Here's what we looked at this week:Objets d'esign: Lexon is releasing speaker and lamp versions of Jeff Koons' Balloon Dog sculpture. Volvo's new Multi-Adaptive Safety Belt compensates for different sizes, shapes and crash severities.Dometic's designey coolers use a different manufacturing method. Wandercraft's Eve, the world's first self-balancing exoskeleton, allows people to walk again.U.C. Berkeley's tiny pogo robot has a unique locomotion style.BARE designs a better—and less expensive—Dutch oven featuring a host of UX improvements.Clever materials use: How to clear standing water on a flat roof using rope.Architecture that works with challenging terrain, not against it: The Zig-Zag Resort, by JA Joubert and UNS Architects.Industrial design firm APE creates the Echo Pro, a perfect-fitting bike helmet with a novel adjustment mechanism.The Splay Max: A folding portable 35" monitor.Industrial Design student work: Dashiell Schaeffer's Curvesse rocking chair, made from a single sheet of plywood.These unusual, "anti-ligature" doorknobs are designed with a grim functional purpose.Designey tool kits: A trend with legs.BareBag's unusual design approach: Bags that serve as hanging points for other bags.From Germany, the NOHRD SlimBeam is a handcrafted, attractive piece of home exercise equipment.Why America's streetlights have been turning purple.When industrial design is subject to aftermarket modifications: BoxPlates to undo the PlayStation 5's look.This ShowerClear design fixes the mold problem all showerheads have.Industrial design case study: Curve ID tackles industrial kitchen equipment for JAVAR. #core77 #weekly #roundup

Volvo is introducing a new seatbelt that self-adjusts based on your body and driving conditions, particularly in the event of a collision.This "multi-adaptive safety belt" gathers real-time data from interior and exterior sensors, adapting the force it applies "based on the situation and individual’s profiles, such as their height, weight, body shape and seating position," Volvo says. Multi-adaptive safety beltIt's a way of customizing protection for the rider, rather than a static setting for all passengers. Volvo gives the example of a larger occupant and a smaller occupant during a car crash. The smaller will need a "lower belt load" to reduce the risk of rib fractures, while the larger one will need a "higher belt load" to reduce the risk of head injury. Recommended by Our EditorsMost seatbelts have three settings, or "load-limiting profiles," but Volvo offers 11. The sensors analyze the unique characteristics of a crash "in less than a blink of the eye," such as direction, speed, and passenger posture, and shares that information with the seatbelt. It uses this data to select the appropriate setting.Multi-adaptive safety beltVolvo says it developed the tech with data from 80,000 riders and real accidents, and is approaching the seatbelt as a piece of living tech with the capability to receive over-the-air software updates and continuously improve based on data gathered from all Volvo cars. While it could significantly improve safety, more tech can also mean more room to malfunction. If the belt gets too tight, or too loose, it could be a headache for riders.The new belt debuts later this year in the all-electric 2026 Volvo EX60, a midsize SUV set to compete with the Tesla Model Y. Volvo hasn't revealed pricing or photos of the vehicle yet, but it's expected to be among the most popular in the brand's EV lineup. That includes the EX30, a smaller SUV, three-row EX90, and ES90 sedan.Volvo EX90 on the Las Vegas strip #buckle #volvo #seatbelts #autoadjust #based

Volvo is looking to boost its reputation for safety with the release of a new “multi-adaptive safety belt” that uses real-time data from the vehicle’s sensors to better protect the person wearing it.Seatbelt technology hasn’t changed much since Volvo patented one of the first modern three-point safety belts in the early 1960s. But cars have changed significantly, adding sensors, cameras, and high-powered computers to power advanced driver assist features and anti-crash technology.Now, Volvo wants to put those gadgets to work for seatbelts. Modern safety belts use load limiters to control how much force the safety belt applies on the human body during a crash. Volvo says its new safety belt expands the load-limiting profiles from three to 11 and increases the possible number of settings, enabling it to tailor its performance to specific situations and individuals.As such, Volvo can use sensor data to customize seatbelts based on a person’s height, weight, body shape, and seating position. A larger occupant, for example, would receive a higher belt load setting to help reduce the risk of a head injury in a crash, while a smaller person in a milder crash would receive a lower belt load setting to reduce the risk of rib fractures.During a crash, Volvo says its vehicles’ safety systems will share sensor data — such as direction, speed, and passenger posture — with multi-adaptive seatbelts to determine how much force to apply to the occupant’s body. And using over-the-air software updates, Volvo promises that the seatbelts can improve over time.Volvo says its new safety belt expands the load-limiting profiles and increases the possible number of settings. Image: VolvoVolvo has previously deviated from traditional practices to introduce new technologies meant to underscore its commitment to safety. The company limits the top speed on all of its vehicles to 112 mph — notably below the 155 mph established by a “gentleman’s agreement” between Mercedes-Benz, Audi, and BMW to reduce the number of fatalities on the Autobahn.The new seatbelts will debut in the Volvo EX60, the automaker’s mid-sized electric SUV which is scheduled to come out next year.See More: #volvos #new #seatbelts #use #realtime

Volvo has introduced a new seatbelt technology that can customize the protection it provides in real time. The "multi-adaptive safety belt" system, as the automaker is calling it, uses data input from both interior and exterior sensors to change protection settings based on various factors. It can take a person's height, weight, body shape and seating position into account, as well as the direction and speed of the vehicle. The system can communicate all those information to the seatbelt "in the blink of an eye" so that it can optimize protection for the passenger.  If the passenger is on the larger side, for instance, they will receive a higher belt load setting to reduce the risk of a head injury in the event of a serious crash. For milder crashes, someone with a smaller frame will receive a lower belt load setting to prevent rib injuries. Volvo didn't specifically say if the system also takes the position of a seatbelt on women into account, since it doesn't always fit right over a woman's chest. However, the automaker explained that the system expands the number of load-limiting profiles to 11. Load limiters control how much force a seatbelt applies on the body during a crash. Typically, seatbelts only have three load-limiting profiles, but Volvo expanding them to 11 means the system can better optimize the protection a passenger gets.  Volvo used information from five decades of safety research and from a database of over 80,000 people involved in real-life accidents to design the new safety belt. The system was also created to incorporate improvements rolled out via over the-air software updates, which the company expects to release as it gets more data and insights.  "The world first multi-adaptive safety belt is another milestone for automotive safety and a great example of how we leverage real-time data with the ambition to help save millions of more lives," said Åsa Haglund, head of Volvo Cars Safety Centre. "This marks a major upgrade to the modern three-point safety belt, a Volvo invention introduced in 1959, estimated to have saved over a million lives." Volvo engineer Nils Bohlin designed the modern three-point seatbelt and made its patent available for use by other automakers. The company didn't say whether it'll be as generous with the multi-adaptive safety belt, but the new system will debut in the all-electric Volvo EX60 midsize SUV sometime next year.This article originally appeared on Engadget at #volvo #introducing #first #multiadaptive #seatbelt

The new ES90 electric car is the flagship of Volvo's latest digital safety tech.TT News Agency/AFP via Getty Images For decades, the Volvo brand has been synonymous with safety. But keeping passengers secure is no longer just about a strong cabin or cleverly designed crumple zones. Increasingly, safety is about semi-autonomous driving technology that can mitigate collisions or even avoid them entirely. Volvo intends to be ahead of the game in this era too. Its secret weapon? Something called “Gaussian Splatting”. I asked Volvo’s Head of Software Engineering Alwin Bakkenes and subsidiary Zenseact’s VP Product Erik Coelingh exactly what this is and why it’s so important. Volvo: Early Application Of Safety Data “We have a long history of innovations based on data,” says Bakkenes. “The accident research team from the 70s started with measuring tapes. Now in the digital world we’re collecting millions of real-life events. That data has helped us over the years to develop a three-point safety belt and the whiplash protection system. Now, we can see from the data we collect from fleets that a very large portion of serious accidents happen in the dark on country roads where vulnerable road users are involved. That’s why, with the ES90 that we just launched, we are also introducing a function called lighter AES where we have enabled the car to steer away from pedestrians walking on the side of the road or cyclists, which in the dark you can’t see even if you have your high beam on. This technology picks that up earlier than a human driver.” The Volvo EX90 SUV will also benefit from this technology. Volvo Cars uses AI and virtual worlds with the aim to create safer carsVolvo “If you want to lead in collision avoidance and self-driving, you need to have the best possible data from the real world,” adds Bakkenes. “But everyone is looking also at augmenting that with simulated data. The next step is fast automation, so we’re using state-of-the-art end-to-end models to achieve speed in iterations. But sometimes these models hallucinate. To avoid that, we use our 98 years of safety experience and these millions of data points as guardrails to make sure that the car behaves well because we believe that when you start to automate it needs to be trusted. For us every kilometer driven with Pilot Assist or Pilot Assist Plus needs to be safer than when you've driven it yourself. In the world of AI data is king. We use Gaussian Splatting to enhance our data set.” What Is Volvo’s Gaussian Splatting? “Cars are driven all around the world in different weather and traffic conditions by different people,” says Coelingh. “The variation is huge. We collect millions of data points, but it’s still a limited amount compared to reality. Gaussian Splatting is a new technology that some of our PhD students have been developing the last few years into a system where you can take a single data point from the real world where you have all the sensor, camera, radar and LIDAR sequences and then blow it up into thousands or tens of thousands of different scenarios. In that way, you can get a much better representation of the real world because we can test our software against this huge variation. If you do it in software, you can test much faster, so then you can iterate your software much more quickly and improve our product.” “Gaussian Splatting is used in different areas of AI,” continues Coelingh. “It comes from the neural radiance fields.” The original version worked with static images. “The first academic paper was about a drum kit where somebody took still pictures from different angles and then the neural net was trained on those pictures to create a 3D model. It looked perfect from any angle even though there was only a limited set of pictures available. Later that technology was expanded from 3D to 4D space-time, so you could also do it on the video set. We now do this not just with video data, but also with LiDAR and radar data.” A real-world event can be recreated from every angle. “We can start to manipulate other road users in this scenario. We can manipulate real world scenarios and do different simulations around this to make sure that our system is robust to variations.”Gaussian Splatting allows multiple scenario variations to be created from one real event.Volvo Volvo uses this system particularly to explore how small adjustments could prevent accidents. “Most of the work that we do is not about the crash itself,” says Coelingh. “It’s much more about what's happening 4-5 seconds before the crash or potential crash. The data we probe is from crashes, but it's also from events where our systems already did an intervention and in many cases those interventions come in time to prevent an accident and in some cases they come late and we only mitigated it. But all these scenarios are relevant because they happen in the real world, and they are types of edge case. These are rare, but through this technology of Gaussian Splatting, we can go from a few edge cases to suddenly many different edge cases and thereby test our system against those in a way that we previously could not.” Volvo’s Global Safety Focus This is increasingly important for addressing the huge variation in global driving habits and conditions a safety system will be expected to encounter. “Neural Nets are good at learning these types of patterns,” says Coelingh. “Humans can see that because of the behavior of a car the driver is talking into their phone, either slowing down or wiggling in the lane. If you have an end-to-end neural network using representations from camera images, LiDAR and radar, it will anticipate those kinds of things. We are probing data from cars all around the world where Volvo Cars are being driven.” The system acts preemptively, so it can perform a safety maneuver for example when a pedestrian appears suddenly in the path of the vehicle. “You have no time to react,” says Coelingh. Volvo’s safety system will be ready, however. “Even before that, the car already detects free space. It can do an auto steer and it’s a very small correction. It doesn't steer you out of lane. It doesn't jerk you around. It slows down a little bit and it does the correction. It's undramatic, but the impact is massive. Oncoming collisions are incredibly severe. Small adjustments can have big benefits.”Volvo's safety tech can detect pedestrians the human driver may not have seen.Volvo Volvo has developed one software platform to cover both safety and autonomy. “The software stack that we develop is being used in different ways,” says Coelingh. “We want the driver to drive manually undisturbed unless there’s a critical situation. Then we try to assist in the best possible way to avoid collision, either by warning, steering, auto braking or a combination of those. Then we also do cruising or L2 automation.” Volvo demonstrated how it has been using Gaussian Splatting at NVIDIA’s GTC in April. “We went deeply into the safe automation concept,” says Bakkenes. “Neural nets are good at picking up things that you can’t do in a rule-based system. We're developing one stack based on good fleet data which has end-to-end algorithms to achieve massive performance, and it has guard rails to make sure we manage hallucinations. It's not like we have a collision avoidance stack and then we have self-driving stack.” “There was a conscious decision that if we improve performance, then we want the benefits of that to be both for collision avoidance in manual driving and for self-driving,” says Coelingh. “We build everything from the same stack, but the stack itself is scalable. It’s one big neural network that we can train. But then there are parts that we can deploy separately to go from our core premium ADAS system all the way to a system that can do unsupervised automation. Volvo’s purpose is to get to zero collisions, saving lives. We use AI and all our energy to get there.” #volvo #gaussian #splatting #our #secret

The biggest tech events in May and June may be software focused, but there's plenty of hardware going through the wringer here at Engadget. Over the last two weeks alone, we've put a drone, gaming display, headphones and a gaming tablet through their paces. If you missed any of that, or our latest game analysis and EV test drive, keeping scrolling to catch up on our latest reviews.  DJI Mavic 4 Pro Reporter Steve Dent reviews a lot of drones at Engadget. So when he uses descriptors like "a new standard," "the most technologically advanced drone I've seen" and "the best video quality," everyone needs to take note. After his tests, Steve argued that the Mavic 4 Pro is further proof of how DJI continues to outpace its rivals. "It’s an improvement over the Mavic 3 Pro in nearly every area, and as mentioned, it doesn’t really have any competition in the consumer space," he said. "The closest alternative in price and capability is Autel’s Evo II Pro 6K, but that drone has a single-camera system with a smaller sensor, less endurance and shorter range." Sony WH-1000XM6 Sony's latest flagship headphones were hardly a secret by the time they officially arrived last week, but thankfully, the three-year wait for the upgrade was well worth it. The company managed to improve its already great over-ear headphones yet again, with updates to sound quality, noise cancellation and overall comfort. "The only real downside is the price continues to go up: the M6 is more than the M5 was at launch," I wrote. "When you combine their performance with Sony’s ever-growing list of features, the 1000XM6 are the best headphones you can buy right now." ASUS ROG Flow Z13If you're looking for a gaming tablet to replace your laptop, there are some perks to the ROG Flow Z13. However, there are also some drawbacks, mainly the flimsy keyboard that makes typing on anything other than a table or desk quite cumbersome. "It's got a funky build and unapologetically aggressive styling," senior reviews reporter Sam Rutherford explained. "But unless you have a very particular set of requirements, it doesn't fit neatly into most people's lives as an equivalent laptop." LG 27 UltraGear OLED It may have taken writing a review to get senior reviews reporter Devindra Hardwar to understand the hype around 480Hz gaming displays, but I'd argue the sacrifice was well worth it. The LG 27 UltraGear is a powerhouse, right down to the future-proof DisplayPort 2.1 connection. It's expensive though, and besides the OLED panel, it's not much of a looker. But that performance, it'll make you forget where you are. "The real world melted away — I was fully inside Rocket League's absurd soccer arena," he described. "When the match ended, it took me a few minutes to reacclimatize to reality." Driving the Hyundai Ioniq 9 and FBC: Firebreak  Contributor Tim Stevens spent some time behind the wheel of Hyundai's three-row Ioniq 9 EV SUV. Pricing for the more premium trims ventures into Rivian territory, but Tim argues the Ioniq 9 is the more practical choice for the rigors of daily life over the R1S. "The Ioniq 9 has a stance more like a Volvo station wagon than a gigantic family hauler, but make no mistake, it's the latter," he said. "That's immediately evident as soon as you climb into the third row." Senior gaming editor Jessica Conditt took Remedy's co-op shooter FBC: Firebreak for a spin. While the game enticed her to keep playing after almost three hours with two strangers, it could still use some polish before next month's launch. "All of the issues I have with Firebreak can be fine-tuned before the game launches this summer, and I have faith in Remedy to do so," she observed. "Firebreak is poised to be a thoughtful and focused entry in the co-op shooter genre, and it’s already an inviting extension of Remedy’s darkest and silliest sensibilities.This article originally appeared on Engadget at #engadget #review #recap #dji #mavic

PSA: Lidar and high-powered lasers, increasingly common in cars and at entertainment venues, can cause permanent damage to smartphone cameras – even those built to withstand everyday wear. Users should be aware of this hidden risk and avoid direct exposure to these beams to protect their devices. Modern smartphones can survive drops and even take a swim, but they may have met their match – and it's not what anyone expected. The lidar equipment used in cars and stage shows can silently and permanently destroy a camera sensor. Redditor Jeguetelli learned this the hard way. While filming a brand-new Volvo EX90 with his iPhone 16 Pro Max, the phone's camera caught more than just the sleek SUV. A burst from the car's roof-mounted lidar sensor – designed to emit near-infrared laser beams to detect its surroundings – hit the lens directly, leaving behind a permanent cluster of fried pixels in red, pink, and purple hues. Oddly enough, switching to another lens brought the view back to normal. Jeguetelli wasn't overly concerned – AppleCare had him covered – but not everyone will be so fortunate. Volvo confirmed this wasn't a one-off incident. In a statement to The Drive, the automaker warned against pointing cameras directly at lidar units, noting that the concentrated light can damage image sensors. "It's generally advised to avoid pointing a camera directly at a lidar sensor. The laser light emitted by the lidar can potentially damage the camera's sensor or affect its performance," the statement read. Volvo added that the risk increases at close range, where the beam is more concentrated. Filming from a safe distance should prevent damage, and using filters or lens covers may offer additional protection. // Related Stories Unfortunately, Volvos aren't the only risk. Lidar is becoming increasingly common across the auto industry. Despite once dismissing the tech as "unnecessary," Tesla remains a major user, even as it pushes toward camera-only systems. Earlier this month, lidar supplier Luminar Technologies reported that Tesla had purchased over million in lidar hardware. Lidar is not the only thing that can damage camera sensors – lasers are just as harmful. Another Reddit user reported that their Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra developed strange lines after attending a laser-filled event. The patterns appeared in photos and videos, particularly at certain zoom levels. Experts say event lasers are generally eye-safe but can easily destroy camera sensors if the beam hits directly. The International Laser Display Association has long warned about this specific risk. #lidar #great #cars #but #can