Tropicana Nov-Dec 2020 #133 The Festive Issue

THE GADGETS
Indoor Drone
A flying drone for inside your home? What will
they think of next? The Amazon Ring Always
Home Cam is an autonomous drone-style
camera connected to a series of sensors in the
home, and designed to fly to them and start
recording. If these sensors are triggered by a
potential break-in, the home owner will receive a
smartphone alert that will allow him to watch the
footage live. So, it’s really a security camera that
flies room to room inside your home, shooting
videos that it can stream or upload to the
cloud, providing you with multiple viewpoints
throughout the home without requiring the use
of multiple cameras. When not in use, the drone
flies back to its dock, and recharges.
New Windows Open
Taking video conferencing up a notch, a French
company has developed a tool that allows you
to meet colleagues for stand-up meetings, no
matter where they are in the world. La Vitre is
a communications solution made of a very large
vertical touchscreen equipped with a camera, a
microphone and speaker. Users simply have to
“knock” on the touchscreen to launch a meeting
and remote colleagues appear as a life-size
image right in front of them. The screen is also
interactive so you can write on it using a finger
or stylus.
Peeping Through
Rumour has it that Apple may launch an augmented reality line of smart glasses in the spring of 2021. The glasses are said to look similar
to regular glasses, with both lenses to feature displays that can be interacted with using gestures. Called “Apple Glass”, it will work in
conjunction with the iPhone and early prototypes have supported LiDAR sensors for 3D scanning.
TM | NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2020
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