In her new book The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants, University of British Columbia professor Karen Bakker outlines some of the most ground-breaking experiments in animal and plant communication.

“Digital technologies, so often associated with our alienation from nature, are offering us an opportunity to listen to nonhumans in powerful ways, reviving our connection to the natural world,” writes Bakker, a director at the UBC Institute for Resources, Environment, and Sustainability.

She points out that digital listening posts are now being used to continuously record the sounds of ecosystems around the planet, from rainforests to the bottom of the ocean. Developments in miniaturization have even enabled scientists to place microphones on tiny animals like honeybees.

“Combined, these digital devices function like a planetary-scale hearing aid: enabling humans to observe and study nature’s sounds beyond the limits of our sensory capabilities,” Bakker writes. The next step for many scientists is harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to sift through these sounds and enable robots to “speak animal languages and essentially breach the barrier of interspecies communication.”

She cites a team of researchers in Germany that have taught tiny robots how to do the honeybee waggle dance. Using these dancing machines, the scientists were able to command the honeybees to stop moving, and to communicate where to fly to collect a specific nectar. The researchers plan to experiment with implanting robots into the hives so that the honeybees accept them as members of their community.

Bakker also writes about bioacoustics scientist Katie Payne and her discoveries regarding elephant communication. Payne was the first to find that elephants make infrasound signals, sounds below the human hearing range. The vibrations of these signals allow elephants to send messages across long distances through soil and stones. Scientists have since found that elephants have different signals for “honeybee” and “human,” as well as distinguishable signals for “threatening human” versus “nonthreatening human.” If the power of AI could be harnessed to send messages to elephant herds, we might be able to help protect their dwindling populations without removing them from their natural habitats.

Coral reefs also get attention in Bakker’s book. “A healthy coral reef sounds a little bit like an underwater symphony,” she explains. “There are cracks and burbles and hisses and clicks from the reef and its inhabitants and even whales dozens of miles away. If you could hear in the ultrasonic, you might hear the coral itself.” With the use of AI, scientists might eventually be able to get coral to repopulate certain areas by broadcasting “healthy coral reef” sounds to coral larvae.

While the idea of someday having “a zoological version of Google Translate” sounds overwhelmingly positive, there is the fear is that unscrupulous humans might use the technology to control animal populations for their own gain. Bakker warns that the possibility of exploiting animals “raises a lot of alarm bells” and that our “newfound powers” should never be used “to assert our domination over animals and plants.”

The post New AI Tech Allows Humans to Talk to Animals first appeared on Dornob.

In Frisco, Texas, the company tested their theory on a bright orange Nissan NV200 with the words “Self-Driving Vehicle” written on its sides and front. Similar to having the word “Police” written on cruisers, Drive.ai thinks that everyone on the road should easily be able to distinguish a self-driving car from its manually-operated counterparts. The idea is that since we already notice vehicles like police cruisers, ambulances, fire trucks, and school buses on the road, and since the presence of those vehicles normally causes everybody around them to drive more carefully, why not make self-driving cars that noticeable, too?

Then there are the four exterior screens on the front and back of the car, all of which are constantly giving out information about the car’s intentions. Similar to exterior screens on buses that tell you where a bus is going or if it is out of order, these screens should make the behavior of self-driving cars more understandable to other road users (and vice versa). If the car reaches a stop sign and a little girl is crossing with her bicycle, the rear screen will say “Pedestrian Crossing” so that the person behind the Drive.ai car who cannot see the small girl does not get impatient and start honking the horn. While the back screen is giving the driver behind the car information on what the car is thinking, the front screen is telling the little girl not to worry, because the car is “Waiting For You” to cross. This also works for people who are visually-impaired, as the car can speak its intentions through speakers above its front wheels.

Anyone old enough to remember the mid-1980s television series Knight Rider is probably thinking of the artificially-intelligent supercar from that show called KITT, which David Hasselhoff famously used to fight crime. Of course, Drive.ai’s system is not a criminal justice instrument like that fictional car, but an instrument of road-based diplomacy.

Driving can can be a very frustrating experience in general, if not a deadly one. Ask anyone if they have any driving pet peeves, and you’re sure to be inundated with decades worth of bad driving stories. Every time we even witness horrible driving, we’re filled with a desire to communicate our displeasure. Some people like to put up fingers or shout. Road rage has even caused some people to fight, such as on July 24, 2018, when two New Yorkers got into a fight, resulting in one of the drivers almost running over the other.

What Drive.ai is doing is making it easier for everyone to share the road and be a bit more diplomatic. Artificial intelligence cannot cure human stupidity, but it can at least add a new level of confidence and safety to our roads.

The post How Drive.ai is Creating Road-Based Diplomacy first appeared on Dornob.

The doorbell’s video and snapshot options are activated by a motion sensor, so even if someone doesn’t ring it, you’ll know that they’re outside (and not just on the doorstep, because the camera can see everything within a 180-degree range thanks to its wide-angle lens). You can even program your VEIU to take a snapshot, send an alert to your phone, or start recording as soon as it detects movement.

We particularly like the fact that you can use your smartphone to speak with your visitors, even if you’re not in the house (imagine having a conversation with the delivery person who wants permission to leave a package at the door, for example). To make things even better, the VEIU is also capable of recording audio, so you can keep a digital record of all the conversations you have on it. It only takes five minutes to set up, the company assures us, and you won’t need to replace your current doorbell for it to work.

If you love to know what’s going on at all times, you’ll be glad to hear that you can use the doorbell to check the view outside your front door even if no one has set off the motion sensor. And if the device isn’t connected to your smartphone, you can still capture photos and videos with it — even at night.

Of course, if you want to use all the bells and whistles, you’ll need full-time Wi-Fi access, but if there’s a disruption in your connection, no worries — the images and audio recordings will be saved locally.

Another handy feature is the “detection sensitivity”setting, which you can tinker with to meet your needs. Say you have a slew of stray cats that just love to use your front yard as a meeting place or thoroughfare. When you’ve taken more than your fair share of video of the feline intruders, simply adjust the sensitivity setting so they don’t trip the motion sensor every time they cross your porch. 

The VEIU developers report that they are currently working on facial recognition capabilities, which would allow the unit to recognize friends and family (and perhaps alert you if someone you want to avoid comes to the door?!). They also want to make it possible to use the VIEU in tandem with other smart appliances, making the smart home experience as complete as possible.

The post VEIU: Smart Video Doorbell first appeared on Dornob.

From October 16th to 25th of 2017, Montreal hosted the World Design Summit (WDS), where over 30,000 professionals from fields like architecture, graphic design, media, real estate, and industrial design came together to agree on a framework for how design could improve the world. Anyone who’s been through design school has heard this kind of idealism before, but there is something different about the WDS. The breadth of topics covered in its lectures, panel discussions, and workshops underlines the need for multiple solutions in a world faced with multiple challenges. There’s something for everyone, because everyone must be engaged.

About 50 organizations came together to formulate a 10-year international action plan for tackling the major issues facing the world through design. The three-page Montreal Design Declaration explains the value of design as a driver for innovation, an agent of solutions, an expression of culture, a facilitator of change, a progenitor of intelligence, a manager of risk, a provider of resiliency, and a catalyst for growth. The declaration also establishes actions that could be taken to create a “world according to design,” such as design advocacy, the development of design metrics and standards that everyone can understand, design policies that can be implemented by all levels of government, improved design education, and design that is responsive to context.

The WDS is where we can see some of these ideas come to fruition. Of the summit’s 500 exhibitors, I focused on the three that most embodied its ideals.

SmartPixel.tv specializes in the design and manufacturing of interactive display solutions for numerous industries, including real estate, finance, hospitality, tourism, marketing, and sports. In the real estate industry, interactive displays are used by developers to showcase their properties prior to construction, whereby prospective clients can see a new home and its surrounding views before committing to it. These displays are designed for collaboration between multiple users, with features that give developers interactive options when selling to potential clients. For instance, a sun slider shows how natural light will enter a new home, while real-time three-dimensional interior design selection of materials and finishes gets the client engaged in the aesthetic right alongside the designer. Then the three-dimensional renderings of entire neighborhoods show clients what their new community will look like.

Touchscreens have been used in real estate for years now, but the ability to physically show someone a space before it’s been built is an applicable way to advocate for design. Most designers are used to looking at renderings and digital visualizations, but bringing that to non-designers in a context where design is particularly important to them is a significant step forward. It’s not enough to tell someone what their new home will look like with charts and mood boards. You have to (at least digitally) take them into the future, and give them the power to shape it to their liking.

While there many software programs that help teams collaborate, they often lack the intuitive visualization that facilitates design-based thinking in business and academia. Nureva creates software and interactive hardware that allows teams to collaborate on large projects on a wide scale. The software, called “Span,” mimics the visual organization of a wall full of images, sketches, and sticky notes and presents them digitally on the hardware, which takes the form of a canvas. The canvas can be anywhere between 40 and 200 feet in size, and it can be installed on a wall and used exactly like a whiteboard. The whole setup is the digital manifestation of the accumulated disorder that already exists on most people’s desks, except it takes up much less physical space. Used in the context of an architecture firm, a client could reschedule a meeting and watch a senior architect produce quick changes in real-time (without having to scribble any barely legible redlines for a junior architect to interpret). It would save time, money, and paper and improve communication all around.

At the city level, URBEN BLU designs and builds self-cleaning automated toilets for dense urban spaces. Most people would agree that using the restrooms in a park or urban plaza is not always the most appealing option due to poor maintenance, vandalism, and an overall lack of cleanliness. Thankfully, URBEN BLU’s restrooms all have programmable opening hours, self-cleaning floors, automatic disinfection dispensers that activate after each flush, vandal-proof components, and fireproof garbage bins. The bathrooms also adhere to the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), meaning each stall has the mandatory five-foot diameter of space needed for turning wheelchairs and grab bars next to the toilet. All of the fixtures in URBEN BLEU’s projects, such as the hand dryers, soap dispensers, and faucets, are non-contact. It’s not just a bathroom, but it’s also street decor that can be easily integrated into any location or building. Having to use the restroom in public is an experience that everyone has to go through, and it’s nice to see that there are urban toilets being made to address the public’s concerns.

It’s not that design is all that the world needs, but it is something the world cannot do without. Everyone expects their surroundings (and everything in them) to be well-designed. As someone who appreciates good design, I love that no matter who I am talking to now, I am always preaching to the choir.

The post The World According to Designers first appeared on Dornob.

Gotoky is an advanced off-the-grid communication device that allows your smartphone to receive signal in the world’s most remote destinations. The device can even be used during natural or man-made disasters, helping to ensure the safety of those affected by allowing them to contact emergency services and loved ones in the face of potential danger. In a bid to create a safer and more connected world, Gotoky has been developed with compassion and concern for humankind, utilizing our collective advancements in technology to enhance our day-to-day experiences.

Besides promoting the safety of its users, Gotoky also benefits them by allowing them to keep those pennies in their pockets when using their smartphones abroad. More specifically, your phone can create its own network coverage with Gotoky to avoid excessive communications costs when traveling, meaning won’t be charged a ridiculous fee for those crucial phone calls and messages.

How Does It Work?

Gotoky functions by creating a (personal) mesh network in parts of the world where traditional service is either unattainable or too expensive. Once paired with a smartphone, the Gotoky provides you with coverage and enables you to send texts, make calls, use GPS, activate an “Emergency Location Beacon” when in distress, send GPS coordinates to other Gotoky users, use real-time tracking, create events, and ping locations.

Working over standard license-free radio frequencies, Gotoky eliminates your reliance on cellular infrastructure or satellites, meaning it can automatically relay messages to other Gotoky devices in the area. This range can be extended from point to point, allowing users to create their own network with up to 19 miles of coverage.

It’s the ideal device for outdoor enthusiasts, travelers, and professionals working in remote or potentially dangerous locations. Gotoky communication is free, reliable, secure, and accessible, keeping you connected with the planet without those exorbitant roaming charges.

Who Created Gotoky?

Co-founder and CEO Denis Loncar developed Gotoky in response to a personal crisis: while hiking in the mountains, he injured himself and was unable to call for help due to the poor signal on his mobile phone. Loncar was extremely lucky and eventually rescued, but only by chance, as another group of hikers happened to pass by him. After discovering him, they made sure he was safe and properly looked after.

As a result of this eye-opening experience, Loncar and co-founder Katja Lipicnik worked on bringing Gotoky to life. In times of need where danger or risk is involved, a user can now access that necessary help. It’ll probably even end up saving lives. In the recent events in the US following the devastation caused by hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Nate, during which communications were unresponsive for days, the people could have greatly benefited from the Gotoky, as it would have assisted them in ensuring their well-being and personal safety.

How Can I Get One?

Head over the Gotoky’s Kickstarter page and make a donation (no matter how large or small) to get involved in the production and launch of this nifty gadget. It’s definitely a pledge worth making!

The post Gotoky: Off-Grid Phone Coverage Anytime, Anywhere first appeared on Dornob.

It takes someone who has had panic and anxiety attacks to understand how to halt them in their tracks. Designer Ramon Telfer has drawn on his own experiences with anxiety to create a hand-held calming device that can help alleviate anxiety.

Telfer’s Calming Stone uses sensory experiences to help calm the nerves and create a sense of peace. It is shaped like a smooth pebble that’s easy and pleasant to hold in the palm.

A small opening in the face of the pebble releases cool air to help the user breathe easier. A cartridge can be added to release a calming scent like lavender, and a removable earbud can be used to walk the user through guided meditations.

A built-in nightlight lets the user find the calming device even in the middle of the night. Telfer has created a 3D printed prototype and has tested the concept during his own panic attacks to refine and improve on the idea.

“I have always felt compelled to design solutions to help people. When I take my own personal morals and experiences into consideration I believe mental health comes before anything else. Without our sanity and well-being we are helpless. Designing specifically to improve the situations of others who are struggling with their mental health only seems logical.”

“Due to my personal experience, I have developed a strong insight into panic attacks. This allowed me to test out ideas for the ‘calming stone’ while experiencing real panic attacks during the developing process. In addition, discussing my ideas with professional anxiety psychologists allowed me to develop ideas with complementary psychological techniques. I discovered that breathing is one of the most important aspects of controlling emotion, whether it be anxiety, anger, or sadness. By controlling your breathing and focusing on fresh, cool air many people have found that they can relieve stress. However, the depth of anxiety lies within the psyche. Anxiety can lead to irrational thinking and it is important to control these thoughts through guided meditation. Being able to focus on a soothing voice, reiterating positive ideas, while being guiding through several breathing techniques, can help to encourage someone undergoing a panic attack to think positively and control erratic breathing.”

“With these two highly effective techniques I have developed the ‘calming stone’. The form was inspired by the idea of Japanese Zen stacking stones, which are traditionally used to reduce stress.The ‘calming stone’ has an organic design that fits into your palm. The form is relaxing, non-intrusive and ergonomically designed to naturally fit in the hand. Integrated into the design is a breathing cavity where cool air is released out onto your face for a cool, calming sensation and is to be inhaled by the user. Smell capsules, such as lavender, can be additionally inserted to accompany the sensation. An easy to use wireless earbud can be simply removed from the side of the calming stone as a discrete audio experience for the user. There are also a series of simple to use buttons that run down the side of the calming stone, which are designed align with the fingers to create an intuitive user experience. It was important to design a device that was uncomplicated to use for a person in a state of panic.”

The post Beautiful Handheld Object is Multi-Sensory Anxiety Relief first appeared on Dornob.