Latest news with #Specs
Daily Mirror
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mirror
You have razor-sharp vision if you can spot Queen's corgi in just 6 seconds
Sharpen your attention to detail and pop your Specs on, it's time to put your visual skills to the ultimate test with this royal-themed brainteaser that's leaving most Brits scratching their heads Discover whether you've got the eyes of a sniper or desperately need a Specsavers appointment with this devilishly difficult brainteaser. Solving puzzles and riddles is a great way to keep the little ones entertained, or can even help pass the time on your gruelling morning commute. But research has also suggested that they can also positively impact the central nervous system, resulting in a slew of cognitive benefits such as better attention span and concentration levels. However, this royal-themed brainteaser may just leave you utterly stumped and frustrated. Seriously, you'll need razor-sharp vision, meticulous attention to detail, and rapid reaction times to solve this one... READ MORE: You'll need lightning sharp reactions to spot rogue food item in 17 seconds The above image - created by - depicts a vibrant royal garden party at Buckingham Palace in a Where's Wally? style illustration. There are over 100 tiny, comical characters in the picture - from fainting palace guards to aristocrats. However, hiding in plain sight is one of the Queen's beloved corgis - which takes the average person seven seconds to find. So, if you can find the pooch in just six seconds or less, you've proven you've got some serious 20/20 vision. We're not giving away any clues for this one, but zooming in on the picture may help you find the corgi quicker. Giving up, or think you've finally cracked it? Scroll down to the bottom of the article to find the answer. If that regal puzzle didn't even make you break a sweat, it's time to ramp things up to the next level. Below are five seemingly normal questions that look like something you'd see at your local boozer. However, each one of these Qs has been strategically designed to trick you - so don't get too ahead of yourself and rush through. Still, you only have three seconds on each question before you need to move on to the next... Oh, and to prove you're the genius you constantly claim you are - you need to score five out of five. Once you're done, you can check your answers here. How many pairs of animals did Moses take on the Ark? You're in a race and pass the person in 3rd place. So, what place are you in now? John's father had three sons: Snap, Crackle, and...? If a plane crashes right in between France and Spain. Where do you bury the survivors? If it takes seven people seven minutes to eat seven burgers, how long will it take 30 people to eat 30 burgers? Up for another mental workout? Check out our full collection of tricky brainteasers, riddles, and puzzles here - or, learn more about your hidden personality traits with these mind-boggling optical illusions.
Irish Examiner
15-07-2025
- General
- Irish Examiner
Terry Prone: When it comes to woodlice, I'm Albert Pierrepoint — fast and efficient
If you found the weekend a bit hot, you get a sympathy vote. But I put it to you that you did not have to deal with indoor wildlife, a growling toilet, or an upchucking cat while facing the prospect of strangers walking through your bedroom. As I did. If you live in a Martello tower, you do not have air conditioning. You can't afford it, for starters, because old buildings are always trying to fall down or apart, and prevention is costly. But, even if you had the cash, how would you even begin to manage the air inside walls that are nine feet thick? The fact that a tower is circular, though, does provide advantages. The main one being in high summer, that you can open windows on all sides, thereby providing enough of a draught to prevent dwellers from keeling over. Opening the windows does complicate things, though. You get ghettoblaster hard rock from the beach at such volume it makes you wonder if you're going to get palpitations synchronous with the beat. You also get daddy long legs, which are the certified eejits of the insect kingdom. They don't do anything useful, but because they're so self-evidently harmless, you feel guilty about killing them. One of the lesser-known consequences of climate change is that I become a killer during the summer months. Always pretty ruthless about bluebottles and wasps, this year I've added in woodlice. I'd need to confirm it with Éanna Ní Lamhna, but I am convinced that we have an unprecedented outbreak of them currently. If my home were occupied only by me and the woodlice, co-living would be a happy option, but during the summer months, visitors come for the tour, and you don't want tourists trying to compete with woodlice for floor space. Early on in her career, Specs, my cat, used to hunt woodlice, giving them pokes with her front paws to make them go faster and be worth pursuing. Other wildlife, including big spiders, can put on an impressive turn of speed if cat-nudged, and that speed speaks to a primeval feline need. Woodlice don't seem to be capable of increased speed, and so Specs gave up on hunting them. Instead, I have to stamp on them and then vacuum up the corpses. You might interpret 'stamp' as vicious, on my part, but you would be wrong. If I have to kill wildlife, I am committed to being the Albert Pierrepoint of insect execution: it is going to be fast and flawless. Albert, you will remember, was an English hangman who did away with 600 criminals (a handful of whom may have been innocent, but let's not go there). He did nixers in this country. In fact, he did nixers here frequently enough to become, effectively, our locum executioner. He prided himself, did Albert, on the science he brought to his trade. He weighed and measured and timed to ensure that the condemned human fell through a trapdoor and had their neck simultaneously broken by the rope. This obviated the bad hangings, which amounted to slow strangulation, causing kindly relatives of the person being executed to drag on their legs to speed up the process. Bad hangings after the Nuremberg trials led to reflex leg movements that became known as the 'Spandau Ballet', and gave rise to the name of that band. When it comes to woodlice, I'm Pierrepoint: fast and efficient. Not quite as fast as my late husband used to be with earwigs, but his aversion to earwigs was total. He saw them as the embodiment of evil. But then, anything with more than two legs inside a house draws the family into disrepute. Wildlife can put on an impressive turn of speed if cat-nudged, and that speed speaks to a primeval feline need. Picture: iStockphoto I remember preparing a man for a major promotion interview in my kitchen, once. The job was so important and evoked such media interest that if he'd come to our offices, he might have been spotted, and two and two might have been added together. Hence, my kitchen in a previous dwelling, a camera on a tripod capturing his every answer. He was doing pretty well until one question seemed to cause him to silently freeze. He was looking, not at me or the lens, but at the floor behind me. A glance back revealed an audience of one. A curious mouse. I flailed at the mouse with a newspaper and pointed out that we lived by the sea and didn't have cats, which was true at the time. The job aspirant was too polite to criticise, but you could tell he had lost confidence in the whole process. Rodents, where I now live, are assassinated or prevented by Specs, although I worry that, now she is headed for her 20th year — which is pretty advanced for a cat — she may put in for retirement. In fact, I was discussing this with her on Friday morning and advancing the theory that her life, in common with that of most humans, would be greatly improved by not retiring. Humans who give up the day job end up walking the Camino or — worse still — walking the Salt Path, and you know where the latter gets you. Well, OK, it got the one who wrote the book about £11m before things came apart a bit, but the future doesn't look promising — in publication terms — for her. Specs reacted to my advice by throwing up on the coverlet of my bed, which had been washed and dried only the day before. 'You're adding to the water shortage,' I told her, as I turfed the thing into the wash for another go-around. I had an urge to go and confess to Uisce Éireann because I was already failing with the upstairs toilet, which went on strike during the week and had to have its innards replaced by Bryan, who describes himself as a handyman, and is. Very handy. Usually. In this instance, something seems to have gone slightly wrong, because, downstairs quietly reading a Robert Crais thriller — there are few more rewarding pleasures — I registered a sporadic growl. Now, if wildlife large enough to growl had come in through the cat flap, Specs would muster her not-extensive courage and knock hell out of it. She didn't even rouse herself from sleep for a minute in response to the growl. I timed it. It seemed to happen about every seven minutes. I wandered the house, leaving Elvis Cole, the Crais private eye whose business card describes himself as 'the biggest dick in the business', face down on the arm of my chair. All became clear. The growl was coming from the upstairs toilet, which was managing to lightly spray the tiled floor of the wet room with every groan. 'Hell,' I thought, 'if short-taken visitors arrive before Bryan does, they can use the downstairs loo. 'I'll find a way to frame malfunctioning lavatories as an amusing aspect of the narrative of Martello living.'
Tom's Guide
17-06-2025
- Business
- Tom's Guide
Exclusive: I asked Snap's hardware chief about the company's next-gen Specs — here's what I found out
So as we found out last week, Snap is finally launching Specs to the public in 2026 — after an exhaustive developer program that spans four years since its first Spectacles AR glasses. It's been a heluva journey, and with Meta's Project Orion on the horizon and Apple being 'hellbent' on delivering smart glasses, this is becoming a very competitive space. So far, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel has said they will be smaller, lighter, and fully standalone with 'no puck' required. But there's a lot we don't know yet. What has been the story that's led to this point where Snap is ready to go for a full public release? What tech can we expect inside these future contenders for best smart glasses? What's the price? And is society ready for true AR glasses like this? I had a chance to sit down with Snap's VP of Hardware, Scott Myers, and put these questions to him. I have to be a little careful with what I say, because we have like fully announced everything. Yeah. But what he said was that it's substantially smaller. So we have been in this area for 11 years, and we have been building these things for a very long time. It's public information that we have made some acquisitions that like our entire opt optical engine is our own custom thing. We build it ourselves. We design it ourselves, which gives us a pretty unique position where we know exactly how these things are going. We have road maps for development and I really like where we're going. And because we're not just a bunch of companies strung together, we're all like one group working all toward the same goal. I can have the team designing, say, the waveguide, talking to the same team that's working on the rendering engine and SnapOS. And that like synthesis is how we end up still confident about where we're at. Get instant access to breaking news, the hottest reviews, great deals and helpful tips. We've been getting feedback in a lot of different forms about the hardware. We've gotten some phenomenal feedback from the community, but also feedback like 'we wish the field of view was bigger,' you know, or that 'the device was lighter.' There's a joke with the team that like, this is what I want [points towards his reading glasses]. It's a question of what I want. It's how we get there. It's the trade-offs we make to go make these like the dream of true augmented reality, something people can wear and walk around. The social acceptability element is so critically important. Context: Since 2020, Snap has been on a bit of a shopping spree — acquiring AI Factory in 2020 (computer vision AI company), WaveOptics in 2021 (the company designing its waveguide displays), Fit Analytics in 2022 (shopping and ecommerce), a 3D-scanning startup called Th3rd in 2023, and GrAI Matter Labs in 2024 (an edge AI chip company), alongside many more. Well, I think this is one of the reasons we're standalone. I don't want to see people wearing a wire coming out of the back of their head. It makes people look like U.S. Government officials, and that's not how I want to see the world. The form factor obviously matters, but it's also the fit and finish of these things that also matter when you make that jump. Like they need to be robust, but like all of those are pulling the product in different directions. So like, I think one of our strengths is, like, the balance of all of these things. You can make a giant field of view. Some companies have, but you also need really high pixel count or pixels per degree, because it's important for text legibility. You need the ability to make it work indoors and outdoors. Why? Because I don't want to spend all my time inside. As I'm moving through my day, like some of that's inside, some of it's outside. It needs to work in both. So you can't just have a static tint like sunglasses, nor can you just make them clear because they don't work in both environments. So because we've been building these things for so long, we learned these things. We've learned how to solve those problems — what works and what doesn't — but it's all in that trade-off and exactly how you balance all those things. Like, obviously, I'd want the battery to last for days, but then you end up with this giant battery pack that's directionally incorrect, too. This has been a multi-year multi-generation arc. We've launched a pair of 26-degree field of view, augmented reality glasses in 2021 to developers. With that, we learned a ton, and it drove the way our development tool Lens Studio is constructed. So we've been just iterating and iterating and iterating. And what we learned is that like the breath of feedback, the depth of feedback, it's not like you release the product once — you get a long written document, and that's it. It's an active conversation with the community. We even iterate in public in collaboration with our Spectacles subreddit. We want to learn. And what we find is like, as the community grows, as people get better and better at building lenses, they start answering each other's questions. It's a back and forth, like, I personally know developers. That's what a successful community looks like, and we're building this together. And that's very, very intentional. It's in the way our pricing is structured. It's in the way our community is growing. We don't just sell it to anybody, because we want the people who are really going to move the platform forward. It's all very, very, very intentional, and we're very happy with the results as well. As we've had the product out a little bit longer, the lenses have been getting more and more engaging and we're learning together how different UI elements are. I think we are really here to build this with the community because it's an entirely new paradigm. There's a lot of things that will take time for people to understand and figure out. It's not just going to be like, 'oh, here you go, developers — come build for this!' That's not going to work, in my opinion. It is very, very much a community-led discussion. And I couldn't be happier with that. I think what Evan shared was more than Ray-Ban Metas, and less than a Apple Vision Pro. I recognize that's a huge scale!. Obviously we want to make it as low cost as possible. Yeah. But it's also pretty, as you pointed out, pretty advanced technology. And so there's a balance there. One of the things that may not be super intuitive is there's a lot of technology that there is not a ton of world capacity for. Like, we have to go off and work with our suppliers to create these new technologies. Then we have to build the capacity to actually produce them. It's a fun challenge, but there's certainly a ton of work to do. Like, this isn't a Snap-specific problem. This is industry-wide. This is an area where Snap is in a very good spot. Trust matters, privacy matters. And the way we're constructing all of this is a privacy centric way. Like, I want to personalize it. But, this is the most personal possible device. It is literally seeing exactly what I'm seeing. And so, of course, we're going to bring in all the personalization that AI kind of already has like memory. That's an element here, but like I'm actually more worried about how we do it in a privacy-centric way. Back to your previous question, I'm very happy with our direction there. And we've shared a little bit about it, but like having built these for a while, having lived with them, like, it's very much one thing to say, like, hey, but what is this use case? Which I personally don't think is that valuable. It's more about that responsiveness — when I want it, I can go as deep as I want on any topic with it. But do so in a way that maintains my privacy for the times when I don't really need it. But I think that's maybe an undervalued, underexpected problem. Like, you don't want to just share camera images of your entire day! I like that you said battery life, and not just battery capacity. Like, it's all about the way you use it smartly. I used to work on smartphones for a very long time. And yeah, the battery capacity has grown pretty consistently, to be honest — X percent per year. But really, software has gotten much better in how it's being used. This is one of the reasons we built Snap OS, so that we have complete control of exactly how every little bit of energy is consumed across the entire device. It also goes to the way we design the displays, how we make them just super duper efficient, how we do the processing and how we distribute the heat. All of these things have to be balanced, and that's why it's so important to build these, again, where engineers can talk to engineers, and really look at everything as precisely as I can. The other thing I would say is I think if you were to have like in the limit, you have full display, including everything in your world all the time. That would probably be visually overwhelming. I don't personally want a world where I'm walking around and everything's an ad all the time. That would be terrible. So like, I think it'll be about like, what is shown and when, how it's used, and then just generally technology progressing. You know, if you look at some of the initial talk times of very early phones, we're not that long in our developer models. But I think we have some good strategies to increase the battery life now, and it'll just get better and better over time.
Hans India
14-06-2025
- Business
- Hans India
Smart glasses get a second life: AI powers the future of wearable tech
Silicon Valley is making a fresh bet on smart glasses—once a failed experiment, now a potential game-changer thanks to AI. Google, Meta, Snap, and Amazon are doubling down on this tech, reviving the dream of glasses that do more than look smart—they are smart. Unlike the early Google Glass, the new generation of smart glasses features built-in AI assistants capable of understanding and responding to the world around them. Meta's Ray-Ban glasses can translate speech in real time, identify objects, and even determine if a pepper is spicy. Snap's upcoming "Specs" for 2026 promise context-aware AI. Google's Gemini already offers visual memory capabilities. The drive is fueled by two shifts: smartphones no longer excite users like before, and AI is enabling truly hands-free, heads-up computing. But the real challenge remains—can tech firms make smart glasses fashionable, useful, and worth wearing all day? The next tech revolution may be looking us right in the eye—literally.
Yahoo
12-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Why Snap Stock Was a Winner on Wednesday
The company formally introduced its latest product. This is Specs, the new iteration of its smart glasses line. 10 stocks we like better than Snap › Social media company Snap (NYSE: SNAP) saw its share price creep higher on Hump Day, thanks mainly to the announcement of a new product. The company will face some stiff competition, however, so the market's bullishness was guarded; the stock only rose by 1.2% on the news. That was good enough to beat the S&P 500 (SNPINDEX: ^GSPC), though, as that indicator fell by 0.3% on the day. Toward the end of Tuesday's trading session, Snap announced that it is launching a new line of tech-enhanced eyeglasses called Specs. In the announcement, made at this year's annual Augmented World Expo, the company said the rollout would occur next year. It did not get more specific. It did promise several attractive features of the upcoming augmented reality (AR) products, including artificial intelligence (AI) assistance, social connectivity, and a virtual workstation in case users feel like being productive and not playful. In its official press release touting the eyewear, Snap co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel said, "We believe the time is right for a revolution in computing that naturally integrates our digital experiences with the physical world." "We couldn't be more excited about the extraordinary progress in artificial intelligence and augmented reality that is enabling new, human-centered computing experiences," he added. Specs is the continuation of the company's digitally enhanced glasses product line, Spectacles. It introduced the first Spectacles in 2016. There's a big mountain to climb here, though, and that belongs to Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: META). Nearly two years ago, Snap's social media rival introduced its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, with the product earning generally positive reviews, especially for its feature set. Snap will have to keep on its toes to carve out meaningful share in this still-limited market. Before you buy stock in Snap, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the for investors to buy now… and Snap wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $649,102!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $882,344!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor's total average return is 996% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to 174% for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join . See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of June 9, 2025 Randi Zuckerberg, a former director of market development and spokeswoman for Facebook and sister to Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg, is a member of The Motley Fool's board of directors. Eric Volkman has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Meta Platforms. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. Why Snap Stock Was a Winner on Wednesday was originally published by The Motley Fool Sign in to access your portfolio
