What’s new? Up, Up And Away; The Printer With No Ink; See Through TV; Simple View; Secure Line. Screwed Up Trike; On Your Face; Book Transformers; Honey, I’m Home; Shower Power. Big Bad Boards; Low Cost Motion; The 9 Is Here; The Computer Or The Box?; These Wheels Are Made For Climbing. Visible WiFi; Smile Trainer; Cube Of Silence; Hotwired; The Cool Robot Touch. Swiss Bike; Text Mail; Pool Bot; Novelty Dining; Blowing In The Solar Wind.
Tech Universe: Monday 14 March 2011
- UP, UP AND AWAY: National Geographic built a 5 metre by 5 metre model house for their How Hard Can it Be? series. Then they attached the house to 300 weather balloons full of helium. The 10-story high ‘aircraft’ reached around 3,000 metres and flew for about an hour. It’s a wonder Parliament buildings all over the world are still attached to the ground, since they’re so full of gas.
- THE PRINTER WITH NO INK: People at parties or conferences often take smartphone photos using Instagram. If you have an Instaprint box it sits nearby and watches out for certain hashtags or locations at Instagram. When it spots them it prints out the photo. The printer doesn’t use ink; instead colour for the prints comes from the Zink paper it uses which contains cyan, yellow, and magenta dye crystals underneath a polymer overcoat layer. Heat activates the crystals to create the full colour photo. Choose those hashtags carefully. Video:
- SEE THROUGH TV: Samsung Electronics has a prototype of a new transparent LCD screen that’s powered by ambient light — no cords required. It’s also a touchscreen. See through the screen or watch TV, it’s up to you. I guess if the programme’s boring you can always watch the wall instead.
- SIMPLE VIEW: The Argus II from Second Sight is a chip implanted near the retina. The user also wears a pair of glasses with a camera mounted on them. The camera sends signals wirelessly to the retinal implant. That triggers 60 electrodes to stimulate retinal cells and produce light in the patient’s field of view. This gives the patient enough vision to see simple objects. High Res is better but Low Res is better than none.
- SECURE LINE: The 173 billion text messages people in the USA send per month are not secure. In fact, text messages aren’t secure anywhere. TigerText aims to provide secure SMS messaging by encrypting the messages on the way through, then deleting them from the server. This opens up texting for people like doctors who need to ensure their messages are private. Ahhh, a single point for failure…
Tech Universe: Tuesday 15 March 2011
- SCREWED UP TRIKE: Nils Ferber designed a very different trike that you lie on top of. Two 18V Bosch electric screwdrivers push the EX trike at up to 30 Kph. The rider steers by twisting their body to move the larger single back wheel. Two smaller wheels are at the front along with handlebars and brake levers. It’s a great concept but looks mighty dangerous.
- ON YOUR FACE: Can’t stay off Facebook? Maybe you need the SNAK keyboard with its 19 one-touch Social hot keys for Facebook shortcuts. Each button takes you direct to a corresponding Facebook page. Wouldn’t macro software do the same job and be more flexible?
- BOOK TRANSFORMERS: Remember books — those paper devices without hyperlinks and full of fixed sized text? The new Fountaindale Public Library in Illinois, USA, still has the paper but adds Wi-Fi, iPads, Kindles and Nooks, flat-screen TVs, video games, computer terminals, self-checkout stations, an automated book sorter and a cafe. Specially designed reading and activity areas help keep the focus on words. Way to go: focus on the content rather than the containers!
- HONEY, I’M HOME: Can’t see your bags on the luggage carousel? Did you miss them or haven’t they come out yet? The Wireless Luggage Finder could be a handy gadget for the frequent traveller. The tag goes on your bag. It detects altitude and light levels to know when it’s in the cargo hold and shut itself off. Once it’s out of the plane again it signals your keychain device to say it’s within 20 metres. Ready… sprint.
- SHOWER POWER: Hmmm, you’re in the shower and water’s pouring down the drain. Meanwhile the radio’s using electricity or batteries to tell you the news. How about combining the two and powering the radio with water? The H2O FM shower radio is fitted in-line between the water supply and shower hose. Water passing through a micro turbine powers a generator that runs the radio. Simple and brilliant.
Tech Universe: Wednesday 16 March 2011
- BIG BAD BOARDS: The 800 Watt 3-speed Fiik electric skateboard has electric anti-lock brakes too. Top speed is around 37 Kph and the range is around 30 Km. It can handle off-road work as well as on-road skating. The boards are made in Australia. That’s serious grunt.
- LOW COST MOTION: Thwackers is creating a new animated series, Under the HUD. To save time and money though they’re using the motion capture capabilities of the Kinect, with open source middleware and wrappers. The voice and motion actors work in their living room, the characters appear in a video game. It’s fantastic the way tech keeps making inexpensive things that used to cost thousands.
- THE 9 IS HERE: Web developers get ready: Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 is on the loose. It supports HTML5 and CSS3, includes a speed boost and better privacy support. But will all those people stuck with IE6 actually upgrade?
- THE COMPUTER OR THE BOX?: The box the computer came in is usually something you give to the cat or the kid, or just recycle. Asus are taking a new approach: Mini-ITX motherboards will come in a shipping box that also serves as a PC case, with space for extra drives. The cardboard case is intended to last for up to a year to give the owner time to find just the right permanent case. By which time the motherboard will be just a little dated, of course, so it’s back to square one.
- THESE WHEELS ARE MADE FOR CLIMBING: The Quattroped, a rectangular robot from Taiwan University, can transform its wheels into legs. It rolls across flat terrain, yet can clamber over obstacles and up stairs. Each wheel is made from 2 arcs joined into a circle. The 2 arcs can instead split apart and align side by side to create a semicircular ‘leg’. The motor also switches from a smooth continuous motion to a periodic ‘walking’ motion. See it dance too.
Tech Universe: Thursday 17 March 2011
- VISIBLE WIFI: We all know you can’t see wi-fi. In fact, far too often your digital devices can’t see it either. Designers at the Oslo School of Architecture & Design made an ingenious bar graph of a signal by painting it with light. LED lights mounted on a four-metre-tall rod lit up according to signal strength. The team recorded a long exposure of themselves walking around with the rod, creating a visual graph of the signal strength. Imagine a live implementation showing the best spots for getting signals around town — very handy.
- SMILE TRAINER: Omron’s SmileScan software rates your smile from 1 to 100. It recognises the characteristics of what people think is a nice smile, such as the corners of your mouth being turned up or showing some tooth. SmileScan can just rate your smile or train you to smile better, or you can enter a contest mode. Competitive smiling? I suspect it won’t overtake first person shooters.
- CUBE OF SILENCE: Yamaha’s VSP-1 Noise Generator plays sounds such as a beach, a forest or a river to help mask the sounds of talking and offer some privacy in conversations. Just like a radio or MP3 player with speakers?
- HOTWIRED: Iceland has volcanoes, and lots of geothermal energy that powers 85% of homes. Now they’re looking at building the world’s longest sub-sea electric cable to sell surplus power to Europe. The cable would be between 1,200 and 1,900 kilometres long and could allow them to export five terawatt-hours of energy per year. That’s enough for 1.25 million European households. Exporting volcanoes: that’s a cool idea.
- THE COOL ROBOT TOUCH: If you think a nurse robot is going to clean your arm you’ll probably react better than if you think the robot’s trying to comfort you. That’s what research at Georgia Tech, USA, found. It also found people preferred it if the robot didn’t tell them beforehand that it was about to touch them. The team suspects people were startled when the robot started speaking. Yes: “Danger, Will Robinson. I will touch your arm now.”
Tech Universe: Friday 18 March 2011
- SWISS BIKE: The Swiss-made Voltitude electric bike easily folds up for storage. Unfolded it’s about the size of a regular bicycle. It features small, wide wheels and a low centre of gravity, hydraulic disc brakes and rear-wheel drive. A Lithium-Polymer battery gives a range of up to 20 or 40 Km. At around 20 Kg without battery though it’s a fairly hefty ride if you’re pedalling.
- TEXT MAIL: Sweden and Denmark are trying out a system to do away with postage stamps. The user sends an SMS to a server which returns a code the user writes on the envelope. No stamp required. That sure beats queuing up at the Post Office just to buy a stamp.
- POOL BOT: Remember summer, and the pool, and all the skimming and filtering and maintenance? The Solar Pool Skimmer gathers its energy from the sun. As it floats on the surface of the water it removes leaves, dust, organic material and debris and filters the water. An onboard computer helps it navigate in tricky spots. Now they just need a designer to make it look more interesting — perhaps models that look like cruise ships or aircraft carriers.
- NOVELTY DINING: So you’ve made it to the top of the mountain, but there’s no restaurant. What’s up with that? Perhaps a pop-up restaurant would help. Park Associati and Electrolux are putting a semi-transparent moveable pavilion called The Cube in various unexpected and unusual locations around Europe for a few weeks at a time. The 140 square metre interior will seat 18 diners, while a 50 square metre terrace will offer stunning views. Europeans can expect to see The Cube appear atop monuments, on mountainsides and in other bizarre places. The cooking will be the true challenge.
- BLOWING IN THE SOLAR WIND: NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft left home back on 5 September 1977. Since then it’s seen Jupiter and Saturn. Now it’s traversing the heliosheath — the outer shell of a bubble around our solar system created by the solar wind, and soon to meet the interstellar wind. To check changes in the wind scientists had Voyager complete a roll manoeuvre, last performed 21 years ago. Signals took 16 hours to travel the 11 billion miles each way. Meanwhile, here on Earth we toss out electronics after just a few years.
Notes: I write a Tech Universe column for the NZ Herald. This is a fun assignment: Tech Universe brings 5 headlines each day about what’s up in the world of technology. Above are the links from last week.
While I find all the items interesting, some are just cooler than others. I’ve marked out those items.
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