Virtual reality is one of the most exciting trends in consumer technology today — so much so, Digital Trends awarded the HTC Vive VR headset Product of the Year in 2016. There are plenty of cool games and applications in the VR space already, but the technology is still in its infancy, as developers and artists try to figure out the best way to craft immersive experiences. One big problem for VR is that, while it can use sight and sound to create 3D environments, other senses, like touch, are not as developed. The makers of the Sense Glove aim to change that, with a device that lets users feel their interactions with virtual objects.
The Sense Glove resembles a large, skeletal hand into which the users slides their own, while also fastening attachments to their fingers. CEO Gijs den Butter explained how it works.
“So basically, Sense Glove enables touch in virtual reality,” den Butter said. “It does it with force feedback, so you actually are restricted when you’re trying to grasp an object, and with haptic feedback, so you get a little tactile sensation when for example you’re touching hard or slippery objects.”
It’s a tantalizing prospect for game designers looking to develop more visceral VR experiences, but den Butter is focused on satisfying needs of a more mundane variety.
“We use it mainly, currently for B2B (business-to-business) training purposes. So you have to think of training workers on an assembly line. It’s really expensive to hold an assembly line just for training purposes, but in VR you can build it as real as possible, and with our Sense Glove, the interaction with the virtual objects are just as if touching real objects, almost.”
The Sense Glove is a remarkable advancement over the typical controllers bundled with VR headsets, with may track the movement of the user’s hands, but don’t offer any real sense of touch beyond rumbling.
Consumers hoping to acquire a Sense Glove may need to wait a bit. The device is still in the prototype stage. Den Butter plans to have a development kit out in June 2018. Those kits are currently available for pre-order.
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.