Can your robot lawnmower run Doom? This one can

Did you think you’ve seen the last of Doom running on random stuff? Think again. Landscaping technology company Husqvarna just announced that the game will run on some of its robot lawn mowers. So you can mow down hellspawn just ahead of mowing down errant blades of grass.

Here’s the deal. It’ll only be available on the company’s Automower Nera robotic lawn mower models, beginning this April. Once downloaded, you play the game via the lawn mower’s onboard display. Rotating the control knob turns Doomguy left and right and pressing the knob makes you shoot. Holding down the start button initiates forward movement. It’s Doom. You know the drill.

There are some caveats here. First of all, you have to sign up to download the software by September 9. It won’t be available for US residents, despite Husqvarna making a concerted effort to sell more robot lawn mowers in the United States. Finally, this is just the game running on the onboard display. It’s not as if the mower turns your yard into an actual level, with unwanted greenery representing demonic enemies. Still, it’s always nice to see Doom continue to do its thing.

The idea to make the shooter available to lawn mower enthusiasts came after a successful test run at the gaming event DreamHack Winter 2023, which was held in Sweden last December. This is just the latest example of Doom popping up where it shouldn’t. We’ve seen the FPS running on pregnancy tests, rat brain neurons and even inside of other games, like the sequel Doom II and Minecraft. Most recently, Doom was spotted running on actual gut bacteria with a frame rate so atrocious it would take 600 years to reach the ending.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/can-your-robot-lawnmower-run-doom-this-one-can-162641979.html?src=rss

Can your robot lawnmower run Doom? This one can

Did you think you’ve seen the last of Doom running on random stuff? Think again. Landscaping technology company Husqvarna just announced that the game will run on some of its robot lawn mowers. So you can mow down hellspawn just ahead of mowing down errant blades of grass.

Here’s the deal. It’ll only be available on the company’s Automower Nera robotic lawn mower models, beginning this April. Once downloaded, you play the game via the lawn mower’s onboard display. Rotating the control knob turns Doomguy left and right and pressing the knob makes you shoot. Holding down the start button initiates forward movement. It’s Doom. You know the drill.

There are some caveats here. First of all, you have to sign up to download the software by September 9. It won’t be available for US residents, despite Husqvarna making a concerted effort to sell more robot lawn mowers in the United States. Finally, this is just the game running on the onboard display. It’s not as if the mower turns your yard into an actual level, with unwanted greenery representing demonic enemies. Still, it’s always nice to see Doom continue to do its thing.

The idea to make the shooter available to lawn mower enthusiasts came after a successful test run at the gaming event DreamHack Winter 2023, which was held in Sweden last December. This is just the latest example of Doom popping up where it shouldn’t. We’ve seen the FPS running on pregnancy tests, rat brain neurons and even inside of other games, like the sequel Doom II and Minecraft. Most recently, Doom was spotted running on actual gut bacteria with a frame rate so atrocious it would take 600 years to reach the ending.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/can-your-robot-lawnmower-run-doom-this-one-can-162641979.html?src=rss

What to look for in an electric lawn mower

The days of the gas-powered lawn mower and leaf blower are numbered in California. Last October, Governor Gavin Newsom signed AB 1346, banning the sale of new gas-powered tools in the state by 2024, akin to its ban on new internal combustion vehicle sales by 2035.

And the Golden State is far from alone, "I think that the easier the manufacturers make it for other states to adopt the same sort of ban, the more states will do it," University of Southern California environmental law professor Robin Craig told CBS. Lawmakers in Illinois and New York both are seeking to pass similar bills at the state level while cities like Brookline, Massachusetts; Montclair, New Jersey; and Burlington, Vermont, have all independently enacted seasonal bans of their own on gas-powered leaf blowers.

And it’s not just because internal combustion (IC) landscaping equipment is so loud — leaf blowers average 70 dB at 50 feet (the operator hears closer to 95-100 dB) while mowers start at around 85 dB — they are also significant emitters of greenhouse gasses. The California Air Resources Board (CARB) notes that running an IC mower for 1 hour emits the equivalent amount of carbon as driving a 2017 Camry 300 miles from LA to Las Vegas. Operating a 2-stroke leaf blower for the same amount of time produces the same amount of carbon as driving to Denver, roughly 1,000 miles from LA.

Western Cape, South Africa, Man wearing protective clothing and safety helmet trimming grass in a garden. (Photo by: Peter Titmuss/Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
Education Images via Getty Images

That’s actually an improvement from what we saw in the ‘80s and ‘90s before California instituted CARB. Today’s small engines are 40 to 80 percent more efficient and cleaner burning than they were before the agency got its start but, regardless, there are still some 16.7 million small (sub-19kW) engines in California — that’s three million more than the number of light duty passenger vehicles currently operating in the state. And given that the average price of a gallon of gas in America is currently $4.37 (the highest since 2000, per AAA), running all those noisy, thirsty mowers and blowers is getting untenably expensive as well.

With a long, hot summer of high gas prices imminent and the writing on the wall for 2-stroke engines, what better time than now to electrify your lawn care equipment? But before you head down to your local home improvement center, here’s some advice on what to look for in an electric mower directly from the people who design them.

Man mowing the grass with a manual petrol lawnmower.
Catherine Falls Commercial via Getty Images

Gas or Electric

Much like the auto industry’s ongoing transition from IC engines to EVs, lawn care equipment makers have spent recent years investing heavily in battery-based systems and have seen the performance of these power plants rapidly improve to be practically on par with the gas engines they’re replacing — not to mention being quieter, less expensive to operate and generally better for the environment.

For example, your average electric mower or leaf blower is going to produce around 75 dB of noise (equivalent to a running washing machine) — granted, that’s only a 10dB difference between the gas and electric motors, but because decibels are measured along a logarithmic scale, it actually sounds nearly half as loud to the human ear. And unlike gas mowers, using an electric doesn’t require you to don hearing protection (though safety glasses are always a good idea). What’s more, electric engines (with their decided lack of moving parts) wear much more gently than their internal combustion counterparts: No spark plugs to replace, oil to change, gas-oil ratios to measure and pour.

“Many professional-grade battery-powered tools come equipped with a brushless motor, which is virtually maintenance-free,” Stihl battery product manager, Paul Beblowski, told Engadget via email. “With a battery — there’s no need to buy, transport, or store fuel. There’s no tune-up for an electric motor and no need to winterize.” Aside from sharpening the cutting blade once a season or so, all owners really need to do is ensure the battery gets recharged before their next mowing session.

Vintage photograph of a woman in shorts and a sleeveless blouse pushing a gas powered lawn mover in a suburban backyard next to a swimming pool. in the 1950s. (Photo by Found Image Holdings/Corbis via Getty Images)
Found Image Holdings Inc via Getty Images

That’s not to say gas mowers are overnight relics. There are still plenty of use cases in which going with a conventional mower makes more sense, like when you need to clear more than an acre of land, or have to cut through dense, damp underbrush on difficult terrain, or are cutting on a remote field far from power outlets (sit down, Lightning Pro). A given unit of gasoline is still 100 times more energy dense than even the bloodiest-edge battery technology.

When it comes to choosing between a corded versus battery electric mower, “buyers must evaluate the size of their yard, access to outlet, and overall need for convenience,” Beblowski said. “It would make most sense to use a battery-driven mower when there is no access to an outlet or the customer wants the convenience provided by not dragging a cord through their yard. In addition, if the user is mowing around their pool or other water sources, it would make sense to stay away from cords and rely on a battery-driven mower.”

Another thing to consider is that while corded mowers will never run out of power, the amount that they can draw from a standard outlet cannot exceed 15 amps and 1800 watts (15 amps because that’s the US regulation, 1800 watts = 15 amps x 120 volts) — that’s actually the theoretical maximum and will continually throw breakers with that much load, so electric mowers typically top out at 13 amps (and therefore 1500 watts). So, if you’re looking for a heavy duty, high performance mower, especially a riding rig, battery-based systems will largely be your only electrified option.

How electric motors work

Standing in the power tool aisle of your local, prepare to be inundated with signage and branding calling out various aspects of the electric motor’s performance like “13 amps of power!” or “70 minutes of runtime!” These are helpful metrics but can be misleading and finding the right ratio of volts, watts and amps in that electric mower is paramount to getting the most out of your lawn care investment.

Lawn mower. Works in the garden. Spring season. Outdoor activity
Elena Gromova via Getty Images

For those of us that slept through that day of high-school science class, a quick analogy of how electricity works: it’s like plumbing. The given rate of water flowing through a pipe — Wattage, the electrical equivalent of gallons per minute — is determined by the ratio between the water pressure (aka Voltage) and the diameter of the pipe that it’s flowing through (the circuit’s Resistance). If you want to increase the wattage (that is boost the flow of electrons or, by this analogy, have more gallons flow per minute) you either have to increase the water pressure (increase the circuit’s voltage) or widen the pipe (i.e. use a higher amperage wire which lowers resistance).

“A good measuring tool for batteries is watt-hours (comparable to the size of a gas tank),” said Guy Dekowski, Outdoor Senior Product Manager at Dewalt. “Battery watt-hours are battery voltage multiplied by amp hours. This is a good signal of how long the mower can potentially run.”

“It’s important to differentiate between voltage and the amount of work a tool can actually do,” Beblowski said, noting that equating voltage to a motor’s overall power is a common misconception. “While voltage is a factor, the true energy capacity of a battery is measured in watt-hours… the watt-hours tell you the power of the tool. So, if you have an 80-volt system and a 2 Ah battery, you’re looking at 160 watt-hours, but if you have a 36-volt system and a 5 Ah battery, the power is actually higher at 180 watt-hours.”

Unfortunately there is no hard and fast rule governing whether high voltage - low amp tools or low voltage - high amp tools are generally superior. “There are pros and cons to both configurations,” said Dekowski. “Generally higher voltage is capable of more power; however there are variables outside of voltage and current to consider. For example, the deck and blade design have an impact on performance.”

“Hills and the thickness of their grass,” are two yard feature factors users should consider, Dekowski continued. “If a user has an incline, a self-propelled mower may suit them best. The thickness of the grass also plays a factor in the runtime of their mower. In thicker grass, the mower will pull more power driving the need for a mower capable of longer runtime.”

What to look for in an electric mower

The size and shape of your lawn will also impact the size and style of the mower that you need. Pay attention to the mower’s deck size, that indicates how wide of a swath it can clear with each pass. You’ll clear your yard in fewer passes with a 21-inch deck than you will with a 14-inch, though the corollary to that is wider mowers tend to be heavier and less maneuverable than their skinnier counterparts.

If you’ve got a compact urban backyard that needs tending, you can more likely get away with just a small push mower such as the 14-inch Worx 40V, 4Ah Power Share. More expansive suburban yards will do well with a larger, perhaps self-propelled model like the 21-inch Stihl 36V, 6Ah RMA 510 or a 20-inch, 12-amp corded Greenworks mower, while rural homeowners might need something a bit more heavy-duty like Toro’s 21-inch 60V, 6Ah Super Recycler or this 42-inch, 75Ah rideable Ryobi.

“Twenty to 21-inch decks are the most popular for a couple reasons,” Dekowski said. “First, it helps keep the weight at a minimum but the deck is still large enough to minimize work. The other benefits are maneuverability and compactness for storage.”

Like any other tool purchase, when shopping for a new mower try to stick to established, reputable brands like Stihl, Stanley Black and Decker (which owns DeWalt), Makita, Ryobi, Toro, Hart, Greenworks and Sun Joe. Pricing is going to range anywhere from around $125 for a compact, corded unit for urban yards up to a couple thousand for a burly zero-turn riding mower.

A young girl in a straw hat is mowing a lawn in the backyard with an orange lawn mower. A woman gardener is trimming grass with the grass cutter. A lawnmower is cutting a lawn on a summer sunny day.
Zhanna Danilova via Getty Images

Regardless of which brand you choose there are a few features that you should look for in a quality electric mower:

  • Deck material: Avoid mowers with plastic decks. Sure you’ll save a few pounds in weight but those made with metal housings will stand up to the elements, kicked stones and general wear and tear for far longer than their plastic counterparts.

  • Comfortable handles: You’re going to be squeezing these things for the better part of an hour as you systematically amble around the yard, better make sure they’re not going to chafe.

  • Big wheels: Getting stuck in a rut is bad enough when it’s just in the metaphorical sense. Make sure it doesn't happen where the neighbors can see by using a mower with 10-inch rear, 8-inch front ball bearing wheels, suggests Beblowski.

  • Height adjustment: As a rule of thumb, you should be taking off about a third of the grass’ total height every time you mow (chopping it to about 2 to 3¾ inches tall). However, weather and solid conditions will impact how fast the blades grow between cuttings so having a mower that can adjust its blade height is key to maintaining a healthy lawn. Look for a model that can span from 1 - 4-inches off the ground.

  • Beware the brush: Electric motors come in two flavors — brush and brushless. The former has a tendency to overheat and stall while the latter generates more power, less heat and requires basically zero maintenance. Guess which you should choose.

  • Bagging options: Your willingness to go back and rake the whole yard vs stop occasionally to empty clippings on to the compost pile is a pretty strong indicator of whether you should spring for a side discharge, mulching or bagging mower.

  • Accessorize: One of the biggest benefits of choosing a battery over a corded mower is that manufacturers designed their battery packs to work in a wide array of power tools and gadgets, from leaf blowers and limb loppers to snowblowers and soil tillers. So if you’re looking to update more than just your mower, maybe take a look and see what other gadgets its batteries are rated for use on.

With the long Memorial Day weekend just around the corner, now is the perfect time to get your yard trimmed up and ready for post-lockdown barbeque parties — as well as defensible for what’s sure to be an unrelenting wildfire season throughout the American West.

Hitting the Books: AI can help us design the greener, cleaner homes of tomorrow

In his new book, SuperSight: What Augmented Reality Means for Our Lives, Our Work, and the Way We Imagine the Future, author David Rose delves into the current state of the art of augmented reality, discussing how the technology is already transforming myriad industries — from food service to medicine to education to construction and architecture — and what it might accomplish in the near future. In the excerpt below, Rose takes a look at two companies leveraging computer vision and generative adversarial networks to reimagine existing properties as 21st century electrified smart homes. 

Supersight front cover
BenBella Books

Excerpted with permission from SuperSight: What Augmented Reality Means for Our Lives, Our Work, and the Way We Imagine the Future by David Rose, published by BenBella Books.


We should all be using solar panels. Period. The average cost for a sustainable energy system has fallen about 70% in the last decade, from $5.86/watt to $1.50/ watt, so it’s a financial no-brainer. For no money down, you can finance an installation and start saving a hundred dollars a month in the first month, and even more if you live in the sun-saturated South.

So why aren’t we? It’s complicated! Math, logistics, taxes, and aesthetics all play a role. Many homeowners fear it will make their houses shiny and reflective like the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz. The process of figuring out the number of panels in what size you need requires learning to “talk solar” in unfamiliar units like kilowatt-hours. And change always comes with risk, whether actual or just perceived.

The pro-climate mission of Boston-based company Energy Sage is to get people to electrify their homes. That means solar panels on your roof, an electric car, a home battery system, automatic blinds, and a smart thermostat that precools or preheats as you drive home. And they’ve partnered with us at Continuum to get potential customers more comfortable with the idea by showing them what an electrified version of their home might look like. Using publicly available Google Home satellite images, we size solar panels, digitally overlay them on clients’ roofs, and then show them what their pad would look like from both the street and their neighbor’s fence. We then take those images and pair them with data from Project Sunroof, a Google project that helps you work out the solar savings potential of your roof. Once you’ve seen the beautiful pictures of your electrified home and realized how much you’re going to save over the years—and you have the visual and financial data in hand—it’s a simple decision to go forward and make that change.

Other home improvement projects will benefit from a similar SuperSight-envisioned approach. Let’s consider landscaping: another complicated, potentially expensive project with its own disorienting language, risks, and desperate need for pre-project visualization.

I met landscape designer Julie Moir-Messervy at an MIT pitch competition and was immediately intrigued with her mission: to give homeowners the confidence and tools they need to change their barren yard into a collection of outdoor living spaces. Her company, HomeOutside, helps people see new possibilities for their backyards using AI and computer vision. Once they’ve visualized their yard in a compelling way, the company makes it easy for them to make that vision a reality by hiring the landscape installer, getting materials delivered, and even helping spread the payments out over time.

Landscaping isn’t just good for property values; greenscapes filter airborne pollutants that trigger asthma, help people recuperate faster from illness, reduce summer temperatures, and even lower crime. Proper native landscaping powers a dynamic system that helps out the bees and birds, who in turn pollinate trees and reseed plants. Southwest shade trees can reduce the need for air-conditioning, and northeast hedges cut down on winter winds—and heating bills. More trees mean more carbon capture—a ton over the lifetime of each tree—as they literally suck the bad stuff we produce out of the air while reducing runoff and erosion.

But “most people don’t do anything in their yards because they don’t know where to start,” Julie told me. “They don’t know which plants to select and how to arrange them, or don’t know how to install a landscape design and care for it over time.” I was so inspired to work on the problem that I accepted a position on her board and got to work.

HomeOutside is training a generative adversarial network (GAN) to automatically compose beautiful and sustainable landscape designs, based on the thousands of designs (think of these as recipes) the firm has developed for clients over the last twenty-plus years. The company uses Google Earth Engine and photogrammetry to start with a 3D view of any address (US only, currently). The GAN architecture then uses one network (the Generator) to make a new design, and another network (the Discriminator) to judge or score the work. These two networks continue their iterative game, generating then scoring, until the discriminator judges that the landscape has a good composition: shade trees, natural pollinators, grass for playing, hardscapes/decks and furniture for gathering places, plant diversity, and so forth.

Companies that sell plants, furniture, lighting, and hardscapes are obviously interested in this type of “imagination engine” technology, because it bridges the conceptual gap between the current state of someone’s garden and what could be—thus motivating many more people to make the dream real. It’s not just great for the homeowners and outdoor retailers, either—it’s great for the environment, too. But what the company’s environmentally focused investors find most captivating about this project is the opportunity to change the landscape of entire neighborhoods at scale. What if we could create a new national park across millions of backyards that stitch together places for birds and bees? Every acre of forest absorbs about 2.5 tons of carbon a year. What if we turned neighborhoods into significant carbon sequestration zones?

I helped Julie and her team develop HomeOutside’s grand plan to proactively redesign seventy million front yards, then work with Home Depot, Lowe’s, Wayfair, IKEA, and garden centers to email their customers a 3D redesign of their yard. Customers simply go outside their home, open their phone, and,through the app’s use of spatial world anchors, walk through an immersive animated landscape superimposed on their current yard. A time-lapse view from sunrise to sunset shows why the edible garden is placed where it is. The winter visualization explains the choice of new fir trees between their yard and the neighbor’s. Spring flowers bloom with a cacophony of color.

Will people be alarmed by the idea of an algorithm proactively redesigning their yard, with new shade trees and naturally pollinating shrubs? It’s not as if your front yard is private now, thanks to Google Street View. And if you are selling your home, you might decide against hiring the landscapers and just choose to post images of HomeOutside’s makeover version instead to maximize your curb appeal.

Once this visioning technology is commonplace, lots of different fields will start taking advantage of it. Home Depot, for example, recently invested in a startup called Hover, which, after digitizing your home in 3D, visualizes and prices new paint, siding, and roofing materials. SuperSight will soon show the actual paint crew up on their ladders, finishing the last few brush strokes, so you get that delightful experience of a job just finished. Volkswagen might put a new Passat in your driveway, complete with the kayaks and mountain bikes it knows you love on top. And the company trying to sell you home and car insurance? They’ll project a disaster scenario: solar panels fallen off, the shade tree hit by lightning, and your new Passat pummeled in a hail storm. Better buy the insurance before you repaint.

How will we interact with these types of immersive designs? With our SuperSight glasses on, will we point and place trees, or paint flowers from a palette of choices, like a 3D version of Photoshop? Will we select each plant from a vast menu of options for infinite control and customization, or will we just tell the system what we like so it learns our preferences, then proposes a single solution we’ll love? I believe in the happy medium: that we’ll largely prefer to see several “expertly composed” options and choose from among them, much as we do today when working with an architect, interior designer, or wedding planner.

Experts are usually so good at what they do that it’s often a mistake to over-specify particular details. For example, you shouldn’t tell an architect that you want a window exactly here, or an interior designer that you want this particular chair in a specific color in this corner. Instead, you express your opinions at a higher level of abstraction (“I want the room to feel more connected to the environment”) or through describing a required function (“We want a vegetable garden”), and let them do the detailed work.

The same expert-guided interaction model will dominate our relationships with SuperSight AIs. For landscaping, we might ask for a more formal French garden with rectilinear layouts and exotic colorful plants, or a curvaceous organic design that prioritizes privacy from our neighbors. We might indicate a preference for an open space for play, or for a filled-in scheme with more space for a productive garden. And as we express these higher-level interests, our 3D landscape design will dynamically recalculate to match our preferences. With SuperSight glasses on, we’ll be able to test our hunches faster by seeing reconfigurations immediately and in context, superimposed on our real home.

The jury is still out on whether HomeOutside will be able to use this technology to convince millions of homeowners to invest significantly in a sustainable landscape. The testing is promising, though; customers are delighted to see their yards reimagined and restaged. In the next five years, HomeOutside plans to use Google Earth and street view imagery in a generative AI tool to automatically redesign tens of millions of landscapes, with sustainable plants, shade trees, natural pollinators, and bird-friendly berries. If it succeeds, it will mean a million homeowners will plant at least 3 million new shade trees, like oaks and beeches, that will each capture 48 pounds of carbon a year as they mature. That’s 14 billion tons of carbon sequestered over those trees’ lifespans.

As one of the HomeOutside advisors summed up, “You are building the equivalent of a new national park—the National Park of us! Visualization tools like HomeOutside can persuade homeowners to reshape the American landscape.”

That’s the ultimate potential power of SuperSight: to help people envision and imagine a future that benefits themselves and the planet.

Hitting the Books: AI can help us design the greener, cleaner homes of tomorrow

In his new book, SuperSight: What Augmented Reality Means for Our Lives, Our Work, and the Way We Imagine the Future, author David Rose delves into the current state of the art of augmented reality, discussing how the technology is already transforming myriad industries — from food service to medicine to education to construction and architecture — and what it might accomplish in the near future. In the excerpt below, Rose takes a look at two companies leveraging computer vision and generative adversarial networks to reimagine existing properties as 21st century electrified smart homes. 

Supersight front cover
BenBella Books

Excerpted with permission from SuperSight: What Augmented Reality Means for Our Lives, Our Work, and the Way We Imagine the Future by David Rose, published by BenBella Books.


We should all be using solar panels. Period. The average cost for a sustainable energy system has fallen about 70% in the last decade, from $5.86/watt to $1.50/ watt, so it’s a financial no-brainer. For no money down, you can finance an installation and start saving a hundred dollars a month in the first month, and even more if you live in the sun-saturated South.

So why aren’t we? It’s complicated! Math, logistics, taxes, and aesthetics all play a role. Many homeowners fear it will make their houses shiny and reflective like the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz. The process of figuring out the number of panels in what size you need requires learning to “talk solar” in unfamiliar units like kilowatt-hours. And change always comes with risk, whether actual or just perceived.

The pro-climate mission of Boston-based company Energy Sage is to get people to electrify their homes. That means solar panels on your roof, an electric car, a home battery system, automatic blinds, and a smart thermostat that precools or preheats as you drive home. And they’ve partnered with us at Continuum to get potential customers more comfortable with the idea by showing them what an electrified version of their home might look like. Using publicly available Google Home satellite images, we size solar panels, digitally overlay them on clients’ roofs, and then show them what their pad would look like from both the street and their neighbor’s fence. We then take those images and pair them with data from Project Sunroof, a Google project that helps you work out the solar savings potential of your roof. Once you’ve seen the beautiful pictures of your electrified home and realized how much you’re going to save over the years—and you have the visual and financial data in hand—it’s a simple decision to go forward and make that change.

Other home improvement projects will benefit from a similar SuperSight-envisioned approach. Let’s consider landscaping: another complicated, potentially expensive project with its own disorienting language, risks, and desperate need for pre-project visualization.

I met landscape designer Julie Moir-Messervy at an MIT pitch competition and was immediately intrigued with her mission: to give homeowners the confidence and tools they need to change their barren yard into a collection of outdoor living spaces. Her company, HomeOutside, helps people see new possibilities for their backyards using AI and computer vision. Once they’ve visualized their yard in a compelling way, the company makes it easy for them to make that vision a reality by hiring the landscape installer, getting materials delivered, and even helping spread the payments out over time.

Landscaping isn’t just good for property values; greenscapes filter airborne pollutants that trigger asthma, help people recuperate faster from illness, reduce summer temperatures, and even lower crime. Proper native landscaping powers a dynamic system that helps out the bees and birds, who in turn pollinate trees and reseed plants. Southwest shade trees can reduce the need for air-conditioning, and northeast hedges cut down on winter winds—and heating bills. More trees mean more carbon capture—a ton over the lifetime of each tree—as they literally suck the bad stuff we produce out of the air while reducing runoff and erosion.

But “most people don’t do anything in their yards because they don’t know where to start,” Julie told me. “They don’t know which plants to select and how to arrange them, or don’t know how to install a landscape design and care for it over time.” I was so inspired to work on the problem that I accepted a position on her board and got to work.

HomeOutside is training a generative adversarial network (GAN) to automatically compose beautiful and sustainable landscape designs, based on the thousands of designs (think of these as recipes) the firm has developed for clients over the last twenty-plus years. The company uses Google Earth Engine and photogrammetry to start with a 3D view of any address (US only, currently). The GAN architecture then uses one network (the Generator) to make a new design, and another network (the Discriminator) to judge or score the work. These two networks continue their iterative game, generating then scoring, until the discriminator judges that the landscape has a good composition: shade trees, natural pollinators, grass for playing, hardscapes/decks and furniture for gathering places, plant diversity, and so forth.

Companies that sell plants, furniture, lighting, and hardscapes are obviously interested in this type of “imagination engine” technology, because it bridges the conceptual gap between the current state of someone’s garden and what could be—thus motivating many more people to make the dream real. It’s not just great for the homeowners and outdoor retailers, either—it’s great for the environment, too. But what the company’s environmentally focused investors find most captivating about this project is the opportunity to change the landscape of entire neighborhoods at scale. What if we could create a new national park across millions of backyards that stitch together places for birds and bees? Every acre of forest absorbs about 2.5 tons of carbon a year. What if we turned neighborhoods into significant carbon sequestration zones?

I helped Julie and her team develop HomeOutside’s grand plan to proactively redesign seventy million front yards, then work with Home Depot, Lowe’s, Wayfair, IKEA, and garden centers to email their customers a 3D redesign of their yard. Customers simply go outside their home, open their phone, and,through the app’s use of spatial world anchors, walk through an immersive animated landscape superimposed on their current yard. A time-lapse view from sunrise to sunset shows why the edible garden is placed where it is. The winter visualization explains the choice of new fir trees between their yard and the neighbor’s. Spring flowers bloom with a cacophony of color.

Will people be alarmed by the idea of an algorithm proactively redesigning their yard, with new shade trees and naturally pollinating shrubs? It’s not as if your front yard is private now, thanks to Google Street View. And if you are selling your home, you might decide against hiring the landscapers and just choose to post images of HomeOutside’s makeover version instead to maximize your curb appeal.

Once this visioning technology is commonplace, lots of different fields will start taking advantage of it. Home Depot, for example, recently invested in a startup called Hover, which, after digitizing your home in 3D, visualizes and prices new paint, siding, and roofing materials. SuperSight will soon show the actual paint crew up on their ladders, finishing the last few brush strokes, so you get that delightful experience of a job just finished. Volkswagen might put a new Passat in your driveway, complete with the kayaks and mountain bikes it knows you love on top. And the company trying to sell you home and car insurance? They’ll project a disaster scenario: solar panels fallen off, the shade tree hit by lightning, and your new Passat pummeled in a hail storm. Better buy the insurance before you repaint.

How will we interact with these types of immersive designs? With our SuperSight glasses on, will we point and place trees, or paint flowers from a palette of choices, like a 3D version of Photoshop? Will we select each plant from a vast menu of options for infinite control and customization, or will we just tell the system what we like so it learns our preferences, then proposes a single solution we’ll love? I believe in the happy medium: that we’ll largely prefer to see several “expertly composed” options and choose from among them, much as we do today when working with an architect, interior designer, or wedding planner.

Experts are usually so good at what they do that it’s often a mistake to over-specify particular details. For example, you shouldn’t tell an architect that you want a window exactly here, or an interior designer that you want this particular chair in a specific color in this corner. Instead, you express your opinions at a higher level of abstraction (“I want the room to feel more connected to the environment”) or through describing a required function (“We want a vegetable garden”), and let them do the detailed work.

The same expert-guided interaction model will dominate our relationships with SuperSight AIs. For landscaping, we might ask for a more formal French garden with rectilinear layouts and exotic colorful plants, or a curvaceous organic design that prioritizes privacy from our neighbors. We might indicate a preference for an open space for play, or for a filled-in scheme with more space for a productive garden. And as we express these higher-level interests, our 3D landscape design will dynamically recalculate to match our preferences. With SuperSight glasses on, we’ll be able to test our hunches faster by seeing reconfigurations immediately and in context, superimposed on our real home.

The jury is still out on whether HomeOutside will be able to use this technology to convince millions of homeowners to invest significantly in a sustainable landscape. The testing is promising, though; customers are delighted to see their yards reimagined and restaged. In the next five years, HomeOutside plans to use Google Earth and street view imagery in a generative AI tool to automatically redesign tens of millions of landscapes, with sustainable plants, shade trees, natural pollinators, and bird-friendly berries. If it succeeds, it will mean a million homeowners will plant at least 3 million new shade trees, like oaks and beeches, that will each capture 48 pounds of carbon a year as they mature. That’s 14 billion tons of carbon sequestered over those trees’ lifespans.

As one of the HomeOutside advisors summed up, “You are building the equivalent of a new national park—the National Park of us! Visualization tools like HomeOutside can persuade homeowners to reshape the American landscape.”

That’s the ultimate potential power of SuperSight: to help people envision and imagine a future that benefits themselves and the planet.

Segway’s robot mower uses GPS to stay on your lawn

Segway is moving into the robot mower market with the Navimow. What sets this model apart from many others is that you don't need to install a boundary wire. Instead, Navimow uses GPS and other sensors to stay within the perimeter of your lawn.

A so-called Exact Fusion Locating System can maintain Navimow's position accurate to within two centimeters, according to Segway. If the GPS signal ever dips, the company says the device's array of sensors and data ensure it will still work. You can tell Navimow where to mow, define the boundaries and instruct it to avoid certain parts of your garden via an app. Segway claims Navimow uses an algorithm to figure out a mowing path so it doesn't have to criss-cross.

Segway says Navimow operates relatively quietly at 54 dB. There are offset blades to trim edges and corners, while the mower gradually cuts grass from above to reach the height you want (between three and six centimeters). The mower can handle 45-degree inclines and it has an IPX6 water resistance rating, according to Segway.

There are safety features too. Segway says Navimow can detect and bypass obstacles, and its blades will stop spinning if pets or kids get too close. If the device detects rain, it'll return to the charging station, but you can turn off the rain sensor and put Navimow to work even when it's wet outside. When the battery gets too low, Navimow will continue cutting from where it left off after it recharges.

Segway Navimow robot mower
Segway

Installing a perimeter wire can take some time and as SlashGear notes, it can damage a garden, since it's usually buried under grass. So Navimow might be a healthier solution for your lawn than other robot mowers. iRobot planned to make a mower with wireless boundary beacons, but it put the device on hold last year amid the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Segway is releasing four versions of its mower. The Navimow H500E is for lawns with an area of up to 5,400 square feet. It costs €1,199 (around $1,425). The other three models have larger batteries to support bigger lawns, along with 4G support and a GPS anti-theft system. The prices top out at €2,499 (around $2,970). However, Segway hasn't announced US launch details yet.

Segway’s robot mower uses GPS to stay on your lawn

Segway is moving into the robot mower market with the Navimow. What sets this model apart from many others is that you don't need to install a boundary wire. Instead, Navimow uses GPS and other sensors to stay within the perimeter of your lawn.

A so-called Exact Fusion Locating System can maintain Navimow's position accurate to within two centimeters, according to Segway. If the GPS signal ever dips, the company says the device's array of sensors and data ensure it will still work. You can tell Navimow where to mow, define the boundaries and instruct it to avoid certain parts of your garden via an app. Segway claims Navimow uses an algorithm to figure out a mowing path so it doesn't have to criss-cross.

Segway says Navimow operates relatively quietly at 54 dB. There are offset blades to trim edges and corners, while the mower gradually cuts grass from above to reach the height you want (between three and six centimeters). The mower can handle 45-degree inclines and it has an IPX6 water resistance rating, according to Segway.

There are safety features too. Segway says Navimow can detect and bypass obstacles, and its blades will stop spinning if pets or kids get too close. If the device detects rain, it'll return to the charging station, but you can turn off the rain sensor and put Navimow to work even when it's wet outside. When the battery gets too low, Navimow will continue cutting from where it left off after it recharges.

Segway Navimow robot mower
Segway

Installing a perimeter wire can take some time and as SlashGear notes, it can damage a garden, since it's usually buried under grass. So Navimow might be a healthier solution for your lawn than other robot mowers. iRobot planned to make a mower with wireless boundary beacons, but it put the device on hold last year amid the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Segway is releasing four versions of its mower. The Navimow H500E is for lawns with an area of up to 5,400 square feet. It costs €1,199 (around $1,425). The other three models have larger batteries to support bigger lawns, along with 4G support and a GPS anti-theft system. The prices top out at €2,499 (around $2,970). However, Segway hasn't announced US launch details yet.