Top TechTop Tech #59: • Google cars, Time-lapse mining, dog photographers
Promising products and interesting innovations
By Paul Worthington
Today’s Top Tech:
• Google cars are Go
• Time-lapse tech mines the Web
• Nikon snaps shutter based on dog’s heartbeat
Google cars are Go
It’s a “Green lights for our self-driving vehicle prototypes,” Google reports.
This summer a few prototype vehicles “will leave the test track and hit the familiar roads of Mountain View, Calif., with our safety drivers aboard,” the company says.
“When we started designing the world’s first fully self-driving vehicle, our goal was a vehicle that could shoulder the entire burden of driving,” Google adds. “Vehicles that can take anyone from A to B at the push of a button could transform mobility for millions of people, whether by reducing the 94 percent of accidents caused by human error, reclaiming the billions of hours wasted in traffic, or bringing everyday destinations and new opportunities within reach of those who might otherwise be excluded by their inability to drive a car.”
Each prototype’s speed is “capped at a neighborhood-friendly 25mph.” The back-up humans aboard have a removable steering wheel, accelerator pedal, and brake pedal “that allow them to take over driving if needed.”
Time-lapse tech mines the Web
For years, millions of us have taken photos all around the world, and posted those pics online. Now researchers the University of Washington are combining those shots into time-lapse videos that show huge changes over time.
The “approach for synthesizing time-lapse videos of popular landmarks from large community photo collections” is completely automated and “leverages the vast quantity of photos available online,” they write. They clustered 86 million photos into landmarks and popular viewpoints, sorted the photos by date, and warped each photo onto a common viewpoint.
“Our resulting time-lapses show diverse changes in the world’s most popular sites, like glaciers shrinking, skyscrapers being constructed, and waterfalls changing course.”
Nikon snaps shutter based on dog’s heartbeat
File this under silly-but-interesting:
“See what happens when emotions are turned into photographs,” Nikon says. “With Heartography, anyone with a heartbeat can be a photographer.”
“Anyone” in this case being “a dog.”
At least, that’s the first demo of a system that reads heart activity to determine excitability or other intense emotions, and use that info to snap a photo.
There’s more information here.
And here’s a demo of what the dog captured.
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