It should be well known that consumer products often have other nefarious purposes (think baby monitors and tiny voice recorders). Watching what has been revealed at the International CES, (the major consumer electronics expo in Las Vegas) shows some neat high-tech toys that may be worth paying attention to, not necessarily due to any inherent any evil intent, but they show how some clever and formerly advanced technology is becoming less expensive and readily available to the public to do with as they will.
Spying on Mom: Tyche, by AIBrain, Inc.
This was described as “A $200 robot companion for kids that follows the voice command: ‘Go to the kitchen, find Mom, take a picture of her and return here.’ A cellphone provides processor, cameras, microphones, sensors.” It’s probably supposed to be fun, but what if mom doesn’t want her picture taken? And then there is the Sensemother: Mom the spy: Mom who “knows everything without needing to ask”. Sen.se claims to have reinvented and upgraded mom so that she is programmable. Mother, with help from her MotionCookies, can tell you if your kids brushed their teeth properly. Did you take your pills? Did you get enough exercise? Do you drink too much coffee and not enough water? Four “small and slick” sensors, called “MotionCookies,” can be “affixed to almost anything” and assigned a task. They were described as chameleon sensors having “the power to detect and understand the movements of objects and people.” There are some apps, such as intrusion detection and others that help Mother keep track of your “secrets.” Naturally “you don’t want your Mother to record certain things. Just push the Pause button on the smartphone app or simply remove the related Cookie from its location.” Thankfully, “All data generated by devices you buy is yours, only yours. Period. At any time, you can of course choose to delete all your recorded data.” The “motion cookies” are small sensors that include temperature and motion, and since it can process the changes it sees, apps can determine things like if your coffee maker was turned on, is someone walking or running, did you pick up your toothbrush at the right time before going into bed. They can be used as intrusion sensors, so the system could also be turned into a simple portable alarm system. More about Tyche and Sensemother can be read at Network World [Read More] Details on Sensemother can be found at Sen.se Jumping Sumo and MiniDrone from Parrot (makers of the iPhone controlled AR Drone)… Details from The Verge:The MiniDrone, just as the name suggests, is a smaller quadrocopter cut from the same cloth as the AR.Drone. You can hold it in the palm of your hand but it actually has quite a bit of power. We used it inside and it zipped across a room very quickly. Its four rotors spin with ferocity and sound like a swarm of bees attacking, but the MiniDrone keeps its balance and it surprisingly easy to control. It’s controlled just like the AR.Drone using an iPhone app. The makers say that they spent quite a bit of time to make sure that the drone would be stable and easy to use — particularly important since Parrot hopes kids will use the MiniDrone. In practice it seems their work has paid off: you can control the pitch and yaw using one thumb and altitude and rotation using another. You can also use the accelerometer in the iPhone to change the drone’s direction. It may sound complicated, but the computer on board the drone makes it very difficult to spin out of control, and at any time you can release both thumbs and the drone will instantly return to a stable hover. It’s so stable, in fact, that we were able to bounce off of walls and hit it in air without knocking it out of the skies. The MiniDrone does not come with a camera, but many hobbyists add cameras to their quadcopters by purchasing inexpensive (and very light weight) key-fob video recorders from China. The Jumping Sumo is a remotely controlled camera on wheels with the ability to jump. I didn’t quite see the reason for jumping until I saw the video showing it can jump about 3 feet onto a table and keep running. It reminds me of the military robotic cameras we saw at the Milipol Show in Paris in November. Some details on the Sumo from The Verge: it uses two wheels plus and accelerometer and a gyroscope to drive. Since each wheel is independently controlled, it can turn on a dime, and it includes a QVGA camera so you can see from the robot’s perspective. Like the drone, it’s controlled using an app. There’s a thumb-controlled accelerator to move forwards or backwards and you can tilt the iPad to drive around as well. The real impressive part is how quickly it can turn. A quick down swipe with your right thumb will make it immediately turn 180 degrees, and left and right swipes will create a quick 90-degree turn. There’s also a button to perform a spring-loaded jump of about 3 feet. Lastly, there’s a number of preset performances, like a high-speed pirouette that turns the video feed into an unintelligible blur. The Jumping Sumo uses an accelerometer and gyroscope to make sure it goes straight, and it talks with the iPad app using dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi — the newest standard. That’s said to give the feisty toy a 160-foot range and 20 minutes of battery life. [Read More] 
