WOW Tech

Rumors that Apple is working on a major car project got a huge boost following a report that claims the iPhone maker has talked to owners of a massive car-testing site about using the facility.

According to documents obtained by the Guardian through a public records act request, Apple engineer Frank Fearon wrote to officials at GoMentum Station, a former military facility with 20 miles of drivable roads, earlier this year to find out about scheduling time at the test track.

Read More: Apple Rumors: The Likely, the Unlikely, and the Just Plain Absurd

“We would … like to get an understanding of timing and availability for the space, and how we would need to coordinate around other parties who would be using [it],” Fearon wrote to GoMentum Station officials, according to the Guardian.

GoMentum Station is a sprawling 5,000-acre former Navy weapons station near Concord, Calif. The company’s website says it is the largest secure test facility in the world. Honda has already used the facility to test autonomous vehicles.

Reports are just that

But contacting a test-driving facility doesn’t necessarily mean Apple is working on a car — autonomous, electric, or otherwise. The documents cited in the story don’t actually mention a vehicle.

Sure, Apple could be testing a self-driving and/or electric car. Or it could be testing some kind of technology that works in self-driving cars from other vendors. It could also be interested in researching some other form of connected car functionality. All of those could be tested at GoMentum Station.

However, the Guardian article isn’t an isolated report. It’s just the latest in a long line of reports and rumors surrounding a potential Apple car.

In February, the Financial Times reported that Apple was snatching up experts from the automotive industry to work in a secret lab in Silicon Valley.

That same month, the Wall Street Journal reported that Apple was gearing up to take on Tesla in the electric-car market. That report indicated that Apple had dubbed its effort Project Titan.

It’s known that Apple’s Jony Ive is a big automotive fan who has commented on the car market at length in the past. And the late Steve Jobs specifically mentioned that he wanted Apple to get into the car space.

Using Mail on your iPad.
All the best functionality of the desktop app on your mobile device.
The iOS 6 update saw some excellent improvements to the Mail app ­notably the ability to format text. Usefully, Mail takes advantage of the i0S notifications system, so you can get banner notifications or fuller previews on your iPad’s lock screen. One key tip is that, if you receive a Mail notification, you can swipe the notification to unlock your iPad — you don’t have to use the standard unlock slider.

Evernote today updated its app with new features to make it easier for users to organize their notes, including Shortcuts, related notes and Skitch integration.
Shortcuts allows users to "shortcut" important or favorite notes, notebooks and tags so they're available for easy access. These Shortcuts also sync across devices and versions of Evernote so that users can access them everywhere. Previously, the app had a "Favorite" section that was limited strictly to notes.
The company has also integrated Skitch support into the app, so if users have Skitch installed on their phone they can annotate their images and notes with Skitch and they'll show up in Evernote.
Premium Evernote users get a couple new features too, with the ability to annotate PDF documents with Skitch as well as related notes. With related notes, when a new note is started, Evernote will look through past notes to recommend additional notes that may be helpful.

You're unlikely to see Apple’s rumored internet TV service at Monday’s WWDC keynote, and now The New York Times is reporting there won’t be any new Apple TV hardware on display, either. In a report mostly focused on Apple Watch and Apple’s plan to launch a proper SDK for its wearable, the Times reveals that Apple had initially aimed to unveil a new set-top box at its annual developers conference. In fact, that was still the plan “as recently as mid-May.” The new Apple TV is said to come with an “improved” remote control and will finally allow Apple’s developers to create apps for the television screen. But in the final run up to WWDC, Apple has apparently decided the product is not yet “ready for prime time” and scrapped the big reveal.

Another problem is content. Apple’s internet TV service, a competitor to Sling TV and other over-the-top services, is said to be far from completion. The company and content owners are still attempting to negotiate “price, rights and technology issues,” but as Recode reported earlier this week, Apple just isn’t there yet. Another challenge that’s factored into the delay is Apple’s desire to include live, local broadcast networks on a nationwide scale. The company’s latest goal is to launch the internet TV offering later this year or in 2016. At that point, hopefully the new Apple TV box will be ready to go along with it.

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For Easton LaChappelle, a 19-year-old from Colorado in the United States (U.S.), the difficulty with robotics has never been the technology itself - something he says he managed to master in a matter of months from his bedroom in his parent’s house - but the cost.

The technology used by most robotic arms and hands on the market - and many more of those in development - typically comes with large overheads.

In the last five years, though, learning almost exclusively online in forums and emails, LaChappelle has managed to synthesize a series of robotic hands that could change industries and lives - and most of which cost just a few hundred dollars.

While other developments in countries like Austria and Argentina have pushed the boundaries of prosthetic offerings, helping those missing limbs to start to regain use of them with robotics, LaChappelle has done so using 3D printing.

And he’s made one that he says can read your mind. It’s called Anthromod.

“This reads right about 10 channels of the brain, so it kind of works kind of like a muscle sensor in that it picks up small electric discharges and turns that into something you can actually read within software, and then we actually track patterns and try and convert that into movement. So with this I’m actually able to change grips, grip patterns, based on facial gestures, and then use the raw actual brainwaves and focus to actually close the hand or open the clamp or hand,” he told Reuters Television.

One of the most important aspects of the Anthromod design is the way in which it’s controlled by the software, which LaChappelle says is different from the types of control that exist in other robotic platforms.

While it’s the hand itself that moves, as more advanced controls are created it’s the software that’s doing the heavy lifting, using algorithms that make the arm easier to use.

“A good example is we actually had an amputee use the wireless brainwave headset to control a hand, and he was able to fluently control the robotic hand in right around about 10 minutes, so the learning curve is hardly a learning curve any more,” he said.

The arms themselves might not look polished and ready for the shop floor - but LaChappelle sees them as cutting edge.

His robotic arms are all prototypes, each fulfilling a different need according to their design, with some using a wireless brainwave headset, designed more for prosthetic use. Another of his tele-robotic controlled hands was created with dangerous environments in mind, where human-like robots could be sent to allow people to monitor situations and intervene from afar.

“I really tried to make this as human-like as possible - this is probably about my fifth generation of the full robotic arm, and this is controlled using a full tele-robotic system, so there’s actually a glove that you wear that tracks your hand movements, accelerometers to track your wrist and elbow, and then an IMU sensor as well to track your bicep rotation as well as your shoulder movement, and that gets all translated wirelessly to the robotic arm where it will copy what you do,” he said.

One of the most impressive aspects of the arm is not the hardware itself, or even the software that controls it - but the fact that it can be 3D printed for a fraction of the cost of modern prosthetics.