you wonder: How did people like me grow up without the internet?” Mr. Cook said in September to students in Naples.

He added, however, that the technology was not something that would become profound overnight. Wireless headsets remain bulky and used indoors, which means that the first iteration of Apple’s headgear will, similar to many others that preceded it, most likely be used for games. In other words, there will continue to be lots of chatter about the metaverse and virtual (augmented, mixed, whatever-you-want-to-call-dorky-looking) goggles in 2023, but it most likely still won’t be the year that these headsets become widely popular, said Carolina Milanesi, a consumer tech analyst for the research firm Creative Strategies. “From a consumer perspective, it’s still very uncertain what you’re spending your thousand bucks on when you’re buying a headset,” she said. “Do I have to do a meeting with V.R.? With or without legs, it’s not a necessity.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

YouTube’s Doctor Volt repurposed a Blu-Ray drive, which are now easy to find on the cheap in the era of streaming content, to build a simple scanning laser microscope. Gizmodo reports: A couple of custom-designed and manufactured plastic parts were added to the mix to create a scanning bed for a sample that could move back in forth in one direction, while the laser itself shifted back and forth in the other. Unlike an optical microscope, where the entirely of an object is imaged at once, a scanning laser microscope takes light intensity measurements in increments, moving across an object in a grid and assembling a magnified image pixel by pixel. In this case, given the limitations of the Blu-Ray drive’s spindle, which moves the sample being viewed back and forth, the image is assembled from 16,129 measurements (a 127×127 grid) and then scaled up to a 512×512 image.

A browser-based user interface written in Java allows focus adjustments and the scanning speed of the microscope to be modified, but at the slowest possible speed, the results are surprisingly good and recognizable. Certainly not comparable to what you’d get from lab equipment that costs tens of thousands of dollars, but for a re-purposed Blu-Ray drive you could get for less than $20 on eBay, this is an impressive hack.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey, writing on his personal blog: Today is November 6th, 2022, the day of the SAO Incident. Thousands of VRMMORPG gamers were trapped by a mad scientist inside a death game that could only be escaped through completion. If their hit points dropped to zero, their brain would be bombarded by extraordinarily powerful microwaves, supposedly killing the user. The same would happen if anyone in the real world tampered with their NerveGear, the virtual reality head-mounted-display that transported their minds and souls to Aincrad, the primary setting of Sword Art Online.

[…] In SAO, the NerveGear contained a microwave emitter that could be overdriven to lethal levels, something the creator of SAO and the NerveGear itself (Akihiko Kayaba) was able to hide from his employees, regulators, and contract manufacturing partners. I am a pretty smart guy, but I couldn’t come up with any way to make anything like this work, not without attaching the headset to gigantic pieces of equipment.

In lieu of this, I used three of the explosive charge modules I usually use for a different project, tying them to a narrow-band photosensor that can detect when the screen flashes red at a specific frequency, making game-over integration on the part of the developer very easy. When an appropriate game-over screen is displayed, the charges fire, instantly destroying the brain of the user. This isn’t a perfect system, of course. I have plans for an anti-tamper mechanism that, like the NerveGear, will make it impossible to remove or destroy the headset.

Even so, there are a huge variety of failures that could occur and kill the user at the wrong time. This is why I have not worked up the balls to actually use it myself, and also why I am convinced that, like in SAO, the final triggering should really be tied to a high-intelligence agent that can readily determine if conditions for termination are actually correct. At this point, it is just a piece of office art, a thought-provoking reminder of unexplored avenues in game design. It is also, as far as I know, the first non-fiction example of a VR device that can actually kill the user. It won’t be the last.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Indian government wants to develop a home-grown industry that can design and assemble drones and make the components that go into their manufacture. The BBC reports: “Drones can be significant creators of employment and economic growth due to their versatility, and ease of use, especially in India’s remote areas,” says Amber Dubey, former joint secretary at the Ministry of Civil Aviation. “Given its traditional strengths in innovation, information technology, frugal engineering and its huge domestic demand, India has the potential of becoming a global drone hub by 2030,” he tells the BBC. Over the next three years Mr Dubey sees as much as 50 billion rupees $630 million invested in the sector.

[…] However, despite the excitement and investment around India’s drone industry, even those in the sector advise caution. “India has set a goal of being a hub of drones by 2030, but I think we should be cautious because we at present don’t not have an ecosystem and technology initiatives in place,” says Rajiv Kumar Narang, from the Drone Federation of India. He says the industry needs a robust regulator that can oversee safety and help develop an air traffic control system for drones. That will be particularly important as the aircraft become larger, says Mr Narang. “Initiatives have to come from the government. A single entity or a nodal ministry has to take this forward if we want to reach a goal of being the hub by 2030,” he says.

India also lacks the network of firms needed to make all the components that go into making a drone. At the moment many parts, including batteries, motors and flight controllers are imported. But the government is confident an incentive scheme will help boost domestic firms. “The components industry will take two to three years to build, since it traditionally works on low margin and high volumes,” says Mr Dubey. Despite those reservations, firms are confident there will be demand for drones and people to fly them. Chirag Shara is the chief executive of Drone Destination, which has trained more than 800 pilots and instructors since the rules on drone use were first relaxed in August 2021. He estimates that India will need up to 500,000 certified pilots over the next five years.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Department of Justice this afternoon announced criminal charges against the creator of the Baller Ape Club NFT collection for orchestrating a so-called “rug pull.” From a report: The charges, announced alongside those in three other cryptocurrency fraud cases, mark the second time that federal prosecutors have gone after an NFT “rug-pull” scheme, in which an NFT project’s creators sell NFTs on false promises of community benefits and utility, only to abandon the project and make away with investors’ funds. Le Anh Traun, a Vietnamese national, is charged with one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit international money laundering. Traun allegedly collected $2.6 million from Baller Ape NFT buyers, only to shortly thereafter delete the organization’s website and launder the funds. According to the Justice Department, he converted the ill-gotten gains into different cryptocurrencies and moved them across multiple blockchains, in a practice known as “chain-hopping.” If convicted, Traun could face up to 40 years in prison.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.