New York City is to replace pay phones with ultra-high speed Wi-Fi hotspots. The booths will still allow people without a cellphone to make voice calls, now without charge. The replacement program is set to cover 500 booths by this July with an eventual target of 7,500. That’s the vast majority of the 8,178 pay […]
Public transport officials in London are experimenting with bus stop timetable signs using electronic paper. The idea is to blend the benefits of paper and electronic screens. Most bus stops in the city have printed paper displays for timetables and route information. That brings two main disadvantages. Firstly, the sheer hassle of printing new sheets […]
We continue our look back at 2015’s news and subsequent developments with September and October. Insider reports revealed Amazon was working on a low-spec tablet computer which would cost just $50. That proved correct, though that price was only if you took up the “Special Offers” option, meaning advertisements appear on the lock screen. Reviews suggested […]
VertiGo is a wall-climbing robot that is capable of transitioning from the ground to the wall, created in collaboration between Disney Research Zurich and ETH. The robot has two tiltable propellers that provide thrust onto the wall, and four wheels. One pair of wheels is steerable, and each propeller has two degrees of freedom for […]
We continue our look back at 2015’s news and subsequent developments with May. The makers of Oculus Rift said the virtual reality device — already available in a primitive developer form — would be on public sale in 2016. It later confirmed a first quarter public release with a price confirmed only as being more than […]
We continue our look back at 2015’s news and subsequent developments with March when Sony revealed that its virtual reality helmet codenamed Project Morpheus would be released in the first half of 2016. Sadly there’s little more in the way of firm details to report, other than that the finished product will be known simple […]
It’s time once again to take a look back at some of the news stories we’ve covered here at GaS in 2015 as well as following up on later developments. In January the Mars rover Opportunity began suffering problems with the flash memory which it used to store data before sending it back to Earth whenever […]
California officials have upset Google with proposed rules for public use of driverless cars. The rules would mean a licensed driver would have to be in the car whenever it was used. The state was among the earliest to allow testing of autonomous vehicles on public roads, albeit with some tight regulations such as a […]