Bill Nye’s Crowd-Funded LightSail Has Lost Contact With Earth - http://clapway.com/2015/05/28/bill-nyes-crowd-funded-lightsail-has-lost-contact-with-earth123/

Bill Nye’s Kickstart-funded LightSail project has been temporarily halted, after the prototype satellite experienced a computer malfunction during its lower Earth orbit. The solar sail spacecraft launched just last week, and was backed by The Planetary Society, Nye’s organization. The mission for the spacecraft was to use energy solely from the sun to power its motion through space. Currently, communication between the LightSail and Earth has stopped.

The LightSail’s original mission: an experiment for solar sails

Just last week, the LightSail was launched atop the Atlas V rocket at Cape Canaveral, in Florida. The solar sail aircraft included a CubeSat equipped with a 344-square-foot mylar sail, which served to detect invisible, accelerating particles expelled from the sun. The solar “wind” would theoretically and physically work like the wind at sea, where the boat’s sails are used to propel the ship forward. The solar sail would be “pushed” through space by the force of solar wind.

However, the primary goal of the mission was to see if the sails on the LightSail could successfully expand in space. The deployment of the sails was scheduled to happen much later, only after a series of data “chirps” were sent back consistently to Earth, indicating the position of the spacecraft and other important information. Flight controllers have received successful chirps for two consecutive days, but over the weekend, the satellite stopped sending signals.

What next for Bill Nye’s LightSail?

The scientists monitoring the solar sail’s behavior have deduced that the satellite’s Linux-based software system ultimately couldn’t contain the size of the data emitted by the chirps sent to Earth. The more beacons transferred via the chirps, the larger the file size would grow. When the file reaches a size of 32 megabytes, the flight system could have reached maximum capacity and crashed.

The team at the Planetary Society has to unfortunately put the LightSail mission on hold until they can fix this technical issue. Currently, scientists are hoping to reboot the system, by giving it commands every time the spacecraft passes a ground control station. They’re also hoping that charged particles in space will strike an electrical component on the LightSail and help “wake it up.” For the time being, it seems, the solar sail spacecraft remains frozen.

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Bill Nye’s Crowd-Funded LightSail Has Lost Contact With Earth

Japan: Crowdsourcing for Fove VR Eye Tracking Headset - http://clapway.com/2015/05/20/japan-crowdsourcing-for-fove-vr-eye-tracking-headset-123/

If you have always dreamed of owning a virtual reality headset to wish away the world, then you are in luck with the announcement of Fove’s new VR eye tracking headset. Virtual reality creators have made a lot of progress since those bulky headsets with the 1990s awkward graphics. This newest creation shows that Fove has likely taken this adventure the farthest yet.

Fove, which is based in Tokyo, Japan, has a Kickstarter campaign going on to raise money to produce and sell its eye tracking headset, deemed as the first of its kind. The adventure consists of a hands free headset that once it is placed on the head, it can read simple movements of the eyes and turn them into a cool virtual reality existence for users.

The controls allow the user to have their own adventure and be able to do things such as aim and shoot by just using their eye movements, as well as interact with the characters in the virtual reality world by using the eye tracking headset.

VR Eye Tracking Headset Will Have High Accuracy

The new Fove VR eye tracking headset will be presented to early-bird purchasers for only $375. It promises customers that its eye tracking will be accurate to 1/20th of a degree, as well as come with an ultra-low-latency head tracking, and a field of view consisting of being 100-degrees wide with a high-resolution 5.8-inch display on its screen.

The Fove VR eye tracking headset is different from other VR devices like Oculus VR or Samsung VR because it uses eye tracking instead of head movements to trigger the commands from the users. This makes the user’s adventure into virtual reality much easier and produces less strain on the head and neck.

Specifications of the Fove VR Headset

The Fove eye tracking headset will come with a 5.8-inch display screen capable of a resolution of 2560 x 1400, as well as the 100-degree field of view mentioned previously. However, one drawback of this new eye tracking headset is that it will run at 60 frames per second, so it is possible it could cause motion sickness in some players since the normal level is 9-0 frames a second, according to Digital Trends.

Fove needs to raise its goal of $250,000 by July 4 and anyone wanting to make a pledge for helping to produce the eye tracking headset can do so for as little as $5 and get a thank you from the business, with $15 pledge getting the donator a Fove Classy pin badge and $25 getting the donor a Fove VIP t-shirt.

 

Japan: Crowdsourcing for Fove VR Eye Tracking Headset