Everyone has these kinds of people on their Facebook or Instagram feed: New parents. These guys are always flooding your feed with ultrasound screen captures, pics of how big momma’s belly is growing, and of course, the newborn and his or her early years. Cute? Sure, but borrrring. Call me snarky, but once you’ve seen one baby, you’ve seen them all – but we’ll bet you’ve never seen one in a 3D hologram rendition.
It’s not quite as lively as Hologram Tupac, but it’s close. Pioneer has announced a new printing service that can produce holographic photos from a computer-generated 3D model instead of photographing an actual object. By cutting the need to snap pics of a physical item, this makes it possible for the service to print ultrasound photos. The process also uses a special film, Bayfol HX, so the hologram can be seen from within a 23 degree viewing angle. The photo measures 200 components high and 300 wide, with each component containing 60 points of view.
“This method works by shining light containing information about the object from one side of the recording material, and reference light from the other side, and recording the state of interference between the two light sources in the material,” Pioneer’s Yoshinao Ito describes. “A hologram is created by regularly arranging the recordings on the medium.”
Ito also says it’s a great way for parents to capture photos of their children in a way that’s never been done before – making it novel for baby shower invitations or cards to send to family and friends. Amazing, but admittedly pretty creepy.
It all sounds complicated, but probably not any more difficult than teaching your unborn baby how to smile for the camera and prepare itself for being born into the selfie generation. Say cheese!
San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.
Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.
The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.