Dear future world, 10 years ago I've sent this letter on this website. I'm not sure where I'll be 10 years from now. But I hope and pray that God would guide me to realize my dreams. Through him everything is possible.
~Kyl
Amazon unveiled the first of its three custom electric delivery vehicles made by Michigan-based Rivian on Thursday morning.
The vans would hit the road in 2021, it said, and can last up to 150 miles on a single charge.
The vehicles are Alexa-integrated, and have multiple exterior cameras to give the driver a 360-degree view of their surroundings.
The custom vans also include a "dancefloor" inside the driver's cabin, Amazon added — likely referring to the open space where the driver can move around.
Amazon aims to have 10,000 of these vans in operation as early as 2022, and 100,000 by 2030.
Amazon unveiled its first custom electric delivery vehicle on Thursday morning – and it plans to have 100,000 on the road within a decade.
The vehicles are made by Michigan-based Rivian, and Amazon is aiming to deploy the first of them in 2021. The firm told Business Insider the vehicles can last up to 150 miles on a single charge.
Drivers would be able to use Amazon's integrated AI software Alexa to access route, traffic, and weather information hands-free, the company said.
The vehicles also have exterior cameras linked to a display, giving the driver a 360-degree view of the vehicle's surroundings.
Amazon added that the vehicles have a large floor area inside the driver's cabin, which it calls a "dancefloor."
Amazon aims to have 10,000 of the vans in operation as early as 2022, and 100,000 by 2030.
The e-commerce giant designed and built the vehicle in partnership with electric vehicle maker Rivian. The companies first announced the partnership in February, and are working together to develop two other electric vehicle models.
Amazon partnered with Rivian after being unable to find suitable electric vehicles on the market, it said.
Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-rivian-unveil-first-custom-electric-delivery-vehicle-2020-10
The fact we're living in a world where surveillance is becoming more common is unlikely to be a surprise to you. But even when you're out of sight, you might not be safely hidden: researchers have developed a computer program that lets cameras see around corners.
The technique is called computational periscopy, and it works by analysing shadows cast on a wall and applying some seriously powerful decoding algorithms to them. The end result isn't perfect, but it's very impressive (see the image below).
While thoughts of Big Brother watching you might immediately spring to mind, the technology doesn't have to have such a dystopian purpose.
It could, for example, help self-driving cars avoid accidents, or improve the navigation skills of autonomous robots working in disaster areas.
What really makes the program stand out is the way it can be applied to an image captured by any digital camera – you don't need any special equipment.
"It was thought to be practically impossible to reconstruct an image from only scattered light from a wall without any advanced instruments," optical physicist Allard Mosk from Utrecht University in the Netherlands, who wasn't involved in the study, told Nature.
For a source image, the program needs a picture of the wall receiving light from a scene and shadows cast by an object hidden around the corner. More specifically, it needs a penumbra – the outer edge of a shadow cast by an opaque object.
Penumbras are most often talked about in relation to the shadows cast by planets and moons, but here the algorithms developed by the researchers can work backwards from them to reconstruct a picture of the original scene.
The algorithm is essentially unscrambling the light. When light from a scene hits a mirror (as in a conventional periscope), no unscrambling is needed, because the light travels without interference.
In this case, some heavy computational lifting is used to strip back the interference, and turn a matte wall into something like a mirror.
Importantly, there has to be an opaque object blocking the scene, with dimensions and a shape the algorithm already knows about. That helps the program figure out how the light has been scattered and how to put it back together again.
"Based on light ray optics, we can compute and understand which subsets of the scene's appearance influence the camera pixels," says one of the team, electrical engineer Vivek Goyal from Boston University.
"It becomes possible to compute an image of the hidden scene."
Cameras have been doing tricks like this with scattered light for several years, but here everything is done in the software rather than the camera itself.
Even though a specific scenario (with an opaque object) is required, as well as strong lighting illuminating the object, it's another tool that cameras of the future might be able to call upon when needed.
The team thinks that eventually the algorithm might be able to work out the dimensions and shape of the opaque object itself.
"In the future, I imagine there might be some sort of hybrid method, in which the system is able to locate foreground opaque objects and factor that into the computational reconstruction of the scene," says Goyal.
The system is only going to get better over time as well. Right now it takes around 50 seconds to reconstruct a scene from the light and shadows scattered on a wall, but the team thinks that could be improved upon.
Eventually, it might be able to process video footage in real time, the researchers say – but they're hoping it's going to be put to positive rather than sinister uses, like searching through burning buildings or for keeping people safe on the roads.
"I'm not especially excited by surveillance, I don't want to be doing creepy things," Goyal told Ian Sample at the Guardian.
"But being able to see that there's a child on the other side of a parked car, or see a little bit around the corner of an intersection could have a significant impact on safety."
The research has been published in Nature.
Source: https://www.sciencealert.com/
My Prediction: Samsung will be the first smartphone company that will adopt these futuristic camera technologies. Their patent will be name Vert-X, after the word "vertex" - the camera will see what is the view where is the vertex between the camera position and the objects behind the near corner. This will solve the problem of the last decade "Selfie without visible phone in it"