Author: Brett Venter

Chinese researchers have published a paper on Nature Machine Intelligence outlining a project that lets blind users navigate the world more effectively. The wearable device, or collection of them, processes multiple inputs via an AI algorithm and generates prompts that tell the wearer what’s coming up. Researchers from Fudan University, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, East China Normal University, and a few others, led by Gu Leilei of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, created the device specifically for the blind but, in testing, found that its effects improved navigation for both humanoid robots and the seeing impaired. Wearable…

Are you a South African app developer working… well, anywhere in the world? We want to hear from you. Stuff’s annual App Awards is currently accepting entries from local companies and independent developers across a range of business and entertainment categories. Do you have what it takes to push out the competition? The entry process is simple — fill out the form below and consider yourself entered. We’ll handle the rest of it. At the end of the process is… well, an award. We’re not about to tell you what to do with it once you’ve got it but we’re…

Artificial intelligence that remembers interactions is an idea whose time has come. OpenAI is doing it, and soon WhatsApp will too. Not the Meta-owned messaging platform specifically, but the embedded Meta AI that we’re certain every one of the billions of users is availing themselves of. Right? The feature turned up in a recent Android beta of the popular messaging app (version 2.25.11.13, specifically), after it was sighted in an earlier version of WhatsApp. It was sighted, in both instances, by WABetaInfo. Remember WhatsApp? Unlike ChatGPT’s overarching memory, Meta’s implementation will be more targeted. Rather than keeping a database of…

Some folks reckon dolphins are as smart as humans. We reckon they’re smarter. They get to spend all day at the ocean. DolphinGemma, a new AI project from the friendlier depths of the rotting husk of Google, hopes to settle the question once and for all. How? By asking the dolphins, obviously. Researchers haven’t considered what to do if it turns out these aquatic mammals are colossal liars, but DolphinGemma could let us find out what they’re saying — even if it isn’t true. Decoding DolphinGemma  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8GdEVVvXyE If it were earlier in April, we’d suspect that this AI project was…

Some of Samsung’s coolest devices are things we just don’t get here. Case in point: The company’s new Galaxy XCover 7 Pro and Tab Active 5 Pro rugged devices. The toughened pair contain features we haven’t seen since relatively early in the smartphone days. The features? The ability to remove the backplate and swap out the battery. The ‘backward’ step makes sense in the context of Samsung’s target market. These are field devices intended to be used where power may not be reliably available. Eliminating the need for a recharge delay also means more efficiency for whoever uses them. Construction…

The Stuff April-May 2025 issue has hit digital and physical shelves around South Africa, and as usual, it’s jammed with all of the latest tech to hit the planet since the last time we did that. That wasn’t that long ago, but much new has turned up. Bike GPS units, dashboard cameras, sleep masks, and GameCube controllers are just a small (and weird) sample of what awaits readers in this stacked issue of Stuff.  The April-May 2024 main event is Stuff’s headphone buyers guide. Covering every use case from the best all-rounders to audio specialists, wired headphones to the kind…

Doom, like many things that were taken seriously in 1993, has become a meme. It went from a semi-evil (1993, remember?) first-person shooter that revolutionised the game genre to what it is today: a curiosity that developers and hackers try to get running on anything possible. And now there’s one more — a special boxed edition of the game. Doom and Doom II: Will It Run Edition is a very limited-run physical version of the 1993/1994 iD Software being released, appropriately enough, by Limited Run Games. In keeping with the game’s theme, there will be 666 boxed copies of the…

Vivo’s X200 Ultra, the upgrade on the already substantial X200 Pro, is set for launch in China shortly. It’s justifying the name — and the attendant price increase — by creating and releasing something called a Photography Kit. As the name suggests, the collection of peripheral bits will turn Vivo’s new high-end smartphone into something more like a camera. One of these bits is an external zoom lens that ratchets up the phone’s optical zoom from 3.7x to 8.7x. One X200 Ultra, and make it snappy The add-on was revealed by the company in a post to Chinese social media…

How do you touch something that doesn’t exist? That’s a question Reddit-bound anime fans have asked for years, but it’s also a serious consideration for folks developing hologram technology. Minority Report might be a privacy nightmare scenario but the touch interface Tom Cruise uses in the film is undeniably cool. Wouldn’t it be awesome if it were real? Well, it’s not. But FlexiVol, a hologram manipulation method created by researchers at Universidad Pública de Navarra (the Public University of Navarra in Spain), comes close. There are a few caveats at this point. The technology has only just been presented in…

Unitree’s quadruped robots are frequently put to interesting uses — beach cleanup and er… flamethrowers come to mind — so perhaps we should be worried that it’s teaching its G1 humanoid robot to fight. After all, we’re expecting a Machine War™ at some point. If it’s fought with gloves in an actual boxing ring, the apocalypse might not be so bad. The robotics manufacturer dropped a brief teaser video (below) to hype up its longer showing of “robot combat” in the next month or so. It features what looks like the Unitree G1 robot going head to head with both…