Gadgets & Tech – Spoken Edition

Chinese startup Rokid has found a unique and somewhat terrifying market foothold for its AI and augmented-reality tech amid the coronavirus pandemic: smart glasses that clock the temperature of those around you.

The Hangzhou-based company has already sold roughly 1,000 pairs to governments, businesses, and schools, according to a Reuters report. While its products are typically tailored to manufacturing and video game markets, Rokid recently pivoted to creating a better way to streamline screening for covid-19 symptoms in response to the outbreak. In about two weeks, the company developed what it’s calling its T1 glasses, a device that can “see” people’s temperatures up to 3 meters (roughly 10 feet) away.

Here’s how it works: The glasses come equipped with an infrared sensor that measures nearby temperatures with the help of a camera, and communicates that information in real-time to the display. It carries a Qualcomm CPU, 12-megapixel camera, Rokid’s U.S. Director Liang Guan told TechCrunch last month, and can also deploy augmented reality features to record photos and videos hands-free.  

Given the prevalence of fixed thermometer checkpoints in industrial parks and public spaces across China amid the outbreak, Rokid Vice President Xiang Wenjie told Reuters that demand for its T1 glasses has been ramping up rapidly.

“Apart from fixed temperature measurement, T1 can provide portable, distant and prompt temperature checking, which would be a great help,” Xiang said.

As of early April, Rokid reported it was also negotiating deals to supply its T1 smart glasses to American hospitals and local governments, per TechCrunch.

In 2018, Rokid completed a round of “billion-dollar” financing, per the company’s website, led by investors Swiss bank Credit Suisse, Singaporean holding company Temasek, and others. The company is currently working on an upgraded model capable of measuring multiple temperature readings at the same time to quickly scan crowded spaces such as malls and airports, Reuters reported.

Chinese authorities have been deploying increasingly Orwellian technological measures to track the spread of coronavirus as far back as February, with a few big names in American tech following suit soon afterward. Amazon, for instance, has begun using thermal cameras to quickly scan workers at its warehouse and delivery facilities for fevers.

Last year, scientists published a paper with an iconic diagram: a black circle representing, to scale, a 5-solar-mass black hole—and the size of the hypothetical Planet Nine if it were a black hole instead of a planet. So, if Planet Nine really is a black hole, how would we find it? Physicist Edward Witten, famed theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study, has an idea. All it requires is an army of small, laser-launched spacecraft with really accurate clocks.

Apple and Google aren’t developing coronavirus-tracking apps, but on Monday they shared examples of what those apps could look like. Most notably, the tech giants detailed what the public health authorities who can use their contact-tracing APIs to create those apps can’t do: namely, they can’t track your location and they can’t use your data to advertise to you.

No one will be required to download the apps created by health agencies, unlike similar apps rolled out in other countries, so people will have to install them and opt into notifications if they want to see whether anyone else using the app who has tested positive for covid-19 has come within Bluetooth range.

Apple and Google today published step-by-step screenshots of how public health authorities could design their apps, starting with sign-up. For the exposure-tracking apps to be useful, you’ll need to enable notifications (though you don’t have to, and you can also turn them off at any time). You can share a positive covid-19 diagnosis within the app, which you verify by working with your local public health department to obtain a unique test identification number and the date of the test.

The app shares random Bluetooth identifiers generated by your phone with other devices that have come within Bluetooth range of you within the last two weeks. (Those identifiers change every 10-20 minutes, Apple explained, which the company says makes it impossible to track you.) If you have notifications enabled, your phone will receive an alert as to the date of possible exposure to covid-19 and what steps you can take.

Here’s what a public health authority’s contact-tracing app could look like on an iPhone:

The process is the same on Android, as you can see in the screenshots the two tech companies publicly shared:

This isn’t how contact-tracing works in countries where using an app is government-mandated. Those apps, which are being rolled out in India and Russia, are privacy nightmares, as we’ve already detailed. The UK’s National Health Service is reportedly displeased with Google and Apple’s efforts because the data collected is decentralized as opposed to routed through a government server. But it might not matter how secure Apple and Google have made their APIs if people don’t trust the public health departments’ apps. A recent study showed that more than 40 percent of consumers don’t plan to use one of the contact-tracing apps, because they don’t trust tech companies.

Exposure-tracking apps are just one part of the effort to curb the spread of covid-19. States are hiring thousands of human contact tracers to find covid-19 patients who don’t have access to smartphones or who might hesitate to report their diagnosis to an app.

We’ve seen phones with punch-hole selfie cams, pop-up selfie cams, and even 360-degree rotating cameras. But now, new leaks suggest that Lenovo’s upcoming gaming phone might get the wildest front-facing cam of them all thanks to a side-mounted motorized selfie shooter.

The latest info about Lenovo’s upcoming gaming phone comes from XDA-Developers, who recently received some inside info and product renders from a “trusted” source with knowledge about the project.

Like a lot of other gaming phones, Lenovo’s Legion Gaming Phone is expected to feature flagship specs including a Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 processor, a screen with a 144Hz refresh rate, a massive 5,000 mAh battery, and ridiculously fast 90-watt wired charging. And based on some leaked product renders, the Legion Gaming Phone will sport a very aggressive esports-inspired design including a neon blue paint job, a bunch of Xs scattered around its frame, and potentially even some customizable RGB lighting.

OK, enough about that, let’s go back to the Legion Phone’s mysterious side-mounted pop-up camera. For a lot of people, the question is: What’s the point? On other phones with innovative (and also sometimes gimmicky) cameras, the goal behind rotating or pop-up selfie cameras is to remove any distractions from the front of the phone so people can get an unobstructed full-screen experience. But in that case, a top-mounted selfie cam would work just as easily a side-mounted camera.

But for gamers, who typically like to hold their phones in landscape while gaming, a top-mounted selfie camera (either a punch-hole cam or some kind of pop-up cam) doesn’t work because their view would get blocked by your hands. So by putting a pop-up camera on the side of the phone, it appears Lenovo’s goal is to allow people to take pictures or more likely livestream from their phone while gaming, instead of needing to rely on a secondary video capture device.

Admittedly, this may be an incredibly-niche use case, especially here in the west where mobile gaming culture isn’t quite as big as it is in Asia. But for gamers, it actually makes a lot of sense, and when you combine that side-mounted camera with the Legion Phone’s rumored side-mounted USB-C ports, everything Lenovo is doing to support a landscape-first gaming phone could result in a really interesting device. After all, it’s not like the world really needs another fancy glass brick with big specs, so it’s nice to see Lenovo flip the script a bit when it comes to traditional smartphone design.

Unfortunately, we’re still in the dark about the Legion Phone’s pricing or availability, or if Lenovo even has any plans to release it outside of Asia. Hopefully, we’ll know more later this summer as more phones continue to trickle out.

You can spend as much money as you want to customize a mechanical keyboard and install the fanciest switches, but it will never sound as satisfyingly clackety as this setup by Jatin Patel who built an unusual contraption that recreates the sounds of an old-school mechanical typewriter.

It’s absolutely primitive by today’s standards, but when Pong arrived in 1972, it was a technological marvel. So how did Tomy create a handheld knock-off of the game in 1977 when the electronics needed to miniaturize it didn’t exist yet? It created this mechanical alternative that might be one of the most bizarre portable gaming machines I’ve ever seen.

The second wave of covid-19 in the U.S. is likely right around the corner, newly leaked projections from the Trump administration predict. By June 1, the country could see 3,000 deaths a day—a new high—along with hundreds of thousands of new cases. The estimates come as parts of the country have already begun to reopen businesses and ease restrictions on distancing.

It appears Jeff Bezos’s streak as the only big tech robber baron not to be grilled by Congress is coming to a close. Cutthroat tactics are par for the course at Amazon, a company as closely associated with bullying subsidies out of local governments as it is with the burnout of its own employees. So it came it as little surprise that a Wall Street Journal investigation published last week found many long suspected: that the company uses seller data to inform its own private-label products.

Cable bills are already stacked with unnecessary fees for things as silly as activation, deactivation, or rentals. Consumers are regularly gouged for things like regional sports, too. But right now, there aren’t any sports to watch, and cable customers are still being charged for it—something New York Attorney General Letitia James has correctly characterized as “grossly unfair.

Many of us are spending considerably more time at home than we were just a few months ago, and that means looking for ways to pass the endless time we suddenly all have on our hands. If you’ve got a soft spot for puzzles and low-level gaming, Google’s coming through with a handful of legacy Google Doodle games to help keep you occupied.

Over the course of the next two weeks, Google will roll out one of its legacy doodle games per day. For the first in its throwback series, Google brought back an archived Doodle from 2017 with the interactive game “Coding for Carrots,” which celebrated 50 years of kids coding. According to Champika Fernando, an MIT collaborator on the project, this was Google’s “first coding Doodle ever.” Next up, Google’s bringing back a legacy Doodle celebrating the 2017 ICC Champions Trophy that lets users play cricket as an actual, pocket-sized cricket character.

These are not, to be clear, especially difficult games. But they are incredibly cute, and I’ve found that they’re kind of like the New York Times mini crossword, in that they offer a nice distraction from the world during those 5- to 10-minute breaks between calls, or just when you need to step away from work for a moment.

I’ll admit I had some high hopes that Google would re-up some of its more popular Google games, like the first-ever playable Doodle that celebrated the 30th Anniversary of Pac-Man from 2010, or even the very good Rubik’s Cube Doodle from 2014. But because Google archives its Doodles, you can still play these! Plus, there’s plenty coming down the pipeline over the next couple of weeks, so keep an eye on the Doodles homepage to access the featured game of the day.