CES 2014: The Under-A-Pound Gaming PC

Enthusiast gaming PCs tend to be big. In some cases, they're very, very big. But the Spark, from boutique system builder Maingear, bucks the trend by going small—and by desktop standards, this thing is tiny. The aggressively styled red-and-black Spark measures just 4.5 x 4.2 x 2.3 inches, so it won't take up too much room on your entertainment stand. And it weighs in at just 0.98 pounds, according to Maingear. Its tiny size is due to its mostly laptop-class internals. But with a quad-core AMD A8 processor that tops out at 3.1GHz, brand-new AMD R9 M275X graphics, and up to 16GB of RAM, it should have enough power to make modern games look pretty good on your HDTV. There's also room inside for two drives: an SSD to run games from for fast load times, and a hard drive to store media files. Four USB 3.0 ports let you add extra storage or other devices. The Spark will be offered running Valve's Linux-based game-centric SteamOS. But if you're more of a traditionalist, Maingear will sell you one with Windows (7 or 8) installed as well. Maingear isn't offering a price just yet, but we're sure that will slip out once we get closer to when it's expected to go on sale. The company says that should be sometime in late February or March.

CES 2014: Your Next Laptop Keyboard May Double as a Touchpad

Synaptics makes touchpads for the likes of Lenovo, Dell, and HP, and their touch technology lives inside smartphones made by Samsung and Nokia. So they know a thing or two about touch. But rather than resting on their success, they’re here at CES showing off a keyboard technology, called ThinTouch, which replaces the switches under the keys with magnets that pop the keys back up. This means the keyboard can be much thinner, while still feeling surprisingly clicky. It also leaves room for adding other components. So Synaptics added touch sensitivity to the entire keyboard area, which lets you perform Windows 8 gestures by swiping across the keys. Slide your thumb across the spacebar and you can scroll through menus or page through documents. But does that mean traditional laptop touchpads are headed for extinction? Synaptics would rather see them evolve, so they’re teaching them how to take to the air. Their Proximity Touchpad prototype can accurately detect your finger movements as they hover up to three centimeters above the laptop. There’s certainly a lot of potential here for cool next-generation devices. But in the meantime, we hope the company is also working hard on improving the touchpads in current laptops. We still encounter enough touchpad freak-outs to make us miss our mice while we’re away from the office covering massive conventions.

This Wearable Robot Lifts 110 Pounds In Each Hand

The days of idling wishing for a wearable robot are gone. Researchers at the Perceptual Robotics Laboratory in San Giuliano Terme, Italy, have created a "robo-suit" that is capable of lifting 50 kilograms (110 pounds) with each of its arms. The robot also moves to mimick the user's actions, such as walking, moving the arms, and picking up things with its hands, er, grippers. The machine could be tweaked to work in factories or to clear debris and rescue survivors in earthquake zones, the BBC noted. It is one of many robotic exoskeletons being designed around the world.

Elephant Trunk Robot Learns Like A Child

Four years ago, German engineering firm Festo came up with a concept for a robotic arm. Somewhere between an iron snake, a mechanical claw, and a sci-fi tentacle, the Bionic Handling Assistant is functionally most similar to an elephant's trunk. But what should a robot arm grab? For inspiration about learning what to do with hands, the scientists turned to babies. The arm remembers movements that have been guided by a researcher, much like how a baby grabbing onto a parent's finger and will let his arm be moved when the adult moves. The programming behind the robotic trunk teaches it to remember positions that worked for grabbing. The New Scientist story on a visit to the Festo lab is well worth a read. I am in Jochen Steil's lab, grasping a segmented, whiplashing tentacle that resists and tries to push me away. It feels strangely alive, as though I am trying to throttle a giant alien maggot. In fact, I am training a bionic elephant's trunk to do real-world jobs like picking apples or replacing light bulbs – something non-experts haven't been able to do until now. Here's hoping they never develop a taste for blood like the sciencey tentacle-arms of Spiderman 2's Doctor Octopus.

Keyme

This is a cool new company over at new york that lats you scan your key with an iphone so that when you lose your key they can make a copy and deliver it to you or you can go to one of their kiosk to have it made there, by a robot which is amazing.

Robots test touch screens

Who would you want to test your touchscreen device? Maybe an older adult, to ensure it’s intuitive even to someone who isn’t a digital native? Maybe a kid, who’s got high expectations for modern tech? Well, Intel doesn’t use a person at all, MIT Technology Review reports. Instead, it uses robots to evaluate how much people will like new devices.

Unlike people, robots are tireless and provide exact numerical feedback on flaws, the magazine reports. For example, Intel’s robots do stuff like type and play cell phone games on a testing device while training a camera on the screen and recording data on how the screen responds to the robot’s finger. All major technology companies use testing robots, but don’t talk about it for fear of giving away an advantage to a competitor, Jason Huggins, co-founder of an app-testing company called Sauce Labs, told MIT Technology Review.

Check out the full article for other ways robots beat human testers. There’s also a great video of one of the Intel robots pinching to zoom, drawing with a stylus and otherwise using a cellphone much like you do, except with really perfect lines. Does a robot playing a cellphone game win every time? It depends, Intel engineer Eddie Raleigh tells the magazine. Engineers can program the robots to win all the time, or just sometimes.

Google going into AI

In an apparent move to feed its smart-hardware ambitions, Google has bought an artificial intelligence startup, DeepMind, for somewhere in the ballpark of $500 million. Considering all of the data Google sifts through, and the fact that it might be getting into robotics, it's not completely absurd that they'd want some software to give a robotic helping hand. (Facebook apparently wanted the company, too, and they've already made moves to wrangle their own sprawling web of information.) But the other part of this story is a little stranger: the deal reportedly came under the condition that Google create an "ethics board" for the project.

What, exactly, does that mean? No idea. It's unclear how the board would be structured, who'd be on it, or when it would be consulted. The London-based DeepMind doesn't seem particularly sinister, either: the company has mostly used its software in fields like e-commerce and gaming. The point is software like this could eventually be used for work in ethical gray areas, and DeepMind might've wanted to get ahead of the issues. 

Which, good. The more decisions we cede to machines, the more we need human oversight of those decisions. A simple "Don't be evil" mantra might not cut it.