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Showing posts from November, 2015

Robot Camera Foreshadows an Era of Location-Aware Electronics

A French company called Move 'N See produces a line of camera robots. Their devices act as a smart tripod, holding a video camera and automatically moving and zooming the camera as people of interest move around a site. The idea is simple but amazingly innovative. Photo selfies are easy to take, but video selfies are next to impossible. How can I video myself playing football or doing gymnastics, without setting the camera so far back as to be useless? Do spectators want to spend an entire sporting event carefully videoing their friend or relative moving around the field? Enter Move 'N See's "personal robot cameramen." Their devices aim, pan and zoom a video camera as one or more people move around an area. The people of interest wear armbands whose locations are tracked, enabling the camera controller to know where to aim the camera. The camera controller also includes enough smarts to adjust the camera smoothly and to capture multiple people evenly. T...

New report on Chip-Based Indoor Location Positioning Technologies

Grizzly Analytics just released its latest report, on Chip-Based Indoor Location Positioning Technologies . This niche-area report analyzes tech from 19 companies. Why is chip-based indoor location technology interesting? Aren't the algorithms the same as those implemented in software? First, chip-based location tracking can be incorporated into electronic devices, such as Internet of Things devices, Wearables, Smart Home devices, robots, drones, toys, and more. These devices don't have mobile operating systems to run apps, but they can do incredibly cool things if they can track locations accurately. New chips profiled in this report are delivering location positioning in a way that can be implemented effectively in devices - accurate, low power, small chips, easy integration, and more. Second, some of the chips profiled are next generations of chips already in the market, either GPS chips, Wi-Fi chips or sensor analysis chips. If previous generations of these chips are ...