New shoes with built-in GPS devices will go on sale this month to help track dementia patients who wander off and get lost. Caretakers can download a smartphone app that allows them to track the person wearing the shoes, which could help patients with Alzheimer’s disease stay in their homes and live autonomously for longer periods.
With connectivity and smarter planning, intelligent cars promise to cut congestion, make roads safer and generally improve the whole experience of getting behind the wheel. But nobody said it was all altruistic.
In the collective modern imagination, crop circles are usually attributed to either aliens or a vast human conspiracy; possibly both. Some circle-watchers believe the designs are landing strips, maybe, or some kind of communiqué from outer space. Others argue they’re the result of secret government tests, or perhaps secret codes meant to convey information to satellites and aerial drones.
For all the talk about who makes them, few people discuss how. Do people (or little green men) stomp around willy-nilly until the stalks fall down? Or is something decidedly more high-tech going on? We talked to a circlemaker and a materials physicist to get some answers.
It’s a fair scientific question, according to Richard Taylor, a professor of physics and art at the University of Oregon. He believes circlemakers, as they’re known, are using some advanced technology, from microwaves to GPS, to make their increasingly complicated designs.
Sometimes, you want Big Brother to be watching. In that spirit, South Korean officials are turning to GPS technology to keep their kids safe from criminals, AFP reports.
Starting in October, about 1,200 elementary school children in Anyang City, south of Seoul, will receive matchbox-sized GPS-embedded beepers. The devices can notify authorities of the kids' location and activate surveillance cameras.
Advanced electric drive, autonomous navigation and other technological advances will revolutionize the way we drive. PopSci presents stunning visions for the future of the automobile
By Nick Kaloterakis and Bob Sauls (Illustrations); Research by Jon Alain Guzik
Posted 04.29.2010 at 2:00 pm 8 Comments
In this month's Future of the Car issue, we've envisioned three ambitious concepts for vehicles of the future, based on insights and other concepts from some of the brightest automotive designers and engineers in the industry. You can see the others here.
“Modular mission” flexibility—the ability to rapidly revamp for a new task by simply swapping out gear—is already in the cards for future Navy warships. The same idea is at work in this all-purpose rescue vehicle, which is inspired by the Rescue X concept created for Ford by the German designer Robert Engelmann.
Well, now that T-Mobile's G1 has had plenty of time to rest on its Android laurels, it's apparently coming out season for the rest of the pack. The just-unveiled Archos 5 Internet Tablet mixes one part Archos with one part Android and seasons with some great GPS features to create a multi-function power-player.
Google MyMaps—the new customizable maps feature that lets you add placemarks and routes and save them on a map—is awesome. GPS devices are awesome. How awesome would it be if you could put your MyMaps on your GPS device? Okay, so the title of the post sorta gives away that this extreme awesomeness has been achieved, and the video here is the how-to. The middle man making it possible is a new site quite stupidly named takitwithme, that takes your MyMaps URL and converts it to a Garmin-friendly format using Garmin's new Communicator API, or to a plain GPX file for other devices.
This is a capability I've been begging GPS companies to enable for years: Give us a map-like online interface where we can easily create our own routes and waypoints and transfer them to a GPS device. This would not only make trip planning much easier, but think of all the custom routes and points of interest you could create. If I had a friend headed to Austin, I could send them Mike's Tour of Central Texas BBQ. Businesses could make maps available with all their locations, enthusiast groups could put together maps with all the best bike shops, or sewing circles, or whatever. To me, this capability could make GPS devices (or GPS-capable phones) infinitely more useful on a day-to-day basis. The most frustrating thing about the lack of such a service is that every GPS engineer and PR person I've suggested this to over the years has agreed that it's a great idea. So where is it?!
Takitwithme + Garmin isn't the perfect implementation, to be sure—it only works on certain Garmin devices, and although I haven't tested it yet, I get the feeling it's a little wonky. But I love the direction it's headed. Hopefully, enough people will jump on this that Garmin or one of the other GPS makers will finally make this a standard feature.—Mike Haney
Five amazing, clean technologies that will set us free, in this month's energy-focused issue. Also: how to build a better bomb detector, the robotic toys that are raising your children, a human catapult, the world's smallest arcade, and much more.
