Carpenter Who Cut Off His Fingers Makes 'Robohand' With 3-D Printer

Richard van As was recalling the moment of May 2011, when he was in the hospital of Johannesburg and waiting for the statement that his fingers can be stitch back, before an hour he was in carpentry workshop where saw slipped and ripped through his four fingers of right hand. And all of this happened too quickly to understand and know that what actually happened. Rather than the fear of losing his fingers, he was thinking for the way to fix the problem, which is the habit of any real carpenter.

After a lot of research in medicinal field and scouring on the Internet, he couldn’t find it anywhere to buy a functional prosthetic finger whereas the cost of prosthetic hands and limbs was thousands of dollars. But in the end his online research and surfing paid off as he finds the amateur video which was posted by a mechanical effects artist Ivan Owen, who was from Washington State. After five minutes he finds that, actually people can use it.

Printing Prosthetics: 

The pair of a mechanical finger was developed for Richard van As, but the process has gone for the countless benefit in all over world. In January 2012, it was official launched to create affordable mechanical prosthetics with the help of 3D printers. It has been designed in open source, so anyone with the help of desired technology and 3D printer can print out hands, any fingers, and arms as well.

These specialized printers use the additive manufacturing technique and PLA (thermoplastic material Polylactide) to print body parts like; joints and knuckles which can be produced through the combination of stainless steel and aluminum with personalized approach to assemble and fit in the body of human through the guidance of free open-source manual.

After the five minute of installation people can start ti use it. According to, Leonard Nel, communications manager of team, “It’s anatomically driven by the shoulder, elbow and wrist, which means its movements will be controlled by the user”.

Richard van As drives the whole process simply, by removing unnecessary red tape to reduce the cost with something as essential as a limb. The first Robohand was created for the five-year-old Liam in South Africa, who was born with ABS (amniotic band syndrome) and the syndrome left him with none fingers on his right hand, but after fitting the newly printed mechanical hand Liam he was able to pick up stuff within five to ten minutes.

The hand cost for full adult is $2,000 and it takes five and a half hours to print it and approximately ten to fifteen hours to assemble it. Placing an order for prosthetic is pretty simple as customers need to send measurements by filing the forms and 3-D scans of their hands to get their translation into the software and later that will print out the parts for their desired prosthetic, but for this now an eight-month waiting list from the date of order.

Welcome the Next Generation of Narratives Wearable Camera

The first generation of the Narrative’s life logging camera has made its debut nearly a year back and it is almost time that the company should think about unveiling a sequel to this device. At CES, people could finally see as what the company has been working on till now and do not jump to the conclusion that nothing additional has been added to the sequel. You will be very wrong. As if now the company has given the name to the device as narrative Clip 2 and has even added a bulk of changes to the device.

The CEO, Martin Källström has given a very clear indication that the Swedish outfit has taken a completely new approach with their second-generation wearable camera and supported the fact that there is no need to fix a device until it is broken. Unlike other companies, the company did not look into developing something new but instead they focused on the some of the major issues encountered with the original device.

Three biggest issues fixed: 

Narrative Clip- The customers were facing issues with that was given to attach the device or the unit to the clothes. The company has now replaced this clip with a flexible mount, which can not only accommodate tripods but lapel pins as well.

Image quality- The unit was initially released with a 5-megapixel sensor but the company has now replaced this with 8-megapixel senor with 90-degree unit that will be offering much better low light performance compared to the previous version.

Sync Images- The initial device was dependent on the USB for syncing data but the company has added Bluetooth and Wi-Fi to enable the users to be able to sync the images with their phones or even through online services offered by the company. Bluetooth can be used for connecting with iOS apps and Android apps. So, now the users will be able to manage and see their photos on their phones.

According to the company, the initial Narrative was more about clicking pictures and making is a part of someone’s private journal, but the latest Narrative will make it much more social with their addition of the social layer. The Narrative Clip 2 is expected to be available in the market in 2015 and people can either have a black, white, or red one as their options.

The device is currently priced at $199. If the users are finding this a bit heavy on the pocket, then the company is still keeping their original narrative available and they are bringing down the price to $149. In United Kingdom the unit will available at £100 and in Australia it will be available at AU$245. At the moment the company is not sure about the existing stocks but they have promised that they will keep on manufacturing the previous version as long as they are receiving demands from the customers.

This device is the perfect companion for the people who are addicted to photography. This clip on camera will be automatically snapping pictures every 30 seconds and each of these photos will be stamped by GPS.

ViewSonic V55 Smartphone With Iris Scanner

One of most exciting rumors of 2014 was the inclusion of Iris-scanning technology as a prominent feature of the smart phones. Even though the technology was expected to be introduced in the flagship Samsung Galaxy handset, it really did not happen but still kept making headlines throughout the year. The technology was expected to see the daylight in 2014 but it could not happen.

However, the good news is here in 2015, the New Year brings out a break to this jinx and hopes are soaring higher as we will see the very first smartphone featuring the iris scanning and recognition technology. This is expected from ViewSonic, which is company largely associated with displays. The company will reportedly launch a smartphone packed with the Iris recognition technology sometime in January 2015.

Viewsonic’s New Smartphone: 

The California-based company is known to highlight their products at CES every year and hopes are quite high that the company will be launching the smartphone at the event this year. Gizmochina in a report has depicted the functions, features and also some of unseen images of this new  smartphone. The publication has even gone ahead and posted a YouTube video with the title "ViewSonic V55 teaser with Iris recognition technology". This video highlights the different features and how these features work on the smartphone. At the moment there is no information pertaining to the price of the new smartphone.

According to some of the reports, the new technology will ensure that only the owner of the phone, whose iris patterns are pre-recorded with will able to unlock the phone and allow the user to access information from the smartphone.

The reports also suggest that the ViewSonic V55 smartphone will have the iris scanner on top right corner of the handset, which will be covered with a small piece. The users of the phone will have to slide this covering piece to use the scanner. The report also indicates that when the user slides the screen to open the scanner, a light will automatically turn on to indicate that that scanner has been activated.

 The user or the owner of the smartphones will be able to protect their personal files and documents stored on their V55 smartphone by making use of the iris scanner. The reports add that for anyone to access any information that has been stored and protected by the Iris recognition sensor, they will need to the owner to scan their eye into the sensor and that’s how the information will be unlocked.

Specifications of ViewSonic V55: 

This smartphone is expected to be full of pack a 64-bit Snapdragon 410 quad-core processor clocked at 1.4GHz; 2GB RAM, Adreno 306 GPU; and comes in two built-in storage variants - 16GB and 32GB.

Further the smartphone is expected to sport a 5.5-inch full-HD (1080x1920 pixels) OGS display and also includes a 13-megapixel rear Sony camera. The smartphone is expected to support 4G LTE networks. But the only drawback is that there is no information pertaining to the operating system used on the smartphone.

Vine Appears to Have Verified a Fake Beyoncé Account

According to the reports, the recently verified Beyoncé account, which was opened four days ago on Vine, appears to be fake. The account was suspended on Sunday afternoon, but until that time the account was able to get nearly 40, 000 views on the single video posted, this is the same video, which was posted by the star on her Instagram account. However, all this was after the welcoming tweet links to the video-sharing network were tweeted by employees of Twitter and Vine.

This also included Vine’s head of production. All these people later went on to delete their tweets. Therefore, the main question that remains is as to why the company Vine, verified a fake account. At present, the company was not reachable to respond to any of this issue and this issue clearly highlighted a loophole in the Vine’s verification process that has easily hackers to fake a Beyoncé and also get her green badge.

The verification process

The Vine has two ways of verifying their users, one of the ways is a manual process and the second one is by authenticating the user with the Twitter account (which owns Vine). If a user tries to open a Vine account by making use of their Twitter account, there Vine account will get automatically verified.

Once the verification has been completed, the user can change their Vine account to whatever they like. This method was used by Ross Miller to create a perfectly verified account for Vine for his Twitter super-friend Taye Diggs.

He just had to borrow the username that is used by Diggs for his Instragram account, he changed the profile photo on Vine and over: Verified account for Taye at Vine, at least working till it gets suspended.

On a boarder security scale, it is really a big loophole which requires immediate attention and needs to be fixed soon. Twitter as more than 100000 verified people and the verification bug is grabbing for attention. This loophole can easily make impersonator to fake an account for American singer. Reports have clearly indicated that the account created for Beyoncé has been already identified to be fake.

About Vine: 

Vine was founded in June 2012 by Rus Yusupov, Colin Kroll and Dom Hofmann, it provides the sharing services for a short-form videos. Microblogging website Twitter has acquired it in October 2012 before the official launch of website.

Features of Vine: 

If you love to record and edit vedio, so Vine if perfect platform for you. It allows all users to record and edit short vedios, which is of five- to six-second-long clips and later with the help of revine you can share it with other followers. Popular Vines have a feature to revined automatically and all of the Vines can be published or shared on other social networking sites such as; Facebook and Twitter. If you wan to browse the videos of others, so all you need to install a Vine's app where you will get the option of groups of videos by trend or theme or popular videos.

The New Panasonic 4K UHD Blu-Ray Player Prototype Packs a Punch

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2015 displayed some fantastic innovations that promise to light up the gadget market in the coming time. Among many, the Panasonic 4K Blu-Ray player prototype has managed to grab some attention of many visitors in CES 2015.

The electronic manufacturing company Panasonic has launched its generation next Blu-Ray player at CES this year, which was held in Las Vegas. The new launch is one of the series of Flagship televisions, called CX850U 4K TV. This prototype player is able to offer a resolution of 3,480 * 2,160 and a bit rate of 100 Mb per second. Its ability of displaying 4K resolution images at the rate of 60 frames per second makes it a special one. Its specific design is exclusive for supporting video processing technology which is presently on the way of inclusion in the current standards of Ultra HD Blu-Ray. It’s High dynamic Range (HDR) and immersive audio technologies are also expected to be included under the UHD standards.

Colour Features

Similar to other renowned TV manufacturing companies, Panasonic flaunts a modified LED version with phosphor coating that delivers the colour brightness never seen before. It has a much broader range of colours which fills up to 98 per cent of DCI colour space. The fresh new Panasonic CX850U stands out for its picture processor engine called Studio Master Drive that enhances richness of colours and emphasizes on the accuracy of the colours in vivid images giving a much superior quality of pictures. Going through the prototype player one can undoubtedly say that the CX850U 4K Panasonic TV is just the perfect alternative to the kind of colour features displayed on cinema theatres.

Operating System

The Panasonic CX850U runs on the Linux based Firefox Operating System along with an exclusive Graphical User Interface of Panasonic. It has got a versatile combination of web-based Operating System along with a clear and convenient interface for the user benefits. The Linux based Firefox OS has a voice assistant associated with it called Xumo Guide that has got a touch of smartness in it for content discovery and some more added functions.

Appearance

It was quite surprising to see that Panasonic did not prepare a centre stage for them on the occasion of announcing their new launch of 4K UHD Blu-Ray player prototypes. It deserved much bigger limelight than what it received having such fantastic features of its kind. The small black box Blu-Ray player will be developed in collaboration with UHD alliance which includes partners like Samsung, Panasonic and many more from the Hollywood industry such as 20TH Century Fox, Technicolor and Warner Brothers.

Prospect

The fact that there is a rapid increase in availability and affordability of the 4K TVs point towards the mere future where there will be hardly any homes left having 4K UHD Blu-Ray technology get installed in the drawing rooms, starting from the year 2015 itself. But before that there is a long distance to cover up starting from the point of being a prototype till ending up enjoying the success.