Spy Stuff

There’s a scene in Star Wars Clone Wars where a clone trooper tosses up a floating remote camera and uses it to survey the entire city from the safety of building’s rubble. The camera has multiple lenses to provide complete 360 degree coverage of the entire area. In real life, this was largely the kind of idea used by the Walt Disney company for many of their 360 degree movies they showed at Disneyland and Epcot – only they used multiple cameras, not one camera with multiple lenses.

Now Google is using life to imitate art with their latest “street view” features of Google maps. Immersive Media is the company which uses a drive by technique, and a multi-lensed camera – called the Dodeca Telemmersion® System.

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There has never been more visible and more worrying hidden cameras around, almost everywhere that you go you are likely to be caught on camera, but there is nothing that we can really do about it, because it is the way that we live now. But there is also a growing amount of hidden cameras used for surveillance at work and sometimes even at home, whatever the reason there is now a small device that you can use to see if there are any hidden cameras watching you.
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Spy cameras seem to be all over the place at the moment, yesterday we reported on the spy in the sky and in the past we’ve had cameras concealed in teddies, the really cool remote control car (with infra-red spy cam) and a slew of other spy cameras. The next camera to add to your covert office surveillance is the tie cam, a video camera concealed in a regular looking tie.

An extremely high resolution, 450Tvl, CCD pinhole camera discreetly hidden in a tie - virtually impossible to detect with the naked eye- and a miniature digital video recorder, small enough to fit into a cigarette pack, to record extremely high quality colour video and sound.

This little 007 gadget will set you back to the tune of $1,355 (£645.99) from Spy Catcher Online, a somewhat expensive way to prove who is office slacker when it comes to filling the coffee machine.

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This looks like something that wouldn’t be out of place in “The Terminator”, the Microdrone, a remote control spy camera being trialled by the police in the UK.

Like the X-UFO the Microdrone uses four separate rotors to fly and is equipped with CCTV cameras to monitor suspects below (thermal imaging is also possible at extra cost). The Microdrone is controlled by an officer on the ground who wears a special visor (similar to the iTheatre) which receives and displays the video transmitted back from the drone.

This all looks pretty futuristic and a bit big brother (which is back on UK screens next week, oh joy), considering there is already one CCTV camera to every 14 people in the UK having a few more flying around probably isn’t going to make that much difference.

Via This is London, thanks.

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Most fighter plane cockpits are designed with a heads up display (HUD) which projects vital information on a glass screen in front of the pilot so he can pay more attention to what goes on outside the plane and not the instruments and displays inside the plane.

Until now, that is. That’s because the F35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter – a joint endeavor from Lockheed Martin Aeronautics, Northrop Grumman, and British Aerospace - has become the first fighter aircraft in decades to be designed without a HUD. This is thanks the fighter pilot’s new, and albeit frightening, best friend, a combat helmet which uses a miniaturized version of the HUD inside the helmet itself.

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It may look like it’s missing a rear axel, but a compact two wheeled surveillance robot may become a popular recon robot in the battlefield. The Recon Scout is described as a 2 1/2 pound “dumbell” which trails a camera and can be viewed by a handheld device which also acts as it’s controlled.

Developed the University of Minnesota, the Recon Scout is been based on Marine Corps specifications for ease of use (it can operate with just one hand after a brief charge of a few minutes) and is hardened with a titanium shell to be able to even be launched out of a mortar, or dropped from an unmanned aerial reconnaissance vehicle for a ground level point of view.

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Biometrics are the rage today. You can use your fingerprints to secure your data, to enter your home and, of course, to access your computer. There are fingerprint readers on mice, keyboards and you can buy them as stand-alone devices too.

But fingerprint scanners are just not ‘in’ anymore. The trend is pointing towards iris or retinal scanners. A Korean company called Qritek have created an affordable iris scanner, and have decided to stuff it in a mouse.

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Ever wished you knew what somebody over at the other table was talking about? Assuming you enter a cocktail party, only to have the entire room fall to a silent hush before normal conversation resumes. Whispers are being passed by from one end of the room to another, and you’re dying to figure out whether you committed a fashion faux pas or you failed to zip up your fly. Whatever the scenario is, everyone could do with the Listen Up device that enables you to listen in discreetly, thanks to the credit card sized device.

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