Video-game controllers come in a wide range of shapes and sizes — joysticks, steering wheels, nunchucks, and everything in between. But no matter what style you use, chances are pretty high that your controller will be hand-operated.
3DRudder — an intriguing new input device we came across at CES this week — is an exception to this rule. When you boil it down, it’s essentially a giant omni-directional D-pad that you control with your feet. Tilt the pad in any direction, and you’ll go in that direction.
But that’s not all. Unlike your average D-pad or joystick, the 3DRudder gives you control over more than just directional acceleration. Twist your feet, and you can adjust the orientation. Put pressure on the toe of one foot and the heel of another, and you can zoom in or out. It sounds complicated, but it’s actually fairly simple to get the hang of.
We sat down and took it for a spin, and after just a minute or two, we were zipping around a virtual 3D world like seasoned 3DRudder pros.
That said, it’s definitely not quite as dynamic as a traditional controller. Without buttons, the range of functions the device can perform is mostly limited to controlling motion and perspective — so you’d likely need additional input devices to use it in a video game. For moving around a 3D modeling environment, however, something like this would be ideal, as it would free up your hands for other tasks.
The device isn’t quite for sale just yet, but is currently in the midst of a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo to raise funds for production.
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.