France is known for a lot of things. The first images that come to mind may be lavish museums and decadent cheeses, the country also has a rep in the electronic music scene. So it’s not surprising that France is the birthplace of Photonic, a unique device for consumers that like to move.
Showcased on the floor of CES 2015, the jagged orb functions much like a digital shaker. It’s lined with a several sensors that recognize the speed of your body movements, and when paired with your iOS device and the accompanying mobile app, it allows you to control a melange of beats, melodies, and various sound loops.
It essentially lets you create music in real-time, with the option to select from a variety of musical styles, ranging from jazz to chiptune to rock’n’roll. You can also split the melody and rhythm components between two Photonics, allowing you to collaborate with a friend on a whim.
It’s a little difficult to grasp without actually handling the product for yourself, but we can vouch that it’s an entertaining novelty. The orb itself is lightweight and easy to move, and surprisingly, it instantly conveys your movements to your device via Bluetooth with little hassle. When you shake the device furiously, the tempo increases and becomes more frantic. When you stop, it stops. You can even remove the battery-powered sensor from the orb and embed it in something else entirely, like say a sock or a stuffed animal.
Sadly, the Phototonic is currently only available in the U.K. at a price point of €91, with a second production run scheduled for February 2015. No word on a U.S. release date and pricing, but given the hubbub surrounding the company’s CES booth, we hope the device will be making it stateside soon.
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.