Around the world in 7 days #5
Dinesh Hosamani
Global Product Support Engineer @ ASM | Master's Degree, Particle Accelerators
A new 3D printed AR display could be game changer
The world's first flexible, transparent augmented reality (AR) display screen using 3D printing and low-cost materials has been created by researchers at the University of Melbourne, KDH Design Corporation and the Melbourne Centre for Nanofabrication (MCN). This is set to advance how AR is used across a wide range of applications.
Because we use glass substrate , it becomes difficult to use it at different angles of light source and not to mention all the steps such as photomasking, lamination, cutting, or etching microstructure patterns that are involved adding to cost and low yeild. The team has successfully developed by 3D printing a transparent AR display screen using low-cost, optical-quality polymer and plastic – a first-of-its-kind achievement in the field of AR displays.
My take : This is a great improvement in field of 3D-Manufacturing and AR display as it has many application, though bike helmet and AR has is always limited by battery , since you don't have much space to keep it in helmet and safety concerns thereof. Gaming, military, and field services can leverage this technology.
Meta unveils its first custom AI chip
Meta on Thursday unveiled its first custom-designed computer chip tailored especially for processing artificial intelligence programs, called the Meta Training and Inference Accelerator, or "MTIA. The chip, consisting of a mesh of blocks of circuits that operate in parallel, runs software that optimizes programs using Meta's PyTorch open-source developer framework.
Meta said, "with an eye on future AI-related use cases, we believe that dedicated hardware is the best solution in terms of compute power and efficiency" for video. The company noted that people spend half their time on Facebook watching video, with over four billion video views per day.
My Take : The present Meta chip is 7nm TSMC processor at 25W TDP. They are just tring to secure themselves with a basic AI chip in case the NVIDIA raises its price. They want to understand what it takes to build a chip, eventually NVIDIA will dominate the space.
Tesla demonstrates Optimus robots’ new skills
During Tesla's annual shareholder meeting, the company showed a video that demonstrates how the capabilities of Optimus humanoid robots have been improved.
Tesla is also training the robot to move its arms in complex trajectories and handle soft or fragile objects with complex shapes. For example, the video shows how the robot carefully touches the egg without breaking it.
My Take : This looks an attempt to built robot which could perform highly complex assembly procedure with greater finesse and repeatability. I would assume that these will just stick with the factory floor functions so that manufacturing can be optimized and be cost efficient in long run.
Wendy's to have robots deliver food orders through tunnels.
Wendy’s is piloting a robot-powered “underground delivery system” for online order pickups. The system, which will be built through a partnership with Pipedream, will have robots travel through the tunnel to a "Instant Pickup portals" of the online delivery.
When a customer arrives at a space, they talk to the restaurant crew through the Instant Pickup portal’s speaker to confirm their order. From there, an autonomous robot will traverse a set of tunnels to deliver the food to the customer’s parking space. Wendy’s says Pipedream’s system uses “temperature-controlled delivery technology” that should help prevent food from getting cold (or too warm) while in transit and keeps customers from having to go inside or wait at a drive-thru to grab their food.
My take: This looks like a solution to avoid the real estate cost and putting up employees at drive throughs, over the time they want to have few stores with much bigger capacity and have these tunnel branch out to various part of the city. This might also eliminate the cost factor associated with delivery and the inefficiencies with it. But the difference being that home delivery and drive in maybe as they go ahead they would just have bigger tunnels , have o wait and watch but nice idea though.
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Amazon’s 100 drone deliveries puts Prime Air far behind Alphabet’s Wing and Walmart partner Zipline.
Nearly a decade after announcing grand plans for 30-minute drone delivery of items up to 5 pounds, Amazon told CNBC it’s now completed just 100 deliveries in two small U.S. markets.
“While the FAA broadened Prime Air’s authority to conduct drone deliveries to include sites in California and Texas, the phased process for expanding our service areas is taking longer than we anticipated,” said Av Zammit, an Amazon spokesperson.
“It’s actually not that hard to deliver a package via drone,” Carbon , a former Boeing executive hired for Prime air said at an Amazon event in November. “It’s a very different problem space to design, build, certify and operate an autonomous safety-critical system that can operate over densely populated environments within the national airspace
My Take : If not for the date today deliveries , drone deliveries are good solution for emergency like blood transfer etc. to hospitals, Ports , farming etc. Eventually a zone can be identified where the deliveries can be made between cities say a warehouse in farthest part of Bangalore , Kengeri to a warehouse in Mysore landing in 30 mins and the door to door delivery comes to 1 hour its still a good business , this is still faster, greener and economical than driving a mini truck between two cities. Eventually once the public acceptance in crease these can also be a good intra city delivery.
Apple TV is finally giving users the ability to watch multiple live sports games at once.
The feature will come in handy if two of your favorite teams are playing at the same time and you don’t want to keep flipping back and forth between games. Once you choose the games you want to watch, Apple will let you customize your viewing layout with multiple options, allowing you to enlarge one match while keeping the others small. You can also opt to watch two to four games in a split-screen layout, as well as toggle audio preferences. Apple says MLS 360 and MLB Big Inning support multi-view, too
The launch of Multiview comes packaged within tvOS 16.5, which launched alongside the release of iOS 16.5 that adds a Sports tab in Apple News.
My take : Apple has been aggressively trying to cover the streaming rights of various sports , it eventually want to have a continues stream of revenue via services , it can bundle up its cloud, music, news subscription into a one and can beat many competitors. Eventually give discount to the customers who have money in their apple account , well possible.
Hydrogen-powered motorcycle could be a reality now.
Honda, Kawasaki, Suzuki and Yamaha are following up on their agreement to standardize EV motorcycle batteries with a mad science experiment to develop hydrogen-powered motorcycles. They have received approval from the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry to form a technological research association called HySE (Hydrogen Small mobility & Engine technology) for developing hydrogen-powered engines for small mobility.*
Main research and development areas, and the role of each company:
1.Research on hydrogen-powered engines: Research on the model-based development of hydrogen-powered engines (Honda).Element study on functionality, performance, and reliability of the hydrogen-powered engines (Suzuki)Hands-on research using real hydrogen-powered engines on their functionality, performance, and reliability (Yamaha Motor, Kawasaki Motors)
2.Study on hydrogen refueling system: Studying the requirements for a hydrogen refueling system and hydrogen tanks for small mobility (Yamaha)
3.Study on fuel supply system: Studying the auxiliary equipment required for a fuel supply system and tanks, and the equipment installed between the fuel tank and the injector (Kawasaki Motors)
These are not, however, hydrogen fuel cell EVs we’re talking about. They are more alike to the hydrogen-powered Toyota Corolla Sport, which means any possible bikes the project yields will have engines that are more or less an adaptation of current gasoline-powered engines. Yamaha’s head of R and D suggests that, if successful, this project could become the culmination of the bike makers’ work developing internal combustion engines.
My take : Before thinking from the feasibility point of view such projects needs to be viewed from a need for self sufficiency. Two wheelers are excellent means for last mile connectivity and hence decarbonizing them will help in future. Say if you can offset some small portion of your logistics from fossil its not bad. Say all your motorcycles are now fossil free that would still mean a good savings on your import. Of course, first we need to tackle around how to make small hydrogen engines commercially viable