Turning her attention to kids with ADHD, tech fashion designer Anouk Wipprecht teamed with researchers at Ars Electronica to create a playful, bio-sensing unicorn wearable headset that keeps a watchful eye on what peaks their interest.

Behind the badass Spider Dress and other techno-neuroscience fashion designs by Anouk Wipprecht frolics a tireless Alice-in-Wonderland-like tinkerer who prefers soldering electronics and software coding over outdoor tea parties.

Wipprecht is her own wearable technology Maker Faire, traveling the globe to team up with innovators ranging from Audi to Intel. She creates one-of-a-kind garments, many of which light up, move or video record without the wearer lifting a finger. She uses Arduino, Intel Curie or Intel Edison compute modules and sensors that combine to turn a person’s biometric data into automatic reactions.

Her latest creation is a unicorn-horn shaped headgear that uses neurosensory technology connected to an Intel Edison compute module to tell a tiny video camera when to record a person’s most memorable moments.

When the wearer’s focus hits a certain height, the brain sensors signal the built-in computer system to turn the camera on and capture the wearer’s attention point, explained Wipprecht. Video gets uploaded to the internet via Bluetooth LE, so it can reviewed later on a screen.

“It’s the playful notion of ‘something on your head’ that might know more about your environment than you do,” said Wipprecht. “It’s a piece of technology that can help you supervise your world.”

Fit for curious people of all ages, the unicorn horn was specifically designed for young people diagnosed with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). It was created as part of her winter 2015-2016 Ars Electronica SPARKS H2020 residency, which gave Wipprecht access to an extensive lab, new technologies to test and experts who helped her create a prototype to advance ADHD therapy and research.

“I play with it together with kids on the ADHD spectrum, to let them know when their attention spikes and what happened to cause it,” she said.

“For me it’s a way of quantifying behavioral aspects in a non-invasion way to help them getting a better grip on their world.”

She said kids get a kick out of wearing the headgear. In general, the kids who tried it were tech-savy and curious to learn what causes spikes in their awareness.

They wanted see what those spikes look like.

“It gives them a better understanding on how their brains work,” Wipprecht said.

Wearable Tech for Detecting Brainwaves

Her first foray into working with brainwaves was in 2014, when she created Synapse Dress in collaboration with Intel innovation engineer Karolina Cengija, who had an interest in computing wireless biosignals. That dress captured brainwave signals from sensors fitted in a stylish headband. Wipprecht wrote computer commands that immediately and accurately react to a person’s heightened awareness. If the wearer got excited or frightened, a camera imbedded in the dress recorded the scene.

“Through that collaboration, we learned a lot about electroencephalogram – electrical activity in the brain — and how to measure it accurately,” said Wipprecht.

To create the unicorn horn headset, Christopher Lindinger, head of innovation at Ars Electronica FutureLab, acquired cutting-edge EEG systems from Austrian company G.Tec. Their g.Sahara electrodes use golden alloy, which reduces the electrode-skin impedance, Wipprecht didn’t need to apply a greasy conductive gel on the wearer’s skin, which is often necessary for signals to transmit from the body and sensors.

“Having clinical style gel patches stuck to your hair is not all that fashionable,” she said with a smile.

“Instead, these electrodes have eight little pins that easily affix to a person’s hair. The system makes the camera record and behave as an extra set of eyes.”

From Extra Eye to Agent Unicorn

An LED light in the headpiece turns on when the brain sensors are trigger by the wearer’s heighten awareness. The light indicates to everyone the camera is recording.

The system captures eight seconds of video: three before and five after the triggered event. That eight second video file is sent through the Intel Edison module and shared wirelessly to a nearby computer or device, where it gets date and time stamped for later viewing.

She also created a second prototype unicorn horn using an Intel RealSense depth camera connected to Intel Compute Stick, which is an full functioning wireless PC the size of a pack of gum.

“I want to develop hand gesture tracing, facial recognition and emotion detection facets,” she said.

This second version will combine computer vision with machine learning to record moments and read the wearer’s intentions.

“People with ADHD or on the Autism spectrum often have problems reading other humans, which gives them stress,” she said. “This system would be able to monitor, compute and question a person’s communication with others. It will act as a learning system or agent for the wearer.”

New View of Tech

Wipprecht is inspired by seeing computing technology get smaller and by the increasing quality and types of sensors move into design and fabrics around us. She believes these trends will force many to change their perception of technology.

“As technology crawls closer to the skin, we need to redesign the bond we have towards technology,” she said.

She believes technology should be viewed as a medium rather than a tool.

“Technology came into our lives to help us, but it often ends up being a token of stress,” Wipprecht continued.

She relentlessly twists this notion into inspiration for creating technology that fit into our lives like a trusted friend.

“The Unicorn Horn is another example for how technology can live on the body and guide us through our world.”

The post Unicorn Wearable Uses Neuroscience to Help Kids appeared first on iQ by Intel.

Broadcasting eSports on TV is the latest craze, but the internet-born phenomenon may have already hit its stride live-streaming.

Four decades after the first video game competition, eSports will finally hit primetime television on May 27 with TBS’s ELeague.

Interest in eSports is skyrocketing around the world, but the question remains whether the excitement of video game matchups, which thrill millions of fans via livestreaming on internet sites like Twitch and YouTube, will succeed on a cable television network.

“Everybody is waiting with baited breath to see how ELeague is received,” said Matt Hill, senior vice president of Global Sports and Entertainment at GMR Marketing.

Gaming tournaments have come a long way from their humble beginnings: Folklore has it that Stanford University students participated in the first eSport, the “Intergalactic Spacewar Olympics” in October 1972. Grand prize winners got a year’s subscription to Rolling Stone magazine.

Today, the world’s longest running eSports tournament Intel Extreme Masters (IEM) attracts gamers compete for a prize pool of $1 million. The 2015 event in Katowice, Poland attracted 100,000 people and set an IEM record of 1 million concurrent viewers on Twitch.

Enthusiasts and occasional viewers composed a huge audience even before a network put eSports on TV. According to research firm Newzoo, audiences are expected to climb from 256 million in 2016 to more than 345 million by 2019.

According to Hill, TBS could play a major role in that growth, especially by attracting new audiences to professional eSports.

The transition from streaming to live broadcasts presents unique challenges for the emerging sport but also massive opportunities.

A lot more is riding on the first two seasons of ELeague (airing throughout the summer and featuring popular shooter Counter-Strike: Global Offensive) than the $1.2 million in prize money, said Hill.

“The biggest benefit is from a perception standpoint,” he said. “[Being on television means] eSports are no longer thought of as an underground industry.”

The live-streaming video platform Twitch draws in a staggering 8.5 million active users a day, and eSports account for an equitable share of the viewership. With those numbers, many would argue that the digital sport has already reached the “mainstream,” whether it’s shown on TV or not.

“At a time when the majority of traditional sports are trying to figure out how to solve the digital puzzle, you have eSports, which have been born out of the digital space, now trying to go backwards into TV,” said Hill.

But a successful run on the national stage could convince big (and still apprehensive) advertisers to enter the fray. And getting more major brands behind eSports appears the next logical step to turning competitive gaming into a national pastime.

For these potential advertisers, ELeague is more than just a broadcast. It’s the final testing ground.

The Twitch Takeover

ELeague is testing the waters with a 10-week gaming tournament that airs every Friday. The tournament includes 24 teams, all of which have won a Counter-Strike: Global Offensive tournament in the past year, playing the popular first-person shooter on air.

Hopes are high that the tournament will flourish in its prime Friday night slot, but the eSports community has its share of reservations about the limelight. Chiefly, TV may not be the right fit for a sport primarily consumed on the internet.

“TV is a very structured medium—the ads, the right kind of commentators, the timing—it relies on consistency and repeatable structures,” said Gareth Martin, formerly a channel manager at the video game-centric TV network Ginx.TV.

To his point, a sport like professional basketball, with its clockwork regularity of quarters and halftime analyses, easily adapted to the television format. An eSport match, on the other hand, can go on almost indefinitely or be over in the blink of an eye.

For some, Twitch seems like the best method for consuming headshots, knock outs and pentakills (when players take down an opponent’s entire team).

“Twitch was really born out of a true passion for eSports,” said Andy Swanson, the VP of eSports at Twitch. “Most people discovered and experienced eSports on Twitch and continue to come back on a daily basis.”

Twitch grew up alongside eSports, rendering it a platform custom-tailored for the competitive gaming experience in many ways.

For one thing, it eliminates barriers to entry for fans and pros alike. Regardless of skill level, players from all over the world can easily and instantly broadcast their matches and scrimmages.

“The fact that Twitch focuses on the live experience and provides the opportunity for fans to interact with one another makes it the perfect platform,” Swanson said.

Much like Facebook or Instagram, the Twitch interface also naturally fosters a sense of community. Fans can keep up with their favorite players and teams simply by subscribing to their channels. The chat window even allows them direct communication with players, other fans and rival camps.

These internet-tailored features heighten not only the communal aspect, but the drama that remains so crucial to enjoying eSports. Chats overflowing with fan reactions to “oh my god” moments is something TV struggles to replicate.

TV Strikes Back

But even with the disadvantages, eSports may still have a place on broadcast TV.

Traditional television cannot match the immediacy and adaptability of the internet, but the way people watch TV is evolving into a much more internet-enabled experience.

According to the research of Professor Matthew Eastin of University of Texas at Austin, sports fans now use second devices such as tablets and phones to enhancement their engagement with televised sports.

“People are able to immerse themselves in a franchise beyond being a fan who sits on the couch and says ‘Go team!’” he explained. “They are out there contributing to the community of the team itself.”

Passive sports viewing is out, and multi-platform sports apps are in. The rising popularity of Major League Baseball’s At Bat, for instance, brings an array of information (box scores, pitch data, player stats) to a fan’s fingertips.

Secondary devices could supplant the connectivity the eSports audiences craves. Comparable to MLB’s At Bat, Turner Broadcasting Network already hinted at providing similar features for ELeague through Bleacher Report’s Team Stream, another second-screen sports app.

In the end, eSports may not need TV to go mainstream. Like the networks and advertisers who are eagerly waiting to assess ELeague’s success, everyone will have to wait and see.

The post Will Audiences Tune In to eSports on TV? appeared first on iQ by Intel.

New apps use zombies, aliens and superheroes to make exercise more entertaining.

From tossing around the football to jumping rope, the National Football League’s Play 60 initiative sought to mitigate America’s child obesity problem by getting kids to move for an hour every day. Now, technology offers an innovative way to get people of all ages off the couch. Instead of focusing on changing behavior, a goal that’s proven difficult to accomplish, new fitness apps look to alter the activity.

Fitness trackers are really useful for keeping tabs on activity and biorhythms, but are they doing enough to keep people on the right path to lasting health? That question is diving development of new apps that turning fitness trackers into action games.

“[Fitness trackers] encourage you to walk or run more, but they don’t actually change the exercise itself,” said Adrian Hon, CEO of fitness app company Six to Start.

“What we’re trying to do is make the act of exercise more exciting.”

Hon’s company developed an app that tracks a person’s running and uses it as an element of the plot in a story. Runners aren’t just getting fit with Hon’s app—as a character in the story, they’re running for their lives.

With respect to exercise, gamification means using standard game-play characteristics—scoring points, defeating monsters, reaping rewards—and applying them to fitness activities like running or lifting weights. This new generation of apps and wearable technology are enabling all forms of exercise to be turned into games.

Cutting the Tether

The gamification of exercise began long before people started using fitness apps. Games like Dance Dance Revolution, and the Wii Fit got gamers off the couch and moving, with more than 20 million units sold worldwide. These games were immensely popular, not only because they got people to exercise, but because they were fun to play. It was worth it to leave the couch and sweat a little.

Those early fitness games, however, still required a player to be in front of the television or gaming system. Apps and wearable technology have helped solve this problem by freeing people to exercise outdoors or on-the-go.

Run like Someone’s Chasing You

Running is the most popular form of exercise, but compared to dancing and playing sports, it suffers on the fun quotient.

“When you jog on the treadmill, it’s still boring, painful, tedious,” Hon said. “A lot of running apps help you monitor your performance—how fast, how far—but they don’t necessarily make you more excited about running.”

Six to Start found a way to do just that. Its first app was based on a simple truth about human beings: People will run to escape the zombie apocalypse.

Zombies, Run! quickly became the world’s best-selling fitness app. Like Dance Dance Revolution and Wii Fit, Zombies, Run! works because it’s a game first.

“We don’t sell it as a way to make you fitter,” Hon said. “It’s a way to make running more interesting.”

The app features a well-written, intricately developed narrative about a town attempting to survive the rise of the zombies. Users are given missions, such as locating medical supplies for their band of survivors or simply outrunning the zombie hoard.

Runners listen to the story through their earbuds, with the app tracking their movements to help pace the narrative. The app can be used with Apple Watch, and older versions synch with RunKeeper. Currently, the app doesn’t share data with other fitness devices and wearables. Although, obviously, runners can use both products at the same time.

Zombies, Run! is in its fifth season—like a television show, a new season comes out each year and each season features new storylines and new missions to keep players running. People are clearly responding to the app: In October 2015, it topped the 2 million download mark.

There are several other apps with similar concepts, turning a simple jog into a run for one’s life.

Six to Start has added two other games to its strong debut app. The Walk was developed in conjunction with the UK’s Department of Health and asks users to walk the length of Great Britain to help stop a bombing. Superhero Workout has players do aerobic and core-building exercises to help defend earth against an alien attack.

Competitors have also brought narrative fitness apps to the marketplace. Battlesuit Runner has users running from aliens. Changes in running speed allow users to make plot decisions.

“If you want to rescue the hostages, slow down for a few seconds,” the app prompts. “If you prefer to pursue the retreating hostiles instead, speed up for a few seconds.”

Beautiful Music Together

If a good story isn’t enough to get someone to exercise, maybe the right song will do the trick. Many of the narrative games including Run, Zombies! realize the importance of the right soundtrack and encourage users to incorporate music from their mobile devices into the game.

Other apps rely even more heavily on music. Sworkit, which was funded on an episode of Shark Tank, calls music the “secret ingredient” to sticking with a workout regimen. Studies have shown the powerful link between music and exercise performance. The app even replaced a points-based fitness product that allowed users to earn real-world discounts, as music was found to be a more powerful motivator than greed.

Sworkit also includes video clips and guides users through short personalized circuit-training workouts.

“Customization is also key,” said Leanna Olbinsky, a community manager for Sworkit. “You need to make your workout your own. Most people don’t like someone telling them exactly what to do.”

This is likely the case for the more than 14 million people who have downloaded Sworkit, including Ivanka Trump.

Sworkit bills itself as a phone-based alternative to wearables and currently doesn’t synch with data from other products.

Going the Distance

Have these fitness apps succeeded in making exercise more fun in the long run, or are they simply a fad that will eventually find their place among all the other discarded fitness equipment that’s captured the public’s attention over the years?

Like a television show or graphic novel, narrative apps are only as good as their stories. If the plots are compelling and well-crafted, people may continue running along with them. But if the zombie and alien apps “jump the shark,” people may tune out.

The success of the apps, however, do seem to provide a blueprint for wearable devices. While Fitbit and similar devices have sold well, customers need more than just fitness data to keep them using the product and getting healthy.

Research showed that fewer than 30 percent of Fitbit users continue using the product for a year. Meanwhile, over a three-year span, Zombies, Run has nearly a 20 percent retention rate.

Hon seems to think that the future lies with smart watches, rather than dedicated wearables. In addition to Apple Watch, his game will be compatible with Android Wear in the near future.

“I think people are losing their minds about wearables,” he told The Guardian, expressing skepticism that a wearable would have enough processing power to provide the multi-faceted, multi-dimensional story or game that would be required to capture—and keep—the public’s attention for the long term.

Of course, as wearable hardware continues to advance, the idea of a narrative fitness game interacting with wearable data isn’t out of the realm of possibility. Technology continues to find new ways to inspire people’s imaginations, and fitness apps will continue to transform exercise from a chore into something that’s exciting and fun.

The post Gamification Apps Make Fitness Fun appeared first on iQ by Intel.

These indie games are lightweight and play on any device, but they’re best streamed on big TV screens in social settings.

Advances in technology lead to bigger, shinier games each year, but outside the mainstream flows a river of creative and entertaining independent games that play well across a variety of devices and screen sizes.

Many small studios use innovative design techniques to create incredible adventures that rival games from bigger studios. They commonly deliver gorgeous pixel and 2D art without requiring a high-end computer processor and graphic chips. That means these games work across different devices, including hardware like the Intel Compute Stick, a tiny PC that plugs into TVs and monitors using HDMI.

It’s quick and easy to grab a smartphone, tablet or laptop and dive into bejeweled remixes like Beglitched or terrifying, soundtrack-driven zombie titles like Noct, but playing these games on a large living room TV screen intensifies and socializes the experience.

Car racing in Drift Stage, exploring fictional worlds in Night in the Woods or masterminding strategies in Overland becomes gripping entertainment for a group or friends or family. The indie games have a light-weight design, making them the ticket for easily turning game night into a house party almost anywhere.

Rain World

In the visually striking platformer Rain World, players dive into the mysterious ruins of a fallen civilization. They must evade the bizarre predators of its broken ecosystem while inhabiting an adorable creature known only as “slugcat.”

An indie darling with a cult following online, composer James Primate called the process of creating Rain World a “constant collaboration with the Internet.” The developers often incorporate community feedback, so fans should keep an eye out for their own ideas and suggestions.

The dynamic approach to pixel art and enemy AI brings the game world to life. A feast for the eyes enjoyed best on the big screen, friends can help each other outsmart the intelligent predators who react differently in every playthrough. Primate even teased a robust couch co-operative mode, where up to four players can “explore the huge game world together!”

Beglitched

The “cyberpink” game Beglitched blends witchcraft with the world of computing into one hilarious experience. Breathing new life into the classic Bejeweled format, it sends players on a mission to “debug” mysterious coding errors by solving tile-matching puzzles.

In the game’s fiction, programming abilities are seen as magical powers. Players embark on a hacking journey as an apprentice to the craft, and they must piece together a larger secret through subtle hints.

“The narrative has an emphasis on personal insecurity and identity, and there’s sort of a feeling of exploring a lonely person’s internal life,” said programmer Alec Thomson.

A crowd-pleaser for groups that appreciate tech humor, actually playing the game is anything but lonely.

Noct

Rendered in black and white, this multiplayer horror game draws players in with stark visuals and a haunting soundtrack created with help from Nine Inch Nails guitarist Robin Finck.

Creator Chris Eskins wondered what a zombie game would look like if it only used thermal imaging. The result: an atmosphere that rides the tension between claustrophobia and isolation.

The horror of Noct derives less from jump-scares and more from a sense of shared dread amped up by group play. The eerie soundtrack begs to be blasted through the surround sound of a home theater, ensuring friends will have to dare each other to play.

Night in the Woods

Contrary to its spooky name, Night in the Woods offers a whimsical tale about a casually dressed cat trying to get home. The world resembles an eccentric children’s book, filled with smiling animals and minimalist shapes.

A narrative-driven game ideal for fans of Telltale, players impact the story through dialogue choices. The subtle changes give Night in the Woods good replay value, rewarding players who watch each other’s tales unfold in a variety of different ways.

“Night in the Woods is very intimate, but at game conventions, we see lots of people sitting close to each other, reading along and laughing at the jokes together,” said Adam Saltsman of Finji, the small publisher helping to finish the game.

Overland

Another title produced by Finji, the survival game Overland leans more toward strategy and tactics than story. Players use scarce resources and time management to traverse a desolate landscape filled with minimalist art and innumerable threats.

Playing together and putting several minds to the task can only increase the chances of survival. Saltsman equates the experience of playing Overland together to “a board game, with a lot of arguing over what to do next and why, and who to abandon and who to save, and what risk to take next.”

Gang Beasts

Double Fine’s clay-inspired fighting game Gang Beasts is less a tactical battle of wills than a wrestling match between oversized toddlers. Perfect as a party game, it turns living rooms into the virtual version of a mud-wrestling match.

Playing as multi-colored humanoid blobs that knock each other around in factories or off skyscrapers exemplifies why this competitive title encourages silliness above all else.

The game is set in the fictional metropolis of Beef City, and it rewards ridiculous antics while not punishing players who flout the rules.

Perfect for a game night with those friends who miss the days of Twister!, Gang Beasts promises to make everyone feel stupid enough to enjoy themselves.

Drift Stage

Classic racing games like Pole Position have been haunting arcades, bargain bins and retro compilation videos for years. Drift Stage modernizes that ‘80s classic, making virtual racing feel more glorious than ever.

The game’s chic pastels and flashy drift physics encourage flashier and flashier moves.

“Modern games don’t really lend themselves to the sort of multiplayer atmosphere I grew up with,” said Charles Blanchard, the designer behind Drift Stage’s art.

“You can’t have a good arcade racing game without split screen multiplayer. Being able to race your friends, on your couch—with no lag or any possible excuse beyond having a crappy 3rd party controller—results in the best kind of competitive play.”

Editor’s note: Since these games have yet to be released, the writer could not test them all on the Intel Compute Stick. An additional USB hub will be needed to play local multiplayer.

The post 7 Portable Indie Games Best Played on Big Screens appeared first on iQ by Intel.

For the first time ever, half of NASA’s astronaut grads are women, and they’re preparing to go where no man has gone before: Mars.

Between the documentaries and movies chronicling the brave men who first ventured into space and the grainy footage of Neil Armstrong taking mankind’s first step on the moon, there are far too many scenes of women waiting at home, eyes glued to TV screens with phones close at hand, waiting for news of their husbands’ fates in the great void.

Today, however, 50 percent of NASA’s latest astronaut class is female. It’s clear that women have earned a seat in the rocket, and one of them could very well be the first person to set foot on Mars.

NASA newest grads weren’t picked because of their gender. They beat out 6,100 applicants because they were the best people for the job.

“We never determine how many people of each gender we’re going to take, but these were the most qualified people of the ones that we interviewed,” said Janet Kavandi, NASA’s deputy director at the Glenn Research Centre about the latest astronaut class.

Though the Mars mission is at least 15 years away, preparations are already underway. Women will play a role in all aspects of that journey, whether behind the scenes, building the equipment to get there, or front and center, readying themselves to explore the red planet.

“If we go to Mars, we’ll be representing our entire species in a place we’ve never been before,” said Anne McClain, 36, a decorated war vet who flew on the frontlines of Iraqi Freedom. “To me, it’s the highest thing a human being can achieve.”

Space Trailblazers

Current data show that there is no evidence of differences between the genders when examining behavioral or psychological responses during spaceflight.

Women are, however, more likely to experience orthostatic intolerance – the inability to stand for long periods without fainting – after landing. Men are more likely to experience visual impairment after time in space.

NASA researchers acknowledge that there is a disparity between available data for spacefaring men and women, since far fewer women have had the opportunity to travel in space. To date, 543 humans have done so, but a mere 11 percent have been women.

It’s not that some haven’t made it into the ranks already. There’s Sally Ride, the first American woman to travel in space, for example, and Italy’s Samantha Cristoforetti, the first woman to spend 200 consecutive days living in the International Space Station. Still, given the fact that the field has been previously dominated by men, this recent shift is seismic.

Getting to NASA, let alone Mars, is a giant step in itself.

“I had always set my sights on working with NASA, but I didn’t want to get there by checking the usual boxes, like learning to fly and scuba dive,” said Christina Hammock Koch, 37. “I wanted to get there because I was passionate about science and the next frontier.” She spent 3-1/2 years working on Earth’s “frontiers,” working in Antarctica (including the South Pole) and the Arctic.

Koch also worked at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s Laboratory for High Energy Astrophysics and Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory’s Space Department, where she helped develop scientific instruments already used on multiple NASA missions.

Koch and McClain are joined by Jessica Meir and Nicole Aunapu Mann, both 38. Meir, a biologist, studied the effects of microgravity and space flight on the human body at the Johnson Space Center before becoming an astronaut.  Mann is a mechanical engineer who served two tours of duty with the Marine Corps, flying fighter jets in Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom.

Making it to Mars

The trip to Mars will be arduous. It is 35 million miles away, and the commute to get there will take six to nine months. A round trip mission would take two to three years. Conditions are harsh, with months-long dust storms and temperatures that drop as low as -284 in winter.

But the astronauts are already acquiring the necessary skills for the ride.

During their two years of astronaut training, the women piloted T-38 supersonic jets (capable of traversing 20 miles per minute), experienced zero-gravity in the “vomit comet” and put on 400-pound space suits to perform tasks under 40 feet of water in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab, complete with an underwater mock-up of the International Space Station.

McClain compares wearing the space suit to piloting an aircraft.

“It’s an extremely technical piece of equipment,” she said. “You have to know all of the details about the suit; you’ve got to know the emergency procedures; you’ve got to know the different systems; you have to learn kind of different way of adapting your body movements to accomplish the mission.”

The astronauts will continue to train as they progress through the three-tiered Mars mission plan: Earth Reliant Exploration focuses on research aboard the International Space Station. Proving Ground is where NASA will conduct complex operations in a deep—but not too deep—space environment. Earth Independent activities include human missions in deep space, and eventually, on Mars itself.

Along the way, NASA will continue to gather data on the physiological effects space travel has on the human body, as well as the differences in how men and women respond to space.

Having already taken on extreme challenges here on Earth, Mann, McClain, Koch and Meir are ready to tackle the next frontier.

The post One Giant Step for Womankind appeared first on iQ by Intel.

As companies cater to the millennial desire for a more inspiring workplace—from extended paid family leave to flexible office hours — new work perks improve work-life balance for everyone.

No one would argue that Lego stations, gourmet cafes and dog-friendly spaces make work a little more fun, but companies are realizing that today’s young workforce cares about more than just free breakfasts and beer. As the American Society of Employers found, gimmicky perks are costly without improving worker engagement.

The conversation around workplace balance and benefits is undergoing a radical shift. As tech companies and startups try to recruit the best and brightest talent, they’re realizing their offerings need to woo a generation unaccustomed and unwilling to settle.

The Deloitte Millennial Survey 2016 found that 44 percent of millennials would like to leave their current employer in the next two years because “a perceived lack of leadership-skill development and feelings of being overlooked are compounded by larger issues around work-life balance, the desire for flexibility and a conflict of values.”

Millennials will work hard, but not simply for a paycheck, said Ekaterina Walter, bestselling author of Think Like Zuck: The Five Business Secrets of Facebook’s Improbably Brilliant CEO Mark Zuckerberg, international speaker and global evangelist at Sprinklr.

“Young people understand that hard work is required to get ahead,” Walter said.

In her book, she explained young employees are not willing to work in frigid eight-to-five environments that were so common among their parents and grandparents.

“They want flexibility to live life and accumulate experiences while they are young, and, in return, they will put their best foot forward,” she wrote. “The future of work is not so much about work/life balance, but rather about integrated life.”

“It is about figuring out how to combine work life with your personal life in a way that they complement each other,” Walter said.

From paid sabbaticals to continuing education stipends, companies are providing perks that provide employees meaningful opportunities to grow.

The Future of Work/Life Balance

“A lot of companies are starting to allow employees flexibility, and they are seeing spikes in productivity,” Walter said.

Google has really raised the bar high for fostering an “integrated life.” Fortune named the company the “Best Company to Work For” seven times in the past decade. Along with access to a medical care facility and gym at the Googleplex headquarters in Mountain View, California, employees can get up to $12,000 in tuition reimbursement per year, adoption assistance with up to $5,000 to help with legal fees and emergency backup childcare.

Other companies offer other unique benefits like student debt repayment perks or vacation stipends—all things that workers of all ages can use and enjoy. Price Waterhouse Cooper (PWC), for instance, gives its workers $1,200 annually to pay off student-loan debt. Airbnb offers employees $2,000 per year to travel (and stay in an Airbnb) anywhere in the world.

Innovative companies have also committed to funding everything from team-building classes (macaroon baking, anyone?) to sabbaticals to gender reassignment surgery.

Some of the biggest perks millennials look for, however, continue to be mentorship, recognition and opportunities for advancement. Millennials are also tech savvy and don’t want to be stuck in an outdated workplace. As 28-year-old Elizabeth Plank told The New York Times, she left a nonprofit gig for exactly these reasons.

“We called people on phones and we — I don’t know — we faxed people. And we had to mail things,” she said.

Margaret Davis, a 28-year-old who left her job at a pharmaceutical company because she felt overlooked amid management changes, told Time that getting “lost in the system after four years” prompted a career change.

“I want my strengths to add value,” she said.

Forbes’ Karl Moore, author of “The Modern Mentor in a Millennial Workplace,” wrote that far from being immature and lazy, young people desperately want an advisor, someone who can help guide their careers.

“Millennials acknowledge, albeit not out loud, that they have certain limitations. They are aware that they lack some crucial elements in order to move forward,” he wrote. “They view mentors as meaningful contributors to their personal growth.”

While employees may not have expected stipends and structured leadership programs a decade ago, millennials are helping drive the meaningful changes that ensure all employees have a better work day.

Focus on Family

“There’s a perks arms-race for high-paying, white collar work,” Bloomberg’s Rebecca Greenfield wrote. “The tech industry has zeroed in on leave because it has trouble hiring and keeping women.”

Although many millennials aren’t parents just yet, paid family leave is important for future moms and dads when they’re deciding where to work. According to a Washington Post article on millennials and work-life balance, nearly 40 percent of millennials are so dissatisfied with paid leave policies in the U.S., they’d be willing to move to another country.

“A figure like that certainly shifts the conversation from paid parental-leave being a ‘nice to have’ to being a ‘need to have’ for companies,” Karyn Twaronite, Ernst & Young’s global-diversity and inclusiveness officer, told the Post.

With nearly 1.4 million new tech jobs needing to be filled by 2020, employers know attracting top millennial talent is a necessity.

“Part of it is the workforce in tech is very competitive,” said Juliet Gorman, director of culture and engagement at Etsy, which offers 26 weeks of fully-paid leave for men and women who become parents through birth or adoption. “There’s more demand and more amazing jobs out there than we can find talent to fill.”

Many large companies are setting a high standard. Netflix reportedly offers a full year’s paid maternity or paternity leave to its employees, while Adobe reportedly gives 26 weeks of paid maternity leave and 16 weeks of paid paternity leave. Microsoft offers 20 weeks of paid leave to new moms and 12 weeks to new dads. Google, Amazon, Intel and countless other tech companies also offer generous time off for new parents.

It certainly helps when the boss sets a good example. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is considered a role model on this front. While his company allows both male and female employees to take four months off during their child’s first year, it was a major milestone that Zuckerberg himself took two months off when his daughter, Max, was born.

“Leading by example shouldn’t just be for executing your projects, but this behavior should also apply to life beyond office,” said Walter. “The fact that Mark Zuckerberg, a Fortune 500 CEO, took two months off for his paternity leave to spend time with his daughter is admirable. The message it sent to other employees is, ‘It’s okay to fully utilize the benefit that the company offers you without feeling guilty.’”

As employees’ children grow up, some companies offer work perks for the kids, too.

Since its inception in 1933, Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day gave children a chance to see first-hand what their parents did all day. Today, many companies try to appeal to millennial parents, who are more focused on helping their children develop independence and a self-identity, by involving their children in the workday and encouraging their interest in technology.

For example, Panasonic hosted a semester-long weekend program that taught employees’ children about topics ranging from STEM careers and coding to filmmaking and robotics. Facebook’s version includes a drone club and Lego engineering stations, while Google teaches kids about online safety and exposes them to coding languages such as Scratch.

While there’s no perfect formula for retaining top talent, innovative companies have made significant strides toward creating an encouraging atmosphere — one that fosters professional loyalty through personal growth.

Dina Roth Port contributed to this story.

The post Work Perks: Millennials Search for Meaning in the Workplace appeared first on iQ by Intel.

Canada’s Austin Wang won first prize at Intel ISEF 2016 for developing a microbial fuel cell that converts organic waste into energy, while runners-up awards went to America’s Syamantak Payra and Kathy Liu for their respective improvements to knee braces and batteries.

Han Jie (Austin) Wang, an 18 year old from Vancouver, British Columbia, sees a long life ahead, and he’s determined to have a healthy planet on which to live it.

For the past four years, Wang has been looking for a way to reduce carbon emissions by improving the efficiency of microbial fuel cells (MFCs).

MFCs are bioelectrochemical systems that convert chemical energy into electrical energy by exploiting the electron transferring capabilities of special microorganisms.

For his Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) research project, Wang identified specific genes in genetically enhanced E.coli bacteria that enabled them to generate power efficiently.

“I am working with a device that uses bacteria to break down waste and generate electricity,” he said.

Wang’s system can produce significantly more power than existing MFC processes at a cost that is competitive with solar energy. He believes this will make MFCs commercially viable.

In turn, he anticipates that MFCs will play a part in both reducing carbon emissions and providing power for third world and developing nations.

The budding microbiologist won top honors for this research at the 2016 Intel ISEF: the Gordon E. Moore Award and a $75,000 scholarship.

Runners-up

Two runners-up, Syamantak Payra, 15, of Friendswood, Texas, and Kathy Liu, 17, of Salt Lake City, Utah, received Intel Foundation Young Scientist Awards and $50,000 scholarships for their innovative research.

Payra developed a low-cost electronically-aided knee brace that allows an individual with a weakened leg to walk more naturally.

According to the teen’s research, more than 6 million people in the U.S. alone require Knee-Ankle-Foot-Orthoses (KAFOs) due to injury or disease. These devices lock the knee joint to allow wearers to stand or walk without leg collapse.

“However, since normal walking requires knee bending, conventional fixed knee KAFOs cause health problems: gait deviations, hip/back pain, joint/muscle damage, and excess energy expenditure,” said Payra.

To address this problem, Payra modified a standard brace, adding a gyroscopically-oriented sensor on the healthy leg to control a robotically-powered knee brace on the weak leg.

When Payra tested his prototype with two individuals partially disabled by polio, it almost immediately restored a more natural gait and increased mobility.

Liu took her research in a different direction. Concerned about recent reports of fires caused by batteries in planes, cell phones and hoverboards, Liu set out to find a solution.

She succeeded in developing an alternative battery component that not only improves battery safety, but also performance.

“We can replace the flammable liquids in batteries with a solid polymer to drastically improve safety and also enable batteries that pack even more power,” she explained.

In her research, Lui evaluated more than 90 different potential solid electrolyte candidates. Based on tests with charred luffa fruit, she developed and tested a novel mix of table sugar and a boron hydrogen compound that had an ionic conductivity nearly 100 times better than the most popularly investigated alternative.

Lui’s new rechargeable battery is smaller and more lightweight, without the risk of fire inherent in lithium-ion batteries.

This research could result in more efficient, low-cost and sustainable energy storage.

Inspiring the Next Generation of Innovators

“Intel congratulates this year’s winners and hopes that their work will inspire other young innovators to apply their curiosity and ingenuity to today’s global challenges,” said Rosalind Hudnell, vice president in Human Resources, director of Corporate Affairs at Intel Corporation, and president of the Intel Foundation.

“This international science and engineering exhibition is an excellent example of what can be achieved when students from different backgrounds, perspectives and geographies come together to share ideas and solutions.”

This year, 1,760 young scientists attended Intel ISEF after advancing from 419 affiliate fairs in 77 countries, regions and territories around the globe.

In addition to prizes for the top winners, roughly 600 finalists received awards and prizes for inspired research, including 20 “Best of Category” winners, each of whom received a $5,000 prize.

The Intel Foundation also awarded a $1,000 grant to each winner’s school and to the affiliated fair they represent.

In all, approximately $4 million in prizes was awarded.

“Our top winners this year – Wang, Payra and Lui – clearly demonstrate that age has no bearing on your ability to conduct research and come up with solutions to important problems,” said Maya Ajmera, president and CEO of Society for Science & the Public.

“We congratulate them not only for their success, but on their dedication and hard work. They and the rest of the Intel ISEF finalists are the rising stars of STEM, and we look forward to watching them pursue their passions and in turn make the world a better place for future generations.”

The post Teen Turns Sewage into Electricity to Win Global Science Fair appeared first on iQ by Intel.

One internationally acclaimed high-school roboticist turned his passion for science into a successful startup.

When three 18-year-old kids from the Czech Republic developed a robot that was sophisticated enough to open a beer bottle and pour the liquid into a glass in 2009—subsequently winning Intel’s International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF)—it was only the beginning of their careers as gifted makers.

Today, two of those plucky students, Marek Votroubek and Petr Bubeníček, own the world’s largest 3D photo bank of products.

“The victory in Intel ISEF opened for us the door into the real business, not just by the publicity of this competition but by work results and experience that won us the award,” Votroubek said. “The transition from a school project to real business was very easy.”

Each year more than 1,700 student finalists earn the right to attend the Intel ISEF as a result of winning a local, regional or national Intel ISEF-affiliated fair. Votroubek was a finalist, and his team won $3,000. It was a springboard to his startup, 3Doid.

3Doid uses its own specialized machines and proprietary algorithms to create 360-degree 3D photos known as 3doids. The fully automated machines capture a total of 324 photos from 9 different heights in order to piece together the 3doid.

The maximum resolution is twice that of Full HD at 4MPx, so the photos don’t lose their focus when magnified or rotated. This makes 3doids an ideal option for companies that sell products online. Most of the major Czech online stores use 3doids, and Votroubek said there are major benefits to going this route.

Because few manufacturers release actual product photos, opting instead for photorealistic renderings, retailers are forced to use the same images as their competitors. This is further complicated if the images are fuzzy or only taken from one point of view.

“The customer normally engages more with the product because he can view it from any angle. If the product is worse than he expected, he can buy a better one,” said Votroubek.

Using 3doids gives retailers an advantage, too. The number of people who purchased a product was approximately 27 percent higher on websites that had 3doids than on those with 2D images, according to Peep Laja, founder of ConversionXL, a company specializing in conversion optimization and data-driven growth for businesses.

The idea for 3doids came from Bubeníček’s father, who worked for a manufacturer that produced plastic automobile parts. These parts vary in shape and are often hard to piece together. 3doids provide a means of showing the intricate details from every angle, ensuring a perfect fit each time.

The startup eventually shifted to photographing electronics. What sets the company apart, however, is that it’s able to capture images even before the product hits the market.

“When it goes from manufacturer through the official country distribution to the e-shop, we shoot it,” Votroubek explained. “So, when the product is available for sale, there is also a 3doid ready. Now, we are starting to cooperate with manufacturers to be able to shoot it when it leaves their building.”

3doid continues to innovate and grow, and Votroubek credits the group’s ISEF win with getting the ball rolling.

“Basically, preparation for Intel ISEF taught me to work effectively and quickly,” he said. “If it had not been for Intel ISEF, I would still be doing what I do now but with a delay of five years. Almost every one of my inventions stands on something I have invented before: robots for the ISEF competition.”

As a kid, Votroubek was a LEGO fanatic who loved to figure out how various machines worked. By the time he hit secondary school, his chemistry and physics teacher Martina Kunderová noticed his technical prowess. She suggested that he and Bubeníček enter the competition.

The result was the beer-pouring EiMSA Robot. Its primary capabilities, however, had little to do with cracking open a cold one.

The robot was built to search for objects and manipulate them according to the needs of the operator. It “perceives” through a digital camera that sends pictures into a computer where they are processed. This is how the robot searches for the pre-defined object.

When the requested object is found, the computer sends orders into its engines’ control centers. The motion is driven by electric engines from AKU-drills that move eight wheels and an arm that’s been adapted to grasp various objects.

This impressive machine beat out 320 other projects from 56 countries. Votroubek said his team’s project knowledge set them apart.

“Contrary to other teams, we knew our project into the smallest detail, as we spent hundreds of hours working on it,” he said. “We could easily explain to the jury why parts used in the construction of EiMSAR are used the way they are.”

Votroubek maintains this same level of passionate know-how with all his projects. Aside from the 3Doid venture, he also works on an EDWIN cylinder mower that enables homeowners to cut the perfect lawn and an experimental eight-wheel wheelchair that can move through rough terrain, using hydraulic cylinders to walk the stairs.

Overall, Votroubek repudiates idling and procrastination, opting instead for the breakneck pace of innovation. The way he sees it, he can rest when the work is completed.

“I try to work at full speed while I have ideas. I can rest in five, 10 years,” said Votroubek. “Or I can just keep my projects going.”

Katerina Bousova contributed to this story.

The post Czech Innovator Develops World’s Largest 3D Photo Bank appeared first on iQ by Intel.

A premier first-person shooter, Doom still inspires programmers, modders and digital artists to adapt the game in unexpected ways.

Excitement over the release of Doom 2016 is proof the beloved 24-year-old game series is a pop-culture mainstay. Doom is much more than a big-name franchise about blasting demons in their ugly faces. It’s a rare phenomenon that inspired the DIY gaming movement and continues to spark unbridled creativity among its biggest fans.

Since id Software unleashed Doom on PCs in 1993, it has ushered in two entire generations of modders, makers and artistic communities. These fans have endless reasons to love Doom, according to David Kushner, author of Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture.

While researching his book, he learned why Doom continues to be way ahead of its time.

“I was amazed by all the innovations Doom exemplified,” he explained, “Fast action FPS [first-person shooter], co-op play, shareware, mods, deathmatching, violence, the list goes on.”

Beyond its legacy as an FPS, Doom is pegged for sparking a revolution in digital creation.

“The most compelling thing about Doom today is the very fact that people are still playing it and making things for it,” said Andrew Stine, the co-founder of Doomworld, a popular internet hangout where “modders, map authors, musician, and coders” have been coming together to share Doom-related content since 1998.

“People enjoy the idea of carrying on a tradition that [goes back] over two decades, which is a rare thing in gaming–a hobby that is usually always looking ahead to the next big thing,” he said.

Doom and the DIY Gaming Movement

The creative juices of Doom fans tend to spring from the unlikeliest of places.

Case in point: among makers and coding communities, there is something of a hackers’ dare to see who can get Doom running on the most underpowered hardware.

In recent years, the game has been played on everything from a Canon printer to an Intel Edison, a small microcontroller with built-in wireless that’s typically used in wearable prototypes and Internet of Things devices.

The process of adapting a game’s code to run on a system other than what was intended is known as porting, and Doom has been ported like no other game.

“The reason why Doom has been ported so much is because it was designed with portability in mind,” stated Google software engineer and technical writer Fabien Sanglard.

This has everything to do with Doom’s rather unconventional evolution.

Before creator John Carmack sat down to program Doom, he went out and purchased a NeXT workstation—the ill-fated computer system Steve Jobs built after being booted from Apple. That NeXT may have sealed the fate for Doom.

“This way of programming was unusual at the time: Most games of the era were built on a PC,” said Sanglard.

The result was that Doom played nicely with other systems, unlike its other PC-born contemporaries.

When id Software eventually released Doom’s source code to the public in 1997, DIY programmers latched on. Hackers were at liberty to bring the game to every platform, even unthinkable ones like Apple Watch.

Impressively, members of the Omnimaga Texas Instruments programming group even got Doom to play on graphing calculators.

“I’m not saying it was easy, but I didn’t run into difficult issues,” said Xavier Andréani, who ported Doom from a black-and-white calculator to a color calculator in 2012. “The game runs smoothly on all TI-Nspire calculators. There’s no need to overclock [or hack the calculator to run faster].”

The desire to play Doom on everything reached fever pitch when one Inception-minded YouTuber named TheZombieKiller found a way to play Doom inside Doom.

Doom’s Design Legacy

Not only did Doom introduce a renaissance of DIY hardware hacking, but the game also gave many aspiring game designers a stage to shine on.

“Doom, more than any other game, inspired a generation of developers to join the industry,” Kushner said, referring to, among many things, Doom’s innovative WAD “Where’s All the Data” file system.

John Carmack was very forward thinking when he structured the game’s files. Doom’s .wad or WAD, allows players to easily modify the content of a game.

Carmack wanted players to be able to design their own levels, fill them with their own artwork and music, and then share their finished creations with other fans over the internet, which was just coming into its own in the mid ‘90s.

And share they did.

Even today, the number of games made from Doom’s ingredients remains unprecedented. No one knows for sure how many Doom mods exist, but honest estimates sit at around fifty thousand unique pieces of user-created content.

According to Chris Hecker, a key programmer on Will Wright’s Spore, Doom was also important for designers who didn’t have art or programming chops. He said the game marked the first time these professionals could create and show a demo of their work during a job interview.

Today, the kinds of games people create with Doom run the gamut.

There are brief, kitschy affairs, like Pirate Doom. Or elaborate, full-scale productions that spent years in development, like Beautiful Doom, which made the original Doom an altogether more pleasant experience.

Over at Doomworld, Stine links to something in the neighborhood of 18,000 custom-built Doom games. Annually, the community gives out awards for the best WADs of the year, and there are more than enough honorable mentions.

There is also the Espi, the lifetime achievement award for an outstanding body of Doom user-creation, as it is entirely possible for someone to have spent a lifetime authoring Doom content.

“I think that Doom’s continued success as a creative outlet can be boiled down to the structure of the game itself,” Stine said.

“Doom is incredibly simplistic compared to most modern games. There’s no inventory, no skill tree, no forced stealth segments. So the game itself affords a lot of experimentation and variation because the key elements are so basic.”

With no sign of fans running out of fresh ideas to build on these basics, it looks like Doom will continue to inspire the next generation of creatives who aren’t limited by technology but by the depths of their imaginations.

The post How Doom 1 Inspired the DIY Gaming Movement appeared first on iQ by Intel.

From viral video proposals to Pinterest inspiration boards, technology helps savvy millennials plan the hashtag weddings of their dreams.

Now that millennials—the generation that hardly remembers a time before the internet and smartphones—are planning weddings, it’s no surprise that technology is influencing new traditions.

It used to be that a bride would spend months flipping through magazines and visiting wedding stores to get inspired for her big day. Today, social media and digital tools make it easier than ever for couples to plan, share and document their big day.

“It’s not about who spends the most: You get points for innovation, filmmaking, storytelling and artistic interpretation,” said Carolyn Gerin, co-founder of the WedTech Summit, an annual conference that showcases the latest in wedding technology. “And since everyone’s on camera 24-7, the experience had better be interesting.”

While the methods have changed, the goal remains: to create a truly memorable event that expresses the couple’s personalities… and shares well on Instagram.

Collaboration is Key

When Florence Ion, a San Francisco-based tech journalist, began planning her upcoming wedding, she created a budget spreadsheet using a template she found online and shared it with her fiancé via Google Docs.

“My friends and family all have Google accounts, too, so it’s made it easy to collaborate with them—especially since we’re all living in different parts of the country,” Ion said.

Collaboration is essential among the generation that doesn’t order lunch without crowd-sourcing it on Yelp. Comprehensive planning sites such as local vendor network WeddingWire and social marketplace Wedspire integrate social sharing so everything – from setting a budget to monitoring guest headcount and hiring the band – is easier.

Other engaged couples and the couple’s family and friends can use Pinterest-like boards to discuss and make group decisions.

Many couples today take a project-management approach to planning a wedding, using tools such as Evernote, Cozi or Google Docs to organize and track their to-do’s. For wedding planners, services like HoneyBook.com and AislePlanner.com allow users to create and share inspiration boards with clients, collaborate with vendors and facilitate payments.

Logistics made Simpler

Technology streamlines many of the labor-intensive tasks that are a given of modern weddings. Couples can send save-the-dates and monitor email open rates and RSVPs via sites like PaperlessPost and Greenvelope.

Online tux rental shop Menguin.com or bridal partywear site Weddington Way provide a “virtual showroom” where attendants can collaborate and discuss attire options.

The Wedding Reality app even lets a bride virtually design and try on a dress, while FaceTime and Skype allow bridesmaids to shop together even if they live on opposite sides of the country.

GigSalad lets couples preview and listen to “tens of thousands” of potential reception bands. Shapeways brings DIY favors and decor to another level with custom 3D-printed creations.

And gone are the days of sending an email (or letter!) with planning information; today, most couples—over 70 percent according to wedding site The Knot–opt for a wedding website.

What’s more, according to this year’s The Knot’s Real Weddings Study, a survey of more than 18,000 brides and grooms, 89 percent of couples are using their smartphones to plan their weddings.

Wedding planning and registry sites like The Knot, WeddingWire or Wedding Paper Divas make it easy (and free) for couples to create a basic site. More advanced features, such as personalized invitations and guest messaging, are available on paid sites such as AppyCouple, Wedding Woo or Glö.

“We’re hosting our wedding website on a co-op web server, and we built it with a responsive template that we purchased from ThemeForest,” Ion said. “I hear good things about Wix.com for making your own wedding website—they have mobile-friendly templates, too.”

Another mobile option is the personalized wedding app from WedPics, which pulls together all the important info—accommodations, wedding events, gift registry—in addition to providing guests a place to upload photos.

And for those elements where tradition still reigns, such as the importance of a handwritten thank-you note, tech can still help simplify the process. Bond.co makes quick work of sending “handwritten” thank-you notes by employing robots that can mimic a sample of a user’s handwriting.

Redoing the Registry

It’s no longer where a couple is registered but how. MyRegistry.com allows couples to register for anything for sale online by importing purchase pages from any e-commerce website. Zola has an iPhone app for adding gifts with the scan of a barcode, receiving alerts when something is purchased and facilitating requests for cash gifts as well.

Often millennials, many of whom already live with their soon-to-be spouse, don’t want things at all. They prefer cash gifts to use toward experiences rather than matching table linens.

Sites like HoneyFund.com and Envelope Registry help couples ask guests to invest in honeymoon trips or down payments on homes, while ThankfulRegistry.com and IDoFoundation.org facilitates donations to charity in a couple’s honor.

Creating a Public Record

Possibly the most important part of a wedding in 2016: its digital legacy. For today’s couples, it’s all about creating and curating photographic and video memories that endure.

By getting guests to use a unique photo hashtag (WeddingWire.com will even help generate one), couples have an automatic index of candid photos. Services like TweetWall Pro can instantly project posts onto a screen in the venue so guests can see their live posts at the wedding. Later, the happy couple can create a hard copy album of their favorite tagged shots with ChatBook.

To encourage her guests to act as photographers—which, as Ion points out, they’re going to do anyway—she plans to offer up a handful of selfie sticks for shared use.

“I’m going to build a little charging station for the guests and their smartphones, with the help of Monoprice and a few well-placed decorations,” Ion said. “It’ll include both Apple and Android-friendly cables, and even USB Type-C.”

Even photobooths are getting a digital upgrade with companies like Photomadic, which have kiosks that can instantly upload photos and animated GIFs images of guests to social media. For guests who can’t be there, Anybots allow an absentee get in on the action from afar. Essentially, users create an online avatar that gives them virtual access to the event using a speaker, camera and video screen.

Another video trend involves placing cameras in creative places for unexpected views of the event. Ion plans to hide an HTC Re action camera (similar to a GoPro) inside a bridesmaid’s bouquet, and later prop it on a Joby GorillaPod to take time-lapse images of the reception.

“You can set up the camera with a smartphone to see the field of view and ensure that it’s recording what you want,” she said. “The Re saves each snap as an individual photo, which helps produce some candid moments.”

According to Gerin, another tech trend is hiring a photographer to control a camera-carrying drone for aerial perspectives of the ceremony and reception. With This Ring Wedding Films offers these services.

Ion, however, is saying no to drones. “I don’t know that I trust a flying apparatus with all that tulle in the crowd,” she said. ”That sounds like a fashion disaster waiting to happen.”

The post Hashtag Weddings and Instagram I Dos appeared first on iQ by Intel.

A new generation of distillers are turning to precision science and technology to bring consistency to the age-old art of bourbon making.

The state of Kentucky is famous for many things from thoroughbred races horses and Louisville Slugger baseball bats, to Colonel Sanders’ fried chicken and bourbon. The state produces about 95 percent of the world’s bourbon, a drink distilled using time-honored traditions and, recently, a few new tricks.

Distillers along the Kentucky Bourbon Trail boast bourbon roots reaching back to Kentucky’s first settlers in the 1700s. The amber liquid is the main ingredient in the mint julep, Kentucky’s most famous cocktail and the signature drink of the Kentucky Derby, where spectators consume 120,000 mint juleps over the two-day horseracing event at Churchill Downs.

The careful craftsmanship of turning “mash bill” grains—at least 51 percent corn—into tasty bourbon is sacred to distillers and casual connoisseurs alike.

A new generation of distillers is keeping one foot planted firmly in the past as it barrels into the future using science, technology and human ingenuity to make better bourbon faster.

Technology isn’t replacing artistry; it’s enhancing it, according to Caleb Kilburn, the 24-year-old head distiller of Peerless, which has family ties to bourbon making that trace back 120 years.

“There’s a fear with getting too automated, letting tech replace artistry,” he said. Yet Kilburn didn’t hesitate to install processing equipment and controls that he said make Peerless one of the more technologically advanced craft distilleries in the U.S.

Growing up on a dairy farm in Kentucky, Kilburn explored local distilleries and saw how some used rudimentary equipment while others used sophisticated tools.

“Both styles required a high degree of artistry, but the more technologically advanced systems were able to make more consistent products and operate on a larger scale than the more hands-on makers,” said Kilburn.

“Technology is definitely making the product of bourbon better.”

He sees the age-old art of making bourbon evolving with modern manufacturing techniques.

“Analytics ensure that only the highest quality and cleanest grains are used at our distillery,” he said. “Production processes follow the same parameters, and are corrected through the use of PID control loops, ensuring our finely tuned set points are maintained.”

PID control loops were first invented to automatically steer ships at the turn of the 20^th century. This feedback mechanism has evolved and today is used in microcontrollers that power robots and other internet-connected devices.

“All of our barrels are tracked through a digital record system, allowing me to access everything that went into that specific barrel’s production—grain measurements, cooking times and temperature, fermentation progression, distillation parameters, alcohol yields and information about that barrel’s maturation,” he said.

For most, the bourbon community is still seen as very traditional.

“It’s old school,” said Chuck Hemann, a digital analytics and insights manager at Intel by day and a whisky aficionado by night…and weekends.

“If you’ve ever toured the Buffalo Trace distillery in Frankfort, Kentucky, you’ve seen the old wooden tracks they use to roll barrels from one warehouse to another.”

Hemann said that most people see technology only used in the marketing of bourbon. Last year, Jim Beam used virtual reality to show how its Devil’s Cut Bourbon is made. He said this same innovative spirit is transforming cocktail making, especially around new specialty bitters and serving temperatures.

Cooling Period

Kegs and blenders are examples of how technology influences the way people drink, said Jason Sherman, founder of Beyond Zero in Louisville. He launched his company in 2008 to create a machine that does what many people thought was impossible: It freezes alcohol.

“When you’re talking to a bartender, a lot of language you use is telling them what to do with ice,” Sherman said. “Neat, on the rocks, shaken not stirred.”

But with his turbo version of a home ice-maker, which freezes alcohol into solid cubes in less than five minutes, people can make cocktails “in the rocks.”

Sherman said a pour of bourbon served “in the rocks” allows the person to appreciate flavor notes they otherwise couldn’t because the extreme cold—the cubes take a drink down to 20 or 30 degrees below zero—removes the ethanol burn of high-proof spirits.

For cocktails, he explained, the mixologist can use the same formula of water, bitters, spirits and other ingredients in the ice cubes, thus eliminating the last, disappointing drink of a watered-down cocktail.

“This really opens up the door to create a new way of drinking and present drinks in a different way,” he said.

The Need for More Bourbon

As the worldwide thirst for bourbon continues to rise, some distillers who believe grains fermented in lower temperatures equate to superior flavors are relying on refrigeration.

“A nice big chiller that keeps the right temperature for yeast means we can make bourbon for that julep year round,” said Marianne Barnes of the under-construction Castle and Key distillery in Frankfort, Kentucky

To meet demand, distillers like Kilburn are working to eliminate risks for human error. A computer programmed with his detailed instructions guides every step of the process, leaving nothing to chance—from precisely weighing the incoming grains to monitoring the barometric pressure in the distilling room.

The Problem with Aging

Older age typically signals higher-quality bourbon, but new techniques are challenging this notion.

“The new craft guys are trying different ways to get their product onto market without waiting four years or even two years,” said Colin Blake, an instructor at the Distilled Spirits Epicenter in Louisville.

Chemical changes occur when the spirit interacts with the charred oak inside barrels. It’s crucial for developing a bourbon’s color, aroma and flavor. Smaller barrels can speed up those changes by decreasing the volume and increasing the surface area per liquid, explained Blake.

In an effort to make bourbon faster, one distiller in Cleveland, Ohio, some 350 miles northeast of Kentucky, is using pressure techniques and oxygen infusion to speed up the aging process.

“Instead of putting the alcohol inside the barrel, we put the barrel inside the alcohol,” Tom Lix, founder and CEO of Cleveland Whiskey told Inc. Magazine.

His whiskey is aged a short time in barrels then removed. The barrels are cut up, placed into a giant stainless steel vessel with the slightly aged bourbon and pressure cooked.

“Generally aged less than a year, it has some characteristics of younger whiskey, but it’s getting more complex,” said Blake, describing Cleveland Whiskey.

The Perfect Mix

“Every aspect of the industry is changing,” said Barnes, noting that every distiller wants to find a way to make and keep more bourbon.

“Barrel makers are looking at ways to decrease barrel loss,” she said. “Even the farmers are thinking of different ways to grow [grain] to make it optimal for distillers.”

As technology continues to improve, it will most definitely play an increasingly important role in this industry, said Peerless distiller Kilburn.

“Testing methods throughout the process will become more accurate, more economical, and the management of the data will become much simpler,” he said.

“Overall, the process of making bourbon will continue to be refined and improved, making for better and better products.”

Dana McMahan and Deb Landau contributed to this story. 

The post Bourbon Tech Improving Your Mint Julep appeared first on iQ by Intel.

Exemptions from FAA regulations allowed Intel’s Drone 100 – a Guinness World record-setting sky light show – to perform for the first time in the U.S.

The sun dropped out of sight one evening in March. The blue sky turned dark above California’s Palm Desert except for 100 colorful dots that danced like fireflies syncopated to a live outdoor orchestra. Invited spectators sat 500 feet away from a makeshift landing pad and watched a centennial of drones turn the night sky into a vibrant ballet of flickering lights.

In an isolated part of Indio, the desert city neighboring Coachella (famous for its annual music festival) and Indian Wells (home of professional tennis tournaments), six minutes of mesmerizing aerial eye candy marked the first time the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) allowed 100 drones to fly synchronously in U.S. airspace.

“Our goal is to do this over stadiums, over events that have large populations,” said Intel CEO and drone enthusiast Brian Krzanich. Drone 100 demonstrates that art, technology and government regulations working together can open possibilities for how aerial robots – drones – are used.

FAA drone regulations limit individuals and businesses from flying multiple drones simultaneously without special exemption.  Since unmanned aerial systems (UAS) can pose risks to the busy and complex U.S. airspace, the FAA has taken incremental steps to address any hazards from the proliferation of drones.

“A positive regulatory environment can be the great enabler for drone innovation, safety and industry expansion,” said Krzanich, who in May was selected to lead the FAA’s Drone Advisory Council, which makes recommendations on UAS-related issues.

In late 2015, the first event set a Guinness World Record outside of Hamburg, Germany for most unmanned aerial vehicles airborne simultaneously. Before it could occur in U.S. airspace, however, Krzanich’s team needed to secure a Section 333 Exemption from the FAA, granting special permission for one pilot to operate multiple drones.

“We worked with the FAA, walked them through what our technology can do, step by step,” said Natalie Cheung, drone product manager at Intel.

Since safety is the FAA’s main concern, Cheung said demonstrating safeguards built into the automation and manual control systems was critical to winning the exemption to fly in the U.S.

The 100 flying robots were programmed to lift off, line up and create different shapes that pulsed with colorful light, disappearing for split seconds then reappearing in rhythmic perfection. In addition to choreographed moves, the 100 drones were trained to respect the 200-foot height limit, a broad rule the FAA raised to 400 feet just days later, showing how regulations are evolving.

The 100 drones were split into three groups with each group controlled by one laptop. A fourth so-called master laptop overriding them all was operated by Pilot in Command, Jeff Lo.

“My laptop can select all the drones and tell them to come home,” said Lo, a technical marketing manager at Intel who has an FAA-issued pilot certificate and leads a biplane racing team in his spare time.

He said in the U.S., the FAA requires a certificated pilot to operate commercial drone flights.

“Presumably, regulators want commercial drone pilots to understand the air traffic control system, where the airports are, how to find the right information and alert other airmen if necessary,” said Lo.

While three assistant pilots monitored battery voltages and other aspects of each set of drones, Lo kept tabs on weather conditions and made sure no drone flew outside designated air space.

Ascending Technologies, now part of Intel, built the100 drones. PCs powered by Intel processors were used to develop and run the drone automation and control system.

“A mountain of data comes from these drones,” said Lo.

Each drone relies on the unlicensed 2.4GHz spectrum – the same spectrum used by wi-fi – for wireless communication with the command center laptops. They use GPS and barometric pressure sensors to calculate their proper position.

One onboard processor runs the basic flight mechanics of holding position and changing rotor speeds, which steers each drone. Another processor is programed to take wireless communication commands for navigation and that turn on and off lights, and change colors.

Looking ahead, Lo said that drone technologies such as computer vision, innovations like 5G wireless networks and solid regulation combined will help make drones more intelligence, reliable and safe.

“Flying has always given me a wonderful feeling of freedom since you can move in any direction,” said Lo.  “Even if I’m not inside the drone, I still have that sense of freedom to move in three dimensions. Now imagine multiplying that by a hundred then add lights and music!“

Airfield photos by Jeff Lo.

Go here to learn more about how sensors, computing, and communication technologies from Intel are helping aerial device innovation reach new heights.

The post 100 Flying Robots Shine Light on Drone Regulations appeared first on iQ by Intel.

New sports technology continues to enhance athlete performances, make equipment lighter and more efficient, and crush records once thought unbreakable.

Editor’s Update: Gabart won the historic Transat bakerly on May 10, 2016. He sailed into New York after navigating 4,634 nautical miles across the Atlantic in 8 days, 8 hours, 54 min, 39 seconds (just 25 minutes shy of breaking the world record). 

French yachtsman François Gabart’s 100-foot- long ‘Ultime’ class trimaran, sponsored by French insurance group MACIF, is one of the world’s fastest racing yachts. This high-tech sailboat hit the water last summer after an 18-month build that required 100,000 human-hours of work. As its name suggests, it is the ultimate sailing machine.

With a focus on performance, safety and comfort, the boat is equipped with curved foils that allow it to practically fly across the surface of the water.

The vessel’s first serious outing was the Transat Jacques Vabre ‘Match of Giants’ in November 2015. Co-skippered by Gabart and Pascal Bidégorry, they made the crossing from Le Havre to Brazil in just 12 days and 17 hours, leaving the second place boat 88 miles in their wake.

Gabart’s current challenge is even tougher. He recently embarked on the Transat bakerly 2016, a 3,500-mile single-handed race from Plymouth to New York.

Sir Francis Chichester won inaugural race took in 1960. The voyage took Chichester 40 days. The winner of the 2016 event is expected to do the journey in just seven.

However, to do it in such a short amount of time pushes both boat and skipper to their physical limits. Often sailing into the wind, contestants can face mile after mile of stormy seas, battered by waves. They also have to contend with icebergs, freezing fog and the risk of collision with fishing boats, merchant ships and even whales.

Such a dangerous trip requires an extraordinary boat.

Biomechanical Machine

Perched on the waters of Plymouth Sound, the trimaran MACIF resembles a giant, cybernetic insect; a melding of man and machine, either component useless without the other.

Remove the skipper from the cockpit and the boat would veer aimlessly across the sea, eventually running aground on some distant shore. And by his own admission, Gabart could not control the vessel alone without the network of meters, sensors and computers that festoon the inner walls of its carbon fiber hull.

Intel’s involvement in the project began during the boat’s design phase, when the French naval architecture firm Van Peteghem Lauriot-Prévost (VPLP) and its digital simulation provider Hydrocean employed the Xeon computing clusters at Intel’s HPC lab in Swindon to find the most efficient design.

“You have the shape of the hull, and you’re just putting it in virtual water,” explains Gabart. “You try it at different speeds, then you have graphs that tell you that this hull is better for [these conditions]… You always have a balance to find between different shapes.”

Innovative Design

Using the clusters, the whole design and optimization process was reduced by three weeks, enabling the team to maintain a lightweight construction while refining the shape of the hulls.

The innovative design also incorporates a spacious cockpit, providing some protection from the elements, while giving Gabart access to the steering wheels, winches and travelers, from where he can perform 95 percent of adjustments to the sails.

Aft of this is the small cabin where the skipper can sit, eat and sleep. It also features the touchscreen monitor that provides access to the wealth of data generated by the equipment on board and corralled by a computer below deck.

“I have to spend a lot of time here,” says Gabart, “This is the control of everything. You have the weather, you have all the information from the shore. Everything about it is coming here.”

NUCs and bolts

Originally the vessel was equipped with a pair of fifth generation Intel Core NUCs (Next Unit of Computing). But the team decided they needed more processing power while keeping consumption low.

With so much data to manage, plus real-time weather prediction and course optimization to take into account, responsiveness is crucial. So now the vessel is equipped with a pair of computers powered by 6th Generation Intel Core i7 processors.

Reliability and safety is paramount, and as with all of the trimaran MACIF’s systems, there is redundancy throughout, with a second computer, second monitor, multiple radio and GPS systems, plus three autopilots in case of failure.

To monitor his sleep patterns, Gabart has been using a timer app via the touchscreen display where he can also rate the quality of the sleep he’s getting. But it requires him to enter the data manually and because he sleeps in such short bursts he admits it wasn’t working well.

“I check if everything is okay, and sometimes I manage to do several [naps] in the same hour. I do one nap. I just wake up for a minute; I check there are no boats. I check the sails. I go for another nap.”

Because of the need to move about the boat, Intel has provided Gabart with an Asus Transformer Book T300 Chi, a 2 in 1 device that can be easily switched between laptop and tablet configurations.

The main navigation touchscreen isn’t visible from the cockpit, so Gabart can use the Transformer Book instead, either as a standalone computer or mirroring the main display.

“It’s quite practical,” he tell us, “because you’re not far away from the computer, but if you’re steering the boat, for example, you can put your small screen in front of you and you know where you are.”

Looking Ahead

Intel’s involvement with Gabart and the trimaran MACIF extends beyond the design and on-board systems. Yacht racing isn’t a particularly audience-friendly sport; there’s little TV reporting or commentary during the race, and information is fairly limited.

To help people relate to the vessel, Intel will use its RealSense 3D camera technology to scan the multihull, inside and out, producing a detailed 3D model. This can then be explored via an online app, enabling viewers to navigate around the boat and discover information about the various systems on board.

All of the data captured by the on-board sensors will be relayed via an Intel Xeon server, enabling viewers to follow Gabart on his journey accompanied by a rich set of data. With everything from the boat’s speed and location to the skipper’s heart rate and sleep patterns, fans will be able to stay abreast of every detail of the race.

360-Degree 4K Video

Later in the year, coverage of the boat will extend to 4K 360° content captured from photos, time-lapse footage and video, as Gabart continues his voyages. Intel is also working on live 4K 360° content, made possible using Quick Sync Video Technology powered by its Iris Pro Graphics. Before long, VR viewers will able to experience the rush of flying above the ocean at 43 knots –- nearly 50mph.

But there’s more yet to come: the trimaran MACIF is practically a floating laboratory, where new technologies are constantly being tested and refined.

They’re already trialing a new communication system, capable of capturing binaural sound that recreates the experience of being on board, helping teammates and support crew better understand the conditions. While the issue of operating tech in the cold and wet is also being tackled with gestural controls and voice activation.

And for Gabart himself, he feels there is still much more to improve. His first port of call is the autopilot, the vital, key component in single-handed racing.

“At the moment, the autopilot is just following… it’s just measuring what happens and acting on it,” he says. “When a sailor is steering, he’s also anticipating what he sees in front of him or what he could imagine – because this is on his feelings; he can anticipate things.

“Will an autopilot in the future be able to just look in front of the boat, to measure the wind ahead? Maybe in a few years we can measure the wind that will arrive. We could just look a mile in front and say, ‘Okay, in ten seconds, I will have this type of wind’.”

And that’s enough time for a skilled skipper to make a judgement on how best to steer his craft. “We just need a few seconds,” asserts Gabart. “At least you know what the wind will be in ten seconds. It’s wonderful information.”

The post Smart Sailing: François Gabart’s Ultra-Fast Tech Lab appeared first on iQ by Intel.

Through Intel She Will Connect, millions of women like Jessica Orji are using computers and accessing the internet for the first time – empowering themselves and their businesses through it.

In 2015 Jessica Orji turned on a computer for the first time and it changed her life. This young hairdresser, living in Mushin, Nigeria, previously believed that computers and the internet were the territory of 419 scammers and pornographers.

“In Nigeria, the internet is a man’s world,” she said. “Intel is changing that.”

Orji is one of the millions of women in developing nations excluded from the technological age through barriers like a lack of education, poverty and a prevalent culture of gender inequality. Today, she uses technology to promote her business, connecting with new customers online.

Connecting Women

According to Intel’s report Women and the Web, in developing countries covered by the study, nearly 25 percent fewer women are online than men. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the gap was a startling 43 percent.

The She Will Connect initiative was born from this study with the goal of introducing women to the web and giving them the skills to harness its power. Ultimately, She Will Connect wants to bring 5 million women in this region online.

“I took a class through the Intel She Will Connect program, and it changed my life,” explained Orji.

She was one of 60 participants in a free, weeklong Intel Learn Easy Steps computer course at a local state-run skills acquisition centre in early 2015. The course uses a combination of digital literacy training and gender-relevant content to impart skills, then bolsters the training through an online peer network for participants.

Today, Orji prints flyers for her business using word processing tools at her local internet café and even promotes her business online through a Facebook page.

“I connect with millions of people around the world who love the things I love,” she said. “I watch videos on new trends, and I get really excited. My customers love the new styles I bring to them from all over.”

Multiplier Effect

The impact of bridging the internet gender gap isn’t merely inclusion for individual participants. Women are economic multipliers.

Several studies have demonstrated that when women are economically empowered, they spread the wealth to their families and the communities around them. A 2010 study by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development found that women and girls with income reinvest an average of 90 percent. Men only reinvest an average of 30 to 40 percent.

Similarly, the Women and the Web report estimated that bringing women online would contribute up to $18 billion to the annual gross domestic product of 144 developing countries.

Leading by Example

Orji works hard at her vibrant hairdressing stand in the market. She loves to make her customers feel beautiful, but she also aspires to do something bigger.

“I want to inspire other women to start their own businesses,” Orji said. “It can be whatever they can imagine.”

“The Internet will open so many opportunities for women,” she continued, saying that she helped her mom make fliers for her mom’s catering business. “She has gotten some new customers through those fliers. We are hoping we will be able to get a personal computer at home, as the entire family is excited about this new discovery.”

Watch Jessica’s full story here:

The post Women and the Internet Gender Gap appeared first on iQ by Intel.

Popular new mobile titles like Vainglory and Clash Royale show the promise of competitive eSports on the go.

While eSports competitions continue to emphasize PC games like League of Legends, new titles available on mobile devices are shaking things up for players and fans.

According to a report released last year by the NPD Group, younger kids are playing games on their phones more than any other device. Game studios have taken note, creating mobile games that appeal to core and casual players alike.

“Somebody’s going to create [these multiplayer competitive games] for the touchscreen generation,” said Kristian Segerstrale, COO and Executive Director of Super Evil Megacorp, the studio behind Vainglory, a mobile multiplayer online battle arena game.

Segerstrale said Blizzard Entertainment, Riot Games and Valve showed they can grow big communities of PC players, and mobile devices could be next.

To get there, Segerstrale believes mobile designers need to appeal to a traditional PC audience while remaining approachable to the more general smartphone audience. When Vainglory was first unveiled in 2014, for example, a guild for competitive mobile gamers didn’t exist yet.

Designed for mobile platforms, Vainglory is a simplified version of PC games that pit teams against one another in battle.

A little more than a year later, the Vainglory guild organization “Gankstars” is forging this new on-the-go arena. According to the team, what started as a casual guild to help friends play games together quickly blossomed into a household name in the small but rapidly growing world of competitive Vainglory.

The members of team Sirius, part of the Gankstars guild, ranked as world champions after winning the first-ever Vainglory International Premier League in South Korea last year. Their success not only speaks to the growing popularity of all different kinds of eSports, but also the promise of eSports on such ubiquitous platforms as iOS and Android.

It also helps that the game is accessible to a variety of audiences, which Segerstrale stressed, can be difficult.

“Being respectful of the very casual player as much as we are respectful of the core player will be a big challenge,” she said. “The companies that will truly create the stand out product and experience over the next five to 10 years on touchscreens will be able to do that well.”

Why Mobile is Appealing

While Vainglory aims to ingratiate PC players, Supercell’s recently released Clash Royale hopes to be the one to bring eSports to the “anyone with a phone” demographic. A strategy game from the makers of hugely popular Clash of Clans, Clash Royale combines the collectible card game with tower defense mechanics.

It’s already brought in close to $110 million since it was released in early March. “It has everything it needs to be a really popular competitive game,” said Marcus Graham, Director of Programming at Twitch.

“World of Warcraft, League of Legends, these are games that at their core had millions and millions of people playing the game,” Graham said, noting that this gives popular games a leg up on the competition.

“If you have 10 million players and you say you’re doing a tournament for the game, it’s easy to be a success even if you only get 1 percent of those players involved.”

Graham and others believe mobile eSports could outsize existing PC eSports communities. The free-to-play model has worked well for eSports in the past.

“Free-to-play battle arena games like League of Legends are where the trend is,” said George Woo, events organizer at Intel and the man behind Intel Extreme Masters.

“Games with free distribution probably have the most leg for being successful in eSports because there’s a larger population of people playing it.”

Mobile games offer built-in simplicity, such as eliminating the need for external controllers, which can bode well for streaming, according to Koh Kim, co-head of business development at Mobcrush. Mobcrush, a mobile streaming app that sponsors Gankstars, requires little setup compared to its counterparts on PC.

“In the PC realm, the user interface itself is really complicated,” said Kim.

By catering to a mobile-centric audience, Mobcrush aims to introduce game streaming to a larger, more diverse audience.

“People who probably have never streamed before, [lacking] the means or the technical know-how, now have the ability to engage with other users in real-time,” said Kim.

Perhaps the biggest perk to mobile eSports is that the gameplay is intuitive for the smartphone generation.

Alex ‘PwntByUkrainian’ Novosad, co-founder and manager of Gankstars, said playing games with a touchscreen “just feels natural.”

Twitch’s Graham said that the growth of eSports on mobile has the potential to transform existing PC games.

“Eventually we’re going to have our League of Legends for mobile,” he said.

“We’re going have a game that’s played worldwide, where you can speak a language completely different from someone else, but [the game is] the language you speak together.”

The post Why the Future of eSports is Mobile appeared first on iQ by Intel.

In an era where frequent online hacks compromise sensitive personal data, security experts recommend password management systems to stay safe in cyberspace on World Password Day and beyond.

Whether out of convenience, laziness or plain-old forgetfulness, most internet users aren’t great about picking unique and secure passwords. That “abc123” password from 1999 is a hacker’s dream when trying to crack into everything from bank accounts to online healthcare records.

“The biggest mistake people make online is reusing passwords,” said Bruce Snell, Technical Director at Intel Security. “The second big mistake is using a password that’s easy to guess or crack, like password123 or a pet’s name.”

Security researchers rate the worst passwords of the internet every year, and passwords that have been compromised or leaked online show a disturbing trend: While massive pop culture events have caused a few tremors in the worst passwords of 2015 (“starwars,” “solo” and “princess” debuted in the top 25 for the first time), in a sample set of more than 2 million passwords, the top three slots still feature the usual suspects: “123456,” “password” and “qwerty.”

It should come as no surprise then, that researchers estimate 90 percent of user-generated passwords are vulnerable to hacking. Even “secure” passwords provide minimal protection in a world where massive password leaks are commonplace.

Snell said the problem is that many companies do not encrypt the passwords they store online, leaving them vulnerable to hacks. Target, Sony and Anthem are a few recent examples that garnered a lot of attention, but many other companies have experienced similar breaches.

Encryption can make a big difference. Snell said that even a relatively simple encryption algorithm would take years for hackers to unencrypt using a basic computer.

While users can’t force companies to encrypt their data, they can do a better job of securing their accounts. In honor of the fourth annual World Password Day on May 5, Intel Security encourages users to use multi-factor authentication (MFA) to add another protective layer to their passwords.

Even President Obama recently encouraged Americans to “empower” and “protect themselves online” by moving beyond passwords and turning on MFA in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. Snell agrees.

“It’s really important because it adds another component to the authorization process,” he said. “Even if you use an easily guessed or compromised password, there’s a randomized element that a hacker won’t be able to guess.”

MFA supplements the user’s login with additional identification factors, such as a fingerprint, face recognition or a one-time code delivered via text message. If a cybercriminal gets ahold of a user’s login information but has to go the extra step of entering a pin number, Snell explained, the hacker won’t be able to guess the pin and gain access to the account.

Anyone can use MFA, as this powerful security feature is available for free on most major websites. Snell suggests using a password management system—True Key by Intel Security or another open-source option—with MFA features that will generate and store secure passwords.

“A lot of security experts and I recommend password management systems because it takes the stress out of trying to manage a unique password for every online account,” he said, noting that the best one is the easiest to use. “More people use an app or mobile device because those things are attached to everyone’s hip at all times. If the password management system is connected to a phone, people are more likely to use it.”

To get users thinking about improving their personal information on Password Day, Intel Security is spearheading a consumer educational campaign to show consumers why a password is not enough.

Want to get involved? Here’s how you can participate in World Password Day 2016:

1. Visit @IntelSec_Home and share your #PasswordConfession for a chance to win a $250 Amazon gift card. Contest ends on May 4^th.
2. Join the #PasswordDay Twitter Chat about multi-factor authentication on May 5th at 3pm EDT/12pm PDT. Use #ChatSTC to join the conversation.
3. Visit PasswordDay.org to watch our Password Pep Talks and learn how to secure your digital life.

The post Celebrate World Password Day 2016 appeared first on iQ by Intel.

As one of the first major franchises to set a game in the country, Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: India brings an underserved cultural identity to light.

India is a diverse country, home to some 3499 separate communities and 325 different languages and dialects, according to one anthropological survey. But representation of the region in video games has been lazy at best and non-existent at worst.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3’s campaign featured a single mission set in the city of Dharamshala with barely a trace of Indian culture. Games like Final Fantasy and Smite tend to bend elements of Indian culture to fit the game’s needs or aesthetic (particularly with Smite’s voluptuous re-imagining of an Indian goddess).

“There is a feeling of cringing when you have someone called Shiva, but the thing looks nothing like Shiva is supposed to look,” said Arvind Raja Yadav, an independent game designer who created his own role-playing game inspired by Indian mythology.

Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: India, however, is committed to authentic Indian representation.

Set in a bustling city of sandstone and Rangoli patterns, Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: India, an offshoot of the main series, features a cloaked adventurer in the middle of the Sikh War of 1841. The mission is to recover the famed Koh-i-Noor diamond for the good of mankind—while killing a bunch of Sikh enemies along the way.

As with game publisher Ubisoft’s other Assassin’s Creed titles, plenty of historical research went into the game’s creation. The Sikh weaponry for instance, accurately features the katar, the chakram (a sharp, ringlike blade employed by throwing it), and the bag naka, or “tiger’s claw.”

UK-based Climax Studios, the lead designers behind Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: India, emphasized the importance of original historical sources for their world-building.

“We took influence from lithographs. Color was a key component,” the game’s art director Glenn Brace blogged. “We mixed some Sikh-influence into the world.”

It’s not hard to see why a big game studio like Ubisoft is turning its attention to India. According to Ken Research, the Indian gaming market is predicted to exceed $2.7 billion in revenue by 2018.

As others have speculated, the Chronicles series, which includes two other games set in Russia and China, appears to be Ubisoft’s attempt to court these powerful emerging markets.

Vishal Golia, CEO of Gamiana Digital Entertainment, all but confirmed this theory to  Franchise India.

“Foreign giants like EA and Ubisoft have had Indian presence for a long time, helping nurture the local talent,” Golia said. “The ecosystem is building up.”

This coming-of-age story for Indian gaming, however, is not without complications. Designers who are poorly acquainted with Indian culture often take artistic liberties that mix up (or flat-out ignore) important nuances. The results can easily come off as offensive and even exploitative.

Despite its best attempts, Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: India is not above reproach in regards to cultural marginalization. By casting the Sikhs as the antagonists of the story, some argue the game unwittingly plays into pre-existing stereotypes that paint this religious minority as villainous.

According to Gurinder Mann, the Director of the Sikh Museum Initiative, “There is a long way to go before a Sikh character with a turban and beard is seen as being the hero. Only then will we see a true representation of Sikhs in the gaming world.”

An example from comic books is already showing a way forward.

Last year, Silicon Valley executive Supreet Singh Manchanda launched a Kickstarter project called Super Sikh. The goal was to reboot the modern-day superhero. Not by reimagining Superman, Ironman or Spiderman, but by developing a secret agent who wears a turban.

The message? Looks don’t define a hero—actions do.

Despite its more shallow depiction of Sikhs, Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: India avoids the common pitfalls of other major franchises, which, according to Yadav, often treat India like exotic wallpaper.

The next step, perhaps, would be a blockbuster game that not only features India but is created by Indians, too.

Feature image: Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: India, Climax Studio and Ubisoft

The post Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: India and Cultural Representation appeared first on iQ by Intel.

Artists stepping into virtual reality have new motion-tracking, 3D and gaming technologies at their disposal.

The advent of the internet created a whole new mode of self-expression, from digital and gif art to fan-fiction and fan art. Now, new virtual reality (VR) tools are primed to inspire yet another era of creators, both amateur and professional, by inviting them to step into their own inventions.

Nowhere – so far – is the medium’s artistic possibilities more evident than in Tilt Brush, Google’s VR painting app that launched on the HTC Vive in April.

“Combined with the newest generation of motion controllers and input technology, VR has the potential to be the most intuitive and natural creation platform artists have ever experienced,” said Drew Skillman, who together with his partner Patrick Hackett, created Tilt Brush in their San Francisco-based design studio Skillman & Hackett before selling it to Google last year.

The app transforms a pair of motion-tracking controllers into fluid and dynamic paintbrushes, allowing users to paint luminous 3D masterpieces like no other. Brushstrokes levitate in midair, and the Vive’s position tracking cameras allow digital artists to move through the canvas while painting with beams of light in every direction around them.

Praise for the Tilt Brush has been widespread and feverish. Recently, Fast Company called it “the first great VR app,” seeing it as the perfect introduction to this new world of possibilities. Skillman agrees.

“The stars have aligned and VR is finally coming into its own,” he said.

Creativity Begets Creativity

Skillman’s emphasis on fate is apt given the ideation of Tilt Brush happened almost by accident.

In 2012, Skillman and Hackett were both employed at Double Fine Productions, the game studio helmed by renowned point-and-click adventure designer Tim Schafer.

They were fascinated by the latest gaming gadgets, so they banded together under the sarcastic title Department of Future Tech in order to spend 10 percent of their time on wild experiments. Experiments in the Department of Future Tech included duct-taping Razer Hydra motion controllers to their foreheads to enable mobile games to track their body positions.

When Skillman and Hackett decided to combine an Oculus VR headset with the Kinect’s motion-sensing camera on a whim, they were amazed by the results.

“It was a window into what was really going to happen [in] the next five to eight years,” said Hackett.

Having seen a glimpse of the future, the two resigned from Double Fine and formed their own company. Among other things, their focus was on developing technology that could give VR users a sense of having a body inside a virtual simulation.

“We really stumbled into VR painting by accident through our work on different VR and augmented reality interactions,” said Skillman. “While debugging a prototype, [we] started drawing lines in space. We were mesmerized instantly.”

Skillman and his partner weren’t the only ones who were mesmerized, either. Since Tilt Brush’s inception, a flurry of leading cartoonists and animators have rallied behind the technology’s almost magical concept.

Among them are Glen Keane, best known for his animation work on Disney’s The Little Mermaid and Aladdin, and Chris Prynoski of Adult Swim fame. Many big-name artists have already produced a tremendous number of painterly compositions in VR, inspiring Tilt Brush’s creators and amateurs alike.

“It’s amazing to work alongside these artists and watch their VR paintings grow and mature as Tilt Brush evolves,” said Skillman. “In many ways, we feed off of each other’s creative energy.”

Out with the Old…

Skillman believes this technology is the tip of the virtual iceberg.

“With Tilt Brush, we’re doing our best to throw out the old ‘keyboard and mouse’ paradigms that we’ve all grown accustomed to, but we’re still in the early stages of that transition.”

While it may be strange to think of standard computer equipment as old fashioned, according to leading technological innovators, VR has big implications for the type of digital creations people will be making in the future.

“Tools like Maya [the 3D computer graphics software] have been highly tuned and optimized for doing modeling and creation on the PC for many, many years,” said Ebbe Altberg, CEO of Linden Lab, creators of the virtual world Second Life.

“It will take a while for VR to [do similar things] effectively.”

Before the artistic singularity can happen, the tools to create these wonderful worlds will need to develop more.

“But VR is extremely powerful because you have a complete sense of space and scale that you do not have looking at the PC,” Altberg added.

Despite the room for improvement, companies are already bringing new artist-driven technologies to market.

Planned to launch in the latter half of 2016, Linden Lab’s next virtual world, codenamed Project Sansar, will put a big emphasis on creating inside VR. With a sweep of their hand, users will be able to redesign their virtual home or toss boulders around on Mars, Altberg said.

Elsewhere, the VR building game Fantastic Contraption allows players to pull tools out of shortcuts on their body. To assemble a simple machine in the game, for instance, a user might grab a rod from over their shoulder, two wheels off the side of their hip, then snap them all together.

Similarly, the next version of the game-making tool Unreal Engine 4 allows VR creators to fashion worlds with a pair of lightsaber-esque utensils.

While tools such as these will enable a vast array of artistic expression to exist within VR, the art is not necessarily confined to imaginary places. Altberg hints at a porous boundary between the real and virtual, where makers can send their creations back and forth across the digital divide.

Altberg foresees fashion brands jumping on the VR bandwagon, as well as other physical and virtual world crossover projects.

“Our belief is that VR will ultimately impact pretty much everything,” he said.

The post Virtual Reality Tools Spark Creative Arts Movement appeared first on iQ by Intel.

In a year that marks the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death, the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), The Imaginarium and Intel are bringing special-effects technology to the theater.

For the RSC’s winter season (November 2016 to January 2017), The Tempest will feature a 3D-animated character — Ariel the sprite — live on Stratford-upon-Avon’s most hallowed stage.

“We have set ourselves the challenge of creating the most technologically advanced production we have ever staged,” said RSC’s artistic director Gregory Doran. “[We are working] to give our audiences something out of the ordinary.”

Shakespeare’s plays have long celebrated the extraordinary. Four hundred years ago, drums boomed offstage to create the sound of thunder; popping firecrackers became magical spells; actors appeared through smoky trapdoors or were lowered dramatically from the rafters on creaking ropes.

Today, performance-capture technology can transform an actor’s movements, facial expressions and vocalization into extraordinarily lifelike digital characters.

It’s a process used widely in video games and blockbuster movies.

The RSC, Intel and Andy Sirkis’ The Imaginarium spent more than a year researching how to bring the same technology to the theater.

In this winter’s production of The Tempest, an actor behind the scenes acts out the role of Ariel — the spirit bound to serve the magician Prospero — and motion-capture technology projects the actor’s 3D avatar on stage. Because the theater is live, the projection changes with every performance.

“Together we are creating a human-digital interaction that feels ‘alive,’” said Penny Baldwin, ‎vice president and general manager of Intel’s brand.

“Since its first performance in 1610, Shakespeare’s late, great play, The Tempest, has been a vehicle for delivering the greatest spectacle that live theater could create,” said Baldwin.

“Shipwrecks, storms, fantastical creatures and magical masques have challenged the most ambitious companies to deliver their most ground-breaking stagecraft,” she said.

Robust Intel Xeon and Core i7 processors crunch the huge amounts of data that enable the real-time digital content projection.

“We have an opportunity to break new ground and thrill our audiences by bringing together the best of live theater with cutting-edge technology to deliver an amazing experience,” she said.

The RSC’s ambitious production is just one part of the celebrations to mark Shakespeare’s 400th anniversary year.

In April, BBC Two and the RSC hosted Shakespeare Live! from the RSC, that featured “Shakespeare-inspired work” that spanned across musical genres including hip-hop, blues, musical theater, jazz, opera and classical.

The cast included luminaries such as Helen Mirren, Judi Dench, Rufus Wainwright, Joseph Fienne, John Lithgow and many more.

Shakespeare Live! From the RSC will also be screened live in the UK and later in the U.S. via BBC Worldwide.

The post Tempest Tech: Shakespeare Doth Digital appeared first on iQ by Intel.

From farming to mining to building, the increasing availability of drones and the information they can map is changing how companies do business.

Businesses are learning that sometimes the best way to boost the bottom line is by reaching for the sky.

Commercial drone usage across a wide variety of industries is exploding as businesses take advantage of rapidly advancing technology and falling hardware prices to incorporate the technology into their work flow.

“Incorporation of commercial drones is going to continue to grow exponentially,” says Darr Gerscovich, senior vice president of marketing at DroneDeploy.

To date, the aerial data consulting company’s clients have used DroneDeploy drone software to map more than 2 million acres across 100 countries. It helps dozens of industries collect and interpret drone data.

“We’re seeing a tipping point now, but it’s the first of many tipping points,” he said.

DroneDeploy 3D model: Treasure Island by DroneDeploy on Sketchfab

“Businesses are finding a tremendous amount of value in having aerial intelligence,” Gerscovich continued. “Getting data, and making sense of the data.”

In a little more than a year, DroneDeploy clients mapped an area larger than the state of Delaware, and they’re adding aerial data four times faster this year. Drone-captured data, it seems, is in high demand.

More than Google Earth

It’s tempting to think of commercial drone usage as a more detailed version of Google Earth, but the information is far more dynamic.

“Who are the primary users of Google Earth?” Gerscovich asked. “You and me—people with a goal of getting from point A to point B. Roads may change over time, but they typically don’t change that often.”

Limestone Quarry by DroneDeploy on Sketchfab

For Gerscovich’s clients, however, the surveyed areas change constantly.

“We’ve had plenty of examples where Google Earth or another satellite image provider just shows a bunch of trees or a wooded area, and after the drone flight, we see that there’s a full solar power plant there,” he said. “Static imagery is not sufficient.”

(Looking) Down on the Farm

One of the first, and heaviest, users of commercial drones is the agriculture industry.

“Farms have hundreds or thousands of acres,” Gerscovich explained. “They largely use drones for crop scouting. It saves the time of someone going out and driving around the fields, which is one of the ways it’s been done until now.”

Instead, a drone can fly over the entire area and spot which fields farmers need to pay attention to, rather than relying on what can be seen from the nearest driving path. Growers can then upload the images to the cloud and knit them together to make a map showing the condition of an entire crop.

“You can see the entire field and identify the areas where there’s an issue,” Gerscovich said. “During growing season, they’re trying to catch issues while there’s still time to address them.”

The condition of a crop can change with a few days of rain or dry weather, so multiple drone passes are necessary to provide a constant stream of data.

Data Mining and Construction Site Insights

The mining and construction industries have also been early and avid adopters of drone technology. While farms need quick maps of large areas, building and digging sites typically are smaller, but the need for detail is much higher.

“Generally, they want to understand site progress,” Gerscovich said. “In order to get daily or monthly status updates on the stage a project is in, for a large site, it used to take a half a day to walk the entire site. Now, they can do it in 15 minutes with a drone.”

Job sites also tend to make heavy use of 3D modeling, something that can be built from detailed drone data.

“If you’re building a tower, and you’re six months into the project, you can verify the structure is being developed according to plan,” Gerscovich said, explaining that the 3D image can then be loaded into the construction company’s autoCAD system to compare the progress to the building plans.

“It helps people on site, and it also helps people back in the corporate offices to understand what’s happening,” he said.

Aerial data can also measure volume. At construction and mining sites where there are often stockpiles of moved dirt mounds or cement materials, Gerscovich said, drones can give accurate measures of just how large the mound is. Compared to other methods, such as having people climb to the top of the mound with lasers to attempt to measure it, drone technology has its advantages.

“Drones are safer, faster and about half the cost as compared to traditional ground-based volumetrics,” said Dallas VanZanten, owner of aerial mapping company Skymedia Northwest.

Inspection Gadget

An emerging market for drone technology is the inspection industry.

A DroneDeploy client in Mexico was contracted by the government to inspect 600 miles of road. Instead of employing aircraft or spending weeks driving and manually capturing data across the countryside, the company used a handful of drones and quickly produced more than eight terabytes of data.

How much is that? If the Mexican company used 16 GB smartphones, the highway data would have filled 512 of them.

Brick wall inspection by DroneDeploy on Sketchfab

Building inspectors are using drones to get a better look at the roof. Insurance companies, Gerscovich added, can use the resulting 3D images to assess damages.

“Say a tornado comes through an area,” he continued. “Instead of waiting for the claims inspector to arrive, they could fly over the area with a drone and quickly do a 3D model.”

Emergency response teams also incorporate aerial data. Drones can quickly create high-resolution maps of large areas, in, say, a wooded area, for search and rescue operations. Drones can even assist forensic specialists who need to inspect large plane or train crash sites.

“Before the inspectors arrive with cameras to start taking still images, they can create a 3D model, and then everything about the area is preserved,” Gerscovich said. “They can use it to measure distances and angles between things.”

Growth Continues to Skyrocket

In the early days of commercial drone usage, only the largest companies could afford to collect aerial data. Technology has helped lower the price of entry.

Engineering consultant Iain Butler, better known as The UAV Guy, raves that drones are, “a disruptive technology. Literally anyone can crop scout with a drone and get actionable data within minutes.”

Just a couple years ago, most of the drones used commercially were custom-made, with a price tag of $10,000 to $20,000. DroneDeploy said today companies can pay far less.

“The hardware has gotten so good, so quickly, that today a majority of drones used commercially are bought off the shelf—high-end consumer drones,” Gerscovich said.

Taste of Carmel 3D model by DroneDeploy on Sketchfab

Today, an $800 to $1,500 investment is enough to get a business airborne and collecting data.

The biggest hurdle to using consumer drones is that the batteries typically last about 30 minutes. That’s long enough to map between 60 and 80 acres before running out of power.

“Having said that, we’re seeing agricultural companies doing very large maps with off-the-shelf quad copters,” Gerscovich says. “We had one client map 4,300 acres with a quad copter. That’s 3,500 football fields—a massive effort.”

It would also take more than 35 hours and 70 battery changes. “Obviously, they’re doing this because they’re seeing substantial value. Otherwise, no one would be out there doing it for that long,” he said.

Still, companies in various industries are beginning to understand the value in the sky, and they’re finding innovative ways to use drones and help their businesses soar.

The post Drone Data Sparks a New Industrial Revolution appeared first on iQ by Intel.

As performance analysis used by professional athletes goes mainstream, personal trainers can help people turn their fitness data into a personal health plan.

The baseball movie “Moneyball” and the 2014 German Soccer team’s use of Match Insights both showed how athlete data analysis can help win championships. Today, anyone can track their activity like professional athletes and quantified-self fitness buffs, but not everyone can bear the brunt of data overload from wearable technologies.

Wearable technologies and mobile applications that track daily steps, runs or bike ride distances, heart rates and sleep patterns can be extremely rewarding, according to Craig Friedman, vice president of the performance innovation team at EXOS, a health and fitness company that helps measure athlete performance.

“Technology has really helped facilitate a better understanding of what’s going on with the whole body,” said Friedman.

But Friedman sees this digitization of performance hitting a significant inflection point.

“It’s giving people insights that once required an exercise physiology lab, but the data has come faster than the ability or knowledge to know what to do with it,” he said.

Friedman specializes in MLB spring training preparation, worked with the German men’s national soccer team in 2006, and travelled with the WTA tennis tour in 2001.  Over the past few decades, he has witnessed the rise of quantifiable training in professional sports.

“Data for data sake without insight and context really isn’t valuable to many people beyond the subset of quantified-self individuals,” he said.

It’s clear to him coaches will play a critical role in helping people use performance data to develop truly personal fitness regimes.

Friedman said that’s the gist behind EXOS’s decision to team up with Intel. If coaches and trainers learn how to use technology that collects and analyzes performance data, they can help more people reach optimal health.

“Taking a step back from the data then really understanding the individual and what they want from a benefit standpoint helps us frame up that data in different ways that are more relevant to a particular person’s needs,” said Friedman.

Taking a certain number of steps each day, feeling more energetic or less stressful or losing weight are all different priorities for individuals, said Friedman. Starting with benefits or desired results can indicate what data to use.

“If you want to lose weight, are you active enough?,” asked Friedman.

Tracking the number of steps and other daily movement as well as data about diet and sleep over time can help identify areas where behavior changes increase changes for achieving health goals.

Looking ahead, Friedman points to people’s desire to “be like Mike (Jordan),” or other professional athletes.  He sees performance data as a great motivator.

“Many people, especially younger fans participating in the sport, are interested in how they stack up against pro athletes,” said Friedman.

Although comparing personal fitness data with professional athletes isn’t easy today, Friedman believes a common language around performance standards would help. It’s something EXOS does today with professional athletes.

“We take data about someone’s performance capabilities across mindset, nutrition, movement and recovery, and quantify it into an overall performance quotient score,” said Friedman.

Once people have their own performance quotient score, Friedman said they could use it to create a healthy training regime so their performance data can compete against their favorite athlete.

People are being exposed to new kinds of performance data from professional athletes in many sports. For snowboarders, hitting earth with a force of 10Gs could be considered a soft landing, but until a small tracking device placed on snowboards at the Winter X Games delivered the data, it was difficult to tell for sure.

Like runners wearing fitness trackers, X Games athletes in two men’s events – Slopestyle and Big Air – fitted their snowboards with a pencil eraser-sized Intel Curie compute module.

The module connected to an accelerometer, gyroscope, compass, barometer and GPS technology to get measurement for things like velocity, air time, height, distance and rotation.

By knowing an athlete’s acceleration in relation to free-fall speed, fans watching the snowboard competition now had a new scientific statistic to compare across other daredevil athletes. It also made many amateur snowboarders curious about the G-force threshold they’d need to maintain for a smooth landing.

If the Winter X Games is any indication, having insightful performance data is a great motivator for pro and amateur athletes alike.

The post Beating Health Fitness Data Overload appeared first on iQ by Intel.

The latest security technology helps people eliminate the hassle of passwords.

From your social media profiles, online banking, and email accounts, you have a lot of passwords—and you’re not alone. The average person has 24 passwords to remember. Let’s face it: Passwords are a hassle.

“It’s a universal pain point,” said Mark Hocking, Vice President and General Manager of Safe Identity at Intel Security. His team is on a mission to create an authentication model where online security doesn’t depend on some unreliable form of password management.

“People simply can’t remember so many different passwords,” said Hocking. “Everyone is forced to come up with some sort of coping mechanism.”

A newly updated password management application called True Key from Intel Security aims to bring users closer to a world where traditional passwords are obsolete.

The True Key app, available for phones, tablets and computers, protects user’s info with the most secure encryption available and integrates multiple advanced-security technologies. It generates tough-to-crack passwords and remembers them, so the user doesn’t have to memorize them or write them down.

Unfortunately, maintaining “good password hygiene,” is often difficult. Strong passwords are long, complicated and change often, leaving the average person at a loss for how to deal with them all.

Serious Threats to Cyber Security

May 5, 2016 marks the third annual Password Day, a global celebration to remind people that password security is serious business. Passwords are critical gatekeepers to our digital identities, allowing us access to online shopping, dating, banking, social media, private work and life communications.

“That’s the dilemma people are facing: either use simpler passwords or re-use the same password in many places, or they write their passwords down somewhere — none of which are secure,” said Dr. Richard Reiner, chief technology officer of safe identity at Intel Security.

Cyber criminals can steal and sell swaths of user data from hacked web services, including passwords, emails and usernames. Sophisticated hacking methods use password data from one site to access other accounts because, let’s face it, many users employ the same password on multiple sites.

Deloitte reported that of six million actual user-generated passwords, the 10,000 most common passwords would have accessed 98.1 percent of all accounts.

Hocking also pointed out that massive online security breaches at retailers including Target, Neiman Marcus, UPS, Goodwill, Sony and Home Depot, demonstrate that password-hacking runs deep. Hacking Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook accounts seems commonplace—and relatively harmless—today, but Hocking warns that people should become more vigilant about protecting their online identity and personal data.

Security Technology for Cyber Safety

When users install a password management app on their smartphone, tablet, or computer, they no longer have to remember all of their passwords; the app saves the passwords and login information in one secure place.

With the True Key app, users no longer rely solely on a single master password to keep all their stored passwords safe. Instead, a combination of multiple factors including biometrics like fingerprint recognition and “face” – where a mathematical calculation of key facial features (like the distance between the eyes and other points on the face) – can be used to grant access to the app to unlock all your passwords for use.

If the user’s computer has built-in RealSense technology, facial login is even more secure, giving the user’s image depth and creating a more detailed calculation of the user’s facial characteristics.

With the True Key app, multi-factor authentication is built in and easy. The True Key app automatically verifies it’s you with at least two factors – one you choose and the device you’re using (your trusted device). It also allows users to configure which and how many verification factors are used depending on what a user prefers.

A person may opt for convenience and choose to login only using their face only when using a tablet to surf the web from the living room couch, but may want to increase security with an additional factor when using a laptop at the neighborhood café.

The available security factors include fingerprint and face recognition, your trusted device, a second (mobile) device, email confirmation and master password.

The second device feature sends a secure message notification the user’s mobile device to verify it’s them before access is granted. For example, if Dave wants to use his computer and he uses his face to be verified and has second device enabled, it will send a message to his phone. He would then swipe the notification to confirm that he has permission to proceed.

The True Key app syncs across all devices automatically allowing the user to access their passwords on any of their devices once they sign in.

Designed with Users in Mind

All of these security factors were created and tested by designers, developers and security experts, but the ultimate goal was to build a product people would actually use.

“It’s a challenge when you have something so critical and complex,” said Francois Proulx, True Key product security champion. “We want to make sure we have the right balance between security and usability.”

The True Key app works to achieve this goal, by working with customers to identify pain points and having them provide feedback during product development. Today, the app is available on Windows PC, Mac, Android, iOS devices and across Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Intel Security is a “zero information company,” meaning that the True Key app doesn’t store any non-encrypted information to ensure sensitive data is the most protected. The True Key app never records a master password to ensure that a user is the only one who ever has that information. The website passwords are encrypted and saved locally on the device, and for biometric factors like face, the app never “sees” a person’s face, only the encrypted mathematical equation.

In the end, those who download the application can solve an abundance of password-related problems.

“Adopting a password management system requires a real change in behavior, but it’s really liberating when you realize you can let go of that burden,” said Hocking. “With the True Key app, you are your password.”

The post Staying Safe in Cyberspace appeared first on iQ by Intel.

The next wave of drone innovations can take down snowmen, catch litterers, deliver drinks and make the Pope smile.

The things people are doing with drones today are impressive if not downright nutty. These flying devices are helping humanity, but they’re also breaking records, starring in movies and stretching the imagination for what’s possible.

One of the more humorous examples is the chainsaw wielding octocopter. Apparently it has a vendetta against snowmen.

Created by a couple of Finnish farmers, this so-called #killerdrone is the stuff of nightmares because it shows drones can be trained to do almost anything. This flying chainsaw massacre showcases one absurd example.

Over in Germany, a pilot from e-volo flew a hybrid helicopter-drone. It was the first certified manned multicopter flight, and made many people wondered how drones might take Uber to new heights.

The Volocopter VC200 is a fixed-pitch multirotor with 18 electric motors powered by 50 kilowatts of battery power. It’s built with collision-avoidance intelligence by Ascending Technologies, making it easy to fly.

ETH Zurich, the so-called “Silicon Valley of drone innovation,” is a Swiss-based university focused on technology and the natural sciences.” Several of the university’s research projects led to startup companies that focused on using drones to solve a particular problem.

Wingtra, for example, builds drones that have the characteristics of two different aircrafts. These VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) drones have the range and flight time of a fixed-wing aircraft with the precise landing and takeoff capability of multirotors.  Wingtra believes drone technology can aid the agriculture and mining industries and assist with industrial inspections.

Another ETH Zurich spinoff is Aerotain, the company behind the Skye blimp drone. The Skye is a helium filled ball with three electric motors that can rotate 360 degrees around each axis. The result is an aerial platform that can perform precise movements while carrying heavy cargo for long periods of time.

Since the Skye is essentially a helium-filled balloon, Aerotain claims it can fly over crowds safely. The Skye uses drone technology to create new modes of advertising, including at sporting events where it can be flown around a stadium.

Golfers everywhere will appreciate Rakuten, a Japanese company that’s experimenting with a multirotor done that delivers golf balls and drinks on the green. The company is also testing a mobile-based service that will allow golfers to order drinks and balls right from their phones.

Assuming the delivery drone is able to avoid the wayward shot across the fairway, deliveries will start in May.

In Dubai, drones are beloved by the crown prince, who hosted the World Drone Prix race in March. Fifteen-year-old Luke Bannister took home $250,000 in prize money after winning what many called “the largest and most extravagant drone race to date.”

With such an overwhelming cash prize and drone racing quickly becoming a global pastime, the population of pro drone racers is poised to explode.

Even ESPN is getting in on the action. The network announced it will broadcast live drone races at the US Drone National Championships in August 2016.

Dubai is also putting drones to work as aerial “robocops,” using flying cameras to catch illegal garbage dumpers and litterbugs red-handed. Dubai Municipality will employ drones to monitor trucks that dump illegally and popular campsites where citizens are known to leave trash behind.

In Italy, a group of Jesuit students in Rome gave Pope Francis a drone as a gift. This homebuilt quadcopter is meant to represent “the values of technology in the service of man.”

With so many drone innovations in the pipeline, it’s tough to know what’ll happen next. Who knows, maybe the Pope will use his new drone to create a 3D model of the Vatican using photogrammetry techniques. Now that would be cool.

The post Drones Doing the Darndest Things appeared first on iQ by Intel.

Animated films projected onto walls inside China’s great ancient cities pull Chinese youth into historic tales.

In cities across China, peasant troops slice the air with decorative swords in the Chu Han War, peonies bloom while an emperor parties during the prosperous Tang Dynasty and monks follow the famous Silk Road.

These stories, which were projected on giant brick walls in the ancient capital of Xi’an in December, are traveling to cities across China, where people can experience the ancient past in a whole new way.

The History Comes Alive event uses new 3D facial scanning technology, inviting visitors to these cities to travel back in time and be part of Chinese history.

“You become the hero, you become the bad guy,” said Pierre Nelwan, animation director at Media Monks. “You become part of history.”

Through an unprecedented marriage of art, history and technology, history comes alive for generations across China. Attendees at these special events can stand in front of a kiosk built with Intel RealSense cameras. The cameras capture 3D scans of the person’s face, which can then be seamlessly integrated onto the faces of characters in a series of animated films.

Anyone who had his or her face scanned at the sites can download the videos onto a smartphone and share with friends. Anyone who missed the Xi’an event can view the live feed via Youku (China’s version of YouTube). Some 60,000 viewers tuned in to watch the Xi’an walls come alive.

“We have a long history, a very rich history,” said Intel China’s Paul Lu. “The problem is that young people are getting to know it in less and less.”

So Intel teamed up with J. Walter Thompson (JWT) creative agency in Beijing and Media Monks, a creative digital production company based in Holland, to create animated depictions of historical events and legends from China’s vast 5,000 years of history.

Chinese youth are social and embrace technology, said Lu, so the team wanted to create a fun, immersive experience that would not only inspire interest in ancient history, but also allow people to become a part of it.

“What reaction we want to see is from their eyes to their hearts,” said Polly Chu, JWT’s chief creative officer, emphasizing that the desire was to foster an emotional connection. “We wanted to show that history is not just far away. It’s me, I am the history.”

Starting this month, more events will take place throughout the year in cities including Beijing, Nan Jing, Hang Zhou, Cheng Du, Da Li and Guang Zhou, as well as on university campuses and in retail centers around the country. The stories correlate to the cities in which they’re shown, inviting the public to embrace the history in a way that feels personal, relevant to their daily lives.

Making the Impossible Possible

“The process of setting up an event like this, on a scale like this, is insane,” said Nelwan.

Lu said the teams from the U.S. and China spent months developing the facial scanning software to enable faces to seamlessly integrate into the animated characters. The result is astonishing.

“You can see yourself 360 degrees moving in the animation,” he said. “It’s not just plain animation. You can actually see yourself acting.”

“Intel RealSense technology is very unique because it mimics a human being’s two eyes,” said Zhenyu Tang, director of RealSense China. RealSense brings depth perception, gesture control and other capabilities to PCs, laptops and tablets. “It has two cameras so you can get exactly the 3D information into a 3D world.”

For the event in Xi’an, not only did the team manage technical challenges of integrating real faces into large-scale 3D animated movies, they had to navigate government bureaucracy and massive logistics.

“To hold a big event like this in China, we needed to foster a lot of relationships,” said Lu. “It was a huge effort.”

The teams worked with historians and social experts to make sure every detail depicted in the films accurately reflected history. Chu said they studied everything from clothing and hairstyles to weapons and the physical details of the palaces.

“We did a lot of homework,” she said. “We wanted to make sure everything was true to history.”

Editor’s Note: In this Experience Amazing series, iQ explores how computer technology inside is enabling incredible experiences outside. We look at how computer technology powers new experiences and discoveries in science, the maker movement, fashion, sports and entertainment. To learn more about the tech behind these stories, visit Experience Amazing.

The post History Comes Alive in China appeared first on iQ by Intel.

Wind power has the potential to lower energy costs, reduce reliance on fossil fuels and power all of civilization…so why not harness it to the fullest?

Driving along the highway, it’s hard to imagine giant wind turbines with their lackadaisically circling blades can generate enough energy to power much of anything. Turbines, it turns out, make a difference: About 4 percent of the world’s energy production comes from the wind.

That percentage is steadily rising, but wind harvesting is nowhere near what it could be. High-altitude wind innovations could change that.

The trick is capturing that high-altitude energy and bringing it down to earth. There are different ideas for accomplishing this, ranging from a high-tech kite to a helium-inflated turbine to an autonomous figure-eight flying plane.

Wind energy at the ground level tends to be unreliable in most places, but scientists have shown that higher upwinds can be stronger and more dependable. This translates into exponentially more energy: eight times as much potential power for every doubling of wind speed.

According to Cristina Archer of the University of Delaware and co-author of the first global survey of high-altitude wind energy, winds between 1,640 and 40,000 feet had more than four times as much energy as surface breezes—enough, the study estimated, to power all of civilization 100 times over.

“The resource is amazing, and the potential is tremendous,” Archer said.

Harnessing High Winds

California-based startup Makani Power, which Google purchased in 2013, plans to one-up Ben Franklin with a device they call an “energy kite” that could eventually produce power at rates competitive to coal and natural gas.

It looks like an insect-thin airplane with eight propellers on the leading edge of the wing. The kite is designed to fly in circles at 500 to 1,000 feet, anchored to a ground station by a flexible tether made of aluminum and carbon fiber. The spinning rotors turn brushless DC motors to generate electricity.

A computer system fine-tunes the flight path as the wind and weather conditions change.

The design simulates the tip of a wind turbine blade, which produces as much as 70 percent of the total energy. If the winds slow, the rotors can act like helicopter blades, providing extra thrust to keep the kite aloft. If the breeze dies completely, the kite can land safely by reversing the process.

The kite’s ground footprint is much smaller than a traditional turbine and uses about 10 percent of the materials. Operational testing of a 600 kilowatt energy kite could begin in late 2016 or early 2017.

That’s in part because airborne wind systems can operate in far more places than ground turbines, such as valleys. By Makani’s estimates, energy kites could potentially work in over two-thirds of the continental U.S.

Even if high-altitude wind systems can’t compete with standard electrical grid rates right out of the gate, they could still be a big help at isolated locations like military bases, disaster sites and islands, places that otherwise have to rely on generators and expensive imported fuel.

A Low-Cost Green Energy

Massachusetts-based Altaeros Energies has a high-flying device with the potential to reduce this reliance, especially in areas like Alaska, where electricity prices can be ten times the national average.

The Alaska Energy Authority awarded Altaeros a $1.3 million grant to test the world’s first commercial high-altitude wind turbine, with the goal toward providing power to remote rural communities.

Altaeros’s buoyant air turbine, or BAT, is a bulging cylinder inflated with helium. It features a rotating turbine inside and has four stubby fins around the outside. Three load-bearing conductive tethers attach it to a ground station.

In 2012, Altaeros successfully tested a prototype that generated twice as much power at 350 feet as it did at 100 feet. The company hopes to offer power at about 18 cents per kilowatt per hour, roughly half the going price in remote Alaska.

The BAT can be assembled quickly and be used to lift cellular or internet antennas, cameras and weather sensors. It’s designed to work in heavy downpours and winds of more than 100 mph. If the weather gets too severe, the automated control system reels in the BAT to dock at ground level and wait until things improve.

The Sky’s the Limit

To compete with conventional turbines, airborne wind power designs will have to be almost completely autonomous and reliable over long periods. Then there’s the risk of having a large device covered in spinning blades suspended high overhead by nothing more than the wind.

The PowerPlane by Dutch company Ampyx Power addresses this problem by using a complex array of sensors to take off and land on its own, even if its 0.8-inch tether breaks.

In between, the plane flies in a figure-eight pattern that lets it move faster than the wind, like a water skier slaloming behind a boat. The plane generates power by yanking on a winch attached to a generator on the ground.

At a predetermined tether length—the plane can fly up to 1,500 feet high—it switches to descent mode and the generator starts reeling in the tether for a certain distance. Then the plane starts climbing and pulling again.

A prototype model with a 40-foot wingspan can produce about 50 kilowatts, enough to power roughly thirty houses. The team plans to have two PowerPlanes flying by the end of 2016. As soon as 2018, they hope to have a 2MW commercial model available. With a 100- to 130-foot wingspan, it would still use only 8 percent of the material of a comparable ground turbine.

High-altitude systems don’t work everywhere, Archer points out, starting with no-fly-zones near airports, power plants and government buildings. A larger concern is how to regulate and insure them.

“Right now there isn’t an official category for airborne wind power devices,” she said. “No insurance company is going to insure them without one, and they’re still fighting over whether they are ‘unmanned vehicles,’ ‘obstacles to aviation’ or even something recreational.”

If the technology proves itself, though, the sky is truly the limit. The fastest winds of all, with the highest wind power density, await in the jet streams, five miles high.

Feature photo credit: Tony Webster, Creative Commons, 2.0, https://flic.kr/p/pskKMf.

The post Innovation Takes Wind Harvesting to New Heights appeared first on iQ by Intel.

The world’s first certified multicopter lifts off in Bruchsal, Germany, marking a new era for aerial transportation.

Just as smartphone technology sparked new ideas for urban transportation – like Lit Motor’s C1 two-wheeled, self-balancing electric vehicle – drone technologies are pushing the future of personal travel to new heights.

The Volocopter VC200 made aircraft history on March 30 as the first certified multicopter to fly with a person onboard. Designed by German company e-volo, this electric aircraft gives people a glimpse into a future where, one day, ubers and taxis travel above street traffic to their next destination.

“The Volocopter is super easy to fly, silent and built with electrical simplicity compared to helicopters, which are difficult to fly, loud and mechanically complex,” said Jan Stumpf, CEO of Ascending Technologies, an Intel company that has worked with e-volo since 2013.

The Verge called the Volocotper “a dream catcher” because of its symmetrical flock of propellers fixed above the egg-shaped, two-passenger cockpit. The VC200 looks like a supersized drone-helicopter but actually it’s a multicopter, also called multirotor, that uses fixed-pitch blades and is controlled by varying the speed of each rotor.

The VC200’s emission-free electric propulsion comes from 18 propeller-spinning rotors, all powered by nine batteries. It can reach up to 62 mph in flight and uses state-of-the-art navigation technology, making it a cinch to pilot.

Florian Reuter, managing director, strategy and finance at e-volo, estimates the price for the Volocopter will start at 250.000 €.

“We work towards making it available in early 2018 in the U.S. and Germany shortly thereafter,” Reuter said.

Simplicity and built-in safety has a lot to do with Ascending Technologies, a pioneer in drone innovation. They recently helped Intel set a Guinness World Record for the most Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to fly simultaneously. These 100 dancing drones brightened the night sky with a light show choreographed to a live outdoor orchestra performing Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

Even though VC200’s simplicity is challenged by battery and payload limits, Stumpf points out qualities and simplicities that could make this kind of multicopter the next big thing in urban transportation.

“Compared to traditional aircrafts, flying the Volocopter is so much easier for the pilot,” said Stumpf. “Anybody could fly it within minutes.”

It’s energy efficient, easy to operate and the flight control system, particularly the aspects that allow the craft to hover and land gently on its own, can be upgraded swiftly.

“It was really a sublime feeling,” said Alexander Zosel, managing director at Volocopter maker e-volo of the historic flight in Germany.

Zosel said the sensation of flying the Volocopter felt similar to piloting a remote-controlled drone from the ground—until he realized he was some 80 feet above ground.

On its maiden manned flight, the V200 reached 15 mph, but the e-volo team is determined to increase the speed up to 60 mph on follow-up flights.

The fiber-composite aircraft weighs 992lbs (450 kg) and requires about 50 kilowatts of battery power, depending on the air pressure and weather conditions.

Since the propeller blade angle on the VC200 cannot be adjusted, the amount of thrust produced depends solely on the rotation speed of the different rotors.

As Zosel controlled the aircraft using a joystick with thumb controls, Ascending Technologies’ triple redundant autopilot functions allows the Volocopter to hold its position in air whenever the pilot lets go of the joystick.

The autopilot works with brushless motor controllers, which are powered by a direct current and have electronic commutation systems instead of the mechanical brushes and commutators used in brushed dc motors. It connects to a fiber optical communication network and several adapter electronics to communicate with other components like the batteries, data displays or the safety parachute.

“Since the only rotating parts are the propellers—with two ball bearings each—there is not really much to service on this kind of aircraft,” he said.

Stumpf calls the VC200 a digital “fly-by-wire system in an electric ultralight aircraft.” Seeing the first manned flight brought to mind his experience flying 40-year-old Cessna aircrafts and a helicopter with a flight instructor.

He said that while it requires regulated air traffic knowledge and experience, the VC200 tackles the most complex and risky part of general aviation. The simple joystick controller and autopilot technologies reduce chances for human error. Its multi-redundant flight control system helps ensure precise altitude control and positioning stability.

“In general aviation, about 70 percent of all accidents are pilot errors,” he said. “The automatic functions add a layer of safety and comfort.”

He said that the fly-by-wire system learns from each flight and the collection of data can be share with other aircraft built with the same system.

The propeller system is designed to fold up and fit on a towable trailer for easy transport.

Given the need for additional flight testing, and a thicket of government regulatory issues on both sides of the Atlantic, it will likely not be until 2018 at the earliest that you can head over to an e-volo lot and kick a rotor.

e-volo is working toward certification to produce the Volocopter in large quantities. The company stated that in the next few years, the VC200 will influence air sports and air taxi services aimed at shifting individual and public transportation from streets to the sky, something NASA is exploring.

In April, the Wall Street Journal reported that a U.S. federal advisory group proposed expanding regulations for small commercial drones used to capture news video, power line inspections and other types of flights over urban areas or crowds of people.

“We’re showing regulators around the world that technologies used the right ways can help shape new rules for manned and unmanned aerial vehicles,” said Natalie Cheung, UAV product manager for Intel.

As Intel and other industry leaders work to refine regulations around the world, Stumpf is keeping his eye on new ways technology can help.

“If everybody can use safe air travel with the same or less effort as driving a car, there can be a huge impact for individual transportation,” he said.

“Of course the energy storage is still the biggest challenge and for many automatic-manned systems the rules of air would have to adapt,” he said. “But if the technology is available and demand is generated, regulators will follow.”

Photos by e-volo.

Go here to learn more about how sensors, computing, and communication technologies from Intel are helping aerial device innovation react new heights

The post Could Your Next Uber be a Multicopter? appeared first on iQ by Intel.

From real-time game analytics to sensor-based swing analysis, the latest advances are bringing PGA-level tech to weekend golfers.

When golfers talked about technology changing the game in the past, they typically referred to golf club innovations like precision putters or state-of-the-art custom irons. With new advancements in wearable golf tech, duffers are turning to data analytics like never before.

“The data doesn’t lie,” said John McGuire, CEO of Game Golf, which provides amateurs with the same type of real-time analytics the pros use. “It shows a golfer’s tendencies in different situations.”

Whether players are scoring PGA paychecks or hitting the green recreationally on weekends, golfers at every level can benefit from technology that brings a detailed understanding of performance on the course.

The Limits of Equipment

Companies regularly introduce new club heads and shafts that are lighter, stronger and more aerodynamic than their predecessors. Designed with bigger “sweet spots,” these clubs help players hit the ball farther and straighter.

Technologically speaking, golfers who use old clubs are at a disadvantage. Most experts advise against using a club more than two or three years old.

“The best drivers I’ve ever used have come out in the last six months,” said Brian LoGrasso, the manager of the Edwin Watts Golf Superstore in the golfing hotbed of Orlando. “There are just so many more options than ever before.”

Golf balls have also advanced significantly, with a multi-layer construction to give players a target that will fly straighter and farther. At the top levels, technological advances have created a revolution, making some courses too easy for professionals.

These breakthroughs, however, haven’t done much for the weekend golfer—the average golf handicap has barely changed over the last 100 years. High-tech clubs and balls are no substitute for mastering the basics. That’s where new swing tracking and analysis comes into play.

Big Data on the Driving Range

The ShotLink trailer, parked somewhere near the course at every PGA event since 2003, looks like the back end of an 18-wheeler. The advanced command center tracks real-time performance of every shot taken on the tour—often more than 20 million individual golf strokes.

Ten years after ShotLink became an established part of the tour, John McGuire began developing a similar data collection project for amateurs. The result was Game Golf.

Like ShotLink, which uses lasers mounted around the course to track shots, McGuire wanted something that was “nonintrusive.” To help players forget that their every movement was being tracked, the system uses a belt-mounted device, or an app on a golfer’s phone, and small one-ounce tags attached to the end of each club.

At the end of a round, a golfer can see how they did with a dashboard of pro-level statistics, including stroke distance, stroke trajectory and how often the ball hits the green.

What’s more, Game Golf is amassing a huge body of data from its users, with millions of shots already on file. This has led to some interesting analysis, such as the observation that many amateur golfers need to reconsider their equipment choice as they approach the green.

“Our data shows that 94 percent of golfers under-club,” McGuire said. “Most golfers hit the club they chose well, but still come up short. That’s because they had the wrong club selection.”

A Digital Caddy and Coach

A caddy is often the best resource a pro golfer has—a grizzled professional who can offer advice and motivation and who knows the course, both from experience and clubhouse conversations with the other caddies.

New products like the Garmin Approach can do a caddy’s job digitally. While the watch won’t offer a golfer a pep talk—yet—it gives extensive feedback on course conditions.

The watch uses GPS to show a golfer how far the ball is from the hole and alerts the golfer to any hazards, such as water, rough or trees. With maps for more than 40,000 courses around the world, it can even show the golfer where the hole is when it’s not visible—like when a golfer is deep in the woods or buried in a sand trap.

Many of the top-of-the-line Garmin Approach watches also include swing analysis features that measure the strength and speed of a golfer’s swing, much like the tech batters use to improve their swing in baseball.

Research has shown that the ratio of a golfer’s backswing (when a player is “winding up” to hit the ball) to the downswing (when the club is headed for the ball) should be three to one. The Approach measures the speeds of a golfer’s backswing and downswing to see how close each shot comes to achieving the ideal ratio. It coaches the player by sounding tones to help synchronize the two pieces of the golfer’s swing.

Other products, such as Swingbyte, fit on the end of a club. The device gives real-time feedback on the speed of a shot, as well as several different angles to help a golfer determine what went wrong with a bad shot.

And Zepp has a line of swing sensors that fit into a glove that give a 3D image of the path of a golfer’s swing. The sensor, containing two accelerometers and gyroscopes and using Bluetooth LE to connect with smartphones, measures swing speed, hip rotation and a variety of other angles, comparing each to what the goal should be.

Keegan Bradley is a PGA golfer that uses the gloves to help him fine tune his game. He recently joined several other golfers, including Michelle Wie, to help develop the Zepp 2, which incorporates the golfers’ knowledge into a Smart Coach feature.

The new product diagnoses the player’s weaknesses and recommends a training program based on the individual’s swing data, explained Zepp’s Andrew Felix.

From Wii to VR

Virtual reality (VR) may be the next step in the never-ending quest to improve golf scores. The technology could make in-home golf simulators, which today cost upwards of $50,000, more affordable and fun.

Jordan Spieth used the Full Swing golf simulator to prepare for the U.S. Open.

“I can see my spin rates, my launch angle, my launch direction,” Spieth said in a video on Full Swing’s site. “It’s not like I’m hitting into a net. I can watch the ball react on certain greens, and I can play the courses I play on tour.”

With Full Swing, a golfer hits a real ball with a real club. Then, as the real ball bounces away, the VR display shows the ball’s flight on one of 93 championship courses, based on the analytics of the golfer’s swing.

PGA golfers Rory McIlroy and Ian Poulter are regular users of Trackman, another in-home VR golf simulator.

Of course, no product, no matter how advanced, is going to score an ace for the golfer, but increasingly new technology is giving weekend warriors access to professional-level tools for taking their game to the next level.

The post Swing! Golf Tech to Perfect Your Game appeared first on iQ by Intel.

In a time when mathematics was “a man’s work,” Ada Lovelace was trained in aristocratic graces but pursued her passion for what later became computer science.

Many girls growing up in the aristocracy of Victorian-era London fantasized about dancing in elaborate ballrooms and marrying a favorable match. Ada Lovelace dreamed of building a flying machine.

She scoured periodicals for designs of new inventions, considering how a steam engine might power such a device, and studied the anatomy of birds to determine the proper proportion of wing length to body size to enable flight. Her design preceded Henson and Stringfellow’s patent for the aerial steam carriage by some 15 years.

She was only 12 at the time, but it was already clear that Lovelace would not stick to convention, eschewing science and mathematics, as women of her time were expected to do.

The daughter of philandering poet Lord George Gordon Byron and aristocratic Lady Anne Isabella Milbanke Byron, Lovelace did not follow in her father’s footsteps, as her mother feared she might. Instead, she found a language of her own and wrote the world’s first computer program, long before the advent of the first computer.

“Lovelace is a fascinating figure, not least because she made a huge leap when she foresaw the potential of a general purpose computing machine to create music or art,” said Suw Charman-Anderson, social technologist and founder of the annual international Ada Lovelace Day.

“She was so far ahead of her time that it seems none of her peers understood her vision.”

Breaking Free from Convention

Born in London on December 10, 1815, Augusta “Ada” Byron was the only legitimate daughter of the famous poet. However, Lord Byron was disappointed that the baby was not the “glorious boy” he expected. When his marriage failed, he left for Greece, never to return to England.

Lovelace was raised by her aristocratic mother and maternal grandmother, which is to say that she was raised primarily by nannies and tutors. Given the limited expectations for young women of the day, most girls were schooled in the arts and social graces.

Lady Byron, however, was intent that her daughter avoid nurturing any of her father’s “dangerous poetical tendencies” that might lurk in her DNA. She hired tutors to teacher her daughter mathematics and science.

Among Lovelace’s tutors were William Frend, a social reformer; William King, the family doctor; and Mary Somerville, a Scottish astronomer and mathematician who was one of the first women to be admitted into the Royal Astronomical Society.

From the start, Lovelace showed talent for mathematics and received encouragement. Even her absent father seemed to approve.

“I am told she is clever,” he once said. “But above all, I hope she is not poetical; the price paid for such advantages, if advantages they be, is such as to make me pray that my child may escape them.”

The Female Brain on Math

One of Lovelace’s teachers was Augustus de Morgan, a professor at the University of London who was interested in the emerging field of symbolic logic. Because women were not allowed to attend university, de Morgan agreed to teach Lovelace via correspondence.

He was conflicted by her talent and the potential hazards, since math was considered a man’s work. While he said that Lovelace had the potential to be “an original mathematical investigator, perhaps of first-rate eminence,” he was also worried that such weighty brainwork was, “beyond the strength of a woman’s physical power of application.”

Lovelace was undeterred.

“Ada was keen never to take ‘no’ for an answer,” said Anouk Wipprecht, a leading designer in today’s world of wearable technology and one of many contemporary computer scientists inspired by Lovelace. “This was especially important in her time, when woman were kept from any ‘male-mind’ kind of work.”

Lovelace’s determination paid off when, at age 17, she met Charles Babbage, an event that changed her life. Babbage, a mathematician and inventor, demonstrated a model of his difference engine, which was designed to perform mathematical calculations. Lovelace was fascinated and Babbage became Lovelace’s friend and mentor.

When, a few years later, Lovelace was asked to translate an article about another of Babbage’s invention designs, the analytical engine – essentially, an early mechanical computer – Lovelace obliged. The original article had been written in French by Italian engineer Luigi Menabrea.

Lovelace, who was fluent in French, not only translated the text into English, but took liberties in the process, adding copious annotations, including her own thoughts and ideas about the machine.

In these notes, which were three times as long as the original article, Lovelace described, step by step, how the machine could calculate a sequence of Bernoulli numbers.

In short, she developed the world’s first theoretical software algorithm.

“The analytical engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves,” she wrote, describing the way it manipulated symbols, and enabled numbers to repeat and loop. concluding that the machine was capable of far more than mathematical calculations. It could, she believed, be used one day to create music or art.

The translated article, along with Lovelace’s notes, was published in an English science journal in 1843, roughly a century before the development of the modern computer.

“She took a path that no woman had taken before by questioning two theories and entities, then combining them,” said Wipprecht. “This led to groundbreaking formulas that are used in many of the machines we work with today.”

Ada’s Legacy

Though Lovelace’s article attracted little attention when she was alive, her work reemerged a century after her death when author B.Y. Bowden republished them in Faster than Thought, a history of computing in 1953.

Since then, Lovelace received numerous posthumous honors for her work, helping to inspire a new generation of women in STEM careers.

The U.S. Department of Defense named the computer language “Ada” after her. She is the subject of a Google doodle. And last year, on the 200^th anniversary of her birth, the University of Oxford hosted a symposium in Lovelace’s honor, presenting recent research and information on her life and work, as well as linking her ideas to contemporary thinking about mathematics, computing and artificial intelligence.

Charman-Anderson created Ada Lovelace Day in 2009, as a way to celebrate Lovelace’s accomplishments, along with the achievements of all women working in technology.

In 2015, there were more than 150 independently organized Ada Lovelace Day events in more than 25 countries around the globe.

“Women still face a lot of challenges because of their gender, from glass ceilings to lower pay to dealing with everyday sexism,” said Charman-Anderson, who views Lovelace as a role model for change. “They need to see that their hard work surmounting these challenges is worth it and that success is possible.”

The post Ada Lovelace: The First Computer Programmer appeared first on iQ by Intel.

From exercise TV shows and Wii Fit workouts to smart yoga pants and wearable trackers, fitness tech continues to help make healthy habits a part of everyday life.

Technology and exercise have always enjoyed a symbiotic relationship. Since the “godfather of fitness” Jack LaLanne launched his resistance machines in 1950s, the U.S. fitness movement has evolved to include Jane Fonda’s ’80s video craze, Billy Banks’ Taebo in 1990s and Pilates in early 2000s.

Today, popular resistance, stretching and cross-training routines are often measured by wearable tracking devices such as fitness bands and smartwatches.

“In some cases, as with jogging and running shoes, the fitness was there before the technology, so it drove the innovation,” said Shelly McKenzie, historian and author of Getting Physical: The Rise of Fitness Culture in America.

“In others, it was the other way around: The technology, such as video and portable music players, was a tool that people used in different ways,” she said.

Workouts on the Small Screen

As screen technology has advanced—from television and the VCR to gaming and video streaming —so have the ways in which fitness experts have connected with their audience.

Juicing, gyms and home workouts all got their start from Jack LaLanne, who launched his first “physical culture studio” and TV fitness show in the 1950s.

“People thought I was a charlatan and a nut,” the late fitness celebrity said, according to JackLaLanne.com. “The doctors were against me — they said that working out with weights would give people heart attacks, and they would lose their sex drive.”

Still, LaLanne’s workouts caught on, and since then many other fitness gurus have attracted audiences with their workout styles and regimes. Judi Sheppard Missett’s Jazzercise owes its toe-tapping popularity to TV. It was Jane Fonda’s 1982 release of her first workout video that helped make VCRs the must-have new technology for every home.

“At that time, gyms were these sleek, chrome-y big city kind of things,” said McKenzie. “They weren’t in the middle of the country. So if someone was interested in exercising, and their town didn’t have a gym, videos became an option.”

While VHS tapes and DVDs may be past their prime, fitness sharing lives on through video streaming —whether it’s trainer Tracy Anderson’s subscription workouts or free barre classes on YouTube.

And it’s not only passive viewing. Exergaming, or exercise video games, first boomed with 1999’s Dance Dance Revolution, hitting its highest note with Nintendo’s Wii Fit, which launched in late 2007. Five years later, the exergaming equipment set a Guinness World Record with more than 23 million devices sold.

Today, trainers can interact with clients in real time through one-on-one or virtual group class settings using Skype and FaceTime, as well as on fitness sites such as Wello and EMG Live Fitness. Exos, a company that builds health and performance plans for professional and amateur athletes, employees at large companies and the military, also uses online training videos and personal data tracking to help take people to the next fitness level.

The Rise of the Machines

As early as the 1950s, Jack LaLanne developed resistance machines—he is credited with inventing the Smith machine, used for weight training exercises such as squats. But weight training didn’t have mass appeal until Arthur Jones introduced his first Nautilus machine, the Blue Monster, in 1970.

His machines used pulleys, or cams, to provide resistance on muscles throughout the entire range of motion of an exercise—a revolutionary idea at the time. To Jones, these spiral-shaped cams resembled the shell of a nautilus.

“Weightlifting was kind of an intimidating thing before Nautilus—you had to know what you were doing,” McKenzie said. “People could suddenly walk into a gym and do a circuit of weightlifting without any prior knowledge.”

With the advent of specialized equipment, she said, the gym became a fitness destination and memberships at places like Gold’s Gym became increasingly popular.

People began exercising in the context of a club, said Jonathan Black, author of Making the American Body. “Fitness got a huge boost when it became a social activity,” he said.

While gym trends have gone back to basics with free weights and to functional training modes such as CrossFit, today’s fitness clubs still boast treadmills, stationary bicycles and other equipment like Precor’s Elliptical Fitness Trainer (launched in 1995). The elliptical allowed people to enjoy the cardio benefits of running without the impact to their joints, eventually leading to Pilates machines that isolate movements and help with body alignment.

Wearables Make the Athlete

Exercise existed before rubber-soled sneakers and specialized technical fabric, but these innovations made those activities far more comfortable. Then, wearing these skin-tight materials became trendy, with brands like Lululemon championing body-conscious stretch clothing that can be worn all day, even when wearers skip the gym entirely.

“Workout clothes became important because if you wore those items outside of the gym, it became clear that you were that person who just exercised or were going to exercise,” said McKenzie.

This isn’t a totally new phenomenon either. Nike’s founder Bill Bowerman took running shoes from the track to the mainstream with the now-iconic Cortez sneaker. Jane Fonda popularized spandex, a unique synthetic fiber that’s woven into cotton or polyester to create a comfortable, supportive and sweat-wicking fabric.

Activewear maker Under Armour built its entire empire based on moisture-wicking fabrics, which harken to the 1986 introduction of Coolmax, the first synthetic material designed to dissipate perspiration, keeping the wearer drier and cooler.

Today’s fitness clothing technology has gone next level, using sewn-in sensors to create socks and sneakers that keep track of distance traveled and cadence. There’s also shirts that measure heart rate and respiration, a calf compression sleeve from BSX Insight that determines lactic acid threshold to optimize workouts and yoga pants that help wearers perfect their alignment.

Digitization of Performance

Measurable metrics have always been an asset to exercise; after all, fitness goals are often quantifiable: calories burned, weight lost, distance traveled or heart rate achieved. Being able to view and record that data has broad appeal for both motivation and recordkeeping.

Some could say the quantifiable fitness trend kicked into gear with the 1960s invention of the modern pedometer designed to track a person’s 10,000 daily footsteps. That technology evolved into wearable innovations that leveraged GPS to track runs and fitness bands that track biometrics.

The Basis Peak smartwatch, for example, uses tiny built-in sensors to track heart rate, movement, perspiration, skin temperature and sleep patterns. It automatically detects when the wearer is walking, running, biking or sleeping, including the phases of sleep. It even controls music so people don’t have to reach for their smartphones and interrupt workouts.

These wearable trackers can provide powerful psychological sense of accomplishment, according to Itai Vonshak, general manager for wrist worn innovation at Intel’s New Technology Group, which includes the BASIS smartwatch.

“There’s an old adage that you can’t improve what you don’t measure,” he said. “We can measure the heck out of stuff now.”

The time span between when a person starts a new fitness plan to when they start to feel and look better can be months, so seeing data measuring daily effort is valuable.

“Digital feedback gives you sense of completion. When forming new habits shortening the feedback loop creates the virtues circle of action and reward,” said Vonshak.

As these tracking technologies evolve, they will have to help people not only collect data but also provide fitness fanatics with easy to understand, actionable insights for continuous improvement. This could be the health and fitness world’s biggest challenge for this decade.

“This whole category of products really should be about the fullness of your life,” Vonshak said.

“It’s not just about measuring your steps and sleep. It’s about helping you change your habits, making you healthier and happier. Wearables will become indispensable when they will bring people a sense of accountability and positive reinforcement for doing the right things.”

The post Evolution of Fitness Tech: Jazzercise to Fitness Trackers appeared first on iQ by Intel.

UC Davis experiment combines wearable technology data with game design to show a promising way forward for health initiatives.

Recently, middle schoolers in Davis, California saved the world on their walk to school. The special power of choice for these teen superheroes? The ability to count their steps with a Fitbit.

These students were part of an experimental collaboration that began in 2013 between San Francisco-based game studio Funomena and the health department at University of California, Davis.

Every day, students uploaded their fitness data to Terra, an experimental web browser game that turns steps taken in the real world into in-game points.

The game’s fiction casts players as heroic astronauts. Earth is dying, so a new planet needs to be colonized before humanity can relocate.

Points earned in Terra can support a number of colonization activities. The hope is that kids squeeze in as much walking as possible over the course of the day, so that at night they can nurse more space-creatures back to health or terraform more biomes.

“The idea was to make a game that would connect with people’s ‘real lives,’” said Cynthia Carter-Ching, associate professor of Learning and Mind Sciences at the UC Davis School of Education.

The creators hope to show young people that all it takes is a change of attitude to make a big difference in their health.

The Rise of Exergames

Terra isn’t the first game to try and make calorie burning more fun. So-called “exergames” have successfully tethered workout equipment to television monitors or gaming consoles for years.

The Power Pad exercise controller from Nintendo Entertainment System helped players train for field events or practice the cha-cha-cha from the comfort of their living rooms. Wii Fit yoga and Kinect cardio are more recent attempts to gamify fitness.

According to Carter-Ching, the trouble with these traditional options is that they’re not conducive to fostering an overall healthy lifestyle.

“They don’t have an impact on how you think about physical activity during the rest of your day,” she said.

Terra, however,  shifts the philosophy behind exergames in order to make fitness fun and encourage healthy habits that can be practiced every day.

Terra’s method takes advantage of the small fitness decisions kids make throughout the day instead of relegating workouts to 30-minute routines. The game fits their on-the-go lifestyle by ditching workout equipment altogether.

The Fight Against Inactivity

Regular workout routines are only one aspect of being healthy. Someone who works up a sweat at the gym might sit behind a desk or become a couch potato during all other hours of the day.

That’s bad news for anyone’s mental and physical well-being, since long periods of inactivity—even with daily exercise—have been linked to issues like anxiety, heart disease, and diabetes.

Experts agree that by increasing low- to mid-intensity activity throughout the week, such as simple walking, people achieve much healthier lifestyles overall. Among other benefits, studies show that moving more frequently increases brain cells, makes people look younger and prevents premature death.

As a result of the UC Davis’ Terra experiment, Carter-Ching reported that 75 percent of participants looked at their progress throughout the day.  These kids were also interested in learning about how their data correlated to their physical activity.

Some participants felt frustrated that the game couldn’t take important aspects of their lifestyles into account – some lived too far from school to walk, others were swimmers who didn’t get fitness credit because they couldn’t take their pedometers into the pool. The feedback revealed that fitness can vary greatly from person to person, so the wearable technology needs to be customizable.

“Data is personal,” Carter-Ching said. “If we want people to have these highly personal kind of insights into their own behavior, we have to anticipate that the technologies that go along with that will also be highly personal.”

Personal fitness technology will evolve to become more diverse, as will the types of games that play with body data. Terra charts a player’s steps, but there are endless possibilities for using other kinds of metrics, too.

Combining the easy, everyday use of wearables with fun, gameplay incentives could soon be the best health and fitness routine for transforming anyone from couch potato to superhero.

The post Health Hacks: Exergame Terra Makes Fitness Fun appeared first on iQ by Intel.

A maker and X Games champion team up to help an eight-year-old boy born without a hand get a grip on his dream of becoming a BMX freestyle bike rider.

More than anything in the world Jimmy Wilson loves BMX biking, but the absence of fingers on his left hand kept him from the thrill of participating in the daredevil sport. An eclectic mix of 3D printed technology and creative personalities came together to make Jimmy’s dream come true.

Eight-year-old Jimmy never let his physical limitations dent his passion for BMX, a daredevil sport that requires guts and extreme dexterity.

“I like to do jumps on my bike, but I’m not very good at that,” he said in a series of videos for Complex and Intel. “I want to try and do a 360 in the air on the half pipe.”

While Jimmy had the guts, it took human ingenuity and the help of 3D printing technology to give him the dexterity ride like a pro.

Peter Binkley was determined to help the young boy. Jimmy was from Binkley’s community and had something in common with Binkley’s son, who was born without fingers on his left hand. That’s what drove Binkley to join Enabling the Future (e-Nable), a global community of volunteers that use open-source prosthetic designs to create 3D printed hands and arms for those in need of upper limb assistive devices.

After developing prosthetics for his son, Binkley began making devices for other people.  When he set out to create a prosthetic for Jimmy, Binkley had cutting-edge technology from Intel and the open-source community support. What he didn’t have was BMX expertise. That’s when he reached out to pro BMXer Jeremiah Smith, who advised Binkley on how to adapt his designs to the unique needs of BMX biking.

Smith is no stranger to what it takes to compete at the highest level, having taken home bronze in the 2013 X Games in LA. He coached Binkley on the must-have movements every BMXer must perform. Those insights helped Binkley wrap his head around the best way to design the right prosthetic for Jimmy.

“When I think about biking, I don’t really envision the kind of mobility that pro BMX biking involves,” said Binkley.

“When Jeremiah goes airborne off the half-pipe, all bets are off,” he continued. “There’s no guessing what will happen in the air or how he will land. So for a BMX riding device, I had to envision a very broad range of motion, in more directions than you might think.”

The essential connection point between a BMX rider and his bike is the handlebar. Smith said in order to perform BMX tricks, riders must master the side-to-side balance and range of motion in addition to up-and-down movements.

For Binkley, the first iteration of every design is a prototype. In this case, testing the prototype prosthetic had to be as authentically demanding as a competitive BMX ride. The final prosthetic had to enable Smith to perform 360-degree spins while maintaining a reliable grip on the handlebar.

“The device needed to connect securely to the bike using simple hardware, and the socket needed to be a secure, comfortable fit,” said Binkley.

“It also needed to move in the right directions…[and allow the rider] to work the handlebars like a pro biker,” he continued. “After imagining complicated designs with hinges and pins, I settled on a very simple, modified ball and socket joint.”

Binkley said the simplest solutions are usually the most reliable and often the most robust.

“In the end, I stripped the components down to the bare basics,” he said, which made for a design that can be easily adapted and customized for other needs.

“The socket is a personalized feature, so Jimmy’s device is just for Jimmy,” said Binkley. “But this work has the potential to impact the lives of many people around the world. That’s a big motivating factor for me.”

Binkley and his team at e-Nable are building an open library of resources for creating 3D printed prosthetics that anyone can use to their advantage. In the past three years, E-Nable has grown to 8,000 members who are interested in these kinds of projects.

For anyone with their own need or idea for a 3D prosthetic, Binkley recommends exploring designs on enablingthefuture.org. Since every person is different, learning how to edit 3D design files gives tinkerers the ability to customize existing designs.

By helping develop a custom design for Jimmy, Smith discovered that his sport has a lot in common with the maker movement.

“I’ve stuck with BMX for so long because you can be yourself,” said Smith. “It’s all about trial and error and just going for it. It’s huge to know how to fall, and the not knowing part is the scariest part of anything you do in your life.”

The post 3D-Printed Prosthetic Makes Boy’s BMX Dream Come True appeared first on iQ by Intel.

As the social media site celebrates its first decade, here’s how it revolutionized newsgathering and reporting, 140 characters at a time.

On March 21, 2006, one simply five-word phrase started a revolution: “Just setting up my twttr.” This first-ever tweet, written by Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey, was the beginning of a social media shift that completely changed the way people communicate online.

Today, Twitter is used by more than 305 million monthly active users, from brands and celebrities, to news organizations and everyday individuals who want to chirp into the conversation.

Over the last decade, Twitter added new features that improve functionality and help users communicate in new ways, including the ability to post GIFs and create videos with the spin-off app Vine. Despite Twitter’s business drama and difficulty enticing new users, the social media platform is relatively unchanged from when it first launched.

With the ability to gain insight using big data analytics, however, Twitter social media strategies have become so important they’re now part of business DNA in 2016. The platform has also become one of the top sources for minute-to-minute updates on breaking news.

“It’s time to stop thinking of Twitter as a social network,” wrote Joanna Stern in a recent Wall Street Journal article. “It’s more of a news network. I spend 75 percent of my time in the app getting news on everything from politics to technology to, yes, the Kardashians.”

By using hashtags, Twitter made staying up-to-date on relevant stories easy. Hashtags became the calling card of everything from technology conferences such as South by Southwest (#SXSW) to global sporting competitions like the Super Bowl (#SB50), encouraging conversations and driving awareness.

Great Power, Great Responsibility

Like the majority of digital disruptors emerging over the last decade, Twitter was a simple idea brought to life thanks to advances in cloud and mobile technology. The site allows users to post bite-sized 140-character updates, follow people and companies (even ones the user may never interact with in the real world) and exchange public messages without requiring an accepted friend request.

By becoming a go-to source for news and information, Twitter became a promotional tool — for everything from Fortune 500 companies to Kanye West — for tweeting everything from timely product launches and album releases to relevant, snarky memes.

A historic early example of Twitter’s growing influence occurred in January 2009, when a US Airways plane crash landed into the Hudson River. Twitter user @jkrums posted a photo of passengers evacuating the plane. This alerted the world to the incident before traditional media arrived at the scene.

In 2011, the Arab Spring unfolded over Twitter. Social media played a central role in shaping political debates in the region, spreading awareness about ongoing events all over the world and driving online conversations that led to mass protests and ultimately the overthrow of dictatorships.

According to Hussein Amin, Professor of Mass Communications at the American University in Cairo, this was the first time Twitter and other social networks “provided activists with an opportunity to quickly disseminate information while bypassing government restrictions.” It was history made in 140 characters.

Starting in 🇦🇺 on 3/21 and moving across the 🌍, we thank you for 10 incredible years.

Love, Twitter#LoveTwitterhttps://t.co/pH4WWdgK6q

— Twitter (@twitter) March 20, 2016

Years later, this kind of citizen journalism remains incredibly common. Twitter is the place to learn about the death of a revered cultural icon (#DavidBowie), react to the Oscar nominees’ lack of diversity (#OscarsSoWhite) and gather to mourn tragic terror attacks (#PrayForParis).

Of course, not all tweets carry equal weight. One retweet from a celebrity or public figure can catapult unknown individuals to superstardom. Two high school friends recently became worldwide sensations after their #DamnDaniels video went viral. The #StandwithAhmed hashtag helped a teenager secure an invite to The White House after he was wrongfully arrested for bringing a homemade clock to school.

In honor of Twitter’s 10^th anniversary, users can see how influential their first tweet was by going to https://discover.twitter.com/first-tweet.

Original reporting by Ryan Longstaff.

The post Ten Years of Twitter appeared first on iQ by Intel.

Players and coaches are using VR-enhanced pitching practice, energy-boosting cleats and smart bats to bring the sport of baseball into the Digital Age.

Often considered a game of inches, experts say baseball players today gain an advantage when they make it a game of millimeters. That’s where new smart baseball technology is helping give athletes an edge.

Data tracking and analytics depicted in the movie Moneyball are already pervasive as coaches and players hunt for training techniques to enhance gameplay performance. Teams like the Houston Astros are measuring the spin of the ball to fine tune the perfect knuckleball.

As top players prepare for the 2016 season, fans can anticipate the impact of more player data from pitch spin to bat speed to virtual reality replays.

The embrace of new technology indicates this could be the year that a favorite pastime takes a big leap into digital future.

A FitBit for the Bat

Wearable fitness trackers that athletes often wear are moving from their wrists to the equipment itself. The SparTag from Cambridge Consultants is essentially a Fit Bit for a player’s bat. It attaches to the knob at the end, below a batter’s hands.

The small device includes an accelerometer that measures speed on three axes simultaneously. It also has a magnetometer and gyroscope to capture as many aspects of the bat’s journey through space as possible. Using data accumulated from these sensors, the device produces information about the player’s swing power, angle and follow through motion.

Capturing the data, however, is just one piece of the puzzle. SparTag also provides tools to make sense of it all.

“Creating the hardware has become the easy bit,” said Ruth Thomson, head of consumer development for Cambridge Consultants. “The interesting bit is the mathematics.”

Just like the wearable trackers that allow users to compare their step totals to those of friends and colleagues, as well as to an ideal level of daily activity, the SparTag compares the power, follow through and attack angle of a batter’s swing to the ideal ranges in each category. It also shows a three-dimensional map of the swing.

Best of all, the data collection doesn’t require expensive technology, according to Matthew Hill, project leader at SparTag. He said the product uses low-cost sensors like those found in mobile phones. Similar versions of the device can give athletes feedback on their golf swing, tennis stroke and lacrosse shot.

A Smarter Bat

Zepp Technology, which has previously produced 3D swing analysis tools for batters, developed a Smart Bat, too. This custom-made model has a cavity in the knob that allows the tracking device to fit inside.

Perfect Game USA and Ripken Baseball, two of the top amateur baseball organizations in the country, approved the bat for game use. This means hitters can get feedback from their actual swings in a game, making adjustments from at bat to at bat.

Four-time All Star and 2014 American League MVP Mike Trout has used Zepp’s analysis tools for two years. He is introducing a signature model Smart Bat that will be available to the public in June.

Better Hitting through Smart Phones

Fourteen years before Mike Trout won the MVP award, Jason Giambi took home the honor. Giambi played for the Oakland A’s at the time, the team made famous in the book and movie “Moneyball.”

He was one of the most successful practitioners of the Moneyball analysts’ focus on strike-zone management. Giambi led the league in OPS, a statistic that measures power and the ability to reach base.

Now retired, Giambi is involved in Project OPS, which helps to train players to manage the strike zone as well as he did. Project OPS is the creation of EON Sports and is a Virtual Reality Simulator that combines animation and live-action video that allows batters to practice against computer-generated versions of real-life pitchers they may face in a game.

The VR headset uses a user’s cell phone to produce the graphics; an app for iPhone and Android produces the on-screen images while the goggles include a spot to plug in the phone.

“You connect the phone into the goggles and next thing you know, you’re looking out there and facing live pitching and he’s throwing you live pitches — fastball, curveball, slider, changeup,” Giambi told Tech Times.

He compares the device, which costs less than $200, to $70,000 movie projector and screen systems that accomplish the same thing.

At a recent demo, Giambi had All Star Troy Tulowitzki, a former teammate, try the system. Tulowitzki was impressed.

“Before it lands right there,” he said, pointing to the graphic on the screen, “my brain tells me the ball is going to be right there. It’s pretty real.”

It’s All in the Legs

While fans think of sluggers or flame-throwing pitchers as having strong arms, players know that the true key to power is below the belt. A player needs a strong base and generates power through the legs and hips.

To help with that, Athalonz developed the G-Force cleat, which was funded through a Kickstarter campaign at the end of 2015. Athalonz refers to the shoes as “athletic positioning technology”— they put the wearer in a position to generate maximum energy transfer through the legs, something the company says current baseball cleats can’t do.

Athalonz has worked with a team of researchers and tested prototypes on more than two dozen MLB players and coaches to come up with a shoe that increases the power an athlete can generate, simply by making a few small adjustments to the positioning of the feet.

“The optimal athletic position would be to have the heel raised slightly and the weight on the inside of the leg,” said Dr. Preston Wolin, an orthopedic surgeon who consulted with the company. “This drives the toes into the ground so that the energy transfer at the chain begins immediately.”

Next-Level Tracking Systems

The MLB continues to experiment with tracking systems that could make the game more engaging for fans, according to Craig Friedman, vice president of the Performance Innovation Team at EXOS, a company that focuses on proactive health and performance for elite athletes, the military and businesses.

“The data can show the distance they’re covering and how efficient their route is to make a play,” he said.

“It can show how players are seeing the ball come off the bat and how quickly they’re making those decisions for each play.”

While the latest baseball tech isn’t always visible to the fans watching from the ballpark or home, it’s playing a bigger role than ever in enhancing how players train and perform. Smarter equipment, more mathematics and data tracking are combing to change baseball from a game of inches into a game of millimeters.

The post How Baseball Technology Will Change the Game appeared first on iQ by Intel.

With accidental shootings on the rise, new smart gun technology has the potential to save lives.

When President Obama unveiled a new set of executive actions aimed at reducing gun violence in January 2016, the proposed efforts focused largely on more stringent background checks — including ensuring that all gun dealers (even those selling over the Internet or at gun shows) — be fully licensed and compliant.

Obama also stressed the need to develop new technologies to make guns safer.

“If we can set it up so you can’t unlock your phone unless you’ve got the right fingerprint, why can’t we do the same thing for our guns?” he asked in a televised address.

“If there’s an app that can help us find a missing tablet, there’s no reason we can’t do it with a stolen gun,” he continued. “If a child can’t open a bottle of aspirin, we should make sure that they can’t pull a trigger on a gun.”

While these devices aren’t currently on the market, new smart gun technology is on the way.

In 2013, the most recent year for which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has complete data on firearm fatalities, more than 30,000 deaths resulted from gun violence.

Of those deaths, the CDC data shows more than 500 were killed when a weapon discharged accidentally. Another 21,000 were suicides (many of them using a family member’s weapon) and nearly 200 victims were under the age of 14.

Kai Kloepfer thinks new technology could dramatically reduce those numbers.

“Smart guns take human error out of the equation,” said Kloepfer, who was a high school sophomore in Boulder, Colorado, when James Holmes committed the 2012 mass shooting at a movie theater in nearby Aurora. “They have the potential to save lives.”

Aiming High

Inspired to help stem gun violence, Kloepfer, now 18, created a plastic prototype of a gun that fires only when an embedded sensor recognizes an authorized user’s fingerprint on the grip. The sensor can authorize multiple users, which is potentially useful in law enforcement or military settings.

The tech is powered by a small battery that needs recharging every year or so. An indicator light on the gun shows when the power is winding down, making it easy to keep it at the ready.

“Accuracy and reliability are critical,” said Kloepfer, a soon-to-be MIT student whose design won a First Place Grand Award at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in 2013. “The integrated fingerprint sensor is the same kind used by banks and law enforcement. The fingerprints are stored using military-grade encryption.”

Kloepfer isn’t the only one motivated to produce safer, smarter guns. Bill Gentry, CEO of Kodiak Industries, was inspired to create a smart gun after attending a party at the home of a retired Navy Seal.

During the party, a group of kids wandered into the house and returned with a loaded weapon. Though the gun wasn’t fired and nobody was hurt, the averted catastrophe was unforgettable.

Gentry’s Intelligun is an after-market retrofit kit. This means that customers can add a fingerprint-lock component to some existing gun models. It stores electromagnetic maps of fingerprints for up to 20 users and can verify a user within a second. The tech is powered by a battery and includes a power indicator light that signals when it’s time to recharge, once a year or so.

“If a child or a depressed teen gets their hands on a smart gun, they can’t fire it,” he said. “If an assailant grabs it, it’s no longer a gun; it’s a paperweight.”

Others — including the New Jersey Institute of Technology — are working on “dynamic grip recognition” like the tech built into the gun James Bond used in the movie Skyfall. The idea is that by using dozens of tiny sensors in the grip, the smart gun will recognize the unique pressure pattern of the owner’s hand and lock up for anyone else.

Front Sight

Richard Beary, president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police recently told the Washington Post there would be “plenty of agencies interested in beta testing [smart gun] technology.”

He said officers – especially undercover cops – fear having their weapons fall into the wrong hands and used against them. According to FBI statistics, from 2004 to 2013, 33 police officers were murdered with their own weapons.

At a recent smart gun symposium in San Francisco, Police Chief Greg Suhr offered his department as a testing ground for manufacturers as soon as the technology is ready for market, likely within the next five years. He said his officers, many of whom are techies, are excited at the prospect.

In short, he said, smart guns are a “no-brainer.”

Line of Fire

Others, however, have been hesitant to entertain the idea at all. Some are reluctant to trust the technology, particularly in the event of a life-or-death event.

They wonder if the sensor will still work if their hand is sweaty of they have a cut on their finger.

Other opposition has come from the National Rifle Association (NRA) and other guns-rights activists. Many fear that the development of smart guns jeopardizes their Second Amendment rights. Fueling this argument is a 2002 New Jersey law mandating that all firearms sold in the state must adopt smart gun technology within three years of its availability.

It was this law, in part, that incited gun owners to protest against gun dealers who attempted to sell a German smart gun — the Amartix iP1 — in the U.S. in 2014.

The gun used radio frequency identification (RFID), which required users to wear a linked smartwatch and punch in a PIN code before it would fire.

Sales lagged due in part to the protests and the steep $1,800 price tag, and Armatix filed bankruptcy in 2015.

Meanwhile, the NRA has adjusted its position. According to the NRA Institute for Legislative Action web site, “The NRA doesn’t oppose the development of ‘smart’ guns, nor the ability of Americans to voluntarily acquire them. However, NRA opposes any law prohibiting Americans from acquiring or possessing firearms that don’t possess ‘smart’ gun technology.”

New Jersey lawmakers are reconsidering the state’s controversial law, opening the door for consumers to choose their weapons regardless of available technology.

Trajectory

A recent survey conducted by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said that nearly 60 percent of Americans would be willing to purchase a smart gun when buying a new handgun.

This is good news for smart gun developers.

“I’ve never been more optimistic about personalized guns than I am now,” Stephen Teret, founding director of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Gun Policy and Research, told Fortune Magazine last year. Teret has been pushing for safer gun designs for more than three decades.

The post Ready, Fingerprint, Fire: Tech to Make Guns Safer appeared first on iQ by Intel.

While high-tech game simulators, crowdsourcing and advanced analytics can help fans pick their NCAA brackets, perfection remains elusive even for the most dedicated data nerds.

Despite the influence of big data and plenty of analytical tools to help make informed decisions, NCAA March Madness Tournament fans don’t appear to be getting any closer to picking a perfect bracket.

For some, so much data could be devastating.

“It’s going to be carnage,” ESPN’s Jay Bilas, a former player, said of the prospects of picking this year’s winners. “There are going to be landmines everywhere.”

Granted, the odds were never going to be easy. With 63 winners to pick in most brackets (the full tournament plays 67 games, but the opening four are usually not included in the sheets fans fill out), the odds of guessing correctly are one in 9.2 quintillion. Maybe even worse.

From a game simulator that plays games possession by possession, to a group that picks sports wins as efficiently as it predicts Oscar wins to a data nerd with a surprising success rate, tech-savvy fans have sound digital tools to help improve their chances for picking winners.

Still, the perfect bracket doesn’t appear to be on the horizon.

Strength in Numbers

Basketball is a team game, so it should come as no surprise that one option for picking winners of NCAA games involves crowdsourcing with other fans.

UNU depends on large groups of users, which it calls “the swarm” to pick results.

In a head-to-head showdown with college basketball experts earlier this season, the swarm came out victorious. UNU’s group picked the winners of 35 college games, against the point spread and were victorious in 20 of them. CBS Sports.com‘s Gary Parrish picked the same games and won just 13.

UNU’s swarm is equally adept at picking other winners as well. In a football-betting challenge, using simulated money, the swarm would have made a profit of 34 percent betting on college bowl games, while ESPN’s on-air experts would have run a loss of 24 percent.

On Oscar night, the swarm picked 76 percent of winners correctly in all categories, beating film critics from Variety, Rotten Tomatoes, Rolling Stone, USA Today and the LA Times by at least 10 percentage points.

Advanced Stats from a Data Nerd

When can a weatherman in Utah help fans with their brackets? When it’s Ken Pomeroy. A former meteorologist with the U.S. government, Pomeroy quit his job to forecast college basketball instead.

Pomeroy is one of the foremost authorities in the field of advanced basketball metrics, and his subscription site kenpom.com is a must-have for serious followers of basketball.

Pomeroy rates all 351 college basketball teams, all season long, and he has history dating back to 2003. He also looks at advanced measures, such as tempo-free statistics—meaning that a team who allows a low number of points may not really be good at defense; they might just play really slowly.

Pomeroy also looks at strength of schedule, efficiency on offense and defense, and even a team’s luck, to help give the squad a true ranking.

KenPom.com has already been providing ratings and predictions for all the conference tournaments around the country, and he’ll shift into high gear once the NCAA bracket is out.

Game Sim Knows All

There are several programs that attempt to simulate the matchups of the NCAA Tournament, with varying levels of success. For more than two decades, Jeff Sagarin has used his statistical ratings of teams and Monte Carlo simulation techniques to play the NCAA tournament 68 million times, keeping track of who wins most often.

If a fan needs help with an individual game, however, Jon Pence’s Game Sim is worth a try. The tool, part of his website SCACChoops.com, is one of the more accurate simulators in the country, picking not just winners, but also final scores with uncanny accuracy.

The key, Pence explained, is that his program simulates the entire game with shots, points and rebounds, not just the final result.

“Game Sim takes the stats and strength of schedule for two teams and plays out a game, possession-by-possession,” Pence said. “Each possession it determines what percentage of time a team shoots, turns the ball over or goes to the free throw line. It then plays out each play breaking things down a bit more.”

In a situation where a player shoots, Game Sim looks at the player and team most likely to get the rebound. There’s also randomization involved, so each simulation doesn’t end the same way, but Pence maintains it’s not rocket science.

“There really aren’t any complex equations in Game Sim,” he said. “Instead, it’s more along the lines of just making sure things happen the right percentage of the time. The fascinating thing is how well it predicts the score of games.”

Pence has been using Game Sim for the last five years and says it picks the correct winner 75 to 80 percent of the time. About one third of the time, it’s within five points of the team’s actual score for the game. Against Vegas point spreads, it has a 53-percent success rate, “which is considered profitable, I’m told,” he said.

The Trouble with Turnover

Part of the reason fans rely on tech tools to pick the wins is increased turnover in the sport: The best players only stick around for one season.

Witness last season’s NCAA champion Duke Blue Devils, who lost their starting center (Jahlil Okafor), point guard (Tyus Jones) and small forward (Justise Winslow) to the NBA Draft after one season in college. This year, Duke has replaced them with another crew of freshmen who have scored 48 percent of the team’s points this year.

With so many new players on the best teams, and the lack of experience in playing in the tournament, the stage is set for even more upsets than in previous years. As Bilas explained, if the “influx of talent” to a freshman-dependent team like Kentucky or Duke isn’t up to the same level as previous seasons, the favorites come back to the pack.

This year, in particular, Bilas said there doesn’t appear to be a team head and shoulders above the others. There are many good teams but not one that dominates the competition.

So fans have to decide whether the hot-shot freshmen on a big-name team are going to be able to beat out the age and experience of the smaller schools, who are often loaded with seniors and other veteran players.

Speaking of Luck…

Even armed with the most-advanced stats around and with Game Sim and the swarm on their side, fans shouldn’t count on getting very far with their bracket intact this March.

“They don’t call it March Madness for nothing!” Pence said. “Whether it’s a player getting hot from [landing a three-pointer], an injury or maybe someone is just having a bad day because their girlfriend broke up with them, these are college kids that can do amazing things or amazingly boneheaded things on any given play.

“We can play the averages, but I think we all know what happens in March is rarely average.”

The post March Madness: Can Big Data Prevent a Busted Bracket? appeared first on iQ by Intel.

Here’s how researchers and developers are making VR experiences astonishingly real and useful in our daily lives.

When the web was still in its infancy, virtual reality — an immersive computer-simulated lifelike experience first developed during the era of mainframe computers — was a hot (if murky) topic of conversation.

VR’s 40-year journey from sci-fi to reality is amping up to finally hit the mainstream.

VR is already making a splash in the entertainment industry. It was used during the live broadcast of the 2016 Grammys, when Lady Gaga’s face was the 3D background for a living facial tattoo.

Investment in VR is reaching a fevered pitch as its potential stretches from entertainment to manufacturing, tourism and real estate industries. Intel acquiring Replay Technologies to deliver 360-degree VR replays to sports fans is just one example fitting Goldman Sachs Group’s estimate that VR will be an $80 billion market by 2025.

Tech giants like Facebook, Google and Samsung are also supporting cutting-edge research to help improve a user’s virtual experience. As researchers and developers at universities and in the private sector race to make VR meaningful for people’s lives, it’s a good time to explore several projects aimed at unlocking new VR experiences.

Coming out of the Cave

VR has helped change the way that many scientists do their job. Field work can be expensive, difficult and, in some cases, impossible.

For years, Brown University’s computer science department has had a VR room, known as “the CAVE” (for Cave Automatic Virtual Environment). The CAVE is an 8-foot cube with projected images on three walls and the floor. Using LCD glasses that provide stereo depth perception, tracking devices and positional audio, researchers could enter a world they wouldn’t otherwise be able to reach.

“There’s something about being in one of these 3D virtual reality rooms that’s super compelling. It’s like, ‘Whoa! Wow! Amazing!’” said David H. Laidlaw, professor of Computer Science at Brown University and head of the Visualization Research Lab and its new virtual environment, known as the YURT.

The University’s astronomy department used the CAVE to explore the surface of Mars. Archaeologists were able to relive past digs. The CAVE even provided a close-up look at the brain’s wiring and a realistic proxy for fetal surgery.

“We’ve had people looking at 3D fluid flow, like blood flow through coronary arteries,” explained Laidlaw. “We’ve had researchers looking at airflow over bat wings.”

While the Cave’s three-wall display, along with a virtual reality screen for a floor, provided a realistic environment for its users, Laidlaw wasn’t satisfied. He set about improving on the experience.

“The main thing we tried to do was get to the level of human perception in as many of the factors of the virtual reality experience as we could,” he said.

The result is Brown’s new virtual environment, the YURT (Yurt Ultimate Reality Theater), whose rounded walls and conical roof eliminate corners and flat walls, which interrupt the VR experience.

The YURT uses 69 cameras, each with 2 million pixels. The overall resolution of the room — taking into account that many of the camera images overlap — is still well over 100 million pixels.

“The resolution of the screens in the YURT now is about the same resolution as your eye,” he said, noting that it matches the level of brightness and contrast humans can distinguish. “It’s like a retina display. You don’t really need to go beyond that because humans can’t detect it. We are completely saturating the human perceptual ability.”

In addition to the limitations provided by what humans can see, the YURT is also limited by the hardware. Right now, especially for video, the room is capable of displaying far more detail than most cameras can capture.

“Even cameras with multiple lenses, capable of capturing the whole sphere are still only doing it from the perspective of one viewer. For VR, we need the whole 3D world to be defined,” said Laidlaw.

“If you can imagine watching a real live football game in the YURT and being able to walk around on the field, between the players and dodge them, we don’t have that yet. It would be cool, though — especially because you wouldn’t have to worry about them hitting you. You couldn’t feel it.”

Good Vibes

By the time image capture is able to provide the view of a football game that Laidlaw described, it’s possible users might be able to feel the players running into them. Nullspace, a technology company founded by three University of Rochester undergraduates, is perfecting a haptic suit that allows VR users to get tactile feedback from their virtual worlds.

Lucian Copeland and Jordan Brooks were seniors and Morgan Sinko was a junior when the trio first came up with the concept for the Nullspace suit.

“The original idea came from Morgan watching his brother trying to play a dodgeball game on Microsoft Kinect,” Brooks explained. “And he watched his brother get increasingly frustrated with it because he couldn’t interact physically with the balls in the game.”

The group attempted to design a tool that would incorporate a user’s sense of touch into the virtual world. The result was a jacket and gloves that include 32 independently-activated vibration pads, allowing users to feel sensations in their fingers, hands, arms, chest, abdomen and shoulders.

Nullspace says that the suit allows users to feel close to 120 different sensations. This haptic feedback, Brooks explained, is similar to a vibrating cell phone.

“Only it’s a little more powerful, so you can feel it through your clothing,” he said.

Eventually, the suit could provide a wide range of other sensations, including the ability to model the weight of a virtual object. For now, the suit is based on vibration feedback.

The initial reaction to the suit proved that there’s a lot of interest in being able to interact in virtual environments.

“We took it to several Maker Faires and competitions, and everywhere we went, there was tremendous excitement,” Brooks said. “At our first Cornell Cup, there was a line of people wanting to try the suit that wrapped all the way around the convention hall.”

The applications for gaming are obvious, but there are other areas where the Nullspace suit can pay dividends.

“We’ve talked to one or two people at NASA about training astronauts for space walks,” Brooks said. “We’ve talked to people at the VA about treating veterans with PTSD through immersion therapy. The suit lets you get in and immerse yourself in the experience, to let you relive it and process it in a healthy way.”

Brooks said the technology could even be used for remotely control robots.

“Our goal is to make haptic feedback accessible to everybody in virtual reality,” he added. “We want to give everyone the sense of actually being present in virtual reality, instead of just being a ghost.”

(Don’t want to be) All by Myself

Virtual reality can be a lonely business. Conventional wisdom indicates that once a user puts on the headset, the current world and the user’s real-world companions drop away.

The computer science department at New York University isn’t looking to advance VR technology, but rather what can be done with it when it becomes widespread. In essence, the researchers want to create the first VR social network by allowing multiple users to share the same experience.

The ongoing project, which combines social interaction with VR, is called the Holojam. It allows up to four users to share a 32- to 34-foot virtual space without being tethered by wires, as other multi-user systems require.

NYU Computer Science professor Ken Perlin, director of the University’s Games for Learning Institute, told UploadVR that he’s most interested in the impact the technology will have on future societies, when everyone uses VR as part of their daily lives.

From a virtual experience that rivals the capabilities of the human eye to a fully tactile immersion in the world, VR technology is becoming more powerful by the day. But as intense an experience as the technology can provide, it needs to be shareable before people will fully embrace it. This research will help ensure the “next big thing” is finally here to stay.

The post 3 VR Projects Tap Into Human Senses appeared first on iQ by Intel.

Daniel Hobbs practices Judo, plays soccer and basketball, rides his bike and swims. He lives in Spain, speaks fluent English and Spanish and is learning Portuguese. He’s an active 11-year-old whose smile lights up a room.

Daniel’s friends call him “Iron Man” because he wears a prosthetic on his left arm. Although he was born without a hand, he was born at the dawn of the 3D printing revolution, where technology is providing new ways to tackle life’s challenges.

“Daniel is a fighter,” said his mom, Abby. “He never gives up at anything. He’s absolutely determined.”

When Daniel was five months in utero, his parents got the crushing news that their son had a congenital malformation of his left limb. They were thankful, of course, that their son would be otherwise healthy, but knew their unborn baby would have challenges ahead.

Since age 7, Daniel has worn a prosthetic limb, which has helped him do a lot. It opens and closes (like a claw), but its abilities are limited.  The heavier medical-grade prosthetic is expensive because it must be constantly refitted to fit his growing body.

Last year, Intel teamed up with 3D Systems, a company that specializes in large-scale 3D printing, to build Daniel a lighter, more cost-effective hand.

“I was inspired by pushing the limits of this kind of technology,” said Evan Kuester, an applications engineer at 3D Systems. He began working with Daniel, first taking a scan of both hands to make sure the scale and fit would work.

It took some back-and-forth to get it right, but eventually, Kuester was able to create a 3D-printed prosthetic that could literally come out of a printer as a single piece, at a fraction of the cost.

Kuester said he printed the hand using a Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) printer, powered by robust Intel Core processors. A laser draws the cross section of the hand onto a very fine nylon powder repeatedly until it is fused together into a hard plastic.

“It takes about eight hours to print the hand,” said Kuester, adding that the tech-integrated prosthetic costs around $400.

The Hobbs are from the UK but live in Spain, where both parents are teachers and enjoy giving Daniel and his sister Bethany, 13, the opportunity to learn a different language and culture. Paying for Daniel’s prosthetic was a challenge. To fund the initial cost of US$1,800, his dad, Alistair, started the Give Daniel A Hand fundraiser by running a half-marathon.

But the costs kept multiplying. Each time the hand needed to be refitted to fit Daniel’s growing body, or be re-calibrated or fixed for numerous reasons, it cost a couple thousand dollars and needed to be shipped away so Daniel went without while he waited for it to come back.

“We know so many families who can’t afford it,” said Abby. “So we were really interested in finding out what other options were available. We know this is the future of prosthetics. We’re really interested to see what the future holds.”

Kuester said most people wearing prosthetic hands continue to use their other hand for most things because prosthetics lack fine motor skills. He said 3D-printed prosthetics can be custom shaped, so ostensibly someone could print a hand for a specific purpose — say like holding a hammer, guitar pick or a violin bow — and interchange it when needed.

For Daniel, the lighter prosthetic, which weighs less than 2lbs, is loaded with cool factor — having an Iron Man-esque hand makes for a popular show and tell.

As Daniel becomes more confident, his whole family can see the change. For Kuester, the experience making a hand for Daniel has been humbling.

“It makes me feel great to know that some of the things I make actually have an impact on people’s lives,” he said.

Editor’s Note: In this Experience Amazing series, iQ explores how computer technology inside is enabling incredible experiences outside. We look at how computer technology powers new experiences and discoveries in science, the maker movement, fashion, sports and entertainment. To learn more about the tech behind these stories, visit Experience Amazing.

The post Inexpensive Prosthetics for the Masses appeared first on iQ by Intel.

Today’s tech-savvy children will grow up to expect a workplace that’s more representative of their peer population. Research proves this is a smart move for companies too.

There’s no “I” in team, but it turns out, there is a team IQ — one that rises when the team embraces workplace diversity.

“Demographically diverse groups make better decisions and produce more innovations, because they bring in different perspectives,” said Katherine Phillips, co-author of the research and senior vice dean and professor of leadership and ethics at Columbia Business School.

New research from Phillips’ team concluded that diversity sparks greater creativity and encourages complex thinking. This promotes higher quality decision making among groups striving for positive economic or social impact.

Dr. David Rock, Director of the NeuroLeadership Institute, brings neuroscientists and leadership experts together to create science-backed approaches to creating diverse workplaces. Rock helped design Intel’s GROW program, which aims to bring diverse, inclusive approaches to teamwork across the company.

Neuroscience studies the human brain and nervous system. By learning how the brain works — studying everything from cognitive science and brain chemistry to philosophy and psychology — neuroscientists delve deep into human behavior.

“When scientists study smarter teams, what they find is that it’s not the IQ of the individual team members, it’s actually the average social intelligence of the team members that matters,” said Rock.

Social intelligence, a collection of aptitudes more closely associated with women, deals with things like being a good listener, taking turns, sharing and being inclusive. Rock said inclusivity is one of the most important considerations when building a smart team.

“If you have a diverse team that is also inclusive, you actually make better decisions, you’re more creative and you find more errors,” said Rock. “The fundamental reason is because you’re mitigating a whole lot of biases through completely different perspectives.”

He said teams have a relatively fixed intelligence that remains static across tasks and time, so smarter teams will continually out-perform homogenous ones. His research shows a group with different ages, races, gender identities and religions, for example, is more likely to develop the next technological breakthrough, than one composed of members from an identical demographic.

Even with a diverse group, Rock explained, certain people can dominate the team and obliterate the benefits of diversity.

“You need an inclusive environment as well, where people feel that they have a voice and are able to contribute,” he said.

Building Better Teams

Putting this plan into action creates a new set of obstacles, particularly for managers and people who question the need to change the status quo. Impending deadlines may also drive some to rely on the efficiency and speed of a familiar, homogenous team.

“The counter-intuitive issue is that, for the manager, it probably feels better in a non-diverse, non-inclusive team,” Rock said. “In a homogeneous team, the manager can plow through and drive a process without involving people. That manager probably feels more in control, like they’re moving faster.”

People often report working on diverse teams is more difficult, confirmed Rock, but it’s worth the effort to create a smarter team. Still, unconscious social or cultural biases can create roadblocks.

“You really need to put processes in place that mitigate bias at the source,” he said.

For Intel’s GROW initiative, a year-long campaign for all of the company’s 107,000 employees that includes practice tools, webinars, videos and ongoing research, Rock used neuroscience research and data to people develop new habits and overcome biases. One element encourages employees to try something new, to push themselves out of their comfort zones. He said this exercise can open up people’s minds.

The Future of Smart Teamwork

By focusing on developing diverse and inclusive teams, companies that institute programs like GROW position themselves to have a competitive advantage.

“As good engineers, we did research on what we had to do to relate better with one another,” said Danielle Brown, chief diversity and inclusion officer at Intel.

She said the company realized it needed to improve its diversity efforts if it was to remain a tech industry leader. The GROW program helps accomplish this goal.

“If you look at companies that have missed major innovations, many of them had a very fixed mindset, very homogeneous of leadership teams,” Rock said. “If employees have smart ideas, they should be heard. I think we need to mitigate the biases that we have more effectively and actually allow for different voices and different people to succeed.”

The good news is that younger generations are poised to advance these objectives. According to Rock, kids nowadays are more technologically connected and generally grow up in more diverse environments than their parents. When they grow up, he said, they’ll come to expect that same level of inclusion in the workplace.

The post Neuroscience Helps Foster Diversity in the Workplace appeared first on iQ by Intel.

Teens awarded more than $1 million for scientific innovations at the 2016 Intel Science Talent Search, and for the first time in the event’s 75-year history more than half of the finalists were female.

The creation of software that helps drug makers develop new therapies for cancer and heart disease. A cost-effective filter that removes a common contaminant from stormwater systems. A low-cost, smartphone-based lung function analyzer that diagnoses lung disease as accurately as expensive laboratory devices.

These projects scored three teens — Amol Punjabi, Paige Brown and Maya Varma — top honors, including $150,000 each at the 2016 Intel Science Talent Search (Intel STS), held at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., on March 15.

Intel STS is the country’s oldest and most prestigious pre-college science competition, and has launched the careers of 12 Nobel laureates, two Fields medalists, 17 MacArthur Foundation Fellows, and 11 recipients of the National Medal of Science or Technology.

Some 1,750 high school seniors applied for this year’s event; only 40 made the final cut. These finalists traveled to the nation’s capital for a week to present original research to panels of esteemed judges and compete for Medal of Distinction awards in three categories: Basic Research, Global Good and Innovation.

In addition to two of the three top winners being female, it was the first time in the event’s 75-year history that more than half of the finalists were female.

“This milestone is an inspiring sign of progress toward closing the gender gap in technology and engineering,” said Rosalind Hudnell, vice president in Human Resources, director of Corporate Affairs at Intel Corporation, and president of the Intel Foundation.

“We hope these finalists’ outstanding work will inspire young people from all backgrounds to develop their interests in these fields.”

Here are the winners:

Medal of Distinction for Basic Research

This award recognizes finalists who demonstrate exceptional scientific potential through depth of research and analysis.

First Place: Amol Punjabi, 17, of Marlborough, Massachusetts

For his computational biology and bioinformatics project, Punjabi developed software to help drug makers develop new therapies for cancer and heart disease. He is the lead author of a paper on nanoparticles published in ACS Nano and co-author of a paper on a related topic in Nanoscale.

Second Place: Meena Jagadeesan, 17, of Naperville, Illinois

Jagadeesan investigated an object in algebraic combinatorics, or the mathematics of counting, to reveal a novel relationship between classes of graphs.

Third Place: Kunal Shroff, 17, of Great Falls, Virginia

In his research, Shroff discovered new relationships between the key protein associated with Huntington’s disease and the biological processes of cellular death that cause Huntington’s symptoms. His work may lead to new treatments.

Medal of Distinction for Global Good

This category rewards finalists who demonstrate great scientific potential through their passion to make a difference.

First Place: Paige Brown, 17, of Bangor, Maine

Over the course of two years, Brown studied the water quality of six environmentally impaired local streams with high E. coli and five with high phosphate contamination levels. She is currently developing a cost-effective filter largely made of calcium alginate strands to remove the phosphate from stormwater systems.

Second Place: Michael Zhang, 18, of Berwyn, Pennsylvania

Zhang engineered tiny virus-like particles to deliver gene-modifying proteins to target cells for medical therapy by altering the genome of those cells in a controlled way.

Third Place: Nathan Charles Marshall, 17, of Boise, Idaho

Marshall studied a marine sediment core sample and related it to present-day climate change, concluding that Earth can recover from current climate change trends if action is taken soon.

Medal of Distinction for Innovation

This category celebrates finalists who demonstrate problem-solving aptitude through innovative design and creativity.

First Place: Maya Varma, 17, of Cupertino, California

Concerned about the lack of access to medical intervention for lung diseases in the developing world, Varma created a low-cost, smartphone-based lung function analyzer. Using just $35 worth of hobbyist electronics and free computer-aided design tools, her device diagnoses lung disease as accurately as expensive devices currently used in medical laboratories.

Second Place: Milind Jagota, 18, of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania

As a less costly alternative to the transparent conductors now used in touchscreen devices, Jagota studied the performance of random nanowire networks.

Third Place: Kavya Ravichandran, 17, of Westlake, Ohio

Ravichandran studied the use of nanomedicine to destroy potentially fatal blood clots that can cause heart attacks and strokes.

Winners One and All

Second-place winners won $75,000, third place winners, $35,000, and the remaining finalists received $7,500 each.

In total, more than $1 million was awarded to finalists, semifinalists and their schools through the competition.

“The Society congratulates Amol, Paige and Maya,” said Maya Ajmera, president and CEO of Society for Science and the Public and alumna of the Science Talent Search.

“They and the rest of the top winners of Intel STS 2016 are using science and technology to help address the problems they see in the world and will be at the forefront of creating the solutions we need for the future.”

The post How These U.S. High School Students Hit the Big Time appeared first on iQ by Intel.

Caroline Buckee uses mobile health data to track and predict the spread of deadly diseases around the world, and her new predictive models help officials know where to focus disease-fighting efforts.

Although U.S. residents worry considerably more about catching West Nile Virus than coming down with malaria, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that there were 198 million worldwide cases of malaria claiming 500,000 people in 2013. This is mostly an ongoing problem for regions in Africa, and the CDC isn’t the only organization trying to stop the mosquito-borne disease.

Harvard epidemiologist Caroline Buckee was studying the genetics of malaria in Kenya in the mid-2000s while her then-husband Nathan Eagle was analyzing cell phone data for carriers. They realized they could combine their skills to track the spread of the parasite.

Cell phone data can actually help officials stop people from bringing deadly diseases to unaffected locations.

“As epidemiologists, we try to figure out how to prioritize intervention in different places,” Buckee said. “With cell phone data, we can follow people over time, build up a map of where everybody is, then use mathematical models to predict the spread of disease. This is the future of epidemiology.”

Information on public travel patterns is indispensable during an epidemic. It lets epidemiologists track how an outbreak is spreading and predict where it will go next, as well as how people’s movements are changing in response to an outbreak. Authorities can then figure out where to focus disease-fighting resources, how to manage travel restrictions and whether their efforts are working at all.

Historically, epidemiologists and public-health workers have had to resort to low-tech methods like interviews, surveys and theoretical models to find out how people are moving around. But these methods give unreliable and patchy data, Buckee says, and are especially difficult in undeveloped areas.

Cell phone location data is much more accurate. It tells where people are moving to and from, and even who they are coming into contact with. Best of all, it’s essentially instantaneous.

The cholera outbreak that followed the 2010 earthquake in Haiti offered a hint of how useful cell phone data could be in tracking and predicting movement patterns.

Swedish researchers analyzed movement data from two million phones, supplied by Haiti’s largest mobile carrier. Within 12 hours, they found that 630,000 people left Port-au-Prince within three weeks, often for the same places they had spent the Christmas and New Years’ holidays. They were, in essence, able to follow the outbreak.

These types of calculations can change the course of a disease.

Buckee studied how predictions based on cell phone data compared to real life in Pakistan, for example, where dengue fever has made alarming inroads.

Dengue is the quickest spreading mosquito-borne disease in the world, in part because of increasing travel, but also because climate change is helping the insect vector spread to new areas.

“Mosquitoes are now everywhere across the country,” Buckee explained. “They didn’t used to be.”

To assess the reliability of cell phone data predictions, she compared records of a large series of outbreaks across Pakistan in 2013 with a model based in part on mobility data from about 40 million phones. That mobile data predicted the spread and timing of epidemics accurately — and confirmed that people traveled much more than previous estimates.

The study estimated that between 2.4 million and 4.8 million phone subscribers moved between tehsils (roughly equivalent to counties) every day.

“We were surprised how much travel there was,” Buckee said. “There was no way to see that with the standard approach — and it’s just going to increase.”

The travel problem is an issue in malaria-affected regions as well.

In Kenya, Buckee said, travelers were spreading malaria, in some cases more so than mosquitoes.

Her team’s analysis of records from 15 million phones showed which settlements were especially likely to receive visitors from malaria-ridden areas. They found that people returning from malarial hotspots on the edge of Lake Victoria played an important role in transmitting the parasite.

Cell phone data can help even if it isn’t pulled from the country with the outbreak. For example, Buckee and other researchers weren’t able to secure operator data from affected countries during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa.

Instead, they used data from Kenya, Senegal and Cote d’Ivoire to predict how people in places like Guinea and Sierra Leone were spreading the deadly disease. Their findings suggested that porous national borders were a problem: Even if flights between large cities were suspended, people could still cross easily from country to country in rural areas.

Despite evidence that cell phone data is an effective means of studying the spread of deadly diseases, the method isn’t without challenges. Getting the data in the first place is one of the biggest hurdles.

Mobile data is strictly regulated and closely guarded by the telecom companies that collect them. Privacy is a major issue, especially in the developed world.

In the future, Buckee imagines a technological solution to the privacy problem: smartphone apps with opt-in features that share users’ location and medical symptoms. Making systems like these available to authorities and health-care workers could help them develop real-time epidemic response plans, including text message warnings to people in disease hotspots.

She is also fascinated with the idea of linking cell phone data to genomics to track how pathogens mutate over time and space, helping create better vaccines.

“The implications are across the board,” Buckee said. “As far as I’m concerned, more data is better.”

The post Mobile Health Data that Prevents Epidemics appeared first on iQ by Intel.

Fly along with Rotor Riot teams’ quest for the World Drone Prix.

Competing at top drone racing tournaments takes teamwork, practice, tinkering skills, a taste for speed and a knack for virtual reality. But according to Steele Davis and his Rotor Riot teammates, fervor for the lightness of being and commitment to fun are the real secrets to being a successful drone racer.

A relaxed, open mind makes for a faster pilot.

“I try not to take competition or life too seriously,” Davis said as his team prepared to compete against 100 racing teams in the qualifying rounds at the World Organization of Racing Drones Prix in Dubai 2016.

“I like watching funny videos and goofing off with my friends. If you take things too seriously, what’s the point?”

That keeping-it-real state of mind helped Davis and his teammate Chad Nowak finish the in the top 10 in the round of 32 teams competing in the World Drone Prix.

At the event, the largest global drone race to date, with a prize pool totaling US $1 million, the biggest sum yet for drone racing, drones take to the skies March 11-12.

Commissioned by the crown prince of Dubai, Hamdan Bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, a drone racer and adventure sports enthusiast, the race’s global breadth and investment are proof that professional drone racing has hit the big time.

To make it to Dubai, teams had to win qualifying events, which were held in Los Angeles, South Korea, Germany and cities across China. Teams include a pilot to control the drone, a navigator to communicate the surroundings of the drone, a technician to keep the aircraft running, a pit stop leader and a team manager.

The competition evolves from rounds of 32 teams down to 16, two semifinals of eight teams, then the finals to determine the winner.

Members of Rotor Riot shifted pilots and roles to create three different competing teams: Rotor Riot Steele, Rotor Riot Nowak and Charpu FPV (led by Rotor Riot pilot Tommy Tibaja). Even though they pilot races as individuals – they could face one another in the final four – knowledge is shared openly across teammates.

The qualifying track is indoors and is one-third the size of the main outdoor finals track. Kept somewhat secret until the tournament began, the main track was rumored to have moving gates, special lanes and special bonus obstacles. The 591-meter outdoor aerial course was custom-built to challenge the world’s top drone pilots, and according to organizers, there has never been a more tech-infused course.

Womak said the difference between the small indoor and huge outdoor tracks in Dubai was major challenge for all pilots, requiring a different type of drone build or modification so the drone is optimally tuned for each track. Not to mention that Dubai was experiencing the worst rain storm in the past 10 years, making it tough for pilots to even practice.

“Ultimately it comes down to the pilot and his or her ability to adapt to uncontrollable variables like weather (wind), track dynamics and radio frequency signal interference,” said Nowak.

Eye on the Prize with Teamwork

Snatching some of the $1 million prize money would be nice, but most of Rotor Riot’s attention focuses on fun.

“I love meeting up-and-coming flyers,” said Davis who, at 26, is slightly younger than the average drone racer.

“There are kids here at Dubai that are serious competitors at only age 14,” he said.

“What’s really awesome about this race is that all of us get to meet people we’ve known online for years but are only here seeing each other in person for the first time.”

Davis will use a Dubai Edition Team BlackSheep Crossfire, which he said provides excellent R/C range, something that will come in handy to tackle the most challenging track ever built.

The Rotor Riot teams are using 260-270MM quad copters, which is the diagonal span from one propeller motor across the body to the next propeller motor. Each propeller is six inches long and made of glass reinforced nylon. The drones are equipped with cameras, electronic speed controllers, rechargeable batteries, flight controllers programmed using a laptop, and powered by three motors capable of reaching 36,600 revolutions per minute at full throttle.

Always immersed in the moment, Rotor Riot team members are fond of friendly pranks and mischief. Davis, in particular, is notorious for his spontaneous syllogisms that freeze time for a split second while teammates hover around his words looking for simple or deeper meaning before erupting in laughter. It’s become a signature of their YouTube series.

Davis, known as “Mr. Steele,” is an electronics engineer who worked in a hobby shop for years and has a vast knowledge of remote control technology.

His teammates include Australian Chad Nowak, aka “FinalGlideAUS,” who started out competing in full-sized glider planes; Carlos “Charpu” Puertolas is an expert in FPV drones; and Tommy “Ummagawd” Tabajia is a well-known DJ in the Hollywood, Pasadena and Las Vegas club circuits.

Rotor Riot came together in 2015, when executive producer Chad Kapper of Flight Test fame pulled together these four eclectic drone pilots to star in a new drone lifestyle video series on YouTube.

Rotor Riot brings drone fans along for the ride as they share tips and tricks, but the real magic comes through their whimsical, intelligent commentary and genuine comradery.

Tips for Future Drone Racers

Davis’ first drone was a Team Black Sheep Discovery Pro, a bigger and heavier drone compared to multirotor drones he builds and flies now. He’s only been flying drones for a couple of years, moving from 3D helicopters to multirotors — UAVs powered by multiple propellers.

“I’ve built more drones than I can remember.” he said. “Many are the same exact model but with different specs for different purposes, like track racing or freestyle flying.”

His yaw, pitch and rolls are more than drone maneuvers, they’re forms of self-expression for Davis.

He also likes to keep his hardware as clean and simple as possible.

“A messy build leads to a part failure, which leads to a system failure, which leads to a crash, potentially costing me a lot of time and money,” Davis said.

Davis is also diligent about training and a bit rebellious. He flies up to 40 three-minute runs each a week and avoids spending time watching other people’s videos.

“I have always been an innovator and to do so you need to keep your mind open and free from conformity,” Davis said. “My advice to someone just starting out is to spend time getting to know other people who love this hobby.”

Nowak said that in Dubai, hijinks and pranks are part of every moment on and off the track.

“Every racer here is here for the fun of it and to build friendships around our common interest in flying.”

The post How to Be a Pro Drone Racer appeared first on iQ by Intel.

Unhappy being pigeonholed due to her looks, the “most beautiful woman in the world” set out to develop a secret communication system that would take down Nazi submarines.

A lonely immigrant from Austria slips out of her stage clothes and kicks off her heels. Carefully removing her movie makeup, she’s dissatisfied that she’s been overlooked for more significant roles. Instead of throwing a pity party over a glass of Pinot Noir, however, she heads determinedly for her drafting table, a place where she’s previously invented an improved traffic stoplight.

This is where she’ll prove to the world that she’s more than a pretty face.

The scene sounds like Oscar-bait, but the truth is much more fascinating. This is the real-life story of Hedy Lamarr, Hollywood actress turned tech hero.

An inventor whose contributions were recognized posthumously by the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame in 2014, Lamarr helped develop a system used in Bluetooth, GPS and Wi-Fi.

Her dual life as an actress and innovator was part of what makes Lamarr such a captivating character. This was perfectly captured in Google doodler Jennifer Holm’s nod to Lamarr on what would have been her 101^st birthday.

“Lamarr has kind of a mythical status at Google, and I was pretty excited at the chance to tell her story in doodle form,” Holm wrote about her doodle. “Sketching storyboards on a yellow notepad helped me figure out how to show Lamarr in very different scenarios — movie star by day, inventor by night.”

Brains Before Beauty

Although Lamarr was a Hollywood glamour girl and played the femme fatal in movies opposite the likes of Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy, she wasn’t the typical looks-obsessed starlet.

“Any girl can be glamorous,” she once said. “All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.”

As Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes indicated in his book Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, The Most Beautiful Woman in the World, Lamarr’s idea of a good time was a dinner party and discussion with intelligent friends.

“Hedy didn’t drink. She didn’t like to party,” Rhodes told NPR. “Hedy had to find something else to do to occupy her time.”

That “something else” was inventing, and it turned out she had a knack for designing problem-solving technologies. Transforming the drawing room in her house into an innovation studio with a drafting table and the necessary tools, Lamarr invented an aid to help people with limited mobility get in and out of the bath, a florescent dog collar and a bouillon cube that would dissolve to turn water into soda.

While Rhodes said Lamarr laughed that the latter invention was a complete flop, her best-known success was a passion project that still has applications today. The “secret communication system” she developed with composer George Antheil, a neighbor and friend, was the precursor to today’s top wireless technologies.

“Though invented for a different purpose, the fundamentals of the concepts for frequency hopping became a foundation for widely used wireless technologies we readily use today,” said Aicha Evans, Vice President and General Manager for the Intel Communication and Devices Group.

“In the end, wireless is about dividing up the air into clear data transport lanes, modulating and moving data around in a predictable and accurate manner,” she said.

Evans said Lamarr and Antheil’s particular method of efficiently guiding and transporting data over the air was “pure genius” and the foundation for future advancements in wireless technology.

Live and Learn

Born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, Lamarr hailed from Vienna and was of Ukrainian-Hungarian Jewish heritage. Her first marriage was to a munitions manufacturer named Friedrich Mandle, who reportedly conducted business with Benito Mussolini and hosted Adolf Hitler at the couple’s home. Mandle also taught Lamarr about military technology, something that would come in handy years later.

As her marriage to Mandle became increasingly suffocating and abusive, reported CNN, Lamar escaped to America, cleverly booking her voyage so that it coincided with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) studios’ Louis Mayer.

According to Rhodes, Mayer initially offered Lamarr an acting contract when she met with him in London on another occasion but wasn’t satisfied with his terms and confidently walked out on the deal.

That changed rather quickly when the two became traveling companions.

“Once she was aboard, she found a way to make him long for her — after all, she was an actress,” Rhodes told NPR. “And before the ship landed in New York, she had a much, much better contract — the equivalent of about $3,000 a week for seven years.”

Despite securing superstar status in the industry, Lamarr’s fascination with science and technology never faltered. She set her sights on helping the Allies in World War II.

When many German submarines began targeting non-military ships, Lamarr believed radio-guided torpedoes would make more powerful and accurate retaliatory weapons for the Allies’ cause, but she needed to find a way to prevent the radio signals from jamming.

Lamarr and Antheil developed a radio communication system based on the 88 piano keys. It was a success, and the duo received a patent for their work in 1942. Unfortunately, the U.S. Navy ignored their technological feat for another 20 years.

Gone But Not Forgotten

When the war ended, Lamarr and Antheil’s work could have easily perished in a Navy file cabinet. Instead, their invention helped military and private companies develop a frequency-hopping mechanism used during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Later, the system became the precursor to modern wireless technologies.

Although Lamarr didn’t help the Allies as she’d planned, she understood that sometimes things need to move slowly.

“The world isn’t getting any easier. With all these new inventions I believe that people are hurried more and pushed more,” she once said. “The hurried way is not the right way; you need time for everything – time to work, time to play, time to rest.”

Lamarr’s work remained unrecognized until 1997, when the Electronic Frontier Foundation acknowledged “spread-spectrum broadcasting” for its ability to give “give ordinary people with ordinary resources” affordable access to the airwaves.

“The special award for Lamarr and Antheil is remarkable for other reasons besides its recognition of a woman whose contributions were thought to be solely in the field of entertainment,” said EFF Staff Counsel Mike Godwin in the press release. “Ironically, this tool they developed to defend democracy half a century ago promises to extend democracy in the 21st century.”

Intel’s Evans believes new advances in wireless technologies are truly democratizing the Internet, making access easier for people all over the globe.

“Mobile technology is becoming a core element of humanity,” said Evans, who is currently working on bringing 5G wireless technology to the masses. “It’s about the problems and opportunities in our global community.”

This was also true in Lamarr’s time when frequency jumping offered an opportunity to give the Allies an advantage during the war. While Lamarr likely didn’t know the extent to which her invention would impact the world, she knew it was significant enough to warrant recognition.

So what happened when Lamarr heard the EFF was giving her an award? At the time, three years before her death in 2000, the 86-year-old responded with characteristic confidence.

“When they called her up to tell her she would get the award,” Rhodes said, “her first words were, Hedy Lamarr being Hedy Lamarr, ‘Well, it’s about time.'”

The post How Hedy Lamarr Invented Early Wireless Technology appeared first on iQ by Intel.

The genre-bending competitive games releasing in the next year have the potential to bring the usually divided fan bases of eSports together.

Many see eSports as the next $1 billion sport, but getting there depends on a savvy intertwining of new titles and their diverse fan bases.

If new gaming titles such as Blizzard’s Overwatch, Gearbox’s Battleborn and Epic Games’ Paragon are going to succeed as eSports, industry insiders believe these titles have to evolve beyond popularity.

“There is sort of a secret sauce when it comes to eSports,” said Marcus Graham, Twitch’s director of Programming. Enthusiasm for game titles is no longer enough to achieve eSports stardom.

Graham said games have to be fun to play but also fun to watch. They must create powerfully entertaining drama at all levels of competition.

“It used to be a game would try to become a popular eSport by either having a larger prize purse or having a larger event, but if you don’t have all of the pieces in place, that can sort of be misguided effort,” said Graham.

A handful of premier games draw the biggest crowds in eSports. For example, last year’s International in Seattle, the pinnacle of competitive Defense of the Ancients 2 (DOTA 2), garnered more than 20 million viewers as players fought over a prize pool of nearly $18 million.

The longest running league, Intel Extreme Masters (IEM) World Championship, has amassed more than 1.5 million concurrent viewers by packaging together games like League of Legends and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) into the same events.

The sum of eSports’ potential, however, remains fragmented across a number of different games. It has burgeoning Wimbledon-like events, perhaps, but no World Cup.

“People have different tastes in games. There are totally different genres. There’s very little overlap,” said George Woo, events organizer at Intel. “They are truly unique communities.”

As a result, many of the biggest eSporting events remain limited by the size of the fan bases surrounding the top games.

Some leagues like IEM try to get around this by featuring multiple games.

“If you’re a League of Legends fan you’re not going to watch DOTA 2 games, but potentially the League of Legends fans might watch something like CS: GO because the genre’s so different,” said Woo.

This means there’s a huge opportunity for new games to break the mold and unite players and fans across the divide of these various eSports communities.

By fusing together different genres and borrowing from the competitive design of games ranging from Hearthstone to Rocket League, many hope these games will create a new eSports audience that’s not limited by the enthusiasm of a single devoted fan base.

The Promise of Genre-Fusing

Two of the year’s bigger competitive releases, Battleborn and Overwatch, transcend the traditional boundaries between first-person shooters (FPS) and isometric-strategy games.

For Battleborn, this means a FPS with elements of multiplayer online battle arena, tower defense and massively multiplayer online games, according to Randy Varnell, the game’s Creative Director.

Battleborn’s matches are about shooting the opposing team and taking objectives, but also building up experience points and abilities by killing non-playable enemies. Modes like “Metldown” are heavily influenced by League of Legends, with periods of “farming” or collecting the opponent’s minions punctured by bombastic team-fights where players unleash their newly leveled-up powers.

The other half of Battleborn’s potentially far-reaching appeal is its extensive cast of characters. With 25 playable characters at launch, the creators hope Battleborn will have something for everyone.

“You’ll see comfortable modern military archetypes next to strange four-armed witches flinging odd chaos magic, fighting alongside or against sentient mushrooms armed with kunai,” said Varnell.

The designers at Blizzard — Overwatch’s parent company — emphasize the importance of having relatable characters.

“Players always will have a better time if they have a context for their actions and if they have attachments to the heroes they’re playing or facing off against,” said Jeff Kaplan, Overwatch’s Creative Director. “I think hero-switching is an absolute pillar of what makes Overwatch gameplay exciting, fluid and dynamic.”

What sets Overwatch apart from many other arena-based shooters is the way it lets players switch between its many different characters — from the athlete-turned-soldier, Zarya, to the gorilla scientist, Winston. In this way, the game owes less to modern MOBAs than games like Valve’s Team Fortress 2.

What Makes a Great eSport Game?

Of Twitch’s most watched games in 2015, FIFA 15 and Destiny were the only new titles to break into the top 10. Despite FIFA’s general-audience popularity, its success as an eSport has been uneven because it competes with its real-life league counterpart for fans and funding. Destiny’s hardcore following means its player-base is extremely active but ultimately limited by the overall number of people playing the game.

Future eSport titles will need to nurture their enthusiastic communities in order to succeed, but Graham said that titles will need to be retooled into engaging spectator sports.

Ultimately, however, the “secret sauce” for a successful eSports title is up to the fans. When a small studio called Psyonix released a game about playing soccer with cars last year, few predicted its meteoric eSports rise.

Less than a year later, it’s clear Rocket League‘s success is the product of its creators’ community-building efforts, like partnering with the likes of Twitch to create a Championship Series of ongoing monthly competitions.

It’s critical to create engaging, emotion-stirring and entertaining experiences, but the biggest challenge facing any game developer aiming to create the next successful eSports is nurturing the game’s fan base. Finding ways to continuously engage fans and tie them into other eSports communities will determine whether a game thrives or fades away.

Feature image credit: Patrick Strack, IEM Katowice 2016

The post Could New Gaming Titles Unite eSports Fans? appeared first on iQ by Intel.

How a Tweet inspired Instapainting founder Chris Chen to build a master painter robot controlled by Twitch viewers.

Since he couldn’t paint like a master, Chris Chen made a painter robot that could.

Chen is the founder of Instapainting, a company that hires accomplished artists to turn photographs into paintings on canvas. When a Twitter user attempted to steal a customer by offering to have a robot paint the customer’s image, Chen was inspired to make a painter robot of his own.

Three weeks and $250 later, Chen had his first prototype. His bot quickly evolved from mimicking human painters to taking paint stroke commands from live TwitchTV users.

“I don’t think there was ever a real, physical world collaborative Twitch stream,” said Chen.

So he started one.

For years Twitch has been the social video platform of choice for gamers — a place to chat with fellow enthusiasts, stream play-throughs or watch eSports pros battle it out in gaming tournaments. When Twitch switched on new flavors of programming last fall, millions of art fans tuned in to watch a nine-day marathon of “The Joy of Painting,” the 1980s TV show hosted by frizzy-haired, mellow-talking painter Bob Ross.

It was Chen’s second Twitch Paints livestream collaboration. In the debut episode, which made the front page of Hacker News, Twitch commenters had to write code commands to tell the robot where to paint.

For the second show, which attracted more than six thousand Twitch viewers, Chen made it easier, allowing viewers to control the robot painter by typing simple x and y axis coordinates. The finished work is being sold via Ebay with proceeds from the auction going to Watsi, an organization that uses crowd-funding to provide medical care to people around the world.

A History of Robot Painters

Chen’s may be the first painting robot that is crowd controlled via the internet, but it’s not the first robot artist.

The Basel Academy of Art and Design’s “mobile sensory image production mechanism” BNJMN began signing his name to original works in 2013, and E-David (“Drawing Apparatus for Vivid Interactive Display”) started creating visually optimized works of art from the University of Konstanz in 2009. But it was Chen who took the robot art game to the next level of crowd-control creativity.

Chen became curious about crowdsourcing the painting process after seeing a group of Twitch users collaborate on a more scientific project.

“I saw a Twitch Installs Arch Linux project, and that gave me the idea,” said Chen.

Linux is an operating system like Apple OS X or Microsoft Windows, but unlike those systems, Linux is free and open-source. During the Twitch stream, the most popular keystroke every five seconds in a Twitch chat was used to command an Arch Linux virtual machine, giving an entire community of Twitch users control over a single machine. Goals for that stream included booting Arch Linux from the hard disk and configuring a fully working X server.

Building a Rembrandt Robot

Though the technology may looks and sounds complex, Chen said the execution was simple. When an artist draws, the movements are recorded digitally in three dimensions: X and Y (up, down and across the canvas) and Z (for applying pen pressure to the canvas).

The robot then plays the movements back to recreate the painting. Because it skips lulls in movement, the robot can recreate a precise replica faster than humans.

“The robot uses two stepper motors and a servo motor,” explained Chen. “It is modified from a 2D plotting system,” which creates images by moving a pen or instrument across a canvas. This plotting system is essentially the X and Y axis the robot uses to place paint on the canvas.

He added a water brush and DC peristaltic pump so the robot could wet the watercolor palette and apply the paint to the paper.

“The motors are connected to an Arduino Due, and that can plug into a computer where additional software is run to control it and interface with control inputs like a Wacom tablet, mouse or even a Myo armband,” he said.

According to Chen, it was equally simple to connect the robot to Twitch.

“For the Twitch Paints project, the computer was substituted with a Raspberry Pi, which sent commands to the robot,” he explained. “It was hooked up to read commands from the chat window and access a special database to read commands from the point-and-click GUI control.”

The graphical user interface (GUI) allowed viewers to add coordinates in the chat window rather than type elaborate software code instructions.

This futuristic technology has the potential to help anyone paint like a pro, and Chen has considered experimenting with new designs for the robot that would include using analog feedback and automatic color mixing.

For now, he’s focusing on Instapainting, helping it expand the types of handmade art it offers.

“While the robot is cool, it’s not going to replace the breadth and depth of human-designed art any time soon.”

The post The Crowd-Powered Robot that Paints like da Vinci appeared first on iQ by Intel.

In the aftermath of one professional player’s admission to using Adderall, the Electronic Sports League (ESL) is cracking down on performance-enhancing drugs by instituting a new set of standards and tests, positioning the league as a role model for professional sports leagues of all stripes.

When Oakland Athletics homerun slugger Jose Canseco released his tell-all biography Juiced: Wild Times, Rampant ‘Roids, Smash Hits and How Baseball Got Big in 2005, it landed like a bombshell.

The book sparked one of the largest drug scandals in the history of professional sports. Eleven players were questioned by Congress about illegal steroid use. Canseco seemed surprised by the response to his book’s premise that responsible use of steroids was ultimately good for baseball.

Similar naivety hit eSports last year when Kory Friesen, a professional Counter-Strike player better known by his handle “Semphis,” talked about the rampant use of a stimulant that is commonly used to treat Attention Deficit Disorder.

In an interview with Mohan “Launders” Govindasamy last July, Friesen offhandedly mentioned that every member of his Counter-Strike team used performance-enhancing drugs during a match in Poland. He wasn’t asked directly or even prompted; Friesen brought it up of his own volition.

“We were all on Adderall,” he said, referring to the amphetamine-based drug. “It was pretty obvious if you listened to the comms [communication between team players]. People can hate it or whatever.”

Interviewer Govindasamy nodded in agreement as if Adderall use among players was as common as slurping Rock Star or coffee to get a jolt.

The Electronic Sports League’s (ESL) drug and alcohol policy is clear: Players are strictly prohibited from being under the influence of drugs, alcohol or other performance enhancers during a match. Violation of that policy is punishable by exclusion from ESL One.

Friesen’s teammates and owner of Cloud9 publically denied and denounced the use of illegal performance-enhancing drugs, but the damage was done.

In later interviews, Friesen said the team used the drug as a means of overcoming a losing streak in recent matches. Adderall, Friesen said in later interviews, was a way back to success, as it can heighten response time and improve reflexes – skills that are vital to an eSports player.

Counter-Strike, Friesen’s sport of choice, is a shooter game based on pinpoint accuracy and reflexes. The player who can line up a shot first has an enormous edge.

“There is no doubt that we live in a win-at-all-costs era today, and athletes feel a huge amount of pressure to compete at the highest level,” said Ben Nichols, spokesperson for the World Anti-Doping Agency, which recently partnered with the International eSports Federation to curb the use of performance enhancing drugs.

Nichols partially attributes the intensity of player’s must-win mentality to the serious cash winners take home.

The International, a tournament for the popular game DOTA 2, had a prize pool of more than $18 million in 2015, up $8 million from the previous year.

Shortly after Friesen’s statements, the ESL announced its plans to instate tests and regulations around performance-enhancing drugs on July 22, 2015. Partnering with the National Anti-Doping Agency (NADA) in Germany, the ESL intends to create an enforceable, comprehensive drug policy that sets a standard for eSports everywhere.

As ESL grows around the world, it’s increasingly critical for the league to protect the league’s integrity, according to George Woo, marketing manager of the Intel Extreme Masters World Championship (IEM), the longest running global sponsorship agreement in the history of eSports.

“ESL is pioneering anti-cheating and anti-doping across eSports,” he said.

“The league is building a process from the ground up rather than rely on existing rules and procedures used by other sports.”

Educating athletes on the risks of drugs is critical, said Eva Bunthoff, Director of Communications for NADA.

“Athletes need to know what happens when they use banned substances,” she said.

High doses of Adderall can lead to abnormal heart rate, elevated body temperature and changes in blood pressure. In the worst case scenario, a player ends up in a coma.

Then there’s the risk of addiction. According to the FDA, chronic Adderall use can lead to dependence. When the drug is overused, it has the potential for causing vomiting, hallucinations and circulatory collapse.

Like many of its star players, eSports is young. The industry’s growing pains are not only inevitable, but also necessary in order to remain a legitimate sport around the world.

“As eSports evolve and get closer to being viewed as a traditional sport, we’ll have to put the same integrity measures in place,” said George Woo. “We’ll have to grow up.”

Though scandals like these shake up the community, bringing them to light can jumpstart initiatives that prevent eSports from becoming the corrupt world that Canseco painted in his book, Juiced.

Feature image is of IEM San Jose 2015. Credit: Patrick Strack, Courtesy ESL

The post Does eSports Have a Drug Problem? appeared first on iQ by Intel.

Motion controls like the Wii Remote paved the way for a new generation of alternative gaming controllers that encourage players to use their entire bodies to participate in an odd tech version of Simon Says, explore a colorful game world and reassemble a broken heart.

While video games have inspired a staccato of button-tapping throughout their brief but effusive history, the majority of games makes use of few motions other than a twitching of hands and fingers. There are notable exceptions, such as poking tennis balls with the Wii Remote or waving at the Xbox Kinect, but the 900 other ligaments of human physiology get markedly less play.

With the new generation of alternative gaming controllers, however, the days of button-mashing may not be long for this world. These recent and fascinating alternatives give traditional controls a run for their money.

Now more than ever, developers and designers are forging out funky, engaging and high-tech games that explore the entire body’s untapped potential for full-bodied fun.

In Homies (My Homunculi), a feral and funny game by the installation creator and interactive design instructor Sam Sheffield, the player straps into a pop-art inspired robot mask for a disorienting round of Simon Says. The voice of an imperious butler commands players to stick their fingers in places that they probably shouldn’t, like up the robot’s nose or in its ear holes.

“The eyes are on springs so you have to chase them around,” Sheffield said, explaining that all this is simply more challenging than it sounds because you can’t see what you are doing with the mask on.

“The idea is to give people permission to re-explore the geography of their faces,” he said.

Homies drew plenty of chortles and strange glances when it debuted alongside other experimental control interfaces during the ALT.CTRL.GDC exhibit at Game Developers Conference 2015, and for good reason. In the second level of the game, the player dons a wolf mask.

Tilting her head in the direction of the (on-screen) moon, the player is instructed to let out a big howl. A third level would have naturally incorporated a “Creature from the Black Lagoon” style mask, but Sheffield scrapped the idea when he couldn’t come up with a gesture that felt right for the gilled monster.

Sheffield isn’t the only one experimenting with full-bodied gaming experiences. There’s a growing pool of game designers who are putting their heads together to think outside the gamepad’s hard plastic casing. Of course, they couldn’t do it if the technology wasn’t there.

Egged on by the maturation of alternative inputs like Intel RealSense 3D camera technology, an increasing amount of tools exist to unleash their creativity.

“If you ever played with the first incarnations of [motion control cameras], it was like playing stickman,” said Eric Mantion, Developer Evangelist at Intel. “What we’re accomplishing now with RealSense technology is a much finer granularity. It’s like giving a computer human depth perception so it can read face and hand gestures.”

This is exciting in and of itself. Rethinking something as basic and essential as controls often results in all kinds of new and innovating modes of play.

This year’s ALT.CTRL.GDC exhibit, for instance, will include wondrous curiosities such as Palimpseste, an almost kaleidoscopic first-person exploration game that lets you use a pair of goggles to cycle through red, blue and green color filters and discover unseen secrets in the game-world.

In Awkward Ellie, players don trunks to simulate a clumsy elephant who isn’t exactly making friends at the fine china store.

Elsewhere, the IndieCade finalist Maze of Heart uses a next-gen motion-sensing camera to turn the user’s entire body into a kind of mechanical puzzle box. Players must reassemble pieces of their broken hearts, shaking them free from their upper and lower extremities so that the pieces combine in their chest area.

The game design technology is decidedly futuristic, but there’s a getting-back-to-nature element to these advancements.

“What’s interesting about a lot of the newer immersive 3D technologies is how they allow us to reconnect with the kind of gestures that games have let go to the wayside,” Sheffield said.

“There is an incredible vocabulary of gestures that are practical and expressive, but we use almost none of them while playing digital games. These kind of technologies are opening it up.”

In addition to creating fertile grounds for the ideation of fun, intuitive technologies are opening their arms to people who might otherwise be turned off by the complexity of the traditional gamepad and the two-fisted, claw-like grip necessary to use it.

The new wave of full-body games “are about doing micro-gestures — things that your hands and fingers are designed to do,” said Sheffield.

By stepping away from standard controls and button-mashing to design games for the body, the medium will be all the more approachable and human-centric.

The post Alternative Gaming Controllers Facilitate Full-Body Fun appeared first on iQ by Intel.

Contemporary dancer Paige Fraser performs alongside a mirrored visualization of herself, showing how new depth-sensing technology can help tell a compelling story.

Paige Fraser’s mom worked a few doors down from a dance studio in the Bronx and when her squirmy daughter turned four, she enrolled her in ballet lessons. That day changed Fraser’s life forever; it was the day she found her calling.

Fraser is a professional dancer. The now 24-year-old Jamaican was the first African-American Clara in her school’s version of The Nutcracker. She’s toured internationally with the renowned Ailey II troupe and is a founding member of Visceral Dance Company, a contemporary dance studio in Chicago.

By all measures, Fraser is a success, but there were dark days when she felt her world crashing down on her. At age 12, she was diagnosed with scoliosis, a severe curvature in her spine. She was told she’d never be a professional dancer.

“It was overwhelming and confusing,” said Fraser. She had to wear a back brace to school and while she slept. Doctors told her she’d need surgery, that they would need to install metal rods in her back. It was terrifying news.

But her parents found a chiropractor who worked with dancers and showed her surgery wasn’t the only way. It would take hard work, commitment and loads of perseverance, but the Frasers had no doubt their daughter could do it.

Last fall, Intel teamed up with Fraser, choreographer Tone Talauega and Mirada Studios to find a unique way to tell Fraser’s inspiring story using technology.

By employing 18 Intel RealSense cameras powered by 6th gen Intel Core processor-based PCs, the team created an ethereal reflection of Fraser that followed her movements throughout the dance.

Tone Talauega has choreographed artists like Backstreet Boys, Jennifer Lopez, Chris Brown and Pink. He used Fraser’s backstory to shape the choreography. She starts the dance crunched down, in abstract poses that represent her scoliosis and struggle. It transitions into a more powerful, athletic dance where she finds herself, eschews the brace and breaks through.

“This is an incredible way to fuse human creativity with the power of technology,” Talauega said. “We’re pushing the envelope of what’s never been done before. The future’s bright when we figure out how to bring together humanity and tech.”

“The technology is the tool that allows us to tell the story,” said Andy Cochrane, digital director at Mirada Studios, a visual effects studio that pushes technology and its ability to accompany the art of storytelling. He said they wanted to show Fraser’s struggles and perseverance in a universal way that allows people to viscerally relate to her story.

By building an environment that responds whenever Fraser is moving, the team was able to tell a unique story. Paul Tapp, Director of Technology for Intel Marketing, said Intel RealSense technology and the ability to sense depth affords a new opportunity in the realms of expression and creativity, and its potential is just now becoming unleashed.

“This is a really nice way of showing how, with RealSense and high-performance computing, you can unleash the creativity of a dancer,” he said.

Attendees at the 2016 Consumer Electronics Show got a peek at Fraser’s live performance on the spotlight stage.

Round and round our Intel Realsense dancer goes, where she stops nobody knows! #CES2016 https://t.co/xLts9qSl40

— Intel (@intel) January 8, 2016

For Fraser, who’s faced years of ups and downs in a competitive profession, the projected dance partner is like having an earlier, other self, dancing with her. During the dance, giant boulders on the screen fall down around Fraser. She’s able to crush them with a powerful kick or dramatic shove. Meanwhile, her 3D-projected double follows her every move, almost backing her up her bravery.

“It almost feels like my essence is dancing with me,” said Fraser, adding that the Intel RealSense dancer embodies her struggle, her overcoming hardships and the message to other athletes and dancers to continue doing what they love. She said she expresses so much emotion during the performance that she almost feels like she’s falling, driving her to the edge.

“The RealSense dancer is that spirit that I carry wherever I go,” she said. “It’s that little voice inside me that encourages and pushes me…and confirms the power I have inside myself. When I do this solo, I’m able to let go and be free.”

Mirada’s Cochrane says Intel’s RealSense technology is a way for computers to understand the world in a whole new way. “It’s a new pair of eyes,” he said.

Editor’s Note: In this Experience Amazing series, iQ explores how computer technology inside is enabling incredible experiences outside. We look at how computer technology powers new experiences and discoveries in science, the maker movement, fashion, sports and entertainment. To learn more about the tech behind these stories, visit Experience Amazing.

The post Dancing with My 3D-Projected Self appeared first on iQ by Intel.

Taking friendship bracelets into the digital age, Jewelbots teaches young girls to tinker and code their way into the exploding world of wearable technology.

Whether it’s the Queen of Coding Grace Hopper or the new wave of women innovation engineers, fashion brand CEOs and musicians, young girls today have a growing number of role models who use science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) in their recipes for success.

Having more role models is critical, but according to the founders of Jewelbots — the so-called friendship bracelets for the iPhone era — the next generation of women leaders and inventors will chase STEM endeavors at an early age, like a game of tag.

“Kids want to have fun; it’s their job,” said Brooke Moreland, co-founder of Jewelbots.

These programmable wearables, which are powered by Arduino Gemma microcontrollers, teach girls how to hack hardware and code software so they can customize their own watches.

“The sooner they realize how much fun they can have, the sooner they will be hooked,” Moreland said.

Hooking young girls with hands-on technology could lead them to careers that are underserved by women today. It might even inspire many to start their own STEM-related businesses, like Moreland and Jewelbots co-founder Sara Chipps.

Through Jewelbots, Moreland and Chipps hope to inspire girls to pursue any careers, whether that means programming new video games or studying computer science. Hacking digital bracelets helps girls unlock their own curiosity and potential for becoming leaders in technology and business.

Chipps is also a developer and co-founder of the non-profit Girl Develop It. She first noticed the importance of empowering young women while teaching them to write software at Flatiron School. Her female students were particularly excited, never realizing what they could do with software until someone took the time to show them.

“Diversity builds a better product and right now software is built by only one demographic,” Chipps said in an interview with AlleyWatch. “Tech is a super-high growth-rate field, and if women don’t focus on tech, they’re not going to be able to get jobs.”

Today, women make up almost half of the total workforce in the U.S. Yet just five years ago, women accounted for only 24 percent of people employed in STEM fields, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economics and Statistics Administration (ESA).

The ESA points to discrimination and gender stereotyping, a lack of flexible policies for working parents, and the lack of representation and role models for young girls as reasons why women are not as attracted to STEM-related careers.

But women are breaking stereotypes with awareness campaigns like #ILookLikeAnEngineer. They rock the maker movement, create biomimicry-infused garments and provide the tech power behind live music performances.

Companies from small local businesses to global corporations are also committing to workplace diversity.

“Technology and engineering are part of our DNA and we believe a diverse engineering workforce is critical to driving continued innovation and growth in our industry,” said Danielle Brown, who heads up diversity and inclusion at Intel. The company’s $300 million commitment to building a diverse workplace, whose progress is outlined in the 2015 Diversity & Inclusion Report, is paving the way for women and underrepresented minorities.

Brown said the skills of a future workforce depend as much on curiosity, creation and design as technical aptitude. To encourage girls’ curiosity and interest in STEM, Brown said Intel will launch a series of activities in 2016 that will include college campus visits, design ideation camps and hackathons designed to connect these young women to role models and career opportunities in STEM.

Moreland said that bringing more women to STEM fields can lead to innovation that’s more diverse and reflects the world’s population.

“Right now, women make up a small percentage of these incredibly important roles,” she said. “We want women’s voices and ideas to be heard, and we want to empower the next generation of women with the skills they need to succeed in this field.”

With more examples like Jewelbots or Cuff and camps like Girls Make Games and Black Girls Code, young girls are getting more opportunities to develop their own technologies to change the world.

The post Inspiring Girls into STEM with Programmable Wearables appeared first on iQ by Intel.

After seeing his hometown torn apart by poverty and crime, one man started an organization that uses agriculture projects to rebuild the community through education, collaboration and outreach.

Fifteen years ago, when Emmanuel Pratt returned from college to Chicago’s South Side where he’d spent much of his life, he found the once-familiar neighborhoods devastated by poverty and decay.

“All the places I went to when I grew up were gone,” he said.

Instead of leaving again, he decided to put his graduate training in architecture and urban planning to practical use. In 2009, he co-founded the Sweet Water Foundation with the mission to help communities rebuild by turning waste into a resource, specifically through high-tech urban farming.

Pratt believes that these methods can not only teach adults and kids about science and technology, but make communities more resilient by being able to grow their own food — literally feeding their minds and bodies.

The foundation’s flagship is the Aquaponics Innovation Center, a research and education center in what was once a vacant shoe warehouse on the city’s South Side. In 2011, the Foundation partnered with Chicago State University to set up an extensive aquaponics system. Pratt worked with Intel to install sensors and technologies for collecting and visualizing data that helped him grow food in a container with no natural light.

Four 1,000-gallon tanks each contain hundreds of tilapia, whose ammonia-rich waste fertilizes plants like lettuce and chard. The plants’ roots filter the water in turn, creating a self-sustaining ecosystem of sorts.

The end result has helped to transform the neighborhood.

Although Pratt said a major part of the Aquaponics Innovation Center’s success involves producing food to sell to local chefs and stores, the center also helps Sweet Water Foundation accomplish larger community goals.

Thousands of local students and other residents visit the facility every year for hands-on lessons in gardening, ecology and nutrition. An apprenticeship program called There Grows the Neighborhood teaches at-risk youth skills like carpentry.

“We’re touching families in neighborhoods they live in, showing them how to feed and support themselves in a sustainable way,” said Pratt, who noted this project has received support from the city and the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Education.

The foundation’s footprint also includes the Perry Avenue Community Farm, a two-acre property in the Englewood/Washington Park neighborhood that was once the site of a notorious reform school. The urban farm now feeds hundreds of people a week during peak season.

Across the street, a once-abandoned three-bedroom home is now the Think-Do House, a community center and meeting place with a vibrant mural by local artist Max Sansing.

Sansing’s art also adorns a trio of Think-Do Pods. These converted shipping containers are filled with smaller aquaponics systems for growing and research.

Each 160-square foot space holds fish tanks fitted with sensors based on a hybrid Arduino/Raspberry Pi computing board. The technologies are open-source and inexpensive, Pratt says, making them perfect for a grass-roots approach.

The sensor arrays let the program’s aspiring aquaponics practitioners, a.k.a Aquapons, monitor the systems remotely, including pH, ammonia, nitrate and CO2 levels as well as temperature, lighting and pump flow. The technology allows them to share the data with other participants and aquaponics systems, all in the goal of optimizing grow rates.

The outsides of the containers are essentially art projects that combine Sansing’s graffiti-inspired paintings with wood cutouts created by some of the foundation’s apprentices. The wood is leftover packing material from shipping construction glass. A basic conversion costs around $10,000-15,000, Pratt said.

“We realized these things were just sitting empty, all over the place,” Pratt said.

When the idea to convert the containers first came up, “everyone thought we were crazy,” Pratt said. “We are, but in a good way.”

The pods aren’t the only tool helping Sweet Water Foundation bring agriculture to unconventional places. The foundation has also helped set up a small but growing network of open-sourced urban farming installations called Urban Agriculture STE[A+]M Hubs in unused spaces in public school classrooms, churches and community centers.

The idea of a spreading network is central to the philosophy behind the effort, Pratt said. He likens the foundation’s community outreach to the thread-like network of mycelia that compose fungi.

Playing off this theme, the foundation set up a series of collaborative, science-themed art and cultural events called the Mycelia Project, where students can share innovation and inspiration.

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How 5G wireless networks will connect 50 billion people and things by 2020.

Dropped calls or a spotty smartphone connection can drive anyone bonkers, but a bad wireless connection to an autonomous car can drive it off a cliff.

The Internet-of-me-and-my-things era is taking shape as world technology leaders race to build so-called 5G wireless networks, slated to switch on for the masses in 2020.

A reliable Internet connection is vital to an increasing number of aspects in daily life. It has become as intrinsic to people’s home as water pipes and electrical wiring, according to 10 Hot Consumer Trends 2016, a report by Ericsson’s ConsumerLab that’s representative of over 1 billion people across 24 countries.

The Ericsson report showed 55 percent of smartphone users believe that within five years their own homes will have embedded sensors that look for construction errors, mold buildup, water leaks and electricity issues.

As more people use the Internet to automatically and remotely control their home’s heating systems, keep a webcam eye on pets, pilot personal drones or augment real-life with digital experiences, some worry that this digital world could grind to a screeching halt if wireless networks around the globe aren’t up to snuff.

Even the world’s fastest, most advanced 4G networks aren’t future-proofed to handle the torrent of wireless data shared simultaneously by people, devices and machines, according to Aicha Evans, vice president of the Intel Communication and Devices Group.

“There will be 50 billion things on the network — human beings, devices, machines — by 2020, and it will only explode from there,” said Evans.

To keep the destiny of the digital world from literally exploding, Evans is making sure future wireless networks are more intelligent, efficient and capable than today’s best 4G networks.

She’s architecting new computer and communication innovations that harness existing mobile networks and wireless technologies — such as 3G, 4G and Wi-Fi — while increasing data transmission speeds up to 10 gigabits per second.

“5G networks will be about 66 times faster than 4G,” wrote CNET’s Stephen Shankland. He believes that will help self-driving cars make time-critical reactions, video chats feel more realistic and cities monitor traffic congestion, pollution levels and parking demand in real time.

Evans calls 5G the third digital revolution.

“When we talk about 5G, we have to take it in the context of the evolution of networks from 2G for voice, 3G for data and 4G for the explosion of data and video streaming,” she said.

Evans said 5G is being built for what people and things will need in the future. It will need to handle 7 billion or more people and nearly five-times as many machines talking at the same time through technology that flies invisibly through the air, around obstacles and into buildings.

It will give people control over rich media experiences, like choosing particular camera perspectives on a live sporting event. It will power the Internet of Things, allowing autonomous cars, smart home appliances and manufacturing machinery to communicate and function with little or no human intercession.

“When you start thinking about machines being on the network for industrial applications, entertainment or for smart cities, the network will need to be way more efficient, way smarter in handling the connections and really pick the best route for a particular application,” she said.

Currently, most wireless communications run on a single-mode transmission. For example, a voice command to a smartphone fetches results from an Internet search or a phone call initiates back-and-forth communication.

With 5G technology, Evans said wireless communications will become interactive, dynamic and responsive by funneling in and out of existing networks, adjusting to deliver the best experience for each particular device.

Things that take seconds, minutes or even days to load or send today will be delivered in milliseconds when 5G technology becomes available, according to Evans.

“We think that this is going to be the underpinning of the next wave of the modern economy because there’s just going to be tons of data going around,” she said.

5G technology can bring precision farming efficiencies across huge swaths of land, track rented cars or bikes in and around urban areas, and bring virtual and augmented experiences to stores, museums and entertainment parks.

In his article How 5G Will Push a Supercharged Network to Your Phone, Home and Car, Shankland pointed out how Google’s Nest thermostats and net-connected smoke detectors are already making homes smarter.

Shankland said automakers are developing self-driving connected cars. Data crunched from fitness wearables will help keep people healthier by warning of heart attack or stroke. He also said cities like Barcelona are becoming smarter by using sensors to monitor everything from traffic and parking to pollution, water pressure and weather.

To feed these growing trends reliably and at lightning speeds, Evans said Intel is taking a holistic approach, working with network operators, governments and regulators to ensure 5G is ready.

“It’s about the devices, the network itself and the infrastructure that is controlling the network,” she said. “It’s about the data centers, servers, analytics and all of that, end to end, coming together and making the smartest decisions possible for the best possible use of the network resulting in the best user experience.”

To make it all work, “This is going to be about partnerships,” she told The Wall Street Journal.

At Mobile World Congress, Intel and AT&T announced they are testing and defining airborne 4G LTE requirements for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones. A proof of concept shows an LTE-based real-time video stream from a UAV using the AT&T LTE network with Intel’s modem.

For anyone unconvinced a new network is necessary, Evans suggested looking at today’s teenagers, who she dubs super-users of all kinds of devices like Amazon Eco, tablets, smartphones, laptops, connected TVs and GoPro cameras. They even fly drones and capture 4K video that someday could be wirelessly live streamed from the sky to smartphones and tablets.

“The teenagers actually get what’s missing currently in the network today,” she said. “They want us to fix that.

“We will make the network ready so everybody can enjoy it.”

#5G is the future of wireless! Intel VP Aicha Evans discusses #IoT at #MWC16. pic.twitter.com/SdVzYgr99w

— Intel (@intel) February 22, 2016

Editor’s note: Learn more about 5G technology innovation at Mobile World Congress.

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