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Board Review: Tabletop Video Games With Physical Pieces

WIRED

I loved Board's unique blend of tabletop gaming, but my family gave it mixed reviews. Encourages everyone to play together at the table. Diverse launch titles show potential. Must be plugged in and includes a fairly short cable. This innovative mashup of digital and physical gaming worlds is a tabletop tablet designed to get family and friends playing together in the same room.


Lenovo Legion Go Gen 2 Review: A High-End Gaming Handheld

WIRED

This premium gaming handheld loads up with features for power users, but Windows still holds it back from being the easy option. Performance is better than previous-generation handhelds. Detachable controllers are comfortable and improve usability. Windows on a handheld is still frustrating. Many companies have tried and failed to produce gaming handhelds that run Windows, and it's not hard to see the appeal.


Amazon just unleashed its Cyber Monday laptop deals and it's dropping prices on MacBooks, gaming PCs, and more

Popular Science

Gear Computers Laptops Amazon just unleashed its Cyber Monday laptop deals and it's dropping prices on MacBooks, gaming PCs, and more Whether you need a basic everyday driver or a full-featured gaming PC, Amazon's Cyber Monday laptop can save you cash. We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. A laptop is a big investment. Not only do they typically cost a lot of money, but you're committing a machine you'll stare at while you shop, do homework, remote work, game, and pretty much everything else in your online life. Amazon just dropped its Cyber Monday deals on laptops and these are some of the lowest prices we have seen all year.


Vasco Translator Q1 Review: Cloning Your Voice

WIRED

This new real-time interpreter can change your language while cloning your voice--sort of. Live voice call translator raises the bar on these devices. Screen is tiny, making typing nearly impossible. Voice cloning feature is hit and miss. Real-time translation gadgets get another upgrade with Vasco's latest, a handheld translator with a feature that is decidedly cool, at least on paper: voice cloning technology.


HP EliteBook 6 G1q Review: An Always-Connected Laptop

WIRED

If you've got a paid subscription (plan prices haven't been announced but are expected to start at $19 per month), the service kicks in automatically when you're disconnected from Wi-Fi and goes dark when the Wi-Fi's live. The service works well--or, at least, as well as the 5G signal is in your area. In my house, cell service is spotty, and HP Go was hit or miss. But on the road, in a beachfront rental with decidedly shoddy Wi-Fi, HP Go worked great, providing me with a reliable backup connection when I needed it the most. HP Go is installed on a laptop, though it seems almost incidental to the main event. The EliteBook 6 G1q is a Qualcomm-based system, with rather pedestrian specs that are similar to what was on the market a year ago. The now-snoozy Snapdragon X Plus X1P42100 anchors the Windows machine, backed up by a healthy 32 GB of RAM and a sad 512 GB SSD (in the test configuration I was sent). The 14-inch screen packs a low-end 1920 x 1200 pixels of resolution and one of the dimmer backlights I've encountered in recent history.


The Tesla Model Y and Model 3 Standard Are Cheaper--but Still Not Cheap

WIRED

The electric vehicle tax credit is gone, and Tesla's new, more affordable models don't quite close the gap. For nearly two decades, CEO Elon Musk has promised Tesla would make a more affordable electric vehicle, to, as he put it in 2006, "help expedite the move from a mine-and-burn hydrocarbon economy towards a solar electric economy." On Tuesday, Tesla announced a new Model Y and Model 3 Standard, versions of its popular compact SUV and sedan stripped of a few higher-end touches and features to bring the price down to $39,990 and $36,990, respectively. They're both about $5,000 cheaper than the Premium variants, which goes a ways--but not all the way--toward recouping the $7,500 tax credit canceled by the GOP-led Congress this past summer . The price point also puts Tesla's newest models firmly in the "more affordable" EV camp.


Examining the legibility of humanoid robot arm movements in a pointing task

Lúčny, Andrej, Antonj, Matilde, Mazzola, Carlo, Hornáčková, Hana, Farić, Ana, Malinovská, Kristína, Vavrecka, Michal, Farkaš, Igor

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Human--robot interaction requires robots whose actions are legible, allowing humans to interpret, predict, and feel safe around them. This study investigates the legibility of humanoid robot arm movements in a pointing task, aiming to understand how humans predict robot intentions from truncated movements and bodily cues. We designed an experiment using the NICO humanoid robot, where participants observed its arm movements towards targets on a touchscreen. Robot cues varied across conditions: gaze, pointing, and pointing with congruent or incongruent gaze. Arm trajectories were stopped at 60\% or 80\% of their full length, and participants predicted the final target. We tested the multimodal superiority and ocular primacy hypotheses, both of which were supported by the experiment.


Meta's new wearable lets you control screens hands-free

FOX News

The glasses' sensor technology opens up new possibilities for research and development in augmented reality applications. Meta's new gesture control wristband might just be the most seamless way to control a computer yet. And no, it doesn't require surgery, a camera, or even a touchscreen. All it needs is your wrist. This futuristic device uses electrical signals from your muscles to understand what your hand wants to do, even if it never actually moves.


ElliQ Review: An AI Companion Bot for Lonely Elders

WIRED

For the past few weeks, the AI-powered ElliQ companion robot has perched on the end of my desk. Designed by Intuition Robotics for seniors living alone, this proactive animatronic chats to me throughout the day, checking how I'm feeling, suggesting "fun" activities, and prodding me to be more active and sociable. While it can be annoying, I've grown attached to ElliQ despite myself, and I can see the positive potential. According to the US Census Bureau, around 16 million elders (over 65) live alone in the country, and up to a third report feelings of loneliness. Multiple studies have shown that social isolation harms mental and physical health, increasing blood pressure, depression, weight gain, alcohol and drug use, and decreasing physical activity, cognition, heart health, and sleep.


Robotic Calibration Based on Haptic Feedback Improves Sim-to-Real Transfer

Gavura, Juraj, Vavrecka, Michal, Farkas, Igor, Gade, Connor

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

When inverse kinematics (IK) is adopted to control robotic arms in manipulation tasks, there is often a discrepancy between the end effector (EE) position of the robot model in the simulator and the physical EE in reality. In most robotic scenarios with sim-to-real transfer, we have information about joint positions in both simulation and reality, but the EE position is only available in simulation. We developed a novel method to overcome this difficulty based on haptic feedback calibration, using a touchscreen in front of the robot that provides information on the EE position in the real environment. During the calibration procedure, the robot touches specific points on the screen, and the information is stored. In the next stage, we build a transformation function from the data based on linear transformation and neural networks that is capable of outputting all missing variables from any partial input (simulated/real joint/EE position). Our results demonstrate that a fully nonlinear neural network model performs best, significantly reducing positioning errors.