If you’re the kind of person who’s sick of those routine walk to the bus stop, train station, or parking lot when all you want is to transport yourself home with minimal effort, you sound about ready to join the human cast of WALL-E aboard the Axion ship. Or if you’re not ready for such intergalactic experience, perhaps the Solowheel could do the trick on land.
Spotted at the Toy Fair 2013 convention at Jacob Javits Center in New York this week, Inventist showed off more toys from its “People Mover” line of … well, people movers, including its flagship products: The Solowheel, Orbitwheel, and a third unnamed vehicle that looks like a Segway without the steering pole.
Limited information was given at the show about this third product except that it’s been around for “about two days” and that it uses a gyroscope to sense forward and backward motion control. This means the user can just hop on, lean slightly forward and back to get the wheels running. Pretty thrilling, considering regular Segways with a pole and handle are hard enough to retain balance. It may or may not reduce the awkward accidents that often happen during those silly Segway tours across major cities.
If this third product is anything like the Solowheel, then it should bare similar or comparable specs: A max speed of 10 mph, a range of 15 to 20 miles, and a charge time of about two hours. The product is also highly maneuverable, allowing for easy turns and shifts as long as the controller can master the weight balance between his or her two feet. The vehicle also good for use on most common terrains, such as grass, cobblestone, concrete (at the Toy Fair, it was demonstrated on carpet with minimal slippage).
We’ll keep you posted when we hear more about its name, pricing information, and availability but for now let’s discuss: Would you want to play with this minimalistic Segway, or is a Segway dangerous enough as it is with a steering pole and handle? Whatever your opinions are, we’ll leave you with this hilarious Segway fail compilation video to ponder its existence.
Note: An earlier version of this article said the “inventor” of Segways died. We have since corrected the mistake, and apologize for any confusion.
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.