Tracking

Being a college lecturer – or at least, being a good one – involves more than just speaking at a podium. You also have to engage the students, and a new dual-camera system is designed to assess just how well instructors are doing so.

Tile trackers have been keeping tabs on people's stuff for years, and the upgraded 2019 range just got unveiled, including the smallest Tile yet.

Amazon Alexa and an OLED screen are the big upgrades for the 2nd-generation Versa, a year and a half after the original appeared.

​Competitive swimmers certainly like to track their performance, often using devices such as swim watches – the problem is, the athletes have to stop to look at those things. A Vancouver-based startup is out to address that problem, with its head-up display (HUD) Form Swim Goggles.

Getting real, physical movements accurately depicted in the digital world remains a challenge for programmers and engineers, but a newly developed glove promises to advance the tech significantly. It's able to capture hand movements with much more detail and nuance than most existing solutions.

No-one likes to queue at airport check-in lines, it eats into your holiday time, and can be both boring and tiring. Now British Airways has signed up for ViewTags, reusable electronic baggage tags that can be attached to luggage before holiday-makers get to the airport.

Many mountain bikers already use smartphone apps to track basic ride metrics such as route/distance travelled, elevation gain, and speed. A group of four Danish cyclists wanted to take things significantly further, however, so they created TrailSense.

​If you're managing security at an outdoor event, then it's important that you know where all of your staff are. A system developed at Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology is designed to let users do just that, and it doesn't require a mobile phone network.

​There are already swim-tracking wearables such as watches, that track data such as the number of lengths swum. TritonWear is taking things further, however, with its just-announced Triton 2 – the device tracks 13 swimming metrics at once, transmitting data in real time for performance analysis.

Mimic Go might look like a bubbly, chubby-version of a tracking tag (which it is) but that's only one of the tricks it has up its red, plastic sleeve. The Mimic Go can help prevent things from going missing in the first place. And light up your ride.

​It was just last year that we heard about the Marine Skin patch, a flexible data-tracking device that can be temporarily adhered to marine creatures. Well, its designers have now come out with a version that's smaller, more sensitive, and capable of going much deeper.

​Essentially cheap, battery-less, sticker-type devices, RFID tags transmit a signal when temporarily powered up by the electromagnetic signal from a reader device. Now, thanks to experimental new technology, they could be used to bring "smart" functionality to plain ol' analog objects.