Welcome to the BYTE, where we serve up the latest home and tech news from the last week for you to sink your teeth into.
This week we’re taking a BYTE out of an AR shopping experience, Uber’s taxi service, Trashbot, MAVERICK, and Kitchen Emoji. Dig in!
Apple Adds Buy Button to AR Experience
Your Augmented Reality experience is becoming a real-time buying experience. Thanks to Apple you not only can test out placing Home Depot products in your surroundings, but you can also use a button to add it to your cart without leaving the AR experience. Home Depot, Wayfair, Bang & Olufsen and 1-800-Flowers are the first companies to incorporate using this feature. This feature is only supported by iOS devices. The best part about the new AR shopping feature is that it doesn’t require an app to enable it. All it requires is safari to link up with your phone’s camera. Is this the future of shopping?
Uber’s Taxi Service
Uber has a new service. But it might not be what you were expecting. In fact, you’ve probably seen this service before. Uber recently launched its new service, called 1-833-USE-Uber, a dial phone ride sharing service. So it’s basically a taxi service. All you have to do is call 1-833-USE-UBER and order a ride. This service is aimed towards older people who don’t understand how to use a smart phone. Let’s be real, most of the younger generations know how to use a smart phone. This service isn’t available everywhere, yet. It’s currently being tested in Arizona.
Trash Sorting Robot
Being eco- friendly isn’t an easy task. Most people don’t bother to recycle because it’s one more chore added to their list. What if recycling wasn’t extra work? What if you had someone or in this case some robot do it for you? CleanRobotics has made this possible with their invention called Trashbot. Trashbot knows what items can be recycled and what items have to be thrown away. All of your trash goes to the same place, but Trashbot moves the recyclables to the recycling bin. The only downfall to this device is you have to place one piece of a trash at a time. You can help the environment without having to add extra work for yourself. Who said recycling wasn’t easy, it just got easier.
New Airplane Design
We can spot an airplane a mile away just by its shape. All airlines use the same shape for their passenger airplanes. That historical shape might change one day. Airbus is trying to come up with a new airplane design that they hope will eventually be used for passenger airplanes. At the Singapore Airshow they revealed their new aeronautical design, called MAVERICK. MAVERICK stands for Model Aircraft for Validation and Experimentation of Robust Innovative Controls. This new design uses a blended-wing design versus the usual flying-wing design. The advantages of using this blended-wing aircraft are a stronger structure, less aircraft weight, and better fuel efficiency. This design would also be very comfortable layout for passengers because of the excess space in the shape. Unfortunately, it will be a long time before we actually see a life size version of the MAVERICK.
Emoji Kitchen
Texting our emotions are what emojis are used for. But sometimes you feel like the perfect emoji doesn’t exist to express exactly what you are feeling. Google might have solved that problem by making Emoji Kitchen. Emoji kitchen can combine two emojis to create the perfect emotes. Communicating digitally is a common practice to communicate with one another. Now you have 800 more combinations of emojis available to express yourself. Emoji Kitchen can be used on about every android or Samsung device’s keyboard. The only default to Emoji Kitchen is that you can’t create your own custom emoji, instead, the keyboard suggests you a few different emoji combination mixups to use.
