As we get older, our eyes get worse. That’s just a fact of life. It is a rite of passage the first time you leave the eye doctor with a script for “progressive” lenses which are just fancy bifocals. However, a new high-tech version of bifocals promises you better vision, but with a slight drawback, as [Sherri L. Smith] found.

Remember how users of Google Glass earned the nickname “glassholes?” Well, these new bifocals make Google Glass look like a fashion statement. If you are too young to need them, bifocals account for the fact that your eyes need different kinds of help when you look close up (like soldering) or far away (like at an antenna up on a roof). A true bifocal has two lenses and you quickly learn to look down at anything close up and up to see things far away. Progressives work the same, but they transition between the two settings instead of having a discrete mini lens at the bottom.

The new glasses, the ViXion01 change based on what you are looking for. They measure range and adjust accordingly. For $555, or a monthly rental, you can wear what looks like a prototype for a Star Trek visor and let it deduce what you are looking at and change its lenses accordingly.

Of course, this takes batteries that last about ten hours. It also requires medical approval to be real glasses and it doesn’t have that, yet. Honestly, if they worked well and didn’t look so dorky, the real use case might be allowing your eye doctor to immediately download a new setting as your vision changes. How about you? How much odd headgear are you willing to wear in public and why?

Glasses have a long strange history. While a university prototype we saw earlier was not likely to win fashion awards, they did look better than these. Maybe.

We’ve all been there – staring at a blank PowerPoint slide, struggling to find the perfect image to illustrate our point. Or worse, settling for a cheesy stock photo that doesn’t quite capture what we’re trying to convey. But what if you could create custom, on-brand images that perfectly complement your presentation – without spending […]

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MyVocal.ai is an AI tool that offers voice cloning, text-to-speech, and custom music creation. You can upload your own voice data for training, without limitations on dialogue content. Then you can use your cloned voice to sing songs with the custom music feature! MyVocal.ai uses emotion recognition technology can automatically detect the emotional content of […]

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Learn how to create a custom jitter shader in React-Three-Fiber, inspired by the visual style of PS1-era games, to add a retro aesthetic to 3D models.

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Here’s a super useful method to get high quality upscales for free using Stable Diffusion. The upscalers which come packaged within the AUTOMATIC1111 Stable Diffusion web UI are extremely powerful free upscaling options for your images. Sadly, a lot of people are put off from using them as it requires a bit of setup (same […]

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If, like many of us, you’ve been busy generating AI art with the various generators now available, you might have noticed one problem that most of the AI image generators have in common. The resolution of the generated image is usually rather low, with Midjourney’s upscaled version being the best at 1080p, others like Stable […]

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Are you a YouTuber looking to reach a global audience? Translating your videos into different languages is a great way to expand your reach and grow your subscriber base. But manual translation can be time-consuming and expensive, especially if you have to outsource someone else to do the translation. This is where AI tools come […]

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For racing games, flight simulators, and a few other simulation-style games, a simple controller just won’t do. You want something that looks and feels closer to the real thing. The major downsides to these more elaborate input methods is that they take up a large amount of space, requiring extra time for setup, and can be quite expensive as well. To solve both of these problems [Rahel zahir Ali] created a miniature steering wheel controller for some of his favorite games.

While there are some commercial offerings of small steering wheels integrated into an otherwise standard video game controller and a few 3D printed homebrew options, nothing really felt like a true substitute. The main design goal with this controller was to maintain the 900-degree rotation of a standard car steering wheel in a smaller size. It uses a 600P/R rotary encoder attached to a knob inside of a printed case, with two spring-loaded levers to act as a throttle and brake, as well as a standard joystick to adjust camera angle and four additional buttons. Everything is wired together with an Arduino Leonardo that sends the inputs along to the computer.

Now he’s ready to play some of his favorite games and includes some gameplay footage using this controller in the video linked below. If you’re racing vehicles other than cars and trucks, though, you might want a different type of controller for your games instead.

Learn how to apply a pixel/grid displacement to a texture in Three.js using shaders and GPGPU with a subtle RGB shift effect on cursor move.

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Traditional airports spend big money to install instrument landing systems (ILS) to guide planes in safely. In places like Antarctica, though, it’s simply not possible to permanently install a massive antenna array for localization, particularly with all the ice shifting about on the regular. As covered by Flightradar24, the solution to this is to use a transponder landing system (TLS) instead.

A TLS tracks planes by using multilateration—basically, transponder signals are picked up by multiple antennas and the time delays are used to figure out the position of the aircraft. It then sends the guidance signals a plane would normally expect to receive from an ILS transmitter array, for horizontal and vertical guidance. These signals appear to the plane to be coming from antennas located as per a typical ILS array, with the TLS able to generate signals from ‘virtual emanation points” as needed. This allows the TLS to generate different landing approaches to suit different planes and conditions. From the pilot and aircraft side, it’s all perfectly transparent.

In Antarctica’s McMurdo station, landings are handled by a TLS system that barely takes up more space than a single shipping crate. The system can be set up in just a few hours, unlike a traditional ILS which takes significant installation work spanning weeks or months at best. At the moment, though, the landing strip at McMurdo is stable enough that the system only needs periodic realignment every three years or so.

You might assume that if you’re approaching Antarctica by plane, everything would be on manual. However, the creature comforts of modern airports are available even at one of the the most southerly airports on Earth!

 

X-Minus offers a suite of audio tools, including an AI vocal remover to remove vocals from any song. The vocal remover can be used to create high-quality karaoke tracks or remixes of your favorite songs. To use the tool, you can either upload a file or select one from your device. X-Minus also has the […]

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A simple yet powerful approach to Web Component server-rendering, declarative behaviors, and JavaScript islands.

Topaz Video AI is one of the most powerful editing tools when it comes to AI video enhancement. It’s a great option for those looking to upscale their videos to 2K, 4K, and even 8K+. However, finding the best settings to use can be a bit cumbersome, especially when you factor in the time it […]

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ComfyUI is a powerful and modular GUI for Stable Diffusion that lets you create advanced workflows using a node/graph interface. It fully supports the latest Stable Diffusion models including SDXL 1.0 through an intuitive visual workflow builder. With ComfyUI, you can chain together different operations like upscaling, inpainting, and model mixing all within a single […]

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Build a minimal 3D web application to showcase designs on a laptop and phone in an interactive environment using Three.js and threepipe.

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InvokeAI is a new addition to Stable Diffusion offering a really neat interface with tons of exclusive features. The interactive canvas is one of the best features about InvokeAI, you can input an image and draw around it, inpaint and outpainting both available! I’ve enjoyed using InvokeAI to expand a few of my image creation […]

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Silly Tavern AI is an exciting new chatbot application that allows you to interact with various characters in engaging conversations. Since the app needs to be installed locally on your PC, some people might be wondering how exactly this is done. In this guide, we’ll walk you through the installation process step-by-step to get you […]

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Learn how to create distortion and grain effects on scroll using Three.js shaders, syncing HTML images with WebGL.

An introduction to Raymarching using the power of Signed Distance Fields (SDFs) and simple lighting to create a liquid shape effect.

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