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THE MOST UP-TO-DATE TECH NEWS
TECH NEWS ROOM
Tech News room gives you all the informations about the latest technology you should know. check the latest technology out so you wouldn't lag behind.
LG SHOWS OFF 65-INCH OLED TV THAT ROLLS UP
JANUARY 9,2018
Trade shows are always an excuse for electronics manufacturers to show off wacky hypothetical products that may take many years to show up in consumer products. A favorite of display manufacturers has long been the flexible OLED panel. LG is one of the world’s leading makers of OLED TVs, and it’s got a TV on display at CES 2018 that’s more than just flexible — it’s rollable.
LG’s concept rollable TV has all the bells and whistles with an 65-inch diagonal bezel-free form factor and 8K resolution. That’s a huge screen that might actually benefit from 8K resolution compared to 4K. It’s 135 pixels per inch whereas a 4K screen would only be 67 pixels per inch at this size. However, maybe you don’t want to have an 65-inch OLED dominating a room of your house. No problem, because that’s where the rollable aspect comes into play.
When not being used, the LG OLED panel rolls up into its base like some sort of high-tech carpet. In the promo images, LG shows the top section of the OLED remaining visible to display helpful information like the weather and news. When you want to watch a TV show or movie again, the display pops up and you get the full 65-inch glory.
An OLED panel comes with several advantages over traditional LCDs. An OLED panel is thinner because there is no backlight (all the light comes from the pixels themselves). The contrast is also perfect because black pixels in an OLED matrix are simply off. That also means the rolled up portion of the new LG panel won’t use any power while the strip at the top is in use.
Despite just getting back into mobile OLED technology on phones, LG is a veteran of OLED TVs. Before 2017, the last phone LG made with an OLED was the G Flex 2 in 2015. That panel was terrible, but LG’s new mobile OLEDs are improved while still falling short of Samsung’s.
LG showed off a smaller version of this rollable TV several years ago, but it was less than 20 inches and not even 1080p resolution. Things have come a long way since then, but don’t get your hopes up that you’ll be able to pick this 8K rollable display any time soon. Even if LG does release this panel in the coming years, it’ll probably cost many thousands of dollars. You might want to start saving up now if you fancy one.
THIS IS THE FIRST IN-SCREEN FINGERPRINT SCANNER FOR PHONES
JANUARY 10, 2018
The tech was rumored to go in the iPhone and Samsung phones, so it's kind of a big deal.
James Martin/CNET
Using the world's first phone with a fingerprint scanner built into the display was as awesome as I hoped it would be.
There's no home button getting in the of vast screen space, and no fumbling for a reader on the phone's back. I simply pressed my index finger on the phone screen in the place where the home button would be. The screen registered my digit, then spun up a spiderweb of blue light in a pattern that instantly brings computer circuits to mind. I was in.
Such a simple, elegant harginger of things to come: a home button that appears only when you need it ad then gets out of the way. I would bet several Bitcoins that in-display fingerprint sensors become one of 2018's biggest phone trends, starting with high-end devices like the rumored Samsung Galaxy S9.
This Vivo phone could launch a smartphone trend
But the phone I held in my hands was not the Galaxy S9, which doesn't exist yet. It's by Chinese phonemaker Vivo, and it's still without an official name, price and sale date.
For phone enthusiasts, the real news is that this technology -- which was rumored for the Galaxy S8 and beyond, and also for the iPhone X -- isn't just a bunch of hot air. It's real, and it works.
How in-display fingerprint readers work
In fact, the fingerprint sensor -- made by sensor company Synaptics -- lives beneath the AMOLED display. That's the "screen" you're actually looking at beneath the cover glass. You can see it in our photos here.
This is the sensor that makes it all possible.
John Kim/CNET
When your fingertip hits the target, the sensor array turns on the display to light your finger, and only your finger. The image of your print makes its way to an optical image sensor beneath the AMOLED.
It's then run through an AI processor that's trained to recognize 300 different characteristics of your digit, like how close the ridges of your fingers are. It's a different kind of technology than what most readers use in today's phones.
Synaptics, which demoed the Vivo phone in a crowded booth at the back of an interminable hallway, says that the fingerprint reader won't suck up much more battery by illuminating your finger, promising that its power management is equal to industry standards.
Because the new technology costs more to make, it'll hit premium phones first before eventually making its way down the spectrum as the parts become more plentiful and cheaper to make.
Vivo's phone is the first one we've gotten to see with the tech in real life, but it's clear this is just the beginning.
UBTECH WALKER IS A BIPED BUTLER ROBOT WITH NO ARMS BUT A LOT OF CHARM
JANUARY 10, 2018
Humanoids are the hardest. Atlas is the state of the art, and you might think that because Atlas has solved backflips, building a full-sized biped robot that can just walk around should be easy by now. But it’s very much not easy, especially in the home.
For starters, there’s the noise. Many of the best and strongest humanoids use hydraulics for strength. Even electronic servo-based robots can be loud. But more importantly, bipeds are expensive, fragile, and fall over a lot. Why would you want that in your home?
The people at Ubtech, a China-based robotics company that sells a wide range of home and toy robots, are working on the impossible, and possibly the impractical: Walker, a human-sized biped for the home.
Walker is supposed to be a “complete home butler,” which mostly means it can patrol your home, act as a calendar and email assistant, and play a slow game of soccer with your kids. It has a smooth, quiet gait, which Ubtech credits to its homegrown digital servos. I watched Walker do a little dance, chase a soccer ball, and descend stairs. (The stair ascend demo wasn’t ready yet.)
Of course, most biped robots fall over a lot, and are too heavy to have anywhere near your kids. Walker is a surprisingly light 82 pounds, and is designed to be in balance at all times. If it loses power, it should stay stable right where it is. It’s also designed to fall away from danger if it has to fall.
GRID VIEW
1 of 5
I’m not positive a robot without a manipulation arm can really be called a “home butler,” so thankfully Ubtech is working on arms to add on to Walker. Ubtech also builds a wheeled robot with a robot arm, so the real challenge won’t be building an arm, but keeping Walker in balance while it’s manipulating its environment.
Walker is an ambitious project, most of all because it’s designed to be relatively affordable — in full-sized biped terms, that means “less than hundreds of thousands of dollars,” but I got the impression Ubtech is aiming for a lot lower than that. Walker is supposed to launch sometime in 2019.
JANUARY 10, 2018
Every major VR player has made the same promise. A VR headset that would be completely wireless. One that would let you go anywhere without tripping over cords or being tethered to a computer/phone/PS4. Google, which has spent more than a year quietly improving its VR platform, Daydream, is now the first company to cross the standalone finish line. The Daydream-powered Lenovo Mirage Solo is a beauty.
This the first Daydream device to have 6 degrees of freedom (DOF), which means you can squat, and jump, in addition to moving from side to side and backwards and forwards. The Daydream found on Android phones allows just 3 DOF. Yet as with other Daydream devices, the Mirage Solo uses inside out tracking, so you don’t need sensors strewn about the room to track the headset’s movement.
There are handy volume buttons right next to the audio jack.
It charges via USB-C!
It cradles your head a lot like the PSVR headset.
1 / 3
The Mirage Solo has dual microphones to pick up your voice, and provides audio via a standard 3.5mm jack. It has 64GB of storage built in, but can be expanded via the SD card slot if you need to pack on even more VR “experiences”, and there’s 4GB of memory on board too. It’s powered by the same Qualcomm Snapdragon processor found in the Samsung Galaxy S8 and the upcoming Lenovo Miix 630 Windows tablet. But where Lenovo claims that tablet gets 20 hours of battery life, it claims the Mirage Solo VR headset gets just 7 hours on average. That’s probably because it is powering a 2560 x 1440 display.
So what’s it like? In a demo, I found it damn liberating. Not having to worry about cords as I wander around the room erases at least one burden—unfortunately I still have to worry about smacking into furniture and people. In fact, it might be even more of a concern now that I have no tether.
The quality of the VR experience is on par with smartphone VR. So there’s a little more blur than I’d like when I spin in circles, and the graphics aren’t going to win any awards for photorealism. But if you do want photorealism, Lenovo, in conjunction with Google, also has the Lenovo Mirage Camera, which lets you shoot pretty cool VR videos with a camera about the size of a wallet.
The dual fisheye 13MP lenses.
The capture buttons. The camera connects to your phone via an app so you can look at the stuff you shot.
There’s zero viewfinder, but the camera also captures everything in front of you, so you might not need one.
1 / 3
The Mirage Camera uses dual 13MP cameras to capture stills or video 4K, 1440p, or 1080p at 30 fps. And it’s all automatically shot in stereoscopic VR, no stitching or post processing necessary. Butt’s not a 360 degrees camera. It has a 180 degree field of view, so you aren’t capturing the entire world, just what’s in front of the cameras.
I expected the result to be deeply jarring, but it was actually pretty pleasant. The dual lenses shoot at slightly different angles so there’s a nice 3D effect you don’t get with 360 videos. I could lean towards the birthday cake and, up to a point, actually feel like I was getting closer to the goods.
What I especially liked was how I never felt like I was missing stuff going on directly behind me. When watching the video and stills via VR you can see everything directly in front of you and then turn a see a little bit of the world on your left and right, as well as directly above and below you. The video, which uses Google new VR180 video type, feels just immersive enough for casual passive viewing.
And if you do decide to look all around there’s no abrupt cut off point. Where the content should cut off. Instead it fades into a night sky. In the image below, you can see the divide and the nice little fade between the two worlds.
The Lenovo Mirage Camera does all its processing with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 626 processor. It’s got 2GB of memory, 16GB of built-in storage, and dual microphones for capturing audio. It also connects to your phone via the Google VR180 app. That lets you review all the stuff you shot, and let’s you use the phone as a viewfinder. Though you are capturing everything in front of the camera, so you probably won’t need a viewfinder very often.
So how much will the next step in Google’s attempt at VR cost you? Lenovo has not given official prices, but says the Mirage Solo headset could be under $400, while the Mirage Camera is expected to be under $300.
We should know more about pricing soon, as both the headset and the camera are expected to ship in the spring of 2018. I don’t know if this set up will be the watershed moment VR needs, but new tools and approaches to creating VR content are vitally necessary right now. This technology, and especially the content, is still in its infancy. It’s at the Great Train Robbery stage, not the Citizen Kane one. Maybe a 180-degree VR camera is just what the world of virtual reality needs. A standalone headset definitely is.
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THE MOST UP-TO-DATE TECH NEWS
TECH NEWS ROOM
Tech News room gives you all the informations about the latest technology you should know. check the latest technology out so you wouldn't lag behind.
LG SHOWS OFF 65-INCH OLED TV THAT ROLLS UP
JANUARY 9,2018
Trade shows are always an excuse for electronics manufacturers to show off wacky hypothetical products that may take many years to show up in consumer products. A favorite of display manufacturers has long been the flexible OLED panel. LG is one of the world’s leading makers of OLED TVs, and it’s got a TV on display at CES 2018 that’s more than just flexible — it’s rollable.
LG’s concept rollable TV has all the bells and whistles with an 65-inch diagonal bezel-free form factor and 8K resolution. That’s a huge screen that might actually benefit from 8K resolution compared to 4K. It’s 135 pixels per inch whereas a 4K screen would only be 67 pixels per inch at this size. However, maybe you don’t want to have an 65-inch OLED dominating a room of your house. No problem, because that’s where the rollable aspect comes into play.
When not being used, the LG OLED panel rolls up into its base like some sort of high-tech carpet. In the promo images, LG shows the top section of the OLED remaining visible to display helpful information like the weather and news. When you want to watch a TV show or movie again, the display pops up and you get the full 65-inch glory.
An OLED panel comes with several advantages over traditional LCDs. An OLED panel is thinner because there is no backlight (all the light comes from the pixels themselves). The contrast is also perfect because black pixels in an OLED matrix are simply off. That also means the rolled up portion of the new LG panel won’t use any power while the strip at the top is in use.
Despite just getting back into mobile OLED technology on phones, LG is a veteran of OLED TVs. Before 2017, the last phone LG made with an OLED was the G Flex 2 in 2015. That panel was terrible, but LG’s new mobile OLEDs are improved while still falling short of Samsung’s.
LG showed off a smaller version of this rollable TV several years ago, but it was less than 20 inches and not even 1080p resolution. Things have come a long way since then, but don’t get your hopes up that you’ll be able to pick this 8K rollable display any time soon. Even if LG does release this panel in the coming years, it’ll probably cost many thousands of dollars. You might want to start saving up now if you fancy one.
THIS IS THE FIRST IN-SCREEN FINGERPRINT SCANNER FOR PHONES
JANUARY 10, 2018
The tech was rumored to go in the iPhone and Samsung phones, so it's kind of a big deal.
James Martin/CNET
Using the world's first phone with a fingerprint scanner built into the display was as awesome as I hoped it would be.
There's no home button getting in the of vast screen space, and no fumbling for a reader on the phone's back. I simply pressed my index finger on the phone screen in the place where the home button would be. The screen registered my digit, then spun up a spiderweb of blue light in a pattern that instantly brings computer circuits to mind. I was in.
Such a simple, elegant harginger of things to come: a home button that appears only when you need it ad then gets out of the way. I would bet several Bitcoins that in-display fingerprint sensors become one of 2018's biggest phone trends, starting with high-end devices like the rumored Samsung Galaxy S9.
This Vivo phone could launch a smartphone trend
But the phone I held in my hands was not the Galaxy S9, which doesn't exist yet. It's by Chinese phonemaker Vivo, and it's still without an official name, price and sale date.
For phone enthusiasts, the real news is that this technology -- which was rumored for the Galaxy S8 and beyond, and also for the iPhone X -- isn't just a bunch of hot air. It's real, and it works.
How in-display fingerprint readers work
In fact, the fingerprint sensor -- made by sensor company Synaptics -- lives beneath the AMOLED display. That's the "screen" you're actually looking at beneath the cover glass. You can see it in our photos here.
This is the sensor that makes it all possible.
John Kim/CNET
When your fingertip hits the target, the sensor array turns on the display to light your finger, and only your finger. The image of your print makes its way to an optical image sensor beneath the AMOLED.
It's then run through an AI processor that's trained to recognize 300 different characteristics of your digit, like how close the ridges of your fingers are. It's a different kind of technology than what most readers use in today's phones.
Synaptics, which demoed the Vivo phone in a crowded booth at the back of an interminable hallway, says that the fingerprint reader won't suck up much more battery by illuminating your finger, promising that its power management is equal to industry standards.
Because the new technology costs more to make, it'll hit premium phones first before eventually making its way down the spectrum as the parts become more plentiful and cheaper to make.
Vivo's phone is the first one we've gotten to see with the tech in real life, but it's clear this is just the beginning.
UBTECH WALKER IS A BIPED BUTLER ROBOT WITH NO ARMS BUT A LOT OF CHARM
JANUARY 10, 2018
Humanoids are the hardest. Atlas is the state of the art, and you might think that because Atlas has solved backflips, building a full-sized biped robot that can just walk around should be easy by now. But it’s very much not easy, especially in the home.
For starters, there’s the noise. Many of the best and strongest humanoids use hydraulics for strength. Even electronic servo-based robots can be loud. But more importantly, bipeds are expensive, fragile, and fall over a lot. Why would you want that in your home?
The people at Ubtech, a China-based robotics company that sells a wide range of home and toy robots, are working on the impossible, and possibly the impractical: Walker, a human-sized biped for the home.
Walker is supposed to be a “complete home butler,” which mostly means it can patrol your home, act as a calendar and email assistant, and play a slow game of soccer with your kids. It has a smooth, quiet gait, which Ubtech credits to its homegrown digital servos. I watched Walker do a little dance, chase a soccer ball, and descend stairs. (The stair ascend demo wasn’t ready yet.)
Of course, most biped robots fall over a lot, and are too heavy to have anywhere near your kids. Walker is a surprisingly light 82 pounds, and is designed to be in balance at all times. If it loses power, it should stay stable right where it is. It’s also designed to fall away from danger if it has to fall.
GRID VIEW
1 of 5
I’m not positive a robot without a manipulation arm can really be called a “home butler,” so thankfully Ubtech is working on arms to add on to Walker. Ubtech also builds a wheeled robot with a robot arm, so the real challenge won’t be building an arm, but keeping Walker in balance while it’s manipulating its environment.
Walker is an ambitious project, most of all because it’s designed to be relatively affordable — in full-sized biped terms, that means “less than hundreds of thousands of dollars,” but I got the impression Ubtech is aiming for a lot lower than that. Walker is supposed to launch sometime in 2019.
JANUARY 10, 2018
Every major VR player has made the same promise. A VR headset that would be completely wireless. One that would let you go anywhere without tripping over cords or being tethered to a computer/phone/PS4. Google, which has spent more than a year quietly improving its VR platform, Daydream, is now the first company to cross the standalone finish line. The Daydream-powered Lenovo Mirage Solo is a beauty.
This the first Daydream device to have 6 degrees of freedom (DOF), which means you can squat, and jump, in addition to moving from side to side and backwards and forwards. The Daydream found on Android phones allows just 3 DOF. Yet as with other Daydream devices, the Mirage Solo uses inside out tracking, so you don’t need sensors strewn about the room to track the headset’s movement.
There are handy volume buttons right next to the audio jack.
It charges via USB-C!
It cradles your head a lot like the PSVR headset.
1 / 3
The Mirage Solo has dual microphones to pick up your voice, and provides audio via a standard 3.5mm jack. It has 64GB of storage built in, but can be expanded via the SD card slot if you need to pack on even more VR “experiences”, and there’s 4GB of memory on board too. It’s powered by the same Qualcomm Snapdragon processor found in the Samsung Galaxy S8 and the upcoming Lenovo Miix 630 Windows tablet. But where Lenovo claims that tablet gets 20 hours of battery life, it claims the Mirage Solo VR headset gets just 7 hours on average. That’s probably because it is powering a 2560 x 1440 display.
So what’s it like? In a demo, I found it damn liberating. Not having to worry about cords as I wander around the room erases at least one burden—unfortunately I still have to worry about smacking into furniture and people. In fact, it might be even more of a concern now that I have no tether.
The quality of the VR experience is on par with smartphone VR. So there’s a little more blur than I’d like when I spin in circles, and the graphics aren’t going to win any awards for photorealism. But if you do want photorealism, Lenovo, in conjunction with Google, also has the Lenovo Mirage Camera, which lets you shoot pretty cool VR videos with a camera about the size of a wallet.
The dual fisheye 13MP lenses.
The capture buttons. The camera connects to your phone via an app so you can look at the stuff you shot.
There’s zero viewfinder, but the camera also captures everything in front of you, so you might not need one.
1 / 3
The Mirage Camera uses dual 13MP cameras to capture stills or video 4K, 1440p, or 1080p at 30 fps. And it’s all automatically shot in stereoscopic VR, no stitching or post processing necessary. Butt’s not a 360 degrees camera. It has a 180 degree field of view, so you aren’t capturing the entire world, just what’s in front of the cameras.
I expected the result to be deeply jarring, but it was actually pretty pleasant. The dual lenses shoot at slightly different angles so there’s a nice 3D effect you don’t get with 360 videos. I could lean towards the birthday cake and, up to a point, actually feel like I was getting closer to the goods.
What I especially liked was how I never felt like I was missing stuff going on directly behind me. When watching the video and stills via VR you can see everything directly in front of you and then turn a see a little bit of the world on your left and right, as well as directly above and below you. The video, which uses Google new VR180 video type, feels just immersive enough for casual passive viewing.
And if you do decide to look all around there’s no abrupt cut off point. Where the content should cut off. Instead it fades into a night sky. In the image below, you can see the divide and the nice little fade between the two worlds.
The Lenovo Mirage Camera does all its processing with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 626 processor. It’s got 2GB of memory, 16GB of built-in storage, and dual microphones for capturing audio. It also connects to your phone via the Google VR180 app. That lets you review all the stuff you shot, and let’s you use the phone as a viewfinder. Though you are capturing everything in front of the camera, so you probably won’t need a viewfinder very often.
So how much will the next step in Google’s attempt at VR cost you? Lenovo has not given official prices, but says the Mirage Solo headset could be under $400, while the Mirage Camera is expected to be under $300.
We should know more about pricing soon, as both the headset and the camera are expected to ship in the spring of 2018. I don’t know if this set up will be the watershed moment VR needs, but new tools and approaches to creating VR content are vitally necessary right now. This technology, and especially the content, is still in its infancy. It’s at the Great Train Robbery stage, not the Citizen Kane one. Maybe a 180-degree VR camera is just what the world of virtual reality needs. A standalone headset definitely is.