It may be based on apparently familiar technology, but Y Combinator startup Matterport reckons it’s putting its 3D scanning technology, which it claims can scan real environments into 3D digital representations 20 times faster than the competition, to innovative use.
So, you’re standing in the security line at the airport when you realize that bottle of duty-free Jameson is still in your bag. Also, you just cracked the seal on some not-so-easily-chuggable Kombucha. And that priced-gouged bottle of sunscreen you bought in Tulum? It was almost $10 and it’s still nearly full.
Normally, these liquid-filled bottles would need to be surrendered to the trash can held by a smirking TSA agent. But have no fear frequent fliers, new screening methods may soon be clear for take off.
When Microsoft was developing its Kinect 3D sensor, a critical task was to calibrate its algorithms to rapidly and accurately recognize parts of the human body, especially hands, to make sure the device would work in any home, with any age group, any clothing, and any kind of background object. Using a computer-based approach to do the calibration had limitations, because computers would sometimes fail to identify a human hand in a Kinect-generated image, or would “see” a hand where none existed. So Microsoft is said to have turned to humans for help, crowdsourcing the image-tagging job using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, the online service where people get paid for performing relatively simple tasks that computers are not good at. As a result the Kinect now knows what all (or most) hands look like. Great!
For the first time, the Northwestern researchers used the P300 testing in a mock terrorism scenario in which the subjects are planning, rather than perpetrating, a crime. The P300 brain waves were measured by electrodes attached to the scalp of the make-believe “persons of interest” in the lab.
