After 16 years of tinkering and experimentation, Dyson is releasing its first robotic vacuum cleaner, the Dyson 360 Eye.Though iRobot released Roomba, the first autonomous sucking machine, in 2002, Dyson has been content to lay back, in hopes of ironing out some nagging limitations. "We didn't want to put out a gimmick," Sir James tells Wired. He says that meant inventing a new way for the vacuum to navigate. "Accurate navigation is the key to cleaning properly," says Dyson. "I don't just mean in coverage, but in terms of not going over the same spot twice, because if you do that you're wasting the battery's power." Put differently: Dyson didn't want to release just any robotic vacuum cleaner. He wanted one that could do the chore as well as its human counterparts.The Eye hinges on a 360-degree camera that views the room at a 45 degree angle and takes 30 pictures per second. Those photos become a live map of the room. To get started, the Eye undocks itself from a charging station affixed to the wall, near the floor.

The robot triangulates its position in the room, finds the centre, and starts spiralling outward. Once it has vacuumed 10 square feet, it relocates to clean a new patch. harga vacuum cleaner buat mobilInfrared sensors keep the Eye aware of pets or thin table legs, but the bulk of the vacuum's spatial smarts come from the real-time map of the room. rainbow vacuum cleaner mattress"When you go into a room, you see there's a corner of the table you might bump into and you know roughly how far away you are, and you can judge from it," says Dyson. vacuum cleaners upright bagless"I'm talking about the decisions you make from what you see and what you're able to gauge.That's precisely what our robot does with its 360-degree camera."

Once it's covered the entire floor, it scoots back into its charging dock.Novel as the optical mapping system may be, the vacuum still needs serious suction to be truly autonomous. "We always believed we should clean properly, and cleaning properly means you've got to put a lot of power and brush suction," Dyson says. Like other recent Dyson releases, the Eye has one of the company's proprietary digital motors -- this one is a V2 that whirs at 104,000 RPM -- that Dyson estimates has 20 times the force of other robot vacuums.In place of standard wheels the Eye uses treads, so the Eye can climb over ledges or door frames, sucking dust out of cracks and crevices along the way. And unlike other scuttling vacuum cleaners, the Eye's brush bar is as wide as the body of the robot, so that everything in its path gets a full sweep.Enthusiasts might remember the Dyson DC06, which almost launched in 2001. It had 84 sensors, needed three computers to run, and would have cost thousands of dollars. Its technique was similar to other now-popular robot vacuum cleaners that use random bounce navigation (a system of sensors and bumpers) and maps of the ceiling to make their way around a room, but do so without accurate knowledge of nearby obstacles or a memory of where they've been.

Dyson reportedly pulled it from production because of its heavy machinery and price tag. Simply put, "we realised that a robot that relied on a lot of sensors would still not be very good," he says.In the years since, the company has worked on building a better alternative. Dyson, who in February invested £5 million in a robotics lab at Imperial College London, believes the future of robotics lies in vision-powered systems. Indeed, the technology already is used in autonomous vehicles. Plus, one benefit of optical mapping technology is how naturally it translates into an app. Because the Eye's software knows in real time where it is and where it's been, it can relay a live activity map to the user's phone, where it can monitored and remotely programmed. While the Eye doesn't learn homeowners' behaviour patterns like Nest, it certainly seems like it could later. The infrastructure is already in place.The Dyson 360 Eye goes on sale next spring, first in Japan and then worldwide. The price is not yet set.

Rock It, Raccoon: Zen Pinball 2 Guardians Of The Galaxy Zen Pinball 2 isn’t my digital pinball flavour of choice. I prefer the recreation of actual tables, even if sometimes imperfect, to the shiny Marvel and Star Wars licensed fare of Zen Studios. I still dabble in the lightshow occasionally though and a new Guardians of the Galaxy table seems like a good excuse to shake off the ball rust. Judging by the trailer (below), the new table will fall in the Zen tradition of ramp-heavy high-scoring theme park tables. Lots of bang for your buck (actually $2.99), but not necessarily a whole lot of skills and processes to learn. Win-Toy Soldiers: Disney Infinity – Marvel Super Heroes Whenever I’m reminded that Disney Infinity exists, I’m amazed that it doesn’t have a terrifying claim on parental wallets worldwide. The $75 starter pack that is the gateway into the console toybox has racked up more than three million sales and while the PC version has an initial free download and doesn’t support the physical figures that plug into the game, Skylanders-style, it is otherwise almost equivalent to the console versions.

Purchasing the characters online as digital downloads does detract from the urge to collect ’em all but also means additional PC content is a little cheaper. In Autumn, Infinity is expanding and the 2.0 release will contain twenty new characters plucked from the Marvel universe. Millions of wallets suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. Perhaps that quote will actually be relevant when Disney unleash Infinity 3.0 to coincide with the cinematic release of Star Wars VII: The Generation Gap. Superiority Complex: The Amazing Spider-Man 2 Has a Spider-Man villain ever built a giant version of those suction devices that capture arachnid infiltrators so that they can be safely disposed of? I like to think that it’s happened several times over the decades, so that whenever the quip-slinger hears a vacuum cleaner, he soils his spandex. Judging by the reveal trailer for The Amazing Spider-Man 2 – the game of the sequel to the reboot of the adaptation of the comic book – Peter is more likely to be slinging gloom and doom than quips.

He doesn’t even speak, preferring to let villainous mentor-chum (?) Kraven the Hunter do the talking. What’s Going On With Lego Marvel’s Mess Of A Release? If you’re in the futuristic megacities of Americaland, you’ll likely know that you can buy and play Lego Marvel Super Heroes on Steam right now. You’ve been able to for a week or so. If you’re in, say, Britain, you may not know that you too can’t. Except, until recently, you could buy it! Just not play it. It’s been fixed now, but for a while there, Steam had it as a “coming soon” with a release date in the past, and a store page that let you buy it with no warnings. Just, when you went to install it, it got stuck. So what happened there? And why isn’t it out in the UK for another two weeks? The Amazing Spider-Man 2 Could Be Amazing Or it could be rubbish. But on the evidence of the gameplay-free trailer (below) and the reveal at NYCC, I am hoping it’ll prove to be an above-average comic/movie license.

Details on Polygon suggest improved combat and web-slinging (well they would say that), as well as an expanded and explorable Manhattan backdrop, and “light-RPG elements”. Cameo Man: Lego Marvel Super Heroes The headline may well give away the identity of the latest addition to the Lego Marvel Super Heroes roster but I’m not going to tell you who it is here. The video below explains all and, in its gleeful enthusiasm, makes the game seem like one of the most enticing prospects on the release horizon. I’ve been playing lots of Saints Row IV recently and, as my muscular goth hobo was plummeting from an enormous alien tower, I realised that the Lego games and the Saints Row series have a great deal in common. They both favour a toybox approach to play, forgoing mechanical complexity, and instead piling on ideas, characters, customisation and objectives until only Alan Apathy could be bored. Mr Apathy is not on the Marvel roster. Meet The Bigfigs: Lego Marvel Super Heroes