Skip to main content

Snooz uses white noise to help improve your sleep

snooz wants to give you the best possible nights sleep
Image used with permission by copyright holder
There are plenty of gadgets out there to help you track your sleep, but a new Kickstarter-funded gizmo wants to make sure your bedroom is the best possible environment for it. Snooz is an “acoustic white noise machine” that produces just the right volume of background noise to help you drop off into the land of nod. Its makers are looking for $100,000 in funding and they’re already well on their way.

“Designed with airflow simulations run on supercomputers, Snooz uses a proprietary fan to generate live, natural white noise that is adjustable and doesn’t disturb the surrounding air,” explains the campaign page on Kickstarter. “No looping tracks or low-quality speakers. Just the soothing sound of moving air.”

The inventors behind Snooz point to a 2008 Consumer Reports analysis which said 70 percent of the 2,021 people surveyed found a sound machine helped them get to sleep more easily (that figure is just below prescription medication and way above over-the-counter drugs).

As the Snooz team explains, white noise reduces the gap between your body’s baseline sound and containment noise. In other words, quiet sounds can’t be heard and loud sounds aren’t so jarring. It “literally smooths the bumps in the night” and you can adjust the speed and volume of the proprietary fan inside the enclosure very easily. It’s 98 percent more energy efficient than a box fan too.

There’s the obligatory smartphone app to operate your Snooz from a distance and it’s small and portable enough to take on vacation and to a hotel room. If you want to get your name down for a Snooz — with worldwide delivery scheduled for March 2016 — there’s an early bird price of $49 with the regular Kickstarter price a little extra at $59.

David Nield
Dave is a freelance journalist from Manchester in the north-west of England. He's been writing about technology since the…
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more
AI turned Breaking Bad into an anime — and it’s terrifying
Split image of Breaking Bad anime characters.

These days, it seems like there's nothing AI programs can't do. Thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence, deepfakes have done digital "face-offs" with Hollywood celebrities in films and TV shows, VFX artists can de-age actors almost instantly, and ChatGPT has learned how to write big-budget screenplays in the blink of an eye. Pretty soon, AI will probably decide who wins at the Oscars.

Within the past year, AI has also been used to generate beautiful works of art in seconds, creating a viral new trend and causing a boon for fan artists everywhere. TikTok user @cyborgism recently broke the internet by posting a clip featuring many AI-generated pictures of Breaking Bad. The theme here is that the characters are depicted as anime characters straight out of the 1980s, and the result is concerning to say the least. Depending on your viewpoint, Breaking Bad AI (my unofficial name for it) shows how technology can either threaten the integrity of original works of art or nurture artistic expression.
What if AI created Breaking Bad as a 1980s anime?
Playing over Metro Boomin's rap remix of the famous "I am the one who knocks" monologue, the video features images of the cast that range from shockingly realistic to full-on exaggerated. The clip currently has over 65,000 likes on TikTok alone, and many other users have shared their thoughts on the art. One user wrote, "Regardless of the repercussions on the entertainment industry, I can't wait for AI to be advanced enough to animate the whole show like this."

Read more