It’s only natural that with tablets becoming more popular and television screens growing larger, someone would combine the ideas into a touchscreen table. But while a touch-capable coffee table would look cool in your living room, the general consumer market just isn’t quite there yet. That’s why we’re digging this Moneual Touch Table made for restaurants.
Designed to feature touchscreen menus, order placement interface, and payment options, the Touch Table would be the one stop shop for cafe-goers to enjoy a Seamless-esque experience by interacting solely with computers and minimally with humans. Except, of course, when the waitress brings you your coffee and pastry. Customers can also pay using their NFC-capable smartphones by simply tapping the device on the table screen. This could theoretically reduce human errors and make it easier for friends to split bills without asking the waitress to do the math twice. Additionally, the inclusion of an operating system within a table could mean infinitely possibilities, such as gaming apps, Foursquare check-ins, or Facebook browsing while you’re enjoying that drink. Just make sure you keep that Purell handy, because who knows how many people have fondled this table before you got there.
Moneual has yet to reveal much about Touch Table other than this photo teaser, but the company will be at the International CES and so will we. If the Touch Table is ready for play, we’ll be sure to keep you posted on interactivity, usability, and of course, price and availability.
We finally got our hands on the Moneual Touch Table at CES 2013 and we can attest that this thing is pretty cool. While there are no NFC capacities to show, the table does have a credit card slot and USB cables so owners can port their own apps into the machine while customers can use the USB cord to charge their electronics. We also learned that the Touch Table runs on Windows, in case anyone was interested in developing their own custom app.
The current Moneual interface allows users to view available menu items and tap to order. After the selection has been made, they are taken to a screen where a circular clock denotes the order completion percentage. In the meantime, users can browse the Moneual catalog to learn more about the company has to offer. It’s a neat way to advertise without being too invasive, especially if it’s up to the customers to decide whether they want to interact with the machine. Price and availability are still undetermined as of the show.
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.