Author: Stuff writer

Back in January, Google announced that it was working on a smart contact lens. And now a new partnership with Swiss healthcare company Novartis is bringing the technology one step closer to a reality. Before you get visions of a miniaturised Google Glass, this contact lens isn’t a HUD or an augmented reality device. It’s a little less advanced than that, albeit still something quite incredible: thanks to a tiny sensor and a tiny wireless chip, it’s able to continuously monitor the wearer’s glucose levels through his or her tears. If you’re diabetic, this is a much easier way to…

Tesla Motors’ magnificent Model S is a thing of beauty—but it’s quite large, not to mention outside the budget of the average consumer. However, Tesla has real plans to make an excellent electric car available to that segment of the population. In an interview with Auto Express, Tesla Motors chairman and CEO Elon Musk shared some new details on the company’s previously teased Model III car. The Model III will feature a range of more than 200 miles on a full battery charge and sell for just $35,000—which currently converts to about R375,000. The compact executive car is said to…

When Google-owned smart thermostat maker Nest Labs recently acquired Dropcam, it seemed like a clear move toward running the connected home of the future. A newly-announced initiative to link up such devices only underscores that. Nest Labs, Samsung, and other industry allies today announced Thread, an IP-based protocol for connecting various smart devices around the home in a low-powered mesh network. The Thread Group says it will be more stable and secure than existing options, with no single point of failure allowing one device’s issue to sink the whole network. Thread is designed to work with an array of home-centric…

PonoMusic, the Hi-Res music service that will accompany the PonoPlayer portable device, has formed a partnership with long-running online music platform Omnifone. Omnifone, which owns the cloud-based music service MusicStation (on which, among others, Sony’s Music Unlimited runs), has been stockpiling studio master quality Hi-Res Audio files since 2006, already delivers fully lossless WAV and FLAC audio to its customers, and has promised to add DSD format files in the future. So it’s already a pretty big deal when it comes to Hi-Res Audio, and the deal with Pono should only enhance its reputation. It works both ways, of course,…

A few days ago we heard the first rumour rumblings about a forthcoming Nvidia Shield gaming tablet. Well, now the BBC has weighed in with some lofty claims about the device – the most interesting of which is that it’ll be able to play PC games. The BBC report claims the tablet will run on Android but be able to play graphically advanced PC games by wirelessly linking up to a computer. It’s thought, however, that the computer will need a powerful (and pricey) Nvidia graphics card. The catch is… It sounds as if the system is essentially a tweaked…

Microsoft is developing an AI called “Adam”, which is principally from the same family as Google’s artificial brain. All the big tech companies, drawing from a body of academic research, are pioneering a form of AI called “deep learning”. This is the AI that’s behind speech recognition tech like Siri and voice search on Android phones, reverse image search, and language translation. Thus far, these technologies hold records for accuracy in those regards. Adam, Microsoft claims, has beaten those records. Adam is twice as adept at recognising images while using 30 times fewer machines. Peter Lee, head of Microsoft research,…

Thus far Android Wear smartwatches have let you check messages, fed you notifications and responded to the orders you’ve barked into them. Now, they can do one more thing: manipulate your Android smartphone’s camera. Google has updated its Camera app to include support for Android Wear, putting it on the same platform of other smartwatches such as the Samsung Gear 2 and Pebble that already have remote-capture features on them. That means you’ll be able to use any of the Android Wear smartwatches, such as the Samsung Gear Live or LG G Watch, to remotely trigger the camera on your…

Devices with flexible displays like Samsung and LG’s curved TVs have already trickled into our lives, and now LG has shown off how much further it’s taken its bendy screen technology. The South Korean tech giant has revealed an 18in OLED panel which is flexible enough to be rolled into a tube that’s only 3cm in diameter. While it only has a resolution of 1200 x 810, it’s still an impressive feat. The extra flexibility comes courtesy of a polyamide film on the panel’s rear, which is less rigid than the plastic film that was previously used. Not only does…

Alien: Isolation is still a few months away from a release, but developer The Creative Assembly has just revealed its first piece of downloadable content – and it’s shaping up to be something special. The DLC, which will be free from the day of release to anyone who pre-orders the game, is called Crew Expendable, and stars the majority of the cast of Ridley Scott’s 1979 film as the luckless crew of the Nostromo, the ship that first comes into contact with the killer xenomorph. Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, Harry Dean Stanton, Yaphet Kotto and Veronica Cartwright are all back…

There are already lots of interesting apps for Google Glass, but MindRDR might be the most technologically impressive – because it allows you to control the wearable not by touch or voice, but by brainwaves. Yes, this app enables the user to communicate with their Glass merely through thought. In order to do that, it requires the Glass wearer to put another piece of tech on his or her head: the Neurosky EEG biosensor (priced at around R1290), which measures brainwaves. Currently, MindRDR allows the user to take a photo through Glass then share it to Twitter or Facebook, all…