At CES 2013, mc10 and Reebok revealed the Checklight, a product built to help protect athletes who play football, hockey and other impact sports. Today, you can purchase one of your very own in men's, women's or children's sizes for $149.99 from Reebok's website. For your money, you get the sensor strip, a skull cap to keep it snug on your noggin and a micro-USB charger to keep it powered up.
For those who've forgotten, the Checklight's a head impact indicator powered by mc10's flexible electronics technology that gives athletes and medical personnel simple, actionable information about impacts to the wearer's head. It's not a concussion detector, per se, but it does provide information about the location, number and intensity of impacts to your dome -- so it's a valuable tool that can help identify those in danger and keep them out of harm's way. Well worth $150, we'd say.
Filed under: Wearables
Source: Reebok
If you think using the Leap Motion controller for playing air guitar and typing without a keyboard was cool, try using it to control a NASA rover. Victor Luo and Jeff Norris from NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab got on stage at the Game Developers Conference here in San Francisco to do just that with the ATHLETE (All-Terrain Hex-Limbed Extra-Terrestrial Explorer), which was located 383 miles away in Pasadena. As Luo waved his hand over the sensor, the robot moved in kind, reacting to the subtle movements of his fingers and wrists, wowing the crowd that watched it over a projected Google+ Hangout.
We spoke with Luo and Norris after the panel to gain further insight into the project. As Luo explains, one of JPL's main goals is to build tools to control robots needed for space exploration. Seeing as the gaming industry is already rife with user-friendly controllers ripe for the plucking, it made sense to harness them for the job. "We're very used to the bleeding edge," he said. "From the Kinect to the PlayStation Move, they represent major investments into usability." Hit the jump for our impressions of the simulation software, a look at JPL's grander goal and for video clips of the demo and panel itself.
Filed under: Gaming, Robots, Science
Source: NASA JPL
It must be the season for Android-native makeovers within our apps. RunKeeper has just pushed out a 3.0 update to its exercise tracker that brings the interface in line with Google's Holo concepts from Android 4.0 and beyond. There's more to see once acclimated to the look and feel, however. The 3.0 revamp now has a dedicated tab to show all of an athlete's progress in one area, such as goals and recent history. It also displays both intervals and pacing in mid-activity while making easy to set a reminder for the next run while cooling down. Runners wanting to modernize just need to hit Google Play to give RunKeeper a makeover that could very well improve their health in the process.
Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile
Source: Google Play
Remember the Cheetah-bot that was featured here a couple of months ago? It looked pretty scary as it galloped on the treadmill with its spindly legs moving at an astounding 18 miles per hour. It might have looked as scary as heck then (it still does now), but you can’t deny it was an impressive feat that Boston Dynamics achieved with the support of DARPA.
When the Cheetah reached 18 mph during its run last March, it broke the land speed record for legged robotic machines. The Boston Dynamics team decided that that wasn’t enough, so they tweaked a couple of things and now the Cheetah is faster (and scarier) than ever. Breaking the record that it had previously set, the leggy robot can achieve a peak speed of 28 mph. Yes, that’s right folks, it’s now even faster than the fastest man in the world, Olympian Usain Bolt, who reached 27.78 mph during a 20-meter sprint.
Check out a video of the Cheetah doing its thing after the jump. It’s both scary and impressive at the same time.
VIA [ Dvice ]
Adidas is known for making connected shoes -- but never quite as linked-up as a Nash Money concept making its appearance late into the London Olympics. The Social Media Barricade weaves the guts of a phone and a basic two-line LCD into a running shoe, letting the footwear take Twitter updates very literally on the run through a public account. Even the signature Adidas stripes change their hue through remote control. Before anyone gets visions of athletes checking congratulatory tweets after the 100-meter sprint, just remember that it's an idea rather than a production blueprint: although Adidas is quick to call the Social Media Barricade the "future of athlete connectivity," the only athletes putting eyes on a pair right now are those swinging by the Olympics' media lounge for interviews. Knowing this, we can still imagine some future shoes padding runners' egos at the finish line during the 2016 Rio games.
Continue reading Adidas Social Media Barricade shoe concept moves tweets to the track (video)
Filed under: Wearables
Adidas Social Media Barricade shoe concept moves tweets to the track (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 10 Aug 2012 15:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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