Yes, Driverless Cars Know the Way to San Jose

THE “look Ma, no hands” moment came at about 60 miles an hour on Highway 101.

Brian Torcellini, Google’s driving program manager, had driven the vehicle out of the parking lot at one of the company’s research buildings and along local streets to the freeway, a main artery through Silicon Valley. But shortly after clearing the on-ramp and accelerating to the pace of traffic, he pushed a yellow button on the modified console between the front seats. A loud electronic chime came from the car’s speakers, followed by a synthesized female voice.

“Autodriving,” it announced breathlessly.

Mr. Torcellini took his hands off the steering wheel, lifted his foot from the accelerator, and the Lexus hybrid drove itself, following the curves of the freeway, speeding up to get out of another car’s blind spot, moving over slightly to stay well clear of a truck in the next lane, slowing when a car cut in front.

“We adjusted our speed to give him a little room,” said Anthony Levandowski, one of the lead engineers for Google’s self-driving-car project, who was monitoring the system on a laptop from the passenger seat. “Just like a person would.”

Since the project was first widely publicized more than two years ago, Google has been seen as being at the forefront of efforts to free humans from situations when driving is drudgery. In all, the company’s driverless cars — earlier-generation Toyota Priuses and the newer Lexuses, recognizable by their spinning, roof-mounted laser range finders — have logged about 300,000 miles on all kinds of roads. (Mr. Torcellini unofficially leads the pack, with roughly 30,000 miles behind the wheel — but not turning it.)

But the company is far from alone in its quest for a car that will drive just like a person would, or actually better. Most major automobile manufacturers are working on self-driving systems in one form or another.

Google says it does not want to make cars, but instead work with suppliers and automakers to bring its technology to the marketplace. The company sees the project as an outgrowth of its core work in software and data management, and talks about reimagining people’s relationship with their automobiles.

Self-driving cars, Mr. Levandowski said, will give people “the ability to move through space without necessarily wasting your time.”

Driving cars, he added, “is the most important thing that computers are going to do in the next 10 years.”

For the automakers, on the other hand, self-driving is more about evolution than revolution — about building incrementally upon existing features like smart cruise control and parking assist to make cars that are safer and easier to drive, although the driver is still in control. Full autonomy may be the eventual goal, but the first aim is to make cars more desirable to customers.

“We have this technology,” said Marcial Hernandez, principal engineer at the Volkswagen Group’s Electronics Research Laboratory, up the road in Belmont, Calif. “How do we turn it into a product that can be advertised to a customer, that will have some benefit to a customer?”

With all the research efforts, there is a growing consensus among transportation experts that self-driving cars are coming, sooner than later, and that the potential benefits — in crashes, deaths and injuries avoided, and in roads used more efficiently, to name a few — are enormous. Already, Florida, Nevada and California have made self-driving cars legal for testing purposes, giving each car, in effect, its own driver’s license.

Richard Wallace, director for transportation systems analysis at the Center for Automotive Research, a nonprofit group that recently released a report on self-driving cars with the consulting firm KPMG, said that probably by the end of the decade, “we would be able to have a safe, hands-free left-lane commute.” In 15 to 20 years, he said, “literally from the driveway to destination starts to become possible.”

LIDAR

Google’s autonomous vehicle project uses a spinning range-finding unit, called lidar, on top of the car. It has 64 lasers and receivers.

The device creates a detailed map of the car’s surroundings as it moves. Software adds information from other sensors and compares the map with existing maps, alerting the system to any differences.

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The Eyes Have It: Control of Your Tablet

A group of Danish programmers has come up with the ultimate hands-free set: tracking eye movements to interact with tablets and smart phones.
Eye tracking has already been proposed as a way to tailor advertisements by tracking how long a viewer lingers on a given part of the screen. That technology is still in the future. But it isn't hard to envision using eye tracking to move a cursor, and essentially take the place of the finger-swipe.


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That's what The Eye Tribe (formerly known as Senseye) did. With some $800,000 in seed money the team came up with software that works with an infrared LED and the phone or tablet's front-facing camera. The LED lights up the eye, and the camera picks up an image that is interpreted by the software to show where the user is looking.
The Eye Tribe says on its web site that it plans to have a working version out in 2013. One thing smart phones and tablets will need to have is the LEDs, as right now they have to be tacked on for The Eye Tribe's system to work. That said, a new generation of devices could have it pre-installed.

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Windows Phone 8 Late to Ball but Dressed to Kill

Windows Phone 8 is Microsoft's effort to catch up with the early movers in mobile phone technology, and it's aiming to grab attention by redefining the mobile experience. "Microsoft needs a bold thrust to have a chance of competing," said Yankee Group Vice President Carl Howe.

Microsoft on Monday officially launched Windows Phone 8 at an event in San Francisco, hot on the heels of its Windows 8 launch last week. 

Windows Phone 8 "is not just having a lot of apps to choose from," Microsoft Vice President Joe Belfiore said during his presentation. He dismissed the "static grid of icons" introduced by Apple, which has become the standard, saying people are the focus of Windows Phone 8's design.
Belfiore showed off a slew of features introduced in the new mobile operating system, adding that with Microsoft's Sky Drive cloud service, those apps can run across Windows 8 PCs, Windows Phone 8 smartphones and Xbox.

Focusing on People

Microsoft has borrowed the Google+ Circles idea and renamed it "Rooms," offering it in Windows Phone 8's People Hub.

Rooms users can create sets of people with whom they can communicate privately, and users can set up their own Rooms as required. Users can see what people in a Room are up to on their social networks, and can share notes and calendars among people in a Room.
Users can invite iPhone and Windows Phone 7 users to a Room. They can get part of the Room's experience such as the calendar, but not the full experience, Belfiore said.
Android users, however, won't be included. "Due to the inconsistent calendar experience found on Android phones, use of the calendar on Android is not recommended," Microsoft spokesperson Katie Hamachek told TechNewsWorld.

The Appification of Windows Phone 8

Apps are the lifeblood of smart devices, and 46 of the top 50 smartphone apps will be available on Windows Phone 8 devices, Belfiore announced. The Windows Phone 8 app store has about 120,000 apps, and hundreds more are being added every day.
New titles coming to Windows Phone 8 include "Temple Run," which Belfiore described as "a highly popular game on the iPhone and Android," "Angry Birds," "Fairway Solitaire," "Star Wars," and the voice-activated "UrbanSpoon."

Courtsey:http://www.technewsworld.com/

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