“Balloon Powered Internet For Everyone”

Project Loon is a network of balloons placed in the stratosphere and designed to provide people in rural and remote areas with internet access. The Project Loon team says it could use wind currents at different levels of the stratosphere to control where balloons move and ensure that they remain evenly spaced out.

The Google site for Project Loon claims that “each balloon can provide connectivity to a ground area of about 40 km in diameter at speeds comparable to 3G.”

Testing began in June 2013, when thirty balloons were launched from New Zealand, and about 50 local users got to test it using special antennas. Google plans to send up 300 balloons around the world at the 40th parallel South that would provide internet to New Zealand, Australia, Chile, and Argentina.

Source: http://www.google.com/loon

Indoor Magnetic Positioning

Researchers at Finland’s University of Oulu  have found a way to use the Earth’s magnetic field to obtain your position indoors. The company IndoorAtlas was started to bring this technology to the public.

They’ve created a smartphone app that can allow users to pinpoint exactly where they are in any building. This was initially a problem because compasses don’t normally work inside buildings as the metallic structures disturb the Earth’s magnetic field. So IndoorAtlas takes a different approach by using these disturbances to create a map of the inside of each building.

The applications are limitless. This could be used by tourists in airports or malls, and also by anyone in any commercial building, to find their way around. It could also be used by companies to target advertisements at potential customers who are nearby.

Virtual Reality for Everyone!

The Oculus Rift is a new virtual reality headset designed specifically for video games, and will make you feel like you are actually in the game. Oculus VR, the company making the headset, initially put the product on (crowdfunding platform) Kickstarter a year and a half ago. It surpassed its ($250,000) goal, but has been bought by Facebook for $2 billion in March this year, which turned its dream of making a commercial version into reality.

The problem with existing virtual reality devices is that they suffer from a high degree of latency (delay) between the user’s action and the corresponding image adjustment on the screen. This makes users feel sick. But Oculus VR claims “ultra-low latency head tracking”, which prevents the problem from occurring, and makes the experience a lot more enjoyable.

A commercial version has not been released yet, but improved head tracking, positional tracking, higher resolution, and wireless operation are some of the features under consideration. The company predicts that the commercial version may be released either later this year or early next year. It will be the arrival of immersive and affordable virtual reality.

My experience at TEDx

Last week, I attended TEDxYouth@Chennai, which was a part of TEDxYouthDay events. TEDxYouthDay is a series of TEDx events happening all around the world coinciding with Universal Children’s Day in late November. These events are designed to empower and inspire young people.

This year’s event was titled “The Spark”. I was really looking forward to being at a live TEDx event, as I had watched quite a few TED and TEDx talks online, and found them thoughtful and inspiring.

The speakers included an environmental activist, an artist, a dancer, a designer, a poet, and a blues group, among others. They shared their personal experiences with certain issues, and how they got to where they are now.

TED is supposed to be about “ideas worth spreading” and finding solutions to problems, while the speakers at this event, though inspiring in a way, did not give us much to think about.

It’s nice to see that Chennai is getting involved with TED! But it would be great if next year, there would be more emphasis on science and technology topics as well.

If Humans Can’t Speed Up The Internet, Computers Will!

TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) is one of the main protocols used in the Internet. It’s what oversees the data we send and receive on our computers, and tries to prevent the clogging up of the networks

Computers and other Internet-enabled devices use a set of rules to manage this exchange of data (broken up into small pieces called “packets”) on a network. These are known as “TCP Congestion Control Algorithms”.

TCP algorithms have been around for over 30 years, but a new system has been developed at MIT to generate algorithms to reduce network congestion. The system, Remy, is capable of improving the speed of data transmission over the network by up to double what is offered in human-developed algorithms.

This could mean much faster Internet for users (if the system is proved to be capable of handling the actual Internet), and who wouldn’t want that?