Author: Nicholas Echevarria

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Connected Objects Sports

The Strike connected baseball helps you close out more games

When baseball teams and television networks want to record how fast a pitcher throws a baseball, sophisticated — and expensive — equipment is used. With the advent of the connected technologies over the past few years, though, that isn’t necessary anymore. Now, the ability to track and record pitches can be found in the ball itself with the Strike connected baseball.

With its embedded Bluetooth antenna and gyroscope, the Strike is able to accurately track ball speed, spin and rotational axis for the kind of in-depth information any serious pitcher or organization would want to have to make real improvements. Jingletek, the company behind Strike, was able to create a product with this level of functionality while still retaining the baseball’s classic form and weight, a key factor in its possible adoption by baseball players, organizations and possibly the majors.

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Video Games

The RetroEngine Sigma is a door to generations of classic gaming

The debacle of the sold-out and impossible-to-find NES Classic Edition illuminates how popular retro gaming truly is. Of course, a Nintendo-branded retro gaming product is bound to fly off the shelves, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a wide swath of other, popular systems people would love to spend an afternoon with.

Enter the RetroEngine Sigma. The team at Doyodo understands the desire for a proper retro gaming experience and wants to expand the Nintendo Classic’s target demographic from the mainstream to everyone else. To do so, the petite, palm-sized console sports an HDMI connection along with the possibility of two or more USB controllers to play the 15 pre-installed games its comes with or titles from over two dozen gaming systems from the past 40 years.

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Smart Home

With the Slide, home curtains slide into the 21st Century

At this point, many parts of the home can be retrofitted with connected components in order to bring them into the 21st century. The result? Dumb lamps that can be cloud controlled and front doors with the ability to track everyone who comes in and out of the home. Curtains, however, have been a bit of a challenge since they come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, forcing apartment dwellers and homeowners to buy brand new units to satisfy their connected needs.

The Slide is one of the few devices designed as a smart retrofit system for curtains and blinds. With it, users can use a companion smartphone app to control single or multiple curtains, adjust how far they should open and even set timers and schedules. IFTTT integration takes the Slide’s functionality up a notch, letting users take advantage of other aspiring smart home mainstays like the Flic and Amazon’s Echo.

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Apparel Connected Objects

Vixole LED-equipped kicks lets everyone know how fresh you are

For more than three decades now, sneakers have been a cultural symbol of the urban lifestyle, and in 2016 have never been as popular. Now, as slow on the uptick as ever, high fashion companies and their devotees are adopting them in the interest of the prevailing trend of the day — making it the perfect time for something like Vixole to come along and capitalize.

The Vixole is a connected sneaker equipped with an LED screen to show off either custom or pre-made designs with the help of a companion smartphone app. It comes in three different versions draped in a black or white colorway. The Vixole Basic comes with a monochrome LED screen, access to the design marketplace to download visuals, wireless charging capabilities, and eight-hour battery life. The Vixole Plus comes with everything the Basic does and tacks on a wide range of sensors that work with its open API for virtual reality integration using the sneaker’s built-in motion detection.

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Connected Objects Imaging

Koova2 guards your home or business with canister-like vigilance

The purveyors of connected smart home objects are convinced that smart home robots are the next big thing. For years now, they’ve infiltrated and surveilled — and in some cases, charmed — homeowners into adding their capabilities to the home. Amaryllo International’s Koova 2 is the sequel to the original while updating it with a few key additions.

This new Koova2 doesn’t stray too far from the original’s small, portable form factor — going as far as still claiming it to be the world’s smallest. It packs a 240° viewing range with auto-tracking capabilities augmented with facial recognition and motion sensors for security purposes, along with a wide array of notifications and alerts to keep users in the know about their abode at all times. Now, two-way audio is added to interact with family and friends or scare off would-be burglars, while activity/block zones let user mark areas to receive/not receive alerts for. Koova2 also offers cloud storage for the video it continuously records, offering users 10-second video notifications and three-second video alerts that are all archived for review anytime.

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Connected Objects Health and Wellness

The Brise connected air purifier produces refreshing, clean breezes in the abode

Current apartments and homes are being built in a manner that makes them more sealed in an effort to reduce energy consumption. This has the unfortunate side effect of amplifying already harmful, polluted air, leading to recent studies by the World Health Organization (WHO) to conclude that indoor pollution is 5x worse than outdoor pollution.

This is why products like Brise are important right now. The combination of a capable air purifier and artificial intelligence makes it a worthy addition to any smart home. The Brise works with its companion smartphone app to analyzing user routines and preferences along with room types and sizes to adjust filtration performance accordingly. This means that Brise will work differently in a kitchen than in a painter’s studio, for instance.

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Connected Objects Toys

DR!FT model cars brings Gran Turismo out of the screen and into your life

While motorsport is one of the most popular sports in the world, it doesn’t have much of a fanbase here in the US outside of NASCAR. Unrealistic portrayals of race cars as children aid the problem, with most model cars sold unable to capture the nuances of full-size racing vehicles. Change that, and the potential for a more engaged audience skyrockets.

Straight out of the home of heavyweights like BMW and Porsche, the DR!FT model race cars are the first toys to accurately replicate the many subtleties of motorsport-ready sports cars, all without any specialized track necessary. This means that DR!FT model cars perform with real racing dynamics that are true-to-scale, allowing them to accelerate realistically, reach a believable top speed, brake authentically, and even drift. It even comes complete with different engine sounds along with simulated brake and tire sounds. 

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Connected Objects

The Pup pocket scanner uploads documents where you need them most

Everyone has a problem with organization to some degree, which is why so many companies continually introduce new and novel solutions to help. Usually, documents pose the biggest challenge because not only do they need be efficiently organized, doing so must be a habit. If not, it’ll quickly become a mess no one wants to sort through at the end of the year.

The Pup is a connected pocket scanner that’s small enough to be used no matter where you are. The wireless device can scan most size documents — whether they’re their own sheets or part of a book — automatically crop, rotate, format and fix curves among other functionality, and then upload it to a program of the user’s choosing like Word or Excel. It even connects to social networks as well so that parent can share a child’s newest piece of art, for example. Pup features laser guides to grab the perfect scan, single button control for ease of use, has its own lighting, can scan in color or in black/white, and has enough onboard storage to store 10,000 pages.

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Connected Objects Fitness

Stealth core trainer makes your gut incognito

As annoying as it might be to hear, simply doing exercise isn’t enough. It’s also necessary to introduce variety into exercise routines, or else long-term physical change will be hard to achieve. Generally speaking, doing so is difficult but can be done. Effectively targeting the 29 different core muscles and keeping them on their toes, though, is a different challenge altogether. This is exactly what makes Stealth so appealing.

Stealth offers users a quick and effective core workout in under three minutes. They simply need to download the Stealth app on their smartphone, place it inside the Stealth, choose their workout, get into the plank position, and exercise their core. The game itself challenges users to follow and destroy different colored circles by bending, twisting and angling themselves in different directions — a ruse to distract them from the pain they’ll definitely be feeling.

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Connected Objects Music

Vinci is a smart headphone with a screen on the side

Apple’s removal of the headphone jack from the iPhone 7 was a truly divisive move. Some see it a company prescient about the longer-term industry trends while others label it a cash grab. No matter what it really is, consumers are left to figure out what to do next. With the Vinci smart headphones, the choice is pretty easy.

The Vinci over the ear headphone is an internet-connected pair of Hi-Fi cans embedded with an AI-powered personal assistant (ala Amazon’s Alexa) to help facilitate a wide array of functionality. Users can interact with Vinci using taps and swipes on either of its colorful screens on either side or by simply using voice. Musically, Vinci’s AI continually learns about user preferences to recommend new songs, fine tune old playlists, or add a soundtrack to a workout session based on heart rate and pace. No matter the situation, though, the Vinci produces high-quality, immersive 3D sound and pairs it with 28 db of intelligent active noise canceling that still lets in important sounds to keep users safe and aware.

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