3D printing is all the rage, but it can be hard to create designs to print on your MakerBot. A startup called Matter and Form just released a really cool, 3D scanner that can scan small and medium-sized objects to create a true 3D model for printing. Although we’ve never seen it in action, this 3D scanner looks pretty awesome. Thanks to Getgeeked NYC and Matter and Form, we’re giving away a 3D Scanner to one lucky DT reader!
The Matter and Form 3D Scanner has an HD camera with dual lasers that rests on a moving platform to scan whatever object you put in form of it. After a short setup, all you have to do is plunk a cool object down on the platform, press a button, sit back, and watch it scan. The scanner can create watertight 3D models within 0.25mm of the size of the original object. You’ll be able to scan items up to 190 x 190 x 250mm in size. Matter and Form says its scanner can capture 2,000 points a second and it can do it in color, if you want. The company’s software then saves the scanned object as a file. File formats include .STL, .OBJ, and point cloud .PLY files, so you should be able to print the file on most 3D printers. You can check out Matter and Form’s website for more details. Sounds pretty cool right?
DTers in New York, be sure to check out the Getgeeked conference at 7PM ET Thursday, Oct. 16 at the Metropolitan West. You can register for the event here. We’ll all be there and our Photography Editor, Les Shu, is hosting a panel.
To enter, just use the official entry form
Matter and Form 3D Scanner contest details:
Starts: Oct. 15
Ends: Sunday, Oct. 19 at 11:59PM PT
U.S. residents only: Sorry to our worldwide fans
Random: Winners are chosen at random
Don’t get greedy: Please only enter the permitted number of times
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.
Military working dogs charge into places the rest of us would flee. So, I understand why anyone would want to breed tougher, healthier dogs for the job.
Warhound, a new startup from Colossal Biosciences co-founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey, has stepped out of stealth with $200 million to clone and gene-edit working dogs for American troops, police departments, and emergency services (via TechCrunch).
AI can describe a picture, identify objects, and answer questions about what a camera sees. But when a blind user needs a quick answer, getting an entire spoken essay about the scene isn't exactly helpful. Researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) have found that AI-powered visual assistance can leave blind users doing too much work to get the information they actually need.
The study, titled Say It My Way: Exploring Control in Conversational Visual Question Answering with Blind Users, examined how people interact with Be My AI, an AI-powered feature of the Be My Eyes app. The researchers found that users often received lengthy descriptions that didn't adequately address their immediate goals, forcing them to ask follow-up questions or find ways to steer the AI towards a more useful answer.