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Filed under: Accessories, Software, iPhone

Found Footage: Control an unmanned aerial vehicle with an iPhone



What does a former US Navy F/A-18 Hornet pilot do with her time now that she heads MIT's Humans and Automation Lab? The short answer is "really cool stuff," and the long answer is even better.

During her tenure as a pilot, Professor Cummings became frustrated with the Hornet's cockpit. "I spent whole time complaining - who was the moron who designed this thing?" she told Wired. At MIT, she and her students were inspired to consider a replacement for the huge controllers that US soldiers use to operate Raven unmanned aerial vehicles. Just six weeks and $5,000 later, they launched a working test flight of a small robotic crafted controlled by an iPhone.

The app they've created relays GPS coordinates to the robot, which then travels from origin to destination on its own. Wired notes that the phone in the video is not jailbroken and the app in question was created like any other. It's very cool indeed. Now if they could only design something to get my kids to the bus stop on time.

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Enterprise, Software, Apple

MIT uses Macs to learn how children gain speech skills


Apple's Science page has a profile up for the folks over at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology -- apparently two MITers, Deb Roy and Rupal Patel, are using Macs, including "five Apple Xserves and a 4.4TB Xserve RAID," to record and track every single moment of their son's early childhood.

Not only are they assured to get his first few steps on tape, but they're also studying early development and how young children gain the skills to interact with other human beings. In order to do this, they're dealing with huge amounts of audio and video data -- about 250TB. And they're also building an analysis application on the platform called TotalRecall to scan through all the audio and video and pick out interesting parts and patterns (creating the kind of image seen above -- apparently that means something to them).

Of course, there is one thing they do that Apple can't -- when the time came to figure out how to transfer 200GB a day from the home environment to work, they eventually settled on a "sneakernet" approach, packing up the digital tapes in a case and carrying them to work. Here's hoping Apple will announce their own proprietary version of iSneakernet at the next WWDC (with a stylish design and a reasonable pricetag, of course).

Filed under: Accessories, iPod Family

Seamless Fashion Show 2006 features iPod-ready couture


Seamless V2, the second annual technology fashion event in Boston, included iPod fashion in its wild mix of wearables.

Pictured above is iDo, a wedding dress concept by Shannon Okey and Alexandra Underhill. The veil included an iPod (update number two: yes, a shuffle, and the bodice a full-sized iPod) to immerse the bride in her own musical choices. The iDo description further describes the aims of the project:

"...the iDo gown takes the so-called Bridezilla where she seemingly wants to go: her very own solitary walk down the aisle, with full control over music only she can hear accessed using touch-sensitive fabric technology ... and a tiara with built-in iPod."

If you're less the Bridezilla and more the iPod-extrovert, you may appreciate designer David Lu's iPod Status. A scrolling display for your messenger bag strap, iPod Status shows the world your "Now Playing" status. I love messenger bag strap devices (I've done a few myself) and I think David Lu is onto something with this prototype device. Photo of iPod Status after the jump.

Continue readingSeamless Fashion Show 2006 features iPod-ready couture

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