Top TechTop Tech #69: Long-range 3D capture, High-speed Artillery, Radar in a chip
Important innovations in science and technology, every day
By Paul Worthington
Today’s Top Tech:
• Long-range 3D vision
• Artillery at Mach 3
• Control your gadget with Radar
Long-range 3D vision captured indoors and out
There are many cameras and other devices for capturing 3D scenes and objects (not just stereographic imagery) but until now, claims developer StereoLabs, they’ve “been limited up to perceiving depth at short range and indoors.”
The San Francisco-based company claims its ZED “is the first sensor to introduce indoor and outdoor long range depth perception, enabling the development of new services and applications in many industries: consumer electronics, drones, robotics, automotive, VFX, 3D printing and more.” The technique also works for collision avoidance “on the ground and in the air,” making it “simple and cost-effective.”
The ZED is a passive stereo camera that “reproduces the way human vision works,” StereoLabs adds. “Using its two “eyes” and through triangulation, the ZED creates a three-dimensional model of the scene it observes.” It can perceive depth between 5–65 feet.
The $449 camera captures high-definition left and right video in a side-by-side format, and the SDK creates 3D models of indoor and outdoor scenes “in real-time on a graphics chip.”
Artillery at Mach 3
The U.S. Naval Institute reports the Navy’s deck guns “could take on new relevance if ongoing tests to fire a guided round at three times the speed of sound from their muzzles are successful.”
Using rounds initially designed for the service’s emerging electromagnetic railgun, Naval Sea Systems Command are now in early testing phases of using the planned hyper velocity projectile (HVPs) with the service’s existing gunpowder-based deck guns found on almost every U.S. Navy surface ship,
Control your gadget with Radar
Moving that mouse too much effort? Google is working on tech to let you wiggle you fingers instead.
The company’s Advanced Technology and Projects lab is developing gesture recognition with high positional accuracy. There are quite a few camera-based options on the market now — but Google is instead using radar, housed in a tiny chip.
The “Project Soli” venture is demo’d here.
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