Toshiba Glass on show at CEATAC 2014 Japan

Toshiba plans to introduce its own brand of smart glasses called Toshiba Glass, part of the peeks, prototypes and general buzz events at Ceatec in Japan.

Toshiba Glass is to feature tiny prisms etched into the lenses.

Matt Hill, writing in Gizmodo, referred to the smart glass entry as "the new kid on the block," targeted for release next year.

Tim Stevens of CNET called out the contrasts between Toshiba Glass and Google Glass, saying Toshiba's entry has fewer features, including the lack of camera.

"More significantly, Toshiba Glass must remain physically tethered to a smartphone to work, as it lacks a battery or processing power of its own."

John Anon in AndroidHeadlines also called out differences. "The main difference with Toshiba's Glass is that it does not contain the typical Google prism, the small additional window attached which does provide the user experience."

James Niccolai of the IDG News Service talked about how this works, saying "unlike Google Glass, Toshiba's glasses don't have a prism over the lens to reflect the image into the eye. 

Instead, with Toshiba's product, the glasses lens itself comprises a series of narrow, vertical prisms.

They're pretty much invisible when you look straight through the lens, but an image projected from an angle reflects back into the eye."

Anon commented that "With both the lack of the glasses independence and the limited ability to project information and images Toshiba's offering is unlikely to offer anywhere near the experience provided by Google," he remarked.

At the same time, Anon said Toshiba Glass could find its place in the smart glass market. He said "It is far more likely that Toshiba's version will be more price-relevant to the general public" and, practically speaking, may serve the purpose of use as a tool for instructional purposes.

The Nikkei Asian Review article about Toshiba Glass said it will be promoted "for such everyday applications as reading recipes in the kitchen."

IDG's Niccolai also noted it would be easy to imagine an industrial use case, such as giving an engineer instructions to repair something, so they can still have both hands on the job.

Toshiba hopes to start shipping their glass product next year; the frames are expected to be launched in three styles – standard, sporty and industrial.

NASA aeronautics research tests new wildfire detection tool

NASA researcher Mike Logan plans to use this small unmanned aerial vehicle to check for fires at a Virginia-North Carolina wildlife refuge as part of an agreement with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. 

Credit: NASA Langley/David C. Bowman

NASA's research in unmanned aerial systems (UAS) may soon provide a means for early detection and mitigation of fires in the Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, a nearly 50,000-square-acre region centered on the Virginia-North Carolina border.

NASA's Langley Research Center, in nearby Hampton, Virginia, has signed a one-year agreement with the Department of the Interior's U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) to test small UASs for the detection of brush and forest fires.

The research is part of the NASA Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate's UAS Integration in the National Airspace System (NAS) project.

"The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is evaluating the feasibility of airborne unmanned platforms and their ability to offer a safer and more cost-effective alternative for surveillance of potential areas of interest immediately following thunderstorm activity," said Great Dismal Swamp Refuge Manager Chris Lowie.

"The agency hopes to see a significant decrease in cost to survey the Great Dismal Swamp, as well as a reduction in time to detect nascent fires, which could potentially save millions of dollars to the taxpayer in firefighting costs," added Lowie.

Mike Logan, the research lead at Langley, came up with the idea after a forest fire in 2011 that lasted almost four months and cost more than $10 million to extinguish.

Smoke from that fire, which was caused by a lightning strike, traveled as far north as Maryland only three years after another $10-million blaze in 2008, according to FWS.

"I made a phone call to the local fire captain after days of inhaling peat bog smoke," said Logan. "I learned most fires are caused by lightning strikes and the only way they can spot them is by hiring an aircraft to do an aerial survey of the huge swamp. So I figured why not use a UAV as a fire detector?"

After approval from the Federal Aviation Administration, the team at Langley plans to fly a lightweight UAS equipped with cameras and transmitters over the wildlife refuge.

"One is an out-of-the-nose camera that can see smoke plumes as they are rising," Logan explained.

"The other is an infrared camera housed in the body of the plane that points down. It can find hot spots by detecting heat signatures."

Although the aircraft can fly as fast as 40 miles an hour, when used in this capacity it will be flown slower while it transmits video, allowing individuals on the ground to observe what is occurring in the live video.

The transmissions can be viewed on a laptop computer in a mobile ground station.

Logan says the drone, which weighs about 15 pounds and has an almost six-foot wingspan, has a range of about eight miles and can stay aloft as long as an hour, before the batteries need recharging.

The aircraft also can be programmed to fly on its own, but a safety pilot will monitor operations during the tests.

"This kind of application for unmanned aerial systems shows just one public benefit," said Dave Hinton, Langley associate director for UAS technologies and applications.

"They can be used to detect fires or locate people who are lost."

NASA SERVIR: ISERV tool enables rapid view of Earth images from space

A screen-capture of the new online map showing available images taken by the ISERV camera system. 

Users can click on a location to see a slideshow of images uploaded by project scientists. 

Credit: NASA

Flipping through online photo albums and social media collections of "selfies" is one thing, but when pictures can show land areas where millions of people live, it can put things in a completely different perspective - especially for scientists.



One of NASA's newest tools for effective Earth observation has been orbiting our planet for more than 15 years.

The International Space Station provides a constant, reliable perspective from which to record changes on the surface of Earth.

A new user-friendly online resource will provide images from a space station camera with nearly two years of images to share.

Danny Hardin, left, an NSSTC senior research scientist from the University of Alabama in Huntsville, trains three researchers from El Salvador to use SERVIR, an NSSTC-developed environmental monitoring system.

Credit: SERVIR

The interface is a world map that links to thousands of images made by the ISERV camera: the International Space Station SERVIR Environmental Research and Visualization System.

With the click of a mouse, the public can access the images with the ISERV Viewer.

People can view and download specific ISERV captures from a collection of more than 4,000 Earth images. ISERV scientists plan to expand the database to about 60,000 by summer 2015.



ISERV was installed as a technology testbed in the Window Observational Research Facility (WORF) on the orbiting laboratory in January 2013 and is scheduled to be removed from operation in 2015.

The camera receives and acts on commands from the ISERV team to acquire image data of specific areas of Earth's surface as the space station passes overhead.

Images from ISERV are uploaded quickly to the web due to a new automated georeferencing capability, allowing imagery to be processed and published much faster.

This is critically important when dealing with a disaster situation. Georeferencing is a process in which points in an image can be associated with geographic locations on a map.

The SERVIR project operates via regional "hubs" in Nairobi, Kenya; Kathmandu, Nepal; and Panama City, Panama, and is coordinated from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center.

The SERVIR hubs can task the ISERV system to image scenes of Earth's surface in their regions of interest to address environmental issues and disasters.

Much as parents can look back to see how their child has changed over the years, scientists hope that the snapshots gathered by ISERV of land areas before and after environmental changes will improve future response to natural disasters.

Alien Planet-Hunting Telescope Tool SPHERE Snaps 1st Amazing Images - Video

A new instrument designed to give scientists a direct look at nearby alien worlds has seen its "first light" in Chile, astronomers announced today (June 4).

This infrared image shows the dust ring around the nearby star HR 4796A in the southern constellation of Centaurus. 

Credit: ESO/J.-L. Beuzit et al./SPHERE Consortium

Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch (SPHERE), the new alien planet detection tool was mounted on the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope Unit Telescope 3 in the Atacama Desert last month.

In its first few days of operations, SPHERE already has produced images of Saturn's moon Titan and dust discs around stars as it gears up to take pictures of exoplanets, ESO officials said.

Using space and ground-based telescopes, astronomers have detected more than 2,000 exoplanets since spotting the first ones back in the 1990s but scientists have rarely been able to look at these worlds directly because the weak glow of a planet is often outshined by bright light from its parent star.

Instead, astronomers often use indirect techniques like the transit method, in which they look for telltale dips in a star's brightness caused when a planet crosses in front of the star.



To be observed directly, planets usually need to be very large and very far away from their parent star.

The first confirmed direct photo of an alien planet in 2010 showed a world eight times the mass of Jupiter that orbited its host star at from more than 300 times the distance between Earth and the sun.

The SPHERE instrument is shown shortly after it was installed on ESO’s VLT Unit Telescope 3 

Credit: ESO/J. Girard

SPHERE is designed to get the highest contrast possible in a small patch of sky around a star to see exoplanets that might otherwise be hidden.

To boost the contrast in its images, SPHERE uses adaptive optics to correct for the blurring effects of the Earth's atmosphere as well as a coronagraph also blocks out starlight.