Foxhole is one of my favourite games to read about, even if I don't play it. It's a massively multiplayer World War 2 game, viewed from above, where battlefield logistics matters as much as aiming and flanking. Its developers have just announced a major new update coming next summer, Foxhole: Airborne, which adds planes to the game for the first time.

Planes, in a topdown MMO? It makes a little more sense if you watch the trailer.

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When multiplayer fishing game Webfishing came out last month, it offered a relaxing hangout zone for cats and dogs. Everything revolves around catching, selling, and collecting the fish that gather in the rivers of a small island. It also lets you customise your character with clothing. Mostly simple hats and shorts, but some options let players celebrate their sexuality, such as a rainbow-adorned t-shirts, or titles that hang above your character which simply say "Trans" or "Bi". All this led one player to complain there was no "Straight" title. So, the developer added one. It costs 10 grand.

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Alright everyone, let's put this new comments section through its paces. I want to hear deep and detailed roundups of everything you've been playing over the past two weeks this time! We're gonna make our tech team weep. Here's what we're clicking on this weekend!

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Good news, everyone: I'm off work all this week. I know, I know - a whole seven days with zero Edwin bullshit. What a prospect. Allow yourself a moment to savour the idea. I'm so thrilled for you! The Maw, sadly, does not understand the concept of "time off". Its hunger is as constant as the tide, as unrelenting as my retreating hairline. So before I disappear into a beam of sunshine, here's this week's list of new PC game releases.

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Great God Grove is, in a word, bonkers. I’ve stopped a small community from completing a blood ritual, played the role of matchmaker to a group of lonely hearts that involved organising a date with god, and plastered a statue with paint as part of a revolutionary movement to uplift the power of art. My time with GGG has been a pick n’ mix of colourful escapades, and together with its story of godly woes, striking art style, vacuum-based puzzle-solving, and nightmare-inducing puppet work, I’m now a die-hard LimboLane devotee.

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The Steam Deck OLED – which is like a Steam Deck but better in almost every way – is getting a new, if potentially more smudge-susceptible Limited Edition. A successor to the translucent version that only went on sale in the US and Canada last year, the Steam Deck OLED: Limited Edition White offers both a snowy look and, for those of us outside North America, the chance to actually buy one. It’ll go on sale November 18th, in all the countries that the Steam Deck currently ships in.

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An AI-assisted robot can listen to spoken commands and assemble 3D objects such as chairs and tables out of reusable building blocks

Treat yourself to a Becky Lynch book signing, games with the Dropout stars, Kevin Smith’s Dogma, and so much more!

Or, for the other half of you: Here Is Our Ivy Wolk Explainer.

I’ve been reviewing robot vacuums for more than a decade, and robot mops for just as long. It’s been astonishing how the technology has evolved, from the original iRobot Roomba bouncing off of walls and furniture to robots that use lidar and vision to map your entire house and intelligently keep it clean.

As part of this evolution, cleaning robots have become more and more hands-off, and most of them are now able to empty themselves into occasionally enormous docks with integrated vacuums and debris bags. This means that your robot can vacuum your house, empty itself, recharge, and repeat this process until the dock’s dirt bag fills up.

But this all breaks down when it comes to robots that both vacuum and mop. Mopping, which is a capability that you definitely want if you have hard floors, requires a significant amount of clean water and generates an equally significant amount of dirty water. One approach is to make docks that are even more enormous—large enough to host tanks for clean and dirty water that you have to change out on a weekly basis.

SwitchBot, a company that got its start with a stick-on robotic switch that can make dumb things with switches into smart things, has been doing some clever things in the robotic vacuum space as well, and we’ve been taking a look at the SwitchBot S10, which hooks up to your home plumbing to autonomously manage all of its water needs. And I have to say, it works so well that it feels inevitable: this is the future of home robots.

A Massive Mopping Vacuum

The giant dock can collect debris from the robot for months, and also includes a hot air dryer for the roller mop.Evan Ackerman/IEEE Spectrum

The SwitchBot S10 is a hybrid robotic vacuum and mop that uses a Neato-style lidar system for localization and mapping. It’s also got a camera on the front to help it with obstacle avoidance. The mopping function uses a cloth-covered spinning roller that adds clean water and sucks out dirty water on every rotation. The roller lifts automatically when the robot senses that it’s about to move onto carpet. The S10 comes with a charging dock with an integrated vacuum and dust collection system, and there’s also a heated mop cleaner underneath, which is a nice touch.

I’m not going to spend a lot of time analyzing the S10’s cleaning performance. From what I can tell, it does a totally decent job vacuuming, and the mopping is particularly good thanks to the roller mop that exerts downward pressure on the floor while spinning. Just about any floor cleaning robot is going to do a respectable job with the actual floor cleaning—it’s all the other stuff, like software and interface and ease of use, that have become more important differentiators.

Home Plumbing Integration

The water dock, seen here hooked up to my toilet and sink, exchanges dirty water out of the robot and includes an option to add cleaning fluid.Evan Ackerman/IEEE Spectrum

The S10’s primary differentiator is that it integrates with your home plumbing. It does this through a secondary dock—there’s the big charging dock, which you can put anywhere, and then the much smaller water dock, which is small enough to slide underneath an average toe-kick in a kitchen.

The dock includes a pumping system that accesses clean water through a pressurized water line, and then squirts dirty water out into a drain. The best place to find this combination of fixtures is near a sink with a p-trap, and if this is already beyond the limits of your plumbing knowledge, well, that’s the real challenge with the S10. The S10 is very much not plug-and-play; to install the water dock, you should be comfortable with basic tool use and, more importantly, have some faith in the integrity of your existing plumbing.

My house was built in the early 1960s, which means that a lot of my plumbing consists of old copper with varying degrees of corrosion and mineral infestation, along with slightly younger but somewhat brittle PVC. Installing the clean water line for the dock involves temporarily shutting off the cold water line feeding a sink or a toilet—that is, turning off a valve that may not have been turned for a decade or more. This is risky, and the potential consequences of any uncontrolled water leak are severe, so know where your main water shutoff is before futzing with the dock installation.

To SwitchBot’s credit, the actual water dock installation process was very easy, thanks to a suite of connectors and adapters that come included. I installed my dock in between a toilet and a pedestal sink, with access to the toilet’s water valve for clean water and the sink’s p-trap for dirty water. The water dock is battery powered, and cleverly charges from the robot itself, so it doesn’t need a power outlet. Even so, this one spot was pretty much the only place in my entire house where the water dock could easily go: my other bathrooms have cabinet sinks, which would have meant drilling holes for the water lines, and neither of them had floor space where the dock could live without being kicked all the time. It’s not like the water dock is all that big, but it really needs to be out of the way, and it can be hard to find a compatible space.

Mediocre Mapping

With the dock set up, the next step is mapping. The mapping process with the S10 was a bit finicky. I spent a bunch of time prepping my house—that is, moving as much furniture as possible off of the floor to give the robot the best chance at making a solid map. I know this isn’t something that most people probably do for their robots, but knowing robots like I do, I figure that getting a really good map is worth the hassle in the long run.

The first mapping run completed in about 20 minutes, but the robot got “stuck” on the way back to its dock thanks to a combination of a bit of black carpet and black coffee table legs. I rescued it, but it promptly forgot its map, and I had to start again. The second time, the robot failed to map my kitchen, dining room, laundry room, and one bathroom by not going through a wide open doorway off of the living room. This was confusing, because I could see the unexplored area on the map, and I’m not sure why the robot decided to call it a day rather than investigating that pretty obvious frontier region.

SwitchBot is not terrible at mapping, but it’s definitely sub-par relative to the experiences that I’ve had with older generations of other robots. The S10 also intermittently freaked out on the black patterned carpet that I have: moving very cautiously, spinning in circles, and occasionally stopping completely while complaining about malfunctioning cliff sensors, presumably because my carpet was absorbing all of the infrared from its cliff sensors while it was trying to map.

Black carpet, terror of robots everywhere.Evan Ackerman/IEEE Spectrum

Part of my frustration here is that I feel like I should be able to tell the robot “it’s a black carpet in that spot, you’re fine,” rather than taking such drastic measures as taping over all of the cliff sensors with tin foil, which I’ve had to do on occasion. And let me tell you how overjoyed I was to discover that the S10’s map editor has that exact option. You can also segment rooms by hand, and even position furniture to give the robot a clue on what kind of obstacles to expect. What’s missing is some way of asking the robot to explore a particular area over again, which would have made the initial process a lot easier.

Would a smarter robot be able to figure out all of this stuff on its own? Sure. But robots are dumb, and being able to manually add carpets and furniture and whatnot is an incredibly useful feature, I just wish I could do that during the mapping run somehow instead of having to spend a couple of hours getting that first map to work. Oh well.

How the SwitchBot S10 Cleans

When you ask the S10 to vacuum and mop, it leaves its charging dock and goes to the water dock. Once it docks there, it will extract any dirty water, clean its roller mop, extract the dirty water, wash its filter, and then finally refill itself with clean water before heading off to start mopping. It may do this several times over the course of a cleaning run, depending on how much water you ask it to use, but it’s quite good at managing all of this by itself. If you would like your floor to be extra clean, you can have the robot make two passes over the same area, which it does in a crosshatch pattern. And the app helpfully clues you in to everything that the robot is doing, including real-time position.

The app does and excellent job of showing where the robot has cleaned. You can also add furniture and floor types to help the robot clean better.Evan Ackerman/IEEE Spectrum

I’m pleasantly surprised by my experience with the S10 and the water dock. It was relatively easy to install and works exactly as it should. This is getting very close to the dream for robot vacuums, right? I will never have to worry about clean water tanks or dirty water tanks. The robot can mop every day if I want it to, and I don’t ever have to think about it, short of emptying the charging dock’s dustbin every few months and occasionally doing some basic robot maintenance.

SwitchBot’s Future

Being able to access water on-demand for mopping is pretty great, but the S10’s water dock is about more than that. SwitchBot already has plans for a humidifier and dehumidifier, which can be filled and emptied with the S10 acting as a water shuttle. And the dehumidifier can even pull water out of the air and then the S10 can use that water to mop, which is pretty cool. I can think of two other applications for a water shuttle that are immediately obvious: pets, and plants.

SwitchBot is already planning for more ways of using the S10’s water transporting capability.SwitchBot

What about a water bowl for your pets that you can put anywhere in your house, and it’s always full of fresh water, thanks to a robot that not only tops the water off, but changes it completely? Or a little plant-sized dock that lives on the floor with a tube up to the pot of your leafy friend for some botanical thirst quenching? Heck, I have an entire fleet of robotic gardens that would love to be tended by a mobile water delivery system.

SwitchBot is not the only company to offer plumbing integration for home robots. Narwal and Roborock also have options for plumbing add-on kits to their existing docks, although they seem to be designed more for European or Asian homes where home plumbing tends to be designed a bit differently. And besides the added complication of systems like these, you’ll pay a premium for them: the SwitchBot S10 can cost as much as $1200, although it’s frequently on sale for less. As with all new features for floor care robots, though, you can expect the price to drop precipitously over the next several years as new features become standard, and I hope plumbing integration gets there soon, because I’m sold.

Marina Umaschi Bers has long been at the forefront of technological innovation for kids. In the 2010s, while teaching at Tufts University, in Massachusetts, she codeveloped the ScratchJr programming language and KIBO robotics kits, both intended for young children in STEM programs. Now head of the DevTech research group at Boston College, she continues to design learning technologies that promote computational thinking and cultivate a culture of engineering in kids.

What was the inspiration behind creating ScratchJr and the KIBO robot kits?

Marina Umaschi Bers: We want little kids—as they learn how to read and write, which are traditional literacies—to learn new literacies, such as how to code. To make that happen, we need to create child-friendly interfaces that are developmentally appropriate for their age, so they learn how to express themselves through computer programming.

How has the process of invention changed since you developed these technologies?

Bers: Now, with the maker culture, it’s a lot cheaper and easier to prototype things. And there’s more understanding that kids can be our partners as researchers and user-testers. They are not passive entities but active in expressing their needs and helping develop inventions that fit their goals.

What should people creating new technologies for kids keep in mind?

Bers: Not all kids are the same. You really need to look at the age of the kids. Try to understand developmentally where these children are in terms of their cognitive, social, emotional development. So when you’re designing, you’re designing not just for a user, but you’re designing for a whole human being.

The other thing is that in order to learn, children need to have fun. But they have fun by really being pushed to explore and create and make new things that are personally meaningful. So you need open-ended environments that allow children to explore and express themselves.

The KIBO kits teach kids robotics coding in a playful and screen-free way. KinderLab Robotics

How can coding and learning about robots bring out the inner inventors in kids?

Bers: I use the words “coding playground.” In a playground, children are inventing games all the time. They are inventing situations, they’re doing pretend play, they’re making things. So if we’re thinking of that as a metaphor when children are coding, it’s a platform for them to create, to make characters, to create stories, to make anything they want. In this idea of the coding playground, creativity is welcome—not just “follow what the teacher says” but let children invent their own projects.

What do you hope for in terms of the next generation of technologies for kids?

Bers: I hope we would see a lot more technologies that are outside. Right now, one of our projects is called Smart Playground [a project that will incorporate motors, sensors, and other devices into playgrounds to bolster computational thinking through play]. Children are able to use their bodies and run around and interact with others. It’s kind of getting away from the one-on-one relationship with the screen. Instead, technology is really going to augment the possibilities of people to interact with other people, and use their whole bodies, much of their brains, and their hands. These technologies will allow children to explore a little bit more of what it means to be human and what’s unique about us.

This article appears in the November 2024 print issue as “The Kids’ Inventor.”

Upon further review, analyst Sean Trend may be right: There may be an emerging GOP majority nationwide.

EA FC 25 players can snag some big freebies this week, with EA Sports celebrating the Ballon d'Or in style for all Ultimate Team players with some of the best players around.

PS5 owners can play some great games this month, including a Bethesda hit and more. Here's what's free for PS Plus subscribers for November, with more to be announced.

A pediatrician, author and co-inventor of a low-cost COVID-19 vaccine warns that the anti-vaccine movement has morphed into a political force that threatens the world's gains against deadly childhood infections like measles.

The Tablelands in Gros Morne National Park, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is one of the most unique landscapes in the world — and its orange peridotite rocks could hold the secret to finding life on Mars.

The Massimo Modular E9 is a sleek, smart and comfy tiny home in 409 square feet. Tech expert Kurt “CyberGuy" Knutsson takes a closer look at what the future of housing might look like.

Kurt “CyberGuy" Knutsson discusses how Axiom Space and luxury designer Prada are collaborating on NASA's Artemis III spacesuit design.

A Good Bundle is a rag-tag alliance of a great many indie game devs, from big dogs to folks with one smallish title to their name. It’s a game bundle, sure, but it’s not your typical bundle. There are 151 games (& tools) by 115 devs in here, and it’s all for charity: split 50/50 […]

Weaving tales of magical fruit and vegetables into your children's stories may encourage them to eat healthy snacks

Waiting for each part of a 3D-printed project to finish, taking it out of the printer, and then installing it on location can be tedious for multi-part projects. What if there was a way for your printer to print its creation exactly where you needed it? That’s the promise of MobiPrint, a new 3D printing robot that can move around a room, printing designs directly onto the floor.

MobiPrint, designed by Daniel Campos Zamora at the University of Washington, consists of a modified off-the-shelf 3D printer atop a home vacuum robot. First it autonomously maps its space—be it a room, a hallway, or an entire floor of a house. Users can then choose from a prebuilt library or upload their own design to be printed anywhere in the mapped area. The robot then traverses the room and prints the design.

It’s “a new system that combines robotics and 3D printing that could actually go and print in the real world,” Campos Zamora says. He presented MobiPrint on 15 October at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology.

Campos Zamora and his team started with a Roborock S5 vacuum robot and installed firmware that allowed it to communicate with the open source program Valetudo. Valetudo disconnects personal robots from their manufacturer’s cloud, connecting them to a local server instead. Data collected by the robot, such as environmental mapping, movement tracking, and path planning, can all be observed locally, enabling users to see the robot’s LIDAR-created map.

Campos Zamora built a layer of software that connects the robot’s perception of its environment to the 3D printer’s print commands. The printer, a modified Prusa Mini+, can print on carpet, hardwood, and vinyl, with maximum printing dimensions of 180 by 180 by 65 millimeters. The robot has printed pet food bowls, signage, and accessibility markers as sample objects.

MakeabilityLab/YouTube

Currently, MobiPrint can only “park and print.” The robot base cannot move during printing to make large objects, like a mobility ramp. Printing designs larger than the robot is one of Campos Zamora’s goals in the future. To learn more about the team’s vision for MobiPrint, Campos Zamora answered a few questions from IEEE Spectrum.

What was the inspiration for creating your mobile 3D printer?

Daniel Campos Zamora: My lab is focused on building systems with an eye towards accessibility. One of the things that really inspired this project was looking at the tactile surface indicators that help blind and low vision users find their way around a space. And so we were like, what if we made something that could automatically go and deploy these things? Especially in indoor environments, which are generally a little trickier and change more frequently over time.

We had to step back and build this entirely different thing, using the environment as a design element. We asked: how do you integrate the real world environment into the design process, and then what kind of things can you print out in the world? That’s how this printer was born.

What were some surprising moments in your design process?

Campos Zamora: When I was testing the robot on different surfaces, I was not expecting the 3D printed designs to stick extremely well to the carpet. It stuck way too well. Like, you know, just completely bonded down there.

I think there’s also just a lot of joy in seeing this printer move. When I was doing a demonstration of it at this conference last week, it almost seemed like the robot had a personality. A vacuum robot can seem to have a personality, but this printer can actually make objects in my environment, so I feel a different relationship to the machine.

Where do you hope to take MobiPrint in the future?

Campos Zamora: There’s several directions I think we could go. Instead of controlling the robot remotely, we could have it follow someone around and print accessibility markers along a path they walk. Or we could integrate an AI system that recommends objects be printed in different locations. I also want to explore having the robot remove and recycle the objects it prints.

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From fish smoothies to oral antibiotics, researchers are taking matters into their own hands in a radical effort to save New Zealand’s yellow-eyed penguins

By inoculating greenhouse na’u seedlings with mycorrhizal fungi, researchers hope to boost survival odds when the plants are returned to the wild

The pathogen takes over the brains of its hosts and controls them for its own sinister ends

"If we hold strong together, we will come through this."

A younger rival may have learned how to sabotage those showers by disrupting water flow.

The family of the man shot and killed by Hamilton police on Saturday has identified him as Erixon Kabera — a father of three, known for his kindness and dedication to Hamilton's Rwandan community. 

While the gimmick of multiple frames wears thin fairly quickly, this mixed box of chocolates from Robert Zemeckis rides on Tom Hanks’ quiet charm

Here is a complete list of highlights on Prime Video this week

Muhammad Musthafa’s sophomore directorial ‘Mura’ is a gangster drama that revolves around revenge and friendship starring a bunch of new as well as seasoned performers

Nintendo just announced that Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp (Free) is shutting down on November 28th at 3 PM UTC. Animal …

Continue reading "‘Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp’ Shutting Down This November, New Paid Game Set To Release With Save Transfer"

Beginning today, Apple will have released one new Apple Vision Pro game, one App Store Great, and upgrading an App …

Continue reading "NFL Retro Bowl 25, Monster Train+, and Puzzle Sculpt Release Today on Apple Arcade Alongside Major Game Updates This Week"

Feral Interactive’s tease seemingly was about Total War: Empire from Creative Assembly and SEGA because the developer just announced that …

Continue reading "‘Total War: Empire’ Is Coming to iOS and Android This Fall From Feral Interactive"

In this week’s episode of The TouchArcade Show, we talk about the site’s closure and what that will mean moving …

Continue reading "Is This Goodbye? – The TouchArcade Show #602"

Discover the calming power of a worry stone! Learn how this ancient tool relieves stress, boosts mindfulness, and promotes emotional balance through touch.

There is already a bunch of early Black Friday deals to check out, but if you're on the lookout for a great set of wireless headphones for yourself or a loved one, here's one that's absolutely worth your attention. Sony's WH-1000XM5 headphones have dropped to $298. That's a $102 discount.

This isn't quite the lowest price we've seen for the over-ear XM5s. They dropped to $280 at one point earlier this year. However, the headphones haven't gone back down to that point since, and this is still a great deal.

The XM5s are our pick for the best wireless headphones overall. We've long been recommending Sony's 1000X line and this is the best iteration to date. They earned a score of 95 in our review.

The redesigned headphones are much more comfortable to wear for extended periods than previous models. Sony has improved the active noise cancellation (ANC) feature as well, thanks to the addition of a new chip and four more microphones. We feel that the company's current flagship headphones do a better job of blocking out high frequencies and background noise (and even human voices) than the XM4s.

The XM5s can switch between noise modes depending on your location or activity, and they can pause audio automatically when you start speaking. They deliver better call quality than rival models and, in general, you'll get clear, crisp sound, including punchy bass. You won't need to charge the XM5s too often either, as they have a 30-hour battery life.

Check out all of the latest Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals here.

The popular Shin Megami Tensei video game series is getting a physical board game. A Japanese company called Icrea is behind the effort and is launching a Kickstarter on November 12 to raise funds for the project.

SHIN MEGAMI TENSEI THE BOARD GAME (the company asked us to use all caps) is a “full-scale board game project” complete with 72 “high quality and detailed demon figures.” Collecting demons and adding them to your party is a major part of the game, so these figurines should help with immersion. It’ll also help with getting random demon figurines lost in the couch.

There’s a board with various locations from the franchise and plenty of series-specific cards to rifle through. The company says a game should take anywhere from three to four hours. The title has already generated a fair amount of excitement at both Gen Con and the most recent Tokyo Game Show.

We don’t know exactly when this will be available for purchase. You know how Kickstarter timelines work. There are going to be a bunch of stretch goals, however, should the company reach the initial financial threshold. It’s a Shin Megami Tensei board game with dozens of cool-looking demon figurines. It shouldn’t have any trouble finding financial backers.

For the uninitiated, Shin Megami Tensei first came out in 1992 for the Super Famicom in Japan. There have been plenty of sequels throughout the years. Shin Megami Tensei V came out back in 2021, but has since received a full-featured refresh called Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance.

The Persona series is also a spinoff of the franchise. This leads to a very serious question. Persona board game when? I want to wander around a fake high school and eat ramen with a motley crew of characters.

Black Friday is right around the corner and the deals are already coming in hot. You can pick up a four-pack of Apple AirTags for just $70, as an early Black Friday promotion. This is a discount of 30 percent and represents a record low price.

Apple AirTags easily made our list of the best Bluetooth trackers, particularly for regular iPhone users. We love the vast finding network, which really helps when you misplace a tag. Just think of all of those AirTags, iPhones and other Apple devices out there helping to create this network.

Apple AirTags also offer the ability to tap into the ultra-wideband (UWB) wireless protocol. This creates a sort of game out of finding lost items, as long as the object is within 25 feet of the phone. The screen will display directional arrows and a distance meter so you can zero in on the lost item without having to ring the AirTag.

There are some caveats. These trackers only really work with iPhones, so Android users should buy something else. Also, the ringer only goes for seven seconds at a time, which isn’t always enough time to track something down. Finally, there’s no attachment point for connecting to a keychain or a related item. However, there are plenty of good AirTag accessories to solve that problem.

Check out all of the latest Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals here.

The blackest of Fridays is nearly upon us and companies have already begun rolling out the deals to separate consumers from their bank accounts. Here’s one for a well-regarded and budget-friendly robovac. The iRobot Roomba Essential Vac is on sale for just $140, which is a discount of 44 percent. The regular price is $250.

The Essential Vac features a similar design to the iRobot Roomba 694, which topped our list of the best budget robot vacuums. This one includes a three-stage cleaning system that works on both carpet and hard floors. It features the same smart navigation system as other iRoomba vacuums, so it’ll avoid stairs and work its way around items of furniture.

Despite being a budget-friendly robovac, there are some modern flourishes. The vacuum will automatically return to the charging station when the battery runs low, which is always nice. It also integrates with the Roomba app for setting cleaning schedules and for building a custom map of the home.

The battery life sits at around two hours, which is a decent metric for the price. That should be more than enough time to thoroughly clean a medium-sized home. The major caveat here is that this is a budget robovac, so it doesn’t mop and it doesn’t ship with a large debris canister. Still, the price is right for those curious about eliminating sweeping from that to-do list.

Check out all of the latest Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals here.

While buzzy social media moments, massive celebrity endorsements and viral memes were everywhere during the U.S. election campaign, those who study social media and pop culture say it's likely that smaller social media interactions had a larger impact on the outcome.

THOUSANDS of fans stay up late to watch the English Premier League. But the UK leaving the EU could change all that.

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Several downballot races in the 2024 presidential election will carry implications for climate policy far beyond state lines

Emteq Labs wants eyewear to be the next frontier of wearable health technology.

The Brighton, England-based company introduced today its emotion-sensing eyewear, Sense. The glasses contain nine optical sensors distributed across the rims that detect subtle changes in facial expression with more than 93 percent accuracy when paired with Emteq’s current software. “If your face moves, we can capture it,” says Steen Strand, whose appointment as Emteq’s new CEO was also announced today. With that detailed data, “you can really start to decode all kinds of things.” The continuous data could help people uncover patterns in their behavior and mood, similar to an activity or sleep tracker.

Emteq is now aiming to take its tech out of laboratory settings with real-world applications. The company is currently producing a small number of Sense glasses, and they’ll be available to commercial partners in December.

The announcement comes just weeks after Meta and Snap each unveiled augmented reality glasses that remain in development. These glasses are “far from ready,” says Strand, who led the augmented reality eyewear division while working at Snap from 2018 to 2022. “In the meantime, we can serve up lightweight eyewear that we believe can deliver some really cool health benefits.”

Fly Vision Vectors

While current augmented reality (AR) headsets have large battery packs to power the devices, glasses require a lightweight design. “Every little bit of power, every bit of weight, becomes critically important,” says Strand. The current version of Sense weighs 62 grams, slightly heavier than the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, which weigh in at about 50 grams.

Because of the weight constraints, Emteq couldn’t use the power-hungry cameras typically used in headsets. With cameras, motion is detected by looking at how pixels change between consecutive images. The method is effective, but captures a lot of redundant information and uses more power. The eyewear’s engineers instead opted for optical sensors that efficiently capture vectors when points on the face move due to the underlying muscles. These sensors were inspired by the efficiency of fly vision. “Flies are incredibly efficient at measuring motion,” says Emteq founder and CSO Charles Nduka. “That’s why you can’t swat the bloody things. They have a very high sample rate internally.”

Sense glasses can capture data as often as 6,000 times per second. The vector-based approach also adds a third dimension to a typical camera’s 2D view of pixels in a single plane.

These sensors look for activation of facial muscles, and the area around the eyes is an ideal spot. While it’s easy to suppress or force a smile, the upper half of our face tends to have more involuntary responses, explains Nduka, who also works as a plastic surgeon in the United Kingdom. However, the glasses can also collect information about the mouth by monitoring the cheek muscles that control jaw movements, conveniently located near the lower rim of a pair of glasses. The data collected is then transmitted from the glasses to pass through Emteq’s algorithms in order to translate the vector data into usable information.

In addition to interpreting facial expressions, Sense can be used to track food intake, an application discovered by accident when one of Emteq’s developers was wearing the glasses while eating breakfast. By monitoring jaw movement, the glasses detect when a user chews and how quickly they eat. Meanwhile, a downward-facing camera takes a photo to log the food, and uses a large language model to determine what’s in the photo, effectively making food logging a passive activity. Currently, Emteq is using an instance of OpenAI’s GPT-4 large language model to accomplish this, but the company has plans to create their own algorithm in the future. Other applications, including monitoring physical activity and posture, are also in development.

One Platform, Many Uses

Nduka believes Emteq’s glasses represent a “fundamental technology,” similar to how the accelerometer is used for a host of applications in smartphones, including managing screen orientation, tracking activity, and even revealing infrastructure damage.

Similarly, Emteq has chosen to develop the technology as a general facial data platform for a range of uses. “If we went deep on just one, it means that all the other opportunities that can be helped—especially some of those rarer use cases—they’d all be delayed,” says Nduka. For example, Nduka is passionate about developing a tool to help those with facial paralysis. But a specialized device for those patients would have high unit costs and be unaffordable for the target user. Allowing more companies to use Emteq’s intellectual property and algorithms will bring down cost.

In this buckshot approach, the general target for Sense’s potential use cases is health applications. “If you look at the history of wearables, health has been the primary driver,” says Strand. The same may be true for eyewear, and he says there’s potential for diet and emotional data to be “the next pillar of health” after sleep and physical activity.

How the data is delivered is still to be determined. In some applications, it could be used to provide real-time feedback—for instance, vibrating to remind the user to slow down eating. Or, it could be used by health professionals only to collect a week’s worth of at-home data for patients with mental health conditions, which Nduka notes largely lack objective measures. (As a medical device for treatment of diagnosed conditions, Sense would have to go through a more intensive regulatory process.) While some users are hungry for more data, others may require a “much more gentle, qualitative approach,” says Strand. Emteq plans to work with expert providers to appropriately package information for users.

Interpreting the data must be done with care, says Vivian Genaro Motti, an associate professor at George Mason University who leads the Human-Centric Design Lab. What expressions mean may vary based on cultural and demographic factors, and “we need to take into account that people sometimes respond to emotions in different ways,” Motti says. With little regulation of wearable devices, she says it’s also important to ensure privacy and protect user data. But Motti raises these concerns because there is a promising potential for the device. “If this is widespread, it’s important that we think carefully about the implications.”

Privacy is also a concern to Edward Savonov, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Alabama, who developed a similar device for dietary tracking in his lab. Having a camera mounted on Emteq’s glasses could pose issues, both for the privacy of those around a user and a user’s own personal information. Many people eat in front of their computer or cell phone, so sensitive data may be in view.

For technology like Sense to be adopted, Sazonov says questions about usability and privacy concerns must first be answered. “Eyewear-based technology has potential for a great future—if we get it right.”

Manu Prakash spoke with IEEE Spectrum shortly after returning to Stanford University from a month aboard a research vessel off the coast of California, where he was testing tools to monitor oceanic carbon sequestration. The associate professor conducts fieldwork around the world to better understand the problems he’s working on, as well as the communities that will be using his inventions.

Prakash develops imaging instruments and diagnostic tools, often for use in global health and environmental sciences. His devices typically cost radically less than conventional equipment—he aims for reductions of two or more orders of magnitude. Whether he’s working on pocketable microscopes, mosquito or plankton monitors, or an autonomous malaria diagnostic platform, Prakash always includes cost and access as key aspects of his engineering. He calls this philosophy “frugal science.”

Why should we think about science frugally?

Manu Prakash: To me, when we are trying to ask and solve problems and puzzles, it becomes important: In whose hands are we putting these solutions? A frugal approach to solving the problem is the difference between 1 percent of the population or billions of people having access to that solution.

Lack of access creates these kinds of barriers in people’s minds, where they think they can or cannot approach a kind of problem. It’s important that we as scientists or just citizens of this world create an environment that feels that anybody has a chance to make important inventions and discoveries if they put their heart to it. The entrance to all that is dependent on tools, but those tools are just inaccessible.

How did you first encounter the idea of “frugal science”?

Prakash: I grew up in India and lived with very little access to things. And I got my Ph.D. at MIT. I was thinking about this stark difference in worlds that I had seen and lived in, so when I started my lab, it was almost a commitment to [asking]: What does it mean when we make access one of the critical dimensions of exploration? So, I think a lot of the work I do is primarily driven by curiosity, but access brings another layer of intellectual curiosity.

How do you identify a problem that might benefit from frugal science?

Prakash: Frankly, it’s hard to find a problem that would not benefit from access. The question to ask is “Where are the neglected problems that we as a society have failed to tackle?” We do a lot of work in diagnostics. A lot [of our solutions] beat the conventional methods that are neither cost effective nor any good. It’s not about cutting corners; it’s about deeply understanding the problem—better solutions at a fraction of the cost. It does require invention. For that order of magnitude change, you really have to start fresh.

Where does your involvement with an invention end?

Prakash: Inventions are part of our soul. Your involvement never ends. I just designed the 415th version of Foldscope [a low-cost “origami” microscope]. People only know it as version 3. We created Foldscope a long time ago; then I realized that nobody was going to provide access to it. So we went back and invented the manufacturing process for Foldscope to scale it. We made the first 100,000 Foldscopes in the lab, which led to millions of Foldscopes being deployed.

So it’s continuous. If people are scared of this, they should never invent anything [laughs], because once you invent something, it’s a lifelong project. You don’t put it aside; the project doesn’t put you aside. You can try to, but that’s not really possible if your heart is in it. You always see problems. Nothing is ever perfect. That can be ever consuming. It’s hard. I don’t want to minimize this process in any way or form.

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