Physical reasoning is important for effective robot manipulation. Recent work has investigated both vision and language modalities for physical reasoning; vision can reveal information about objects in the environment and language serves as an abstraction and communication medium for additional context. Although these works have demonstrated success on a variety of physical reasoning tasks, they are limited to physical properties that can be inferred from visual or language inputs. In this work, we investigate combining tactile perception with language, which enables embodied systems to obtain physical properties through interaction and apply commonsense reasoning. We contribute a new dataset PhysiCLeAR, which comprises both physical/property reasoning tasks and annotated tactile videos obtained using a GelSight tactile sensor. We then introduce Octopi, a system that leverages both tactile representation learning and large vision-language models to predict and reason about tactile inputs with minimal language fine-tuning. Our evaluations on PhysiCLeAR show that Octopi is able to effectively use intermediate physical property predictions to improve its performance on various tactile-related tasks. PhysiCLeAR and Octopi are available at https://github.com/clear-nus/octopi.

Each year at the CES technology show, companies like LG, Samsung, and Intel flaunt their latest innovations. Supercomputers the size of a credit card, 4K TVs as thin as wallpaper, and smartphones that can 3D map their environment were just a few of the inventions showcased during this year's exhibition. But while CES can be a showcase for trends that are likely to dominate the tech world over the coming months, it's also home to the bizarre and strange. This year's conference, which officially concluded on Jan. 8, included demonstrations of everything from "smart" hairbrushes to "intelligent" toothbrushes and shoes that suck up dust and crumbs as you walk. You know what your next hair brush really needs?

Two household items are going'smart' and trust us, you will want them. Check out the'world's first-ever smart hairbrush' and a'hands off' and'transfer free' washer dryer combo that made their debut at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Add your hairbrush to the growing list of household items going "smart." During the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, attendees witnessed the debut of "the world's first-ever smart hairbrush," part of a collaboration between luxury hair care brand Kérastase, tech firm Withings and L'Oréal's Research and Innovation Technology Incubator. The hairbrush joins the toothbrush, water bottle and the toilet as dumb household items turned smart.

If this year's CES continues to predict future tech trends, then we can soon expect to have emotional relationships with our cars, virtual reality devices so realistic you need a sick bag, and products so pricey most people won't be able to afford them. One of the main themes this year at the premier electronics convention, which is held annually in Vegas, is that in the future everything will have a relationship with everything. The Faraday Future FF 91, a family-sized electric vehicle with the acceleration of a Formula 1 car and a "brain" that will apparently be capable of learning from its driver, was unveiled at a media event on Tuesday, before Toyota and Honda took the concept of an intelligent car even further. Toyota showed off its "Concept-i" concept car, which it described as: "More than a machine. It will become our friend".

The tech industry's annual Consumer Electronics Show, in Las Vegas, is known for showing off a ton of crazy gadgets, both useful and fanciful. It's easy to dismiss some innovations out of hand, but even the wackiest products hint at what consumers should expect to see in the future, by offering a read of what trends companies are focusing on. Here is a look at seven wacky CES products -- and what they can tell us about the future of tech. What it is: A black shirt that looks like something a super villain would wear. The garment, made by Japanese firm Xenoma, has embedded silver motion-sensing circuits, and it is supposed to track your movements and the position of your body.

Anyone who's been licked by a cat can speak of the sandpaper-like surface of their flexible tongues. But according to new research, the tiny hooks responsible for this roughness are the secret behind cats' expert grooming, acting like'heat-seeking missiles' for tangles. By capturing these features with macro and high-speed videography, researchers have now 3D-printed a cat tongue at 400% scale, and they say the technique could be used to improve soft robotics systems and wound cleaning materials. By capturing macro and high speed videos of cats grooming, researchers found that the features on their tongues are like tiny claws in both shape and sharpness. These, they say, act like heat-seeking missiles for tangles.