IEEE Spectrum Consumer Electronics Channel

Tactile controls are back in vogue. Apple added two new buttons to the iPhone 16 , home appliances like stoves and washing machines are returning to knobs, and several car manufacturers are rein...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/touchscreens

“Cover, bring to a boil, then reduce heat. Simmer for 20 minutes.” These directions seem simple enough, and yet I have messed up many, many pots of rice over the years. My sympathies to anyo...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/toshiba-rice-cooker

Manu Prakash spoke with IEEE Spectrum shortly after returning to Stanford University from a month aboard a research vessel off the coast of California, where he was testing tools to monitor oce...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/manu-prakash

This article is part of our special report, “Reinventing Invention: Stories from Innovation’s Edge .” Marina Umaschi Bers has long been at the forefront of technological innovation for...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/scratchjr

This article is part of our special report, “Reinventing Invention: Stories from Innovation’s Edge .” The teachings of Mahatma Gandhi were arguably India’s greatest contribution to t...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/gandhi-engineering

This article is part of our special report, “Reinventing Invention: Stories from Innovation’s Edge .” Duncan Turner is the managing director at Hax , a startup accelerator that special...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/hax

In the last decade, Meta has embarked on a quest to blend the physical and virtual realms. The tech giant is bringing that fusion to fruition with the recent unveiling of what it calls its first...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/meta-ar-glasses-expense

Emteq Labs wants eyewear to be the next frontier of wearable health technology. The Brighton, England-based company introduced today its emotion-sensing eyewear, Sense. The glasses contain nine...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/glasses-health-tech

Steve Blank came of age as an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley in the 1970s, when it was truly about the silicon, and by the 1990s he had founded or worked at four high-tech startups . He eventua...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/steve-blank

Dynamic backlight dimming technology, particularly in automotive and medical applications, plays a critical role in enhancing the performance of High Dynamic Range (HDR) displays. This whitepaper...

https://engineeringresources.spectrum.ieee.org/free/w_defa7165/prgm.cgi

Imagine if your boss called a meeting in May to announce that he’s committing 10 percent of the company’s revenue to the development of a brand-new mass-market consumer product, made with a ...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/transistor-radio-invented

Most people have seen a green laser pointer. So it may be surprising to hear that achieving high-quality, compact sources of laser light in the spectral region between the blue and the red has be...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/nist-green-laser

Harry Campbell , a renowned illustrator and longtime IEEE Spectrum contributor, recently passed away after a valiant battle with cancer. Harry’s innovative style and unique approach toward tech...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/harry-campbell-illustrator

Did that rock move, or is it a squirrel crossing the road? Tracking objects that look a lot like their surroundings is a big problem for many autonomous vision systems. AI algorithms can solve t...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/night-vision-camera

Scottish inventor John Logie Baird had a lot of ingenious ideas, not all of which caught on. His phonovision was an early attempt at video recording, with the signals preserved on phonograph re...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/first-tv

The proliferation of IoT technology has made chatterboxes out of everyday hardware and new gadgets too, but it comes with a downside: the more devices sharing the airwaves the more trouble they ...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/topological-acoustics

This article is based on the authors’ new book, Fantasies of Virtual Reality (The MIT Press). In 2017 Mark Zuckerberg stated a bold goal: He wanted one billion people to try virtual realit...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/vr-games

Most people assume that generative AI will keep getting better and better; after all, that’s been the trend so far. And it may do so. But what some people don’t realize is that generative A...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/web-crawling

Few devices are as crucial to people’s everyday lives as their household appliances . Electrical engineer Erika Cruz says it’s her mission to make sure they operate smoothly. Cruz helps ...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/whirlpool-engineer-erika-cruz

Most mobile phones and tablets rely on passive cooling, dissipating heat into the body of the device (and, eventually, into your palms). An active cooling fan would help, but conventional fans ar...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/xmems

Stop for a second and think about the Internet without digital images or video. There would be no faces on Facebook . Instagram and TikTok probably wouldn’t exist. Those Zoom meetings that t...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/compression-algorithms

IT WAS DECEMBER 2006. Twenty-nine-year-old entrepreneur James Park had just purchased a Wii game system. It included the Wii Nunchuk, a US $29 handheld controller with motion sensors that let ga...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/fitbit

Ten years. Two countries. Multiple redesigns. Some US $80 million invested. And, finally, Zero Zero Robotics has a product it says is ready for consumers, not just robotics hobbyists—the Hover...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/hoverair-x1

When Senior Editor Tekla S. Perry started in this magazine’s New York office in 1979, she was issued the standard tools of the trade: notebooks, purple-colored pencils for making edits and corr...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/tekla-perry-ieee-spectrum

A TRANSPARENT TELEVISION MIGHT seem like magic, but both LG and Samsung demonstrated such displays this past January in Las Vegas at CES 2024. And those large transparent TVs, which attracted ...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/transparent-tv

The dream of robotic floor care has always been for it to be hands-off and mind-off. That is, for a robot to live in your house that will keep your floors clean without you having to really do an...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/irobot-roomba-combo-10-max

For the first time in history, there’s a good chance your next Windows laptop won’t have an x86 chip inside. Microsoft launched a new generation of AI-focused Windows laptops, called Copil...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/windows-on-arm

A thimbleful of soil can contain a universe of microorganisms, up to 10 billion by some estimates . Now a group of researchers in Bath, United Kingdom, are building prototype technologies that ha...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/bio-electricity-microbial-battery

Stretchy displays could be used in new kinds of health-monitoring devices and wearable computers, or make it possible to turn curved or spherical objects into touchscreens and lights. But pulling...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/stretchable-display

Elemind , a 5-year-old startup based in Cambridge, Mass., today unveiled a US $349 wearable for neuromodulation, the company’s first product. According to cofounder and CEO Meredith Perry , the...

https://spectrum.ieee.org/elemind-neuromodulation