Intel bringing vision, 3D to laptop and tablet cameras

From mundane 2D devices, integrated cameras in laptops and tablets in the future will change into powerful 3D tools that can sense movement, track emotion, and even monitor reading habits of children, according to Intel.

Intel is developing a "depth sensing" camera, which is an enhanced version of a 3D camera that can go deeper inside images to "bridge the gap between the real and virtual world," said Anil Nanduri , director of perceptual products & solutions at Intel.

The webcam enhancements will help the computer understand a human better, bring new levels of interactivity to 3D games, and make webconferencing fun by blanking out the background and adding a green screen, Nanduri said.

"You'll add the ability to sense your excitement, emotion -- whether you are happy or smiling. The algorithms and technologies are there, but they are getting more refined, and as they get more robust, you'll see them," Nanduri said.

Such depth cameras will be integrated into laptops and ultrabooks in the second half of 2014. The technology will initially appear in external webcams such as Senz3D external webcam, which was jointly developed by Logitech and Intel, and will become available in the coming quarters. The camera technology will ultimately trickle down to tablets and smartphones, Nanduri said.

The camera will also be able to identify characteristics, contours and shapes of items in view. For example, the camera's ability to sense distance, size, depth, color, contours and other parameters of structures could also help in the growing area of 3D printing. A depth sensing picture of a model can be extracted to reveal exact specifications and other details of a design, which can then be printed.

"You are not going to look for a case [for a device] anymore, you'll just point that device, and the cameras will recognize what you have. It'll know the model number...and it'll print [the case] for you, or you go to the store, they will print it for you," Nanduri said.

With the help of eye tracking, it could also track how well somebody is reading and use that information as an evaluation tool. For example, it could track reading, and tell if kids are stuck on words, how much they read, or whether they need help with specific words.

"Having the capabilities to say -- they read about 80 percent of the lines, they had difficulty with these words -- that kind of intelligence for educational tools is phenomenal," Nanduri said.

Other small enhancements also include using a motion-sensing game where hands can be followed to pick up objects in the wider dimension of 3D games. The data collected by the camera could be combined with other modalities like voice recognition to improve human-computer interaction.

There are already 3D cameras out there, but Intel is trying to tack on the algorithm and hardware features that make images more meaningful.

"Kinect was a good initial version of a depth camera more from a long range perspective. When Intel started looking at it, we were primarily looking at it primarily as more personal interaction, short range, which is probably a meter or meter-and-a-half range of interaction," Nanduri said.

Integration in the thin ultrabook display panels may be a challenge. Intel is addressing the challenges with a high resolution short-range camera that focuses on a small area, and what Nanduri called "finger-level articulation."

"You need to have a lot more resolution for that zone. To really scale it to volumes, you need to get to the right form factor from the optics perspective, you need to get to the right power levels and you need to have the right cost structure to help scale it into integration," Nanduri said.

When the technology reaches devices, users may progressively forget the keyboard and mouse when interacting with computers.

"When you have depth information, what you can do with it is pretty phenomenal," Nanduri said.

Car hackers 'drive' car with laptop

Steering a car with a games console The researchers managed to stop, start and steer a car with an old Nintendo handset Next time you have a passenger in the back seat of your car offering infuriatingly "helpful" advice about your driving skills, count yourself lucky that they aren't doing anything more sinister in their attempts to guide your vehicle.

Two security experts in the US have demonstrated taking control of two popular models of car, while someone else was driving them, using a laptop.

Speaking to one news channel ahead of revealing their research at security conference Defcon in Las Vegas in August, Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek said they hoped to raise awareness about the security issues around increasingly computer-dominated car control.

"At the moment there are people who are in the know, there are nay-sayers who don't believe it's important, and there are others saying it's common knowledge but right now there's not much data out there," said Mr Miller, a security engineer at Twitter.

"We would love for everyone to start having a discussion about this, and for manufacturers to listen and improve the security of cars."

Their work, funded by the Pentagon's research facility Darpa, has so far received a mixed reaction from the manufacturers themselves.

How they did it
The researchers used cables to connect the devices to the vehicles' electronic control units (ECUs) via the on-board diagnostics port (also used by mechanics to identify faults) inside a 2010 model Ford Escape and Toyota Prius.

Contained within most modern vehicles, ECUs are part of the computer network that controls most aspects of car functionality including acceleration, braking, steering, monitor displays and the horn.

The pair were able to write software which sent instructions to the car network computer and over-rode the commands from the actual drivers of the cars.

They filmed themselves in the back of one of the vehicles steering it left and right, activating the brakes and showing the fuel gauge drop to zero, all while the vehicle was under driver control and in motion.

cable used in hack The cable used to connect the devices to the ECUs via the diagnostics port.
A spokesman for Toyota told that because the hardware had to be physically connected inside the car, he did not consider it to be "hacking".

"Altered control can only be made when the device is connected. After it is disconnected the car functions normally," he said.

"We don't consider that to be 'hacking' in the sense of creating unexpected behaviour, because the device must be connected - ie the control system of the car physically altered.

"The presence of a laptop or other device connected to the OBD [on board diagnostics] II port would be apparent."

Expensive and difficult
Mr Miller and Mr Valasek say this is not the point.

Their work builds on earlier research carried out by researchers at the University of Washington and the University of San Diego in 2010, who demonstrated that it was possible to control a car remotely and developed a tool, which they called CarShark, for the purpose.

"We're big fans of their work but we figured they already proved you can remotely get into a car's network," Chris Valasek, director of security intelligence at consultancy IOActive.

"We wanted to see how much control would you have once that's happened."

They admitted that they had destroyed a few cars while refining their technique.

"It's very expensive and difficult to do the research to show you can hack into a car. It's not like you can just download something and look at it," said Mr Miller.

"I wouldn't dare do this to my own car," added Mr Valasek.

They said the cars did not appear to acknowledge the address from where a command was being sent, only the instruction itself.

"There's no authentication," said Mr Miller.

"But there are restrictions - the car has to operate very fast. If you run into a wall you need to kill the engine immediately, engage the airbag.

"Car manufacturers don't have the luxury PC software makers have - if something doesn't work in a car that can't happen, it needs to function."

Mr Miller and Mr Valasek intend to make their research openly available following the conference.

car speedometer The hackers set the speedometer to read 199 miles per hour while the car was stationary
"The information will be released to everyone. If you're just relying on the fact people aren't talking about the problem to stay safe, you're not really dealing with the problem," said Mr Miller.

Toyota said it invested heavily in security research.

"Our focus, and that of the entire automotive industry, is to prevent hacking into a vehicle's by-wire control system from a remote/wireless device outside of the vehicle.

"Toyota has developed very strict and effective firewall technology against such remote and wireless services. We continue to try to hack our systems and have a considerable investment in state of the art electro-magnetic R&D facilities.

"We believe our systems are robust and secure."

Ford also told that the company takes electronic security seriously.

"This particular attack was not performed remotely over-the-air, but as a highly aggressive direct physical manipulation of one vehicle over an elongated period of time, which would not be a risk to customers on any mass level," it said in a statement.

"The safety, privacy, and security of our customers is and always will be paramount."

"Scary"
Security expert Prof Alan Woodward, Chief Technology Officer at consultancy Charteris, said that car hacking hasn't been widely discussed because as yet there has been no criminal incident of it.

"I think [car hacking] is one of the most scary things out there - [the hacking of] cars and medical devices are the two things nobody talks about,"

"You've heard of ransomware - imagine that happening inside a car. It won't take criminals that long."

Damian Lewis in Homeland Actor Damian Lewis stars in Homeland, a TV series which featured a car hack storyline

Ransomware is a computer virus that freezes a victim's computer or threatens to release personal files unless a payment is made.

A car crash caused by a hacked car featured as a storyline on the US TV series Homeland but was widely dismissed as fantasy, he added.

"There was loads of talk afterwards saying it was rubbish. I remember saying on Twitter, 'I'm sorry, it's not.'"

However both the researchers and Prof Woodward agree that hacking into a car is not easy.

"This is a very technical attack, it requires a great deal of technical knowledge," Prof Woodward said.

"A lot of manufacturers are doing work on security software but they don't talk about it. It's not about anti-malware software, it's more about penetration testing - finding any holes left in the system.

"When people build things based on software, it is built with Intention A. They never think about intention B - which could be all sorts of nefarious purposes."

Panasonic pleads guilty to laptop battery pack price fixing

Panasonic and its subsidiary Sanyo have agreed to plead guilty to price fixing conspiracies involving laptop battery cells and automotive parts. They will pay a total of $56.5 million in criminal fines, the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) said.

Sanyo agreed to pay $10.7 million for the battery cells conspiracy and Panasonic will pay $45.8 million for its role in the automotive parts conspiracy, the DoJ said in a news release on Thursday.
LG Chem, a manufacturer of rechargeable batteries, has also agreed to plead guilty and to pay a $1.056 million criminal fine for price fixing involving battery cells, the DoJ said. Sanyo and LG Chem were involved in a battery cell conspiracy from about April 2007 until about September 2008, it said.

"The guilty pleas against Sanyo and LG Chem are the first in the department's ongoing investigation into anticompetitive conduct in the cylindrical lithium-ion battery cell industry," it said. Both companies conspired to fix the prices of battery cells sold worldwide for use in notebook computer battery packs, it added.
Lithium ion batteries are rechargeable and are often used in groups in more powerful battery packs for electronic devices. While flat, or prismatic, cells are more common in cellphones or thin-and-light laptops, cylindrical cells are used to make up most removable laptop battery packs.

Sanyo, LG Chem and their co-conspirators agreed during meetings and conversations to price the battery packs to customers at predetermined levels and to issue price quotations to customers in accordance with those agreements, according to the charges. "Sanyo, LG Chem and their co-conspirators collected and exchanged information for the purpose of monitoring and enforcing adherence to the agreed-upon prices and took steps to conceal the conspiracy," the DoJ said.

"Pleading guilty and cooperating with the division's ongoing investigations is a necessary step in changing a corporate culture that turned customers into price-fixing victims," the DoJ added.