Geek News

Hoverboards are ridiculous. They serve no purpose other than signaling that your laziness is only outpaced by your willingness to spend disposable income on fad gadgets. But if you insist on being piggybacked atop a rolling pedestal like a discount Paul Blart, you do you. Just know that it might as well be on one that also transforms into a robotic sidekick and carries your bags for you. First revealed at CES 2016 , the Segway Loomo is a $1,700 hoverboard. It operates much like those that came before it. You step onto the self-balancing platform, lean forward to accelerate, lean back to slow and reverse. But unlike its predecessors, turning the Loomo is done by pressing the knees against the unit's center, leaning left and right, which I found to be a far more intuitive method than lifting and pressing the footpads. The Loomo is surprisingly stable, even when leaning back to stop quickly, though the company does insist that users wear a helmet while riding. It took me only aro...

Autonomous features in commercially available drones are nothing new. Heck, I'm old enough to remember when DJI Phantoms didn't even offer follow-along technology. Shorter version: Most every drone worth its rotors possesses some level of autonomy. But then there's Skydio's R1, which ratchets things up a notch. Or two. The R1 isn't so much a drone as it is a flying, self-positioning action camera. It's sole purpose is to record the person it's following. Built by a team of former-MIT engineers, the R1 relies on the 13 cameras studded throughout its exterior to see the world around it and the same NVIDIA Jetson chip used in self-driving vehicles as a processing hub to navigate. And good lordy, can it navigate. Ok so, you know how the Phantom 4 has obstacle avoidance tech? It's where the drone, upon sensing that it will strike a low-hanging branch or phone pole, will stop following its target and hover a safe distance from the obstruction. The R1, how...

While Amazon continues to toy with the idea of granting delivery drivers one-time access to your front door (or car trunk) to safely stow packages away from nimble-fingered thieves, August Home has gone ahead and added the functionality to its line of smart locks. The company announced on Tuesday that it is teaming with same-day delivery service, Deliv, to offer in-home package drops. Dubbed "August Access" the new feature will work on all August Smart Locks, as well as Yale residential locks and a smattering of commercial ones (ie the ones at the main entrance of apartment complexes). So, if you order same-day delivery from a website that's partnered with Deliv, you'll have the option to opt in for in-home delivery. Doing so generates a one-time password that the delivery driver can use to open the August lock and gain access. And to make sure that there's no shenanigans taking place, customers can watch the delivery take place in real time or view a recording...

Developing self driving vehicle technologies is hard -- just ask Google , or Uber , or Google that other time , or that one bus from Vegas . That's why a number of companies have been working to virtualize the development cycle so that untested technologies can crash and burn safely as their bugs are worked out. Among those companies is Optis, which announced on Tuesday that it will be partnering with two other firms to make virtual prototyping more accessible to the industry. The first company is LeddarTech -- they developed a signal processing technology that's used in solid state LiDAR. LeddarTech and Optis will be working to create a vehicle simulation system so that vehicle manufacturers and OEMs will be able to virtually prototype and test their LiDAR systems. Specifically, Optis "can validate the LiDAR model and simulate the correct response from the LiDAR in real-time through a virtual closed loop simulation with automated driving functions," according to t...