Categories
Imaging Smart Home

Spot is a low-cost, feature-rich camera for the connected home

Home security cameras have a bit of a reputation of lacking the kinds of features worthy of the excessive prices they’ve demanded. Seeing an opportunity, there have been a rash of companies looking to make better money by advertising a better product. iSmartAlarm is hoping their version of a lower cost yet versatile smart home camera will strike a chord with consumers looking for a better value.

Spot has all the expected features for a product in this category: HD-resolution video, night vision, sound and motion detection, push notifications, and both cloud and local storage supporting up to a 64GB micro SD card. The company tries to set its product apart in two ways.

Categories
Sleep

With Sleepion, your rest is like sleeping on clouds

Humans spend a third of their lives sleeping, and there’s pretty much nothing that can be done about it. It’s essential to everyday functioning, and a lack quality, restful sleep key contributes to lack of energy and ailments from high blood pressure to stroke.

Cheero USA Inc created the Sleepion to help people get the kind of sleep necessary to live healthier lives. The compact device is home in the bedroom, where it focuses on Stage 3 and Stage 4 slow wave sleep by stimulating the senses to facilitate a higher quality rest.

Categories
Cell Phone Accessories

ViKC projects a simpler way to text on your smartphone

Typing on a smartphone is notoriously difficult -– and also uncomfortable — for many people. Whether somebody is texting, emailing or filling out an online registration form, the phone’s buttons tend to be too darn small to type anything –- especially complete sentences -– without making at least a few mistakes.

The Virtual Keyboard Cover (ViKC) is designed to address that issue. It attaches to a smartphone like any other cover, but features a red laser diode on top that aims down onto a flat surface and can be powered on to project a virtual LED keyboard onto a table or any other flat, non-reflective work surface.

It works in conjunction with an Android and iOS app that recognizes what the user is typing and transfers it to the screen. ViKC ships in July at the expected price of about $107. Its makers are hoping to raise $162,634 by Jan. 17.

Some consumers –- especially middle-aged ones — may want to give ViKC a try. Younger smartphone users tend to have little problem typing on their mobile devices for some reason, while many older consumers are too technophobic to use a smartphone to begin with. This is a variation on the projection keyboards that have been around for a long time and have tended to not work very well. A further negative is that, for now anyway, ViKC only works with an iPhone 5, 5S, 6, 6S, 6 Plus or Samsung Galaxy S5 or S6.

Categories
Connected Objects

Alger prevents a stranded smartphone, uses tags for everything else

Despite the advanced, technologically-connected aspects of everyday life, simple yet small annoyances still abound. Some examples of these types of annoyances range from forgetting to lock the door to locking the door and forgetting keys inside altogether. The beauty of crowdfunding, though, means there’s most likely a solution for life’s tiny bothers.

Alger is billed as the world’s first preventative anti-loss system, improving on the overdone item finder category by informing users of things left behind as they leave their front door. Without any additional accessories, the Alger’s Bluetooth door attachment communicates with a smartphone’s motion sensor to keep users from leaving it at home. By combining the door attachment with more traditional tags, users can keep tabs on other important things as well, from keys to pets.

Categories
Personal Transportation

Innovation is reduced to a Single Foot Skate

It seems like every day in the crowdfunding world brings yet another way to shave down the commute or simply get around in a new and novel way. And while there are many respectable alternatives (FIT and the Freedom Trike both come to mind), some aim to create a completely new experience — sometimes pushing the boundaries a little too far.

The Single Foot Skate (SFS) is exactly what it says it is: a skate designed to be used with one foot. Although it is admittedly light, easy to carry, and potentially somewhat easier to use, it certainly looks as awkward as it sounds. It also incredibly DIY-looking and is far from any sort of a finished product. The SFS is going for $180 and is expected by June 2016. The campaign is looking for $3,150 by January 18th, 2016 to begin the process of injection molding the product.

The product seems half-baked. Subtracting a skate from the pair does not a good idea make. On the plus side, it’s made from completely recycled materials, so kudos to the eco-friendly nature of the product. The equally silly Walk Wings are a better idea as at least they offer retractable wheels on a entire set of skates, but at the point you might as well risk catching fire on a hoverboard

Categories
Connected Objects

Map your face to better skin with the MAPO connected face mask

The largest organ the human body has — its skin — is probably the most misunderstood. While it’s certainly tough, over time it puts up with stresses ranging from pollution to excessive sun, requiring constant care to make sure it stays in top shape. This is doubly true for the face. Going to the dermatologist routinely, though, is a difficult proposition given a lack time and, in many cases, the money needed.

Designed to maintain optimal levels of water content, the MAPO connected beauty mask is equipped with Bluetooth LE and interfaces with a companion app to make it easier to stay on top of skin health. Within the mask are flexible electronics featuring a four-electrode array that work together to analyze skin characteristics in less than one minute. Over time, these analyses form a profile that is compared to others in the MAPO community to offer helpful, crowdsourced solutions to particular problems.

Categories
Imaging Sensors/IoT

Flail your arms to control apps in-home with ZKOO gesture camera

Leap Motion made a splash a few years ago when it debuted a fascinating add-on product for Macs and PCs that allowed anyone to interface with their devices via gestures. But since it only worked for Macs and PC, the number of situations in which it was truly useful was limited.

Exvision’s ZKOO gesture-tracking camera is touted as the most advanced in the world, but truth be told it doesn’t do much more the Leap Motion can. Using a camera that tracks motion at 100 frames per second it is able to deliver a gesture-tracking experience that boast low latency for both PCs and Android devices, working with hundreds of existing apps out of the box.

Categories
Displays

360Mini projector shows your vistas wherever you look

An increasing number of cameras, including PanoCam3D, enable 360-degree shooting. But there are only a limited number of display devices that allow such still photos and videos to be seen the way they were shot.

360Mini is a media projector that can display 360-degree images and videos the same way they were shot: as a seamless 360-degree panorama. The three-foot-tall projector can be accessed via Wi-Fi to edit and upload data, and mobile devices can be used to navigate through the uploaded content or to control the projector, according to its Kickstarter campaign.

The projector ships in July. Future pricing isn’t provided by the campaign, but early bird backers can get one at pricing that starts at about $978. Its makers are hoping to raise $92,356 by Jan. 24.

360Mini is a clever concept and it’s likely going to be appealing to many people who have shot 360-degree photos or video. But it remains to be seen how popular 360-degree imaging is going to be and how often even fans of the technology are going to want to view such images.

Categories
Connected Objects Imaging

Pinout decks out your camera with enhanced features

Camera accessories are among the most popular devices on crowdfunding sites, but many of them are focused on enhancing a single bit of functionality.

patent-claimedPinout is a small device that connects to DSLR cameras and provides them with enhancements including remote shutter release, geotagging, time lapse, high dynamic range (HDR) and loss prevention. It uses Bluetooth LE technology and works in conjunction with an app for Android and iOS mobile devices.

Categories
Connected Objects Organization

QUICKCUBE combines smart design and touch of tech for more orderly stuff

Fully functional yet aesthetically beautiful storage solutions are few and far between. Usually, those horrid looking blue tubs or even spare cardboard boxes are used to put away extra things in the home. For the Boland family, these weren’t good enough. Thus, the QUICKCUBE was born.

The QUICKCUBE’s design is based solely on physics. While its nigh-transparent plastic walls may look weak, they’re made from a plastic that is three times stronger than the standard, supporting 450lbs in weight. This, along with its honeycombed lids for even more strength, all comes together to form an incredibly strong and perfectly stackable set of storage solutions for anywhere in the home.