You might have heard of Amazon plans to use drones for deliveries, but a recently granted patent reveals how the online retailer turned industry giant also has ambitions to offer drones as "surveillance as a service."
Originally filed in June 2015 before becoming public four years later, the "Image Creation Using Geo-Fence Data" patent describes how "an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) may perform a surveillance action at a property of an authorised party." To do so, the UAV (aka drone) defines the property in question within a geo-fence, a virtual perimeter or boundary around a real-world piece of geography.
The patent gives few other details as to how such a service would operate. It does state customers could have drones visit their property on an hourly, daily or weekly basis, while the drones would carry night vision cameras and microphones to further expand sensing capabilities. On the privacy front, Amazon promises the drones will only be able to capture images within the specific geo-fence, possibly obscuring or outright removing images outside of the specific boundary.
In total DP 2.0 handles up to 77.37Gbps of bandwidth, with a maximum link rate of 20Gbps/lane and more efficient 128b/132b channel encoding. Thus it promises to address the requirements of future displays, such as "beyond 8K" (7680 x 4320) resolutions, higher refresh rates and high dynamic range (HDR support at higher resolutions, improved multiple display configuration support and an improved user experience with augmented/virtual reality (AR/VR) displays, including support for 4K-and-beyond VR resolutions.
The information comes from a Forbes story citing IHS Markit associate director, consumer electronics, Jeff Lin. According to "supply chain info," the foldable Surface device will feature the Lakefield Intel 10nm system-on-chip with always-on mobile connectivity (LTE or 5G) and the ability to run Android apps and iCloud service on Windows 10. As for the OS, it is technically WCOS (Windows Core OS) with dual-display UI.
