Back in the halcyon days of mid-2016, we published an article about a bunch of friends who had banded together to create a largely mechanical, coffee table-sized version of Atari’s legendary 1970s game Pong.
As it turns out, we weren’t the only ones who did. In fact, the story went viral, and Gerardo Orioli and his Uruguayan cohorts were quickly bombarded with requests from people wanting to deck their man caves (and presumably a few woman caves, too) with their own copies.
Jump forward nearly two years, and they are ready to deliver on that demand, as evident from their presence at this year’s CES.
“After the viral success, we decided to move forward with the next set of challenges,” Orioli told Digital Trends last year. “We secured an investor to further our research, and obtained an exclusive license with Atari. We built more prototypes and perfected the functionality and performance in our design. Now we are ready for the next stage.”
The company launched the nostalgia-inducing product on Kickstarter in late-March, quickly garnering more than $300,000 in crowdfunding revenue — nearly 30 percent more than the initial funding goal and enough to begin mass production.
As you can see from the video at the top of this page, the concept is pretty darn rad. The original used magnets and metal bars for the movement of the game pieces, while scoring was carried out using Arduino controllers and simple LED displays. The Kickstarter version builds on that design but adds an extra level of polish.
Pong being the most pick-and-play game this side of Tetris, users can expect a fun, straightforward gaming experience — although, from the sound of things, putting the physical table together wasn’t always so easy.
“Our biggest challenge was to find the right balance between the forces that re-create the 2D movement and illusion of the game,” Orioli continued. “We had to deal with two different kinds of forces: Magnetic and friction. In order to control them, we had to variate the motor’s speeds and accelerations to achieve the right balance; otherwise, the ‘ball’ would fly out of reach. A lot of research was put into trying different motors and different setups, and into choosing the right magnets and surfaces.”
The company is in the final stages of production and expects to start shipping the final product to backers in March. Additional retail units will be sold during the first quarter of 2018 for $2,800.
“We’ve gotten a lot of interest from people,” Walter Nogara, one of the original team members behind the table, said at CES. “From the Kickstarter era until now, when we have the real product here, it’s been quite the experience.”
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.