At any given moment there are approximately a zillion different crowdfunding campaigns happening on the Web. Take a stroll through Kickstarter or Indiegogo and you’ll find no shortage of weird, useless, and downright stupid projects out there – alongside some real gems. We’ve cut through the Pebble clones and janky iPhone cases to round up the most unusual, ambitious, and exciting projects out there this week. Keep in mind that any crowdfunded project — even the best intentioned — can fail, so do your homework before cutting a check for the gadget of your dreams.
Most portable speakers require an AC adapter if you really want to crank the volume. But this new crowdfunded speaker breaks that rule. Soundboks, as its called, is designed to deliver up to 30 hours of nightclub-level decibels off a single battery charge.
Soundboks uses custom-designed amplifiers that help to enhance battery life while optimizing sound for outdoor usage. Under the hood it boasts a pair each of 96 dB low-frequency drivers, 98 dB high-frequency dynamic drivers, and 42-Watt digital amps. With its dual-phase boost function, this speaker is designed to generate up to maximum 119 dB of sound. The volume dial – quite literally – turns to an 11 for an experience similar to that of a live concert.
Instead of sending plastic bottles off to a recycling plant, why not figure out a way to “upcycle” them and make something useful with them? That’s precisely the idea behind the aptly-named “plastic bottle cutter” — a brilliant, pocket-sized cutting tool that can turn any plastic bottle into a strong, versatile strand of rope. It’s incredibly simple too — the entire device consists of just three parts: a wooden handle, a razor blade, and an aluminum cutting guide.
To use the device, you start by grabbing an empty plastic bottle and cutting off the bottom portion. After that, you simply insert the bottle into the tool’s slot, and give a couple twists until the tip of a strand has formed. Just pull on the strand and watch the bottle magically unspool into a strip of plastic rope! The long, thin strand of plastic can be used for just about anything — lashing bits of wood together, hanging up clothes to dry, or even (as the video shows) towing your car. As it turns out, plastic is pretty damn strong.
If you’ve heard of LiDAR before, chances are you heard about it being used as part of a big, expensive project like Daimler’s self-driving Inspiration truck, or the Atlas robot from Boston Dynamics. It’s not a technology that you typically see in low-budget DIY projects — and for good reason. As far as sensor technologies go, LiDAR is typically one of the more expensive ones you can get, which means that the tech is largely inaccessible to the average joe.
Sweep aims to change that. Freshly launched on Kickstarter, Sweep is a scanning LiDAR sensor designed to bring powerful 360 degree sensing capabilities to everyone for an affordable price. “We wanted a scanning LiDAR for our projects and couldn’t find anything that was powerful enough and easy to use for a price we could afford,” the creators say. “Comparable sensors are $1,000 and up, so we set out to develop one ourselves. We’re raising money on Kickstarter to manufacture the Sweep so we can get them into the hands of makers, roboticists, drone enthusiasts, and students.”
Everyone loves a cool t-shirt, but what if your funky new skeleton t-shirt were actually a VR anatomy lesson? A startup by the name of Curiscope has created just that: Virtualit-Tee aims to give kids a cool way to bring anatomy out of textbooks and into the real world. The t-shirt looks like a stylized skeleton design at first glance, but when viewed through the accompanying mobile app, the shirt displays everything from bones to organs and blood vessels.
The 3D anatomy experience can be viewed through the Virtuali-Tee app on a smartphone or tablet. Viewing is directionally programmed so that you can tilt, pan, and zoom just by moving your device, and dive into your friend’s virtual guts to see how the body works up close. Virtuali-Tee and the mobile app are also enabled for viewing with a VR headset to make the experience more immersive. “Too often we feel detached from learning”, said Ed Barton, CEO of Curiscope. “This kind of technology lets us interact with the anatomy and explore it in animated 3D, and this kind of learning can happen anywhere, at any time.”
Although the video for LMCable makes it seem like more of a hassle in life than it really is, the fact that Apple and Android devices have different charge cables is a pain in the neck sometimes. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was one cord that could work for both? Someone has finally come along to fix this minor inconvenience that plagues our lives. LMCable, as it’s called, lets you charge both types of devices with a single universal cable.
So how the hell is this possible? It’s all about the unique connector design, which has two-in-one functionality. Charging a device with a Micro USB connector means turning the cable header one way, and juicing up a device with a Lightning connector only requires you to flip the cable. That’s as simple and as complicated as it gets. The other end is just a standard USB Type-A connector, so it will work with just about every USB charger ever built.
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.