Architects Turned A Tiny 425-Square-Foot Loft Into A Dream Home

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/425-square-feet-manhattan-micro-loft-2014-6

New York City is chock-full of laughably small, awkwardly shaped apartments. Which is why it takes a good imagination to not only make them livable, but actually desirable.

The designers at Specht Harpman Architects recently worked wonders on a 425-square-foot loft on the Upper West Side.

The space, at the top of a six-story brownstone, has 25 feet of vertical space and even access to a rooftop — giving them plenty to work with.

Check out the photos below to see the new micro-loft.

This was the space before. It was run down, with exposed brick walls and dated paint.

For such a small space, it didn't have much room for storage.The architects' solution was to create multi-level “living platforms" in order to squeeze everything in, but still make it feel open.One of their goals was to create a flowing interior "that dissolves the notion of distinct 'rooms.'"A cantilevered bed on steel beams floats over the main living space on the third floor.And the tiny bathroom is tucked beneath the stairs.Which now have a ton of storage space. They feature built-in drawers and shelves, similar to Japanese kaidan dansu.  The roof garden at the top allows light to radiate throughout the apartment. Pretty impressive. It's hard to tell that this was still the same apartment.Compare it again to the new space:

Job well done. 

SEE ALSO: The 10 Most Expensive Homes For Sale In New York City

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These Drones Could Be The Construction Crews Of The Future

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-drones-could-build-bridges-2014-6

Scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland, have developed cool drones that can weave cord into rope bridges, reports New Scientist's Hal Hodson.

Each quadcopter drone is equipped with a spool of strong plastic cable that runs out behind it as it flies. One end of the cable can be secured by making several turns around a pole. The drones are positioned and directed autonomously from the ground by a central computer fitted with a camera that watches them as they fly. For example, to loop cables around each other, the computer directs two drones to fly through certain points at an exact time. In this way, the fleet can tie complicated knots and form large, regularly repeating patterns strung between fixed structures.

For now, these drones are only capable of building tensile structures like the one above. Ammar Mirjan, who collaborated with Augugliaro's on the architectural side of the project, said that currently "something possible would be a structure like a bridge or a connection between existing buildings."

Successful positioning — and, by extension, movement — is one of the key problems roboticists have to solve in order to build a worthwhile robot capable of complex tasks. Given that virtually unlimited workspace that drones have access to (the sky), that problem gets solved much more easily. And if this advantage can continue to be refined, it's easy to imagine this evolving to the point that drones do our building for us.

Koushil Sreenath, roboticist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, told New Scientist that "you [could hypothetically] just program the structure you want, press play and when you come back your structure is done. Our current construction is limited, but with aerial robots those limitations go away."

Hodson says there's interest in drones-as-construction-crew at other institutions too:

At the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Neri Oxman and her team are using robots suspended on cables to build structures. And at the University of Pennsylvania, the General Robotics Automation Sensing and Perception Lab is using drones with robotic clamps to build towers of magnetic blocks.

Check out the full video demo from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology below.

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drag2share: Google set to launch a health-tracking platform called Google Fit

source: http://www.engadget.com/2014/06/13/google-launching-google-fit-health-platform/?utm_source=Feed_Classic_Full&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Engadget&?ncid=rss_full

Not to be left behind by Apple, Google could soon launch its own health-tracking platform for mobile devices. Forbes reports that the search giant is working on a new service, tentatively called Google Fit, which will pull in data from third-party fitness wearables and health apps and combine them into one central app. It's not known if Fit will be delivered as a standalone app or come embedded inside future versions of Android, but it would likely operate as Google-made version of Apple's HealthKit, a service that lets companies like Nike feed in fitness data, and Samsung's own fitness framework, SAMI. An open platform would also lend itself to running on top of Google's upcoming Android Wear platform, allowing smartwatches and fitness bands to feed data into Fit's open APIs. Mirroring Apple, Google is set to unveil its new health-centric service at its own developer conference, Google I/O, which kicks off on June 25th. It has a lot of wearable talks planned for the event, so we won't have long to wait to learn more about what Google has planned.

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drag2share: Visual encyclopedia builds itself by scouring the internet

source: http://www.engadget.com/2014/06/12/levan-self-teaching-knowledge-base/?utm_source=Feed_Classic_Full&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Engadget&?ncid=rss_full

Crowdsourced knowledge bases like Wikipedia encompass a lot of knowledge, but humans can only add to them so quickly. Wouldn't it be better if computers did all the hard work? The University of Washington certainly believes so. Its LEVAN (Learn EVerything about ANything) program is building a visual encyclopedia by automatically searching the Google Books library for descriptive language, and using that to find pictures illustrating the associated concepts. Once LEVAN has seen enough, it can associate images with ideas simply by looking at pixel arrangements. Unlike earlier learning systems, such as Carnegie Mellon's NEIL, it's smart enough to tell the difference between two similar objects (such as a Trojan horse and a racing horse) while lumping them under one broader category.

Right now, the folks at the Wikimedia Foundation have little to worry about. LEVAN has only explored about 175 concepts as of this writing, and it can take as much as 12 hours to add another to the mix. It's open to suggestions from the public, though, and the university has open-sourced its code so that anyone can build on the formula. You won't want to depend on this self-assembling information hub for vital knowledge in the near future, but it should eventually be very useful for both schools teaching basic ideas as well as computer vision software that needs a helping hand.

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âOnLive is giving enterprise cloud services one more try

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2014/06/12/onlive-is-giving-enterprise-cloud-services-one-more-try/

Stop us if this sounds familiar: after successfully launching and new a video game service, a growing cloud computing firm looks to the business sector to expand its customer base. Oh, you've heard this one? That's because OnLive is retracing its steps, following up its CloudLift gaming service (announced back in March) with an enterprise-focused counterpart. Onlive's CloudLift Enterprise is built on the same promise as its older OnLive Desktop service: your work on any device at any time -- but now it's offering its customers a bit more than a virtualized desktop.

Specifically, CloudLift enterprise is designed for graphic intensive applications -- things like drone piloting setups, military training simulators or applications for architecture and design. OnLive says it can deliver these applications to virtually any smartphone, tablet or laptop on any operating system over fairly slow connections, as low as 2Mbps.

OnLive told us that despite the potential growth the enterprise service represents, it's not designed to replace any business from its gaming division -- in fact, the company says it's well pleased with much CloudLift gaming has grown over the past few months. "The game service will continue to be a driving force for the company," Onlive Executive chairman Mark Jung told us, explaining that its enterprise service leverages the same tech that drives its gaming services. "The development work that went into our game platform is the core technology at the center of the Enterprise PaaS solution."

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Source: OnLive

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