Ever since Minority Report, techies have dreamed of a UI built on hand gestures. The problem: everyone’s hands are different, including children. Such interfaces necessarily need to accommodate different scales, so Amazon wants to scan your hands and determine your age.
Lab126, the Amazon division behind the much-maligned Amazon Fire Phone and the much-praised Amazon Echo, is working on the technology. A recent patent granted to Amazon, “Child-appropriate interface selection using hand recognition,” would scan hands for size and other qualities in an augmented reality system. The patent implies the the (unannounced) device will show different user interfaces to children than adults, Geekwire is reporting.
Part of the idea here is to prevent kids from running into the office, making a bunch of wild hand gestures, and deleting a day’s worth of work. Ideally, if you’re working, your kid’s hands won’t be able to affect your device.
But the text of the patent, and included images, indicate that children will be offered different UIs entirely, after their hand size is recognized. If the patent’s wonderful images are anything to go by, adults will be treated to boring things, like “email,” “app,” and “workspace.” Kids, on the other hand, will play with trains, planes, and whatever else it is that children like.
Hand gestures are, at this phase, the primary means by which augmented reality devices are controlled. The Microsoft Hololens, for example, requires users learn all kinds of gestures, from pointing-and-tapping to the seemingly magical “bloom.”
Amazon is cooking up some sort of virtual reality system of its own. Based on the images in this patent, it seems like this system will be ceiling-mounted and not use a headset, but it’s hard to extrapolate too much. At the very least we know they intend to detect children by analyzing hands.
Our question: since when do kids require a simpler user interface? In our experience kids figure out new technology way before adults, even ones who consider themselves tech-savvy. Shouldn’t the simpler interface be presented to the grownups?
And what about otherwise successful people who happen to have smaller than average hands? Will Donald Trump be able to customize the system, and see the adult interface? It’s hard to answer questions like this based on little more than a patent, so it will be interesting to see how this all works out.
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.