April 06, 2006
Gaze control
Gaze Communicator - Eye Movement Interface. "Using a camera, the user’s head is recorded continuously. Segmentation and face detection algorithms analyze the images and detect the position of the users face and eyes. A pattern recognition algorithm based on Hough transform extracts the shapes that relate to the human eye in order to locate the center of the pupil. Analyzed in real-time, the position of the eye in an incoming image will be interpreted as the reference position of a mouse cursor on the users monitor."
I4U News
Flexible and disposable batteries
Enfucell's SoftBattery gets thin and flexible. "Besides the usual thin n' flexible selling angle, Enfucell's batteries, while still in development, are apparently anticipated to be particularly cheap and environmentally friendly due to a more off-the-shelf materials and manufacturing process of metals in a paper and laminate sandwich. Sure, it may not produce a huge amount of juice, but when you're talking about very low-energy applications like e-ink, cheap, flexible batteries could be power the digital newspapers of tomorrow before being thrown away with the day's rubbish."
Engadget
Mixing wired and wireless networks
New network architecture delivers super-broadband wired and wireless service simultaneously. "Telecommunications researchers have demonstrated a novel communications network design that would provide both ultra-high-speed wireless and wired access services from the same signals carried on a single optical fiber. The new hybrid system could allow dual wired/wireless transmission of the same content such as high-definition television, data and voice up to 100 times faster than current networks. The new architecture would reduce the cost of providing dramatically improved service to conference centers, airports, hotels, shopping malls – and ultimately to homes and small offices."
GATech
Big changes in computing and science
NATURE looks ahead. "In the last two decades advances in computing technology, from processing speed to network capacity and the internet, have revolutionized the way scientists work. From sequencing genomes to monitoring the Earth's climate, many recent scientific advances would not have been possible without a parallel increase in computing power - and with revolutionary technologies such as the quantum computer edging towards reality, what will the relationship between computing and science bring us over the next 15 years?"
Smart Mobs
Communication devices
Tango! Communication Device. "It’s a communication device for people who have communication-related impairments with pre-loaded phrases as well as enough extra features to warm the heart of geeks worldwide. It’s the first device of its kind to incorporate a digital camera along with a flash to capture life’s less well-lit moments. The Tango! can also alter the pitch of voice to make it seem like a child (or adult) is talking, as the situation merits."
Gizmodo
Quick 3D faces
3D face imaging in 40 milliseconds. "Computer scientists at Sheffield Hallam University, UK, have developed a new face recognition software which can produce an exact 3D image of a face within 40 milliseconds. A pattern of light is projected on your face, creating a 2D image, from which an accurate 3D representation is generated. This technology should speed airport check-ins, but it could also be used in banks or for checking ID cards as it allows full identification in less than one second."
Primidi
Managing kids gadget time
Bob: Children Hate Him, Parents’ Best Friend. "Bob lets mom and dad assign each of their kids a pin number, and when parents install this timer in between an AC power source and anything that plugs in such as computers, TV or games, it will precisely control the amount of time those devices will run."
Gizmodo
Leaving home with all your stuff
RFID-based Alert when you leave home. "DNP and NICT developed a RFID-based memory assistant that alerts a person if she is leaving her house without carrying the things she will need."
RFID in Japan
GeoSensor networks
The Emergence of GeoSensor Networks. "Tracking objects in a single camera (to identify whether a car is speeding, or has become disabled, for example) is a simple and standard application. The challenges tackled by a geosensor network include tracking a specific car across multiple camera feeds, recognizing convoys that move together, identifying traffic patterns across wider areas, relocating some mobile sensors (e.g. located on-board helicopters) to better cover an emerging situation, and even collaborating with other sensor networks, to identify for example the ATM locations where a specific car may have stopped while it was moving from point A to point B. "
Location Intelligence
Software based on the loose communication of a small island
Island Wisdom, Coded in Java. "If Friday's boat from St. Mary was canceled, there might be six people in the village that needed to know. Armstrong found consistently they would all have that information within hours, even without a formal distribution system, and few uninterested people would be burdened with the knowledge. From studying how this and other situations played out, Armstrong formulated a set of fundamental principles on how people communicate. Now Armstrong is readying a productivity tool that he hopes will put those precepts into action. Called Trampoline, the program will integrate with a company's existing desktop and enterprise server applications, sitting quietly on a company's network and vacuuming in e-mail, files, spreadsheets and anything else it can find."
Wired News
Specialised media players
Jobo Giga Vu Pro:evolution for Pro Photogs. "Bring images in via CF card, and this player is able to review them using a histogram, can detect dust and blown highlights, and has a crosshair readout for RGB values."
Gizmodo
Ajax Office competitors
Introducing ajaxWrite. "The look, feel, and functionality of Microsoft Word, in a completely web-based AJAX platform. Try ajaxWrite today, and experience first-hand how AJAX applications are changing the way the web works, and redefining the software industry."
ajaxwrite
Photo projectors
As Cameras Increasingly Go Digital, Can the Home Slide Show Be Far Behind?. "Now Panasonic has a compact three-pound digital projector that can show your photos on 38- to 300-inch screens without a computer hookup: just pop in an SD memory card (the most popular type) and it turns itself on and shows whatever images are on the card. The PT-P1SDU projector, available next month for $1,199, has a few features not available on slide projectors, like the ability to add movielike wipes, fades and other transitions between images; to show images in random or preprogrammed order; and even to show movies shot with digital cameras. It adjusts its brightness to match the ambient lighting and lets you adjust white balance to match either incandescent or fluorescent lighting."
New York Times
Opensource only
Kwangju Becomes Linux City. "The Korean government plans to pick Kwangju this month as the nation's first ``Linux City,'' where open-source software will become the mainstream programs."The Korea Times
Emotion devices
DeFIBulator, Portable Lie Detector. "There are two ways to describe the DeFIBulator: a portable lie detector, if you’re feeling sensational, or a portable tension detector, if you’re feeling honest. Developed in Singapore, it purports to measure varying degrees of vibration in someone’s voice to 65% accuracy."
Gizmodo
Wireless medical data
Wireless Transmission of ECGs Saves Lives. "While the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association recommend that heart attack patients have their arteries opened within 90 minutes of arriving at the hospital, the NorthEast Medical Center team was able to cut that time to 50 minutes. The national average is about 100 minutes, the researchers said. "We found that the pre-hospital wireless transmission of an ECG directly to a cardiologist's hand-device significantly reduced the time," said the lead researcher, George Adams, M.D. "When the cardiologist can directly see an ECG, it clarifies the decision to mobilize all the personnel necessary for the cath lab to be ready to go when the patient arrives.""EWeek
Easy to make transparent solar cells
Transparent Solar Cells. "Shuzi Hayase, a chief research scientist at Toshiba's Power Supply Materials & Devices Laboratory in Kawasaki, says the cells achieve a respectable 7.3 percent solar-energy conservation efficiency and should be easy to manufacture. "We do not need expensive production lines and sophisticated vacuum systems currently employed in the manufacture of silicon-based cells. The new cells could be manufactured by [silk-screen] printing technologies.""
Transmaterial
Transparent electronics
World's First Transparent Integrated Circuit. "Researchers at Oregon State University have created the world's first completely transparent integrated circuit from inorganic compounds, another major step forward for the rapidly evolving field of transparent electronics. The circuit is a five-stage "ring oscillator," commonly used in electronics for testing and new technology demonstration. It marks a significant milestone on the path toward functioning transparent electronics applications, which many believe could be a large future industry."
gizmag
Managing wireless sensor networks
Comprehensive Wireless Sensor Networking Solution. "One that caught our eye at the National Manufacturing Week (NMW) Conference in Chicago this week was a system that integrates sensors, software, and mesh networking devices into a turnkey solution offering plant/building managers instant actionable measurements of key operational levels (temperature, power, voltage, steam, water, air, flow, and pressure)."
gizmag
Mapping utilities
Pipe network to be mapped in 3D. "We will be producing an 'underlay' to the [map], to show you what's down there. We'll combine all the historical data from the utilities with the in-street data found with location-sensing technology. We want to merge this information dynamically and put it on some kind of handheld unit." The project could result in mobile devices or displays in street diggers that would present streetworkers with a 3D picture of the pipe and cable layout in front of them. This would give workers the confidence to dig without the fear of accidentally cracking a water main or causing a major gas leak."
BBC NEWS
Tiny PCs
'Municator: Micro Linux PC. "The ‘Municator is a $146 computer designed to surf the web, get email, and listen to audio and video. It weighs about a pound, has 256MB RAM and 40GB hard drive, a 800-MHz Godson (???) processor and TV output. Four USB ports, VGA-out, and PS2 port make this uber-micro PC just about as useful as any $2,000 portable tablet."
Gizmodo
April 05, 2006
Laser computing
Laser chips could power petaflop computers. "Laser communications chips capable of pumping data through the veins of gargantuan "petaflop" supercomputers have been demonstrated by NEC in Japan. The communications chips can transfer information through optical fibres at a blistering 25 gigabits per second (a gigabit is a billion bits). This is a record for such components, according to NEC, and is many times faster that the purely electronic interconnects used in today's supercomputers."New Scientist
Sharing virtual experiences
3D virtual fish dissection. "This Digital Fish Library, which will take five years to complete and is supported by a $2.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), will allow scientists to look inside the inner workings of fish without destroying precious specimens. But it also will give you the opportunity to virtually dissect some rare fishes from your computer anywhere in the world."
Primidi
Barcodes to speech
Speechio: listening to paper documents. "Speechio is an information appliance that reads a 2D barcode printed on a paper document and reads the document with a synthesized digital voice. It's designed for people with visual impairments and the elderly. The system uses a 2D barcode called SP Code that can encode a larger amount of information in a small space. So, a page of text information can be encoded and compressed in a small square at a corner of a document."
RFID in Japan
Following a trip
Upload Every Mountain. "Released in February, the newest generation called Contact 4.0 GEO has multi-layered, 3-D flash maps created from photos and models of Everest. Armchair adventurers can follow an expedition's route, zoom in on specific camps and positions, and look at weather forecasts and live satellite images. Comparatively, Google Earth is blurry and brutally slow over the Himalayas."
Wired News
April 04, 2006
Media visualizations
iBloks 3-D personalized entertainment demo. "Using the Windows Presentation Foundation, the iBloks software enables people to mix any type of media assets including music, photos, video, or games to create personalized entertainment™ experiences. People can use their own content or connect to the iBloks shop to purchase licensed digital content from top media companies. After they create their personalized iBlok model, game or card they can easily share their iBlok with friends via email, IM, or on their own web pages or blogs."
Virtual MIX
Voice recording and recognition
IBM's Magic Block: voice recorder with speech recognition. "The Magic Block is a concept for a digital voice recorder that includes a few handy features -- such as biometric security and an intriguing design that limits accidental recordings -- and one function that makes it unique: built-in voice recognition software that can recognize both spoken words and the actual speaker, allowing a user to search for text as well as for comments from specific speakers."
Engadget
The history of your clothes
Second hand garment vibes. "A radio frequency identification (RFID) chip to which the wearer can save information about himself/herself is sewn into each garment. When the item of clothing—for instance, a jacket, pair of pants or T-shirt—is sold at a special second-hand shop, the buyer can access this information online and find out about the garment’s past."
Smart Mobs
Clouds of sensors
Sprinkling RFID sensor tags from the Sky. "The Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) started developing a system that allows for detailed information gathering about a disaster area by sprinkling RFID sensor tags from the sky (possibly using helicopters.) The sensor tags will be used to collect various information about a disaster -- perhaps most importantly, if anyone is alive. The tags are about several centimeters wide/high and equipped with heat, infrared, and vibration sensors."RFID in Japan
Getting information on people in social situations
The Connection Glass facilitates and enhances meeting compatible people. "Computer Mediated Communication significantly increases the size of your usual social or business contact universe and can give you a far greater choice of prospects to mine. On the other hand, there’s no substitute for being there, so you can assess them in person. Computers hold great promise in matching us with particularly suitable partners and we’ve written up several such concepts over the last few years [...] All of these concepts offer communication both in a virtual world level and in a physical environment. Now there’s another viable idea IOHO - Priscilla Bernikowicz’s interactive glasses are designed to help us pick the right person in a room full of people."
gizmag Article
Emotions through recorded media
Instant Feeling Messages. "emosive is a service for mobile devices which allows capturing, storing and sharing of fleeting emotional experiences. Based on the Cognitive Priming theory, as we become more immersed in digital media through our mobile devices, our personal media inventories constantly act as memory aids, "priming" us to better recollect associative, personal (episodic) memories when facing an external stimulus."
we make money not art
Temperature input
ThermoPainter: painting with temperature. "ThermoPainter can detect temperature change regions on a sensing surface as touch regions when objects hotter or colder than the surface touch it. In the system, users can use a physical paintbrush with hot water and an airbrush with cold water in spite of paint as they use in the real world, and even use their own fingers, hands, and breaths directly because of their own body heat."
we make money not art
Judging ease of reading
Book, How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Words. "When Amazon gets the right from a publisher to let readers "search inside" a book, Text Stats tallies the average length of a sentence and amasses little piles for each word used. (Or big piles, as in the case of the King James Bible, for example, where the count for "loin" is 1,548; "behold," 1,426; and "lord" 7,082.) The software then ranks a book for clarity and ease of reading on a variety of indexes. For example, "The Story of Babar" has a Flesch-Kincaid Index score of 6.1 (sixth-grade level), the same as "Everything Is Illuminated" by Jonathan Safran Foer. Their "fogginess" quotients, an index similar to Flesch-Kincaid, are very close, too, though the Foer book is slightly less clear — 8 percent of its words are "complex," compared with 7 percent for "Babar." Text Stats also produces concordances, lists of the 100 most-used words in a book."
New York Times
March 31, 2006
Gadgets talking to gadgets
Seiko Shows Cellphone-Friendly Bluetooth Watch. "The huge display shows you that little envelope indicating that you’ve received a new message, and then can also reveal who sent it and the message subject. Continuously communicating with your cellphone, the device can either make a noise or vibrate your wrist when a call comes in. Seiko says it will start shipping a watch like this “by 2007” but didn’t reveal how much it would cost."
Gizmodo
Tracking flights in 3D
Google Earth live flight tracking. "I’m a big flight tracking fan. When my bride travels on business I like to show our pre-schooler where Mom’s flight is on the map. This flight tracker has a Google Earth button labeled “NEW! Track this flight in 3D via Google Earth!” It downloads a Google Earth file and shows the flight as a location in Google Earth, updating every 1 minute. Perhaps not terribly useful, but fun for airplane and map geeks like me."
Lifehacker
Non-Roman hand writing recognition
HP India's gesture "keyboard" for pen entry. "People using non-Roman characters never forget that these keyboards weren't designed for them, and have spent decades searching for alternatives. The latest, developed by HP Labs India, is the gesture-based keyboard, which is actually a pen tablet that uses a stroke-based system to recognize characters in non-Roman languages. It was designed specifically to deal with languages in use in the subcontinent, such as Tamil and Kannada, but has potential for other Asian languages as well. The system was designed to be rugged, and to be usable by people with no prior experience with keyboards or the Roman alphabet."
Engadget
Better satellite imagery
Satellites Will See More, Faster. "GeoEye says its next-generation satellite, GeoEye-1, will be capable of acquiring each day approximately 270,000 square miles of imagery, an area about the size of Texas. That's about seven times the area covered by Ikonos, the best imaging satellite the company has running today. DigitalGlobe, the satellite imagery supplier for Google Earth, plans to launch its next orbital, WorldView 1, later this year. The company says it will be capable of collecting up to 193,000 square miles of imagery per day."
Wired News
Capturing virtuoso motion
Video-game tech hits classical music. "Best known for bringing characters to life in video games as well as in such films as "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Polar Express," motion capture will allow researchers to create an animated model of Rabbath's techniques for an instructional DVD titled "Art of the Left Hand." "Francois is to classical music what Michael Jordan was to basketball," says Hans Sturm, a double-bass professor at Ball State, who counts Rabbath as both mentor and close personal friend. "Nobody else does what he does. And I doubt anyone ever will." The state-of-the-art technology will preserve Rabbath's bowing and fingering techniques - his "fingering gymnastics," as Mr. Sturm calls them - so that others can analyze the master's approach to the double bass."
csmonitor.com
New forms of instrument
Samchillian Keyboard Concept. "Israeli industrial designer Eitan Shefer has created the Samchillian keyboard, taking a novel approach to a musical instrument where you don’t play specific notes but select how they relate to the ones before them. For example, if you’re playing a C and then want to play a D, you just push the 1 key. There are two directional keys, 16 relative keys and eight finger positions, and when you want to bend the pitch or manipulate the filters, you tilt the unit from side to side."
Gizmodo
March 30, 2006
Hidden or easy wi-fi
Cool Wireless Router Bulb. "Liteon Technology Corp. apparently came up with an interesting design concept for home networking dubbed the Orb. It combines data transfer over power lines with wireless network access. The wireless router component can be screwed into standard light bulb sockets to connect to the data network available on the power lines - neat idea."
I4U News
Art on the TV
Turning the Television Into an Electronic Easel for Future Mondrians. "The role of the TV screen continues to expand with the V.Smile Art Studio, a large battery-operated children's drawing tablet. The $30 device, made to work with the V.Smile TV Learning System (sold separately for $50), also includes one software "smartridge." Plug everything in and your TV screen turns into a large blank easel surrounded by 15 color selections, plus icons for all the basic drawing functions like erase, fill, cut and paste."
New York Times
Reserving your parking spot
Using smarts to find parking. "Within a few years, it will be common to reserve a parking space online before leaving home. If you haven't booked in advance, the navigation screen in your car's dashboard will display the nearest available street or garage parking. When you find an open space at a meter, you won't have to fumble for coins. Instead, you'll punch the meter's ID number into your cell phone. A sensor in the pavement will detect when you leave, and your credit card will be charged for exactly the number of minutes your car was parked. No more running to feed the meter when your appointment runs long, or overpaying and involuntarily giving a gift to the next driver in your spot."
MercuryNews.com
Visual search
Download of the Day: Quintura Search. "Freeware program Quintura Search is a web search tool designed to build powerful keyword-based web searches with a visual interface. The visual semantic map is a graphical map that shows contextual relationships among words in the query. This map helps build a search query by giving hints or words to define the context of the query. The map shows only those words that have close contextual relationships with the keywords in your query. Click a word to change your query and get relevant results that will comply with your new query."
Lifehacker
Digital instruments
Digital Trumpet. "This trumpet is able to generate a wide variety of sounds including eight brass instruments, five woodwind and even a synthesized human voice. Best of all, it comes preloaded with 10 teaching songs that are learned via illuminated LEDs. Don’t fret, parents. There is even a headphone jack. Now if only brass instruments could include one of those. This high-tech trumpet retails for $400."
Gizmodo
A tool for random things
Download of the Day: Caboodle. "Freeware program Caboodle collects and organizes the information you don’t know where to put. Everyone comes across information that they want to refer to later. Maybe gifts you’ve received or sent, product serial numbers, recipes, directions to someone’s house, a photo of your pet, or anything else. Caboodle is a tool to help store and organize such random bits of information."
Lifehacker
Objects that blog
The new world of 'blogjects'. "With "Why Things Matter," Julian Bleecker, a researcher at the University of Southern California, has written a "Manifesto for Networked Objects" (PDF format, 17 pages, 939 KB). In this document, he describes what he calls "blogjects" or "objects that blog." The three major characteristics of a blogject are its sense of space combined with its ability to track where it has been, its knowledge of its encounters and previous experiences, and more importantly, its ability to participate in an assertive way to social networks."Primidi
Waking up to media
Hitachi DVL-7TV Wakes You Up to Lots-O-Media. "This Hitachi DVL-7TV will expose you to your choice of media the first thing in the morning, with TV, DVD, FM, MP3, or even JPEG stills to ease you out of your hung-over haze. There’s a 7-inch screen that’s just about the right size for bedside, and oh yeah, it also has an alarm to jar you awake if all that entertainment doesn’t do the trick."
Gizmodo
Citizen maps
Mapping pickpockets and dog poo. "Chinastic (via Virtual China) reports on a map, maintained by local citizens, which tells you which areas in the Chinese city of Hangzhou to avoid if you want to avoid purse snatchers. On the online map developed by Sun Haitao, citizens mark the spots where they've run across pickpockets."
we make money not art
Setting up web pages to print
Make any page printer friendly with Click2Zap. "The Click2Zap bookmarklet lets you remove whatever elements you want from a web page to help make it printer friendly. Just drag the bookmarklet to your browser’s bookmarks toolbar, go to the page you want to print and click the bookmarklet. Then you can go through the page and click which elements you’d like to remove. If you accidentally remove one you’d like to keep, just undo it. Finally, when you’re finished, click print."
Lifehacker
Flexible tags
First Bendable RFID Tags. "The prototype is 800um thick and process improvements look to move the thickness of the RFID compnents closer to 100um which would cut the final size in half. Since paper is commonly over 300um, the tag could be embedded in documents and would not alter the shape or texture of the paper. This would allow for RFID-enabled business cards and contracts can be made RFID tamper-resistant—perhaps moving DRM into the analog world of contracts."
Gizmodo
Tracking the history of foodstuff
Maintaining Sake Temperature With RFID. "Sake bottles would be tagged with RFID tags, which would then send temperature data to sensors on the truck transporting the sake. The sensors relay this information 3G-style to the sake’s home base. The point of all this? When the customer checks out the sake at the store, he can read the bottle’s temperature history, indicating whether or not the sake had any temperature irregularities in transit."
Gizmodo
March 29, 2006
Rich statistics for your website
See What Your Website Visitors Are Doing With Crazy Egg. "The above screenshot shows the heat overlay, which is where users are clicking and focusing their attention. Other parts of the application will show you where users click, and how many times."
TechCrunch
Tracking your travel
Sherelog: Suica Mashup. "Sherelog is a system that fetches data from Suica (an RFID train pass) and visualizes personal train-ride records on a large public map (or Google Map)."
we make money not art
Getting rid of game UI
Tunnel Vision . "Recently, several new games have renounced the HUD. In Doom 3, the ammo count for your chain gun is displayed not in a floating bar, but on the headstock of the gun. Peter Jackson's King Kong doesn't offer a scrap of onscreen artificial data: Adrien Brody's voice calls out the ammo count each time you reload, and low health is denoted by shaky, blurry vision. In a column called "Off With Their HUDs!" for the game-design site Gamasutra, Greg Wilson argues that losing the HUD helps increase the sense of immersion. "Nothing screams 'this is just a game' louder than an old-fashioned HUD," he writes. The fewer HUDs we see, the more we'll feel we're inside a holodeckian piece of cinema."
Wired News
Connection through touch
Distance Touch Generator. "Lyta -commissioned for the science center Phaeno in Wolfsburg, Germany- consists of two kinetically-charged surfaces, placed 100 metres from each other, and linked telematically so that deformations induced by touching each one are transmitted to the other interactively: when the structure is touched on one site, the touch will be visible and touchable on another."
we make money not art
Huge, huge displays
Virginia Tech's 24 display workstation. "Say hello to Virginia Tech's 31 million pixel-pusher friends, their 24 display array "workstation" runs at 10240 x 3072. Apparently it takes 12 Linux servers running distributed computing software to operate, and can play Quake III at 15-30FPS. Well done, sirs, well done."
Engadget
Fuel cells can be used in flight
Fuel cells to change laptop use"The first versions of the methanol-using units should keep a laptop going for up to nine hours. Fuel cell technology got a boost recently when international air flight regulators changed rules that banned passengers from carrying flammable methanol onto aircraft. Linnet Tsai, deputy marketing manager for Antig, said the first fuel cells to go on sale would marry familiar lithium-ion batteries with the methanol-based technology."
BBC NEWS
Software for color blindness
Software: See in Living Color. "Move the PC's cursor over an item, and eyePilot reports what the color is. If the user clicks on a color name, all instances of it on the page will flash. Or one color can be made to stand out by converting the rest of a page to gray and white. EyePilot also offers the software equivalent of a TV hue knob, allowing users to adjust the overall spectrum of a page until telling contrasts are more easily viewed."Wired News
Mapping cellphone location
STAMPS. "STAMPS is a little program. It can run on your Mobile phone. Using this program you can see a map of the place where you are, visualised on the screen of your mobile. There, you can write a kind of SMS and attach it to the map so that other friends can see your message appearing on their map."
Smart Mobs
Pen-like mouse
CeBIT '06: Anti-Carpal Tunnel Wowpen. "This is a pen-shaped mouse with scroll wheel and two buttons on the front. It was actually very responsive. Although I wasn’t able to sign my name with any fidelity, I was able to make curves and circles, which are pretty difficult using a standard mouse."
Gizmodo
Fun with video editing
Potentially Someth;ng. "The Doodle TV application doodles over live images on TV recognising faces and drawing glasses and mustaches over them, or drawing decoration around the image. It works exceptionally well with news programs as you can see in the image."
we make money not art
Online application creation
DabbleDB: Online App Building For Everyone. "DabbleDB is a platform that allows you to create applications online using a web interface. The sort of applications you would create and then use are what most of us normally hack together in a spreadsheet or using some other database application that is often complex. Example applications that I created in DabbleDB are a contacts list, where I can store, share and categorise my contacts, and also an issue tracking system where I can track bugs and change requests. Other examples on the DabbleDB website are a expense report application, a conference organising app, a scheduling app and a client invoicing application."
TechCrunch
March 23, 2006
Fast file access
IBM breaks speed records with new version of file system. "Project Fastball achieved a new speed record of over 102 gigabytes per second of sustained read/write performance to a single file. The record was achieved using 416 individual storage controllers combined with 104 Power-based eServer p575 nodes (each p575 node has eight dual-core 2.2 GHz POWER5 processors)."Ars Technica
Figuring out your "real" age
What's That in Dog Years?. "The H-Scan uses software and various gizmos to assess 12 biomarkers of aging, including memory, eyesight, hearing, and lung capacity. I felt sure I would ace the test, and in the process garner much-needed assurance that I'm really much younger than my numerical age. After the hour-long test, the computer spat out what it thought was my real age: 45. My heart sank. I'm not 45. I can't possibly look 45."
Business Week
Projectors that work close up
Toshiba Announces Projector with Integrated DVD Player and “Super Close” Lens. "Toshiba introduced its et20 projector at CeBIT 2006 that includes an integrated DVD player, 5.1 channel sound and a unique lens that can produce a six-foot image from three feet away, and a 4.5-foot image from just 27 inches away."
Gizmodo
Finding websites by browsing similarity
Find similar sites with Similicio.us. "It’s an experiment on my part to see whether I can quickly find relevant web sites based on people’s tags/bookmarks on del.icio.us, using the engine from easyutil.com. It answers the question “people who tagged this site also tagged what other sites”. I am using it mostly to find blogs that are similar to the ones I read, and to find new popular web sites that are in my area."
Lifehacker
Web-based OS
Web Based Desktop System. Taking your data and applications everywhere.. "Welcome to eyeOS, a web based desktop system. With eyeOS you can access your data and your applications anywhere, anytime. A virtual office in your hands, no need to install anything in the computer. Everything lives in the browser, for you and your work colleagues. eyeOS is open source and free software. Set up freely an account on our servers or, if you prefer it, install it in your server. Make your life easier with the virtual word processor, calendar, file manager, messenger, browser and other applications. And if you want more applications, just visit the eyeOS Application Database!"
eyeOS
Personal maps
Platial social mapping . "Web site Platial maps your life, your neighbhorhood and your interests with shared annotated Google Maps. Build your “Autobiogeography” map (“here’s where my first kiss happened”) or pinpoint the locations of your bowling team’s venues or be an online tour guide to your hometown. Platial tracks your geographical friends and tags your places. The two-month old startup has just passed 10,000 places in its collaborative “social atlas.”"
Lifehacker
Movie editing through printed cards & QR codes
Tangible movie editing for kids. "1. Film your story with a digital camera. 2. Connect your camera to a computer with Movie Cards software installed. 3. The software will print out the movie cards. These small cards show the first image of each sequence taken from your camera. 4. Lay your cards on the table and arrange them in which ever order you want them to be. 5. Each card has a little QR-code or bar-code, so you can use a scanner or bar-code reader to beep-in your movie cards in the order you decided. 6. Preview on your monitor! Done."
we make money not art
Tracking friends on a GPS device
TomTom Buddies lets you track your friends on the road. "Back in the day, if you wanted to gather a group of drivers into a convoy, you kept in touch by CB radio. With TomTom's new Buddies feature, you can finally toss that relic and stay in contact with Sodbuster, Pig Pen and Rubber Duck via GPS. Once you add a Buddy, you can track each other in realtime, share points of interest and send instant messages (though we really hope you don't do a whole lot of IMing behind the wheel). And if you need a little privacy as you roll into Chi-town, you can hide your twenty and tell your good buddies they can catch you on the flip-flop."
Engadget
Laptop palm scanning
Fujitsu's PalmSecure reads your palm: outlook good. "Privacy fiends, rejoice! If you're not yet satisfied with iris scanning, fingerprint reading, and voice recognition, it looks like Fujitsu's finally bringing a new smaller 35 x 35 x 17mm version of their palm-vein scanning PalmSecure biometrics system to a laptop near you. "
Engadget
GPS clothing
Know Where jacket phones home with GPS data. "Sure, there are already jackets designed to include integrated controls for your audio player, cellphone and other devices. And some of them even look better than the Know Where jacket from Germany's Interactive Wear (which, face it, isn't exactly hard). But how many of them have an integrated GPS unit that can phone home with realtime tracking data?"
Engadget
Plenty of visualizations
Visual Complexity. "Visual Complexity is a listing of nearly 300 different information mapping projects. Compiled by Manuel Lima, a Portuguese information designer who recently finished his MFA at Parson's School of Design in New York, each entry includes a project overview and a link for more detail."
Cool Hunting
Foot switches
Thanko USB Boss Switch Underfoot. "The tricky accompanying software lets you customize its settings to your liking, so you can hide a current window, or hide every window except for one that you designate, such as something busy-looking like Microsoft Word, Excel or Outlook. The software is password protected so your secrets are safe."
Gizmodo
Brain input
The Brain Computer Interface. "The system reads brain-waves from 128 scalp electrodes -- very slowly, mind you -- and apparently over the last couple of years they've already honed the device to control a pointer and enable trained users to actually write a sentence with their mind alone (even though it may take between five and ten minutes to do so)."
Engadget
Persistence of vision visualizations
Light up animated Pac-Man bicycle wheels. "Ladyada writes about her Pac-Man wheels - "The technology here is "persistence of vision"...when LEDs move fast enough they can "draw" an image when the wheel spins. That's the basis behind both the MiniPOV and SpokePOV toys that I designed last year. I rode this design around last burningman, obviously ive adjusted the image so they're "upside down" here for better photographing! "
MAKE
Simple web homepages
SiteShuffle: dead simple way to keep track of your favorite pages. "SiteShuffle is a just-launched, bone-simple way of keeping on top of your favorite sites aimed at novice and casual Internet users. The UI is a set of arrows at the top of a browser window that you click to scroll through a list of your favorite "homepages" -- click on one to load it in your browser. A simple, stripped-down recommendation system recommends other sites you might add to your rotation based on your similarities with other users."
Boing Boing
Virtuality on a cellphone
Augmented Reality on a Cellphone. "Viennese computer scientist Daniel Wagner has figured out a way to show a virtual character on an i-mate SP5 cellphone, and when you move around with the cellphone, it appears that you’re floating around this virtual character in 3D. Other people with cellphones can also see this character from their points of view. "
Gizmodo
Businesses NOT in search engines
Firms 'invisible' to online shoppers. "Nearly half of small businesses could be missing out on their share of the growing online market due to poor knowledge of search engines. A new report from Fasthosts shows that 49 per cent of small firms fail to submit their company’s websites to search engines. Two-thirds of internet users told researchers that they only look at the first two pages of their online search results, Fasthosts said, meaning that many companies will never be discovered online."The Register
A network of medical implants
Picking Up the Pace. "By the end of the decade, electronic-device manufacturers say their implants should be able to track many more vital signs. This is important because most heart patients have other serious ailments on top of heart disease. As sensors become more refined and implants learn to communicate with one another, the next step will be linking devices within the body. For example, an implant might sense when a patient's blood levels are out of whack and tell a drug pump to inject a dose of corrective medicine."Business Week
March 22, 2006
Smart containers
Shipping container with a mind of its own. "One of the many applications for the new RFID tags is that of locating goods and containers in transit. German scientists have developed the “IFF Smart Box”, a container equipped with a scanning device that can check its contents by means of RFID. The data are forwarded to a small computer unit. A software combines them with the current geographical location determined by a GPS receiver. Various sensors can be integrated in the box, too, in order to measure parameters such as pressure, temperature or vibration. The information is transmitted to a database by mobile radio."
gizmag
High-tech sports
Soccer World Cup promises forefront of live sport services. "The portal is amazing, with a range of innovative features such as personally-tailored information systems and personal diary pages, but the highlight is the 3D reconstruction of scenes from the soccer match that enables the viewer to view a replay of key scenes from any point in the stadium – from the referee's perspective or the eyes of the goalkeeper. To make this possible, the team constructed 3D models of stadiums and compiled catalogs of players. An ingenious software program manages to generate the scenes from TV images."
gizmag
Shopping with RSS
Your Personal Shopper With the Initials R.S.S.. "The system, in the case of eBags at least, appears simple enough. Starting later this month, consumers who visit either the company's main site or its shoe site, 6pm.com, will see R.S.S. icons near the sites' products, with messages offering users regular updates on those products. Once a user has indicated a preference for, say, black, size 11 Cole Haan shoes, he clicks on the icon telling the company to send the alerts to his personalized page, then confirms the request by signing into that page. If the user directs eBags to deliver alerts to a My Yahoo page, eBags will send the alert — typically an item description with a photo — only when it has a new product or a promotion relevant to the specified items."New York Times
March 20, 2006
Robotic emotions
The Art of Building a Robot to Love. "At Carnegie Mellon University, Rachel Gockley, a graduate student, found that in certain circumstances people spent more time interacting with a robotic receptionist — a disembodied face on a monitor — when the face looked and sounded unhappy. And at Stanford, Clifford Nass, a professor of communication, found that in a simulation, drivers in a bad mood had far fewer accidents when they were listening to a subdued voice making comments about the drive. "When you're sad, you do much better working with a sad voice," Dr. Nass said. "You don't feel like hanging around with somebody who says, 'Hi! How are you!' ""
New York Times
Things to do with you camera phone
Top 50 Emergency Uses for Your Camera Phone. "About has a list of top emergency uses for your cameraphone compiled by Paul Purcell, a security analyst and preparedness consultant : Just a few: Record parking spot locations; Engine repairs. Send a pic to a mechanic who may talk you through a quick fix; Child custodian. If you can't get to your kids at school or other function, relay a picture of the person who is coming to pick them up..."Smart Mobs
Digital reproduction
Digital Methods Help Replicate Artworks. "The subtle aspects of Japanese paintings, which often include fine line work on delicate materials, could be lost or muted during reproduction. So the process involves creating high-resolution images of the originals with a scanner or camera that can capture images with more than 100 megapixels (compared with, say, the 5 or 6 megapixels of most consumer-oriented digital cameras). Using a combination of software and the human eye, the colors in the digital image are matched to the original work. The image is then printed out on a large-format Hewlett-Packard Designjet 5500 UV inkjet printer with fade-resistant inks. The printer is able to produce the image on washi, a traditional Japanese paper made from the inner bark of trees."
New York Times
March 17, 2006
ID implants
ID card in a tooth. "Dr Thevissen and his team have adapted an RFID tag which vets inject routinely into animals. It can carry information including a person's name, nationality, date of birth, gender and national ID code. Experiments showed that the tag withstood normal biting forces and worked after being heated to 450C and cooled. But repeated expansion and contraction of the tooth due to heating and cooling is a problem. So the design might be modified to include an insulating layer."
we make money not art
Digital metaphors
NEC's "KotoHana" LED flower knows how you feel. "It's pretty hard to tell what's going on here, but there seems to be a "Sensibility Technology" that recognizes the user's feelings, and then tells the flower over a wireless connection. The system works over the Internet, so even from far away the flower's LEDs can light up to reflect your true feelings to that special someone."
Engadget
Big screen interaction
Panasonic shows hugemongous interactive display. "hey paired a couple of 110-inch screens to create the largest interactive display we've ever seen, if not the largest display, period. Their tech isn't as crazy interactive as NYU's Multi-Touch stuff, but Panasonic sure has the right idea about size. Check the read link for a video complete with funny accents and imagery of some sort of "desktop of the future," which, of course, involves tossing around bits of video larger than our respective refrigerators."
Engadget
Getting more information on items in stores
DNP Develops an in-store information clipping system. "As shown in the photo, the system uses QR codes and consumers take a pic of QR with their camera phones. Consumers may use this system for creating a wish list or compare similar sales items. Retailers can collect detailed information about consumers because this system can capture which product a customer clicked (it's recorded even when the consumer doesn't actually buy the product). So, a potential new marketing tool."
RFID in Japan
Closer to fuel cells in laptops?
Antig's Fuel Cells For Laptops Showing At CeBIT Next Week. "Taiwan’s Antig Technology and AVC Corp will be showing off a fuel cell for laptops at next week’s CeBIT Trade Show. They’re saying their fuel cell is production-ready and can go into laptops by the second half of this year."
Gizmodo
Stick-on watches
Timeflex: Oh, That It Were Real. "The Timeflex is a mock-up of a stickable watch. Using some sort of epaper—not yet invented—and an ultra-durable time IC—not yet invented—and the stuff they put on sticky notes, you’ve got yourself a watch you can stick anywhere."
Gizmodo
Copying the real world in online worlds
U2 Rocks Second Life. "A team of fans have recreated a U2 rock concert in Second Life, BrandsInGames reports. While music was streamed in to the arena, a recreated Bono and gang were animated to rock like they're real-life counterparts. Merchandise stalls sod T Shirts and even beer from brands like Sam Adams. After the show, the band came out from their backstage room to give autographs!"
PSFK
Sharing playlists
Downloading Empathy to Your iPod. "IMixes -- as well as playlists on other services such as Rhapsody, Musicstrands and Soundflavor -- are the online cousins of amateur cassette-tape and CD mixes created over the years by countless music collectors as soundtracks for parties and road trips. Many of the playlists focus on a theme -- and many of those on a personal one, whether the subject is a lost love, a class reunion, a nasty breakup, duty in Iraq or a new romance."
Washington Post
Clocking-in digitally
NEC NeoFace time clock keeps workers in line. "The system replaces the classic punch-card reader with facial recognition software, so that old canard of getting someone else to clock in for you is useless. For the ultimate in worker subservience, the time clock can also control access to the company locker room. Try to leave early, and you can forget about grabbing your street clothes; you'll have to sneak out wearing your grubby uniform, letting the whole world know you're pwned."
Engadget
Rich, online photo features
BubbleShare adds Ajax Zoom feature. "The feature is available on every picture hosted by BubbleShare - simply click on the BubbleZoom button and have a 3x zoom view on any area of the photo. Very slick."
TechCrunch
Virtual visitation rights
'Virtual' visits pushed in several states. "Divorce put David List and his 2-year-old daughter on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean, and he worried that she would soon forget him. She hasn't, though. List's divorce agreement guaranteed him "virtual visitation" — the chance to talk with his daughter through an Internet video connection — and he and Ruby Rose, now 5, usually connect at least twice a week. The chats sustain them in between their in-person visits, which come only a few times a year."
USATODAY.com
Exercise while working
The DIY exercise office. "My boss bought a treadmill for his office, and built a table on top of it to use as a desk. Now he spends his entire workday walking about half a mile an hour. He's hoping to be in shape by spring"
MAKE: Blog
Facial recognition in phones
Vodafone 904SH Cellphone with Face Recognition. "Vodafone has rolled out an unusual 3G and GSM cellphone that gets to know you as well as your dog does. It performs this magic trick with an OKI face recognition sensor that does away with the need for entering a pin number."
Gizmodo
Smart toys
Arcade racing brought to life. "Designed for 7-10 years old boys, Floor it! is arcade car racing brought to life. The radio controlled cars sense and react to course conditions like oil slicks, turbo power-ups, water hazards, etc. The cars are controlled through a free floating steering wheel. When the wheel is turned left and right the vehicle acts accordingly. Tilting the steering wheel forward and back controls the throttle and direction of the car. Optional throttle and brake buttons can be used in place of the throttle tilt control."
we make money not art
Work for people with disabilities
Computer Technology Opens a World of Work to Disabled People. "Steven Singley, 41, who is quadriplegic as a result of a car accident 20 years ago, has a special setup that helps him take calls for Office Depot from his home in Centerville, Utah. His right arm, which has limited movement, is strapped to the armrest of his wheelchair, allowing his hand to pivot on a trackball and his pinky knuckle to tap a clicker. A splint with a rubber tip is hooked to his palm so he can type on a keyboard sitting on his lap. "You would think that typing one key at a time would be slow, but I can type 25 words per minute accurately," Mr. Singley said. He puts in 20 to 24 hours a week, requiring extended breaks so his girlfriend can give him his medication and prepare him for his meals."
New York Times
Searching for podcasts
Podzinger: search the full text of podcasts. "Podzinger is a service that aggregates hundreds of thousands of episodes of podcasts, converts the entire text of the casts to text, and then delivers a searachable index. You go to Podzinger, search for a search, and you get back all the podcasts that have mentioned that term -- along with embedded players that can play you back the whole podcast, or just those segments where the keywords are mentioned."
Boing Boing
Managing Office documents online
Open, edit, and save Office documents online. "ThinkFree Office Online lets you open, edit, create, and save Microsoft Office documents (Word, PowerPoint, and Excel) from any browser for, just as you thought, free. ThinkFree Office Online also boasts the ability to: Post documents directly to your blog without any conversion. Create powerful Web presentations using a familiar interface. Convert your existing documents to PDF format"
Lifehacker
Networked objects
Manifesto for Networked Objects. "Julian Bleecker has finally posted his "Manifesto for Networked Objects" in which he discusses "Why Things Matter". Julian elaborates on a variety of issues connected to the "Internet of Things", populated by "Blogjects" or "Spimes" that collect and disseminate information, making us eventually rather live "in" than "on" the internet."
we make money not art
Sharing security between bars
BioBouncer Might Make Bars Safer. "Its camera snaps customers entering clubs and bars, and facial recognition software compares them with stored images of previously identified troublemakers. The technology alerts club security to image matches, while innocent images are automatically flushed at the end of each night, Dussich said. Various clubs can share databases through a virtual private network, so belligerent drunks might find themselves unwelcome in all their neighborhood bars."
Wired News
Online applications
Thumbstacks online presentation builder. "Create and edit slides online with Word-like rich-text editing controls and with images and drawings from anywhere on the web. Launch and view your presentation right from the Thumbstacks site and edit it from any ‘net-connected computer. Thumbstacks is still in alpha so expect a bit of wonkiness; free to sign up."
Lifehacker
More competition for IE
Maxthon: the browser that rocks. "The key strength of Maxthon is that it enables you to customize totally your browsing experience with extreme simplicity. A few examples: URL shortcuts. Instead of typing a URL or clicking a bookmark (ok it takes less than 2 sec but still) you can set up a URL alias (”2″ for instance) and type directly in the URL bar which will lead you to the URL of your choice (eg: your flickr page). You can change easily skins, a wide choice is offered. Mouse gesture is also great just like super drag and drop features to save an image or initiate a search on a given word within web page."
TechCrunch
Soft robots
RI-MAN, the soft and cuddly robot. "With a Pillsbury Doughboy pucker sure to delight any granny, RI-MAN is the latest lifestyle-support robot destined to care for Japan's elderly. The 5-foot 2-inch, 220-pound RI-MAN features plush arms and chest perched atop a wheeled base."
Engadget
March 16, 2006
Getting rid of background noise
Download of the Day: Noise. "Noise plays a continuous, static/waterfall “pink noise” that does a surprisingly effective job of killing annoying co-worker, roommate and downstairs neighbor sounds."
Lifehacker
Flexible RFID
NICT Develops Flexible Fabric RFID Tags. "NICT (National Institute of Information and Communication Technology) developed a flexible RFID tag (2.45GHz) that is mostly made of a fabric material."
RFID in Japan
QR codes for verifying your location
Vending Machines as Location Markers for Calling Taxicabs. "The service can also be used with QR codes that encode location information. Vending machines that bear such location-encoded QR codes are being installed in varous places in the prefecture so that people can easily call a cab just by taking a picture of a QR code with their camera phones and connecting to the K-cabs' taxicab dispatch website."
RFID in Japan
Post-production advertising
Digital product placement alters TV landscape. "Unbeknownst to them, the image of Kellogg's Club Crackers had been digitally painted onto the top of a coffee table after the scene was filmed, launching the latest advance in a growing marketing practice known in the industry as product placement but derided by critics as "stealth advertising.""Reuters.com
March 08, 2006
Setting shortcut keys
Download of the Day: Qliner hotkeys. "Just hold the Windows key for three seconds and up pops a Onscreen Keyboard with icons on the keys that are configured. This you can you use , not only to remind you of hotkey combinations, but also for Drag and Drop Configuration."
Lifehacker
Tools for hardware prototyping
Designer's DIY. "FTD today points towards the Stanford HCI Group who have developed a toolkit for designers of digital devices. D.tools enables product designers to try out the desired functionality themselves before handing it over to the engineers to have them cast all the nifty miniaturization-magic on the item. This they hope, will lead to products that are less flawed in terms of interface design since it's obviously very tedious and expensive to alter the position of a certain button when all the electronics have already been finalized."
we make money not art
Robotics for kids
Huggy robot for hospitalised children. "The Robotics & Multibody Research Group (a research group within the VUB - Brussels University) is working on Anty, an intelligent huggy robot that will entertain long-term hospitalised children. When developed the robot will walk, talk and show feelings. Besides, Anty will be able to develop different personalities, so kids don't get bored with him."
we make money not art
Biological computing
Enzyme computer could live inside you. "Researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have built a molecular calculator that uses enzymes to perform calculations. The team believe enzyme-powered computers could eventually be implanted into the body and used to, for example, tailor the release of drugs to a specific person's metabolism."
we make money not art
Tiny PCs
Shuttle X100 Ultra-Small Media PC. "The Shuttle X100 Ultra-Small Media PC is a design concept that’s so tiny you’d think it was a FireWire drive, but even though it’s small, inside there’s a full-scale computer powered by an Intel Core Duo mobile processor. "
Gizmodo
Touchscreens everywhere
Acer MP-500 touchscreen portable media player. "This one comes as something of a surprise, but it's certainly the kind of surprise we'd like to get more often. Acer is apparently on the verge of releasing its MP-500 media player, and the specs include a 3.5-inch touchscreen display, 20-40GB hard drive, support for most common audio and video formats, video out and a battery life of 4-8 hours. It's expected out in Europe next month at a price of between $350 and $415."
Engadget
Computer-controlled design
Space Antenna Design Evolved by Hive of Borg. "Eighty PCs running artificial intelligence software used “survival of the fittest” principles to evolve a tiny antenna that will be used on a space mission next month. NASA called the group of computers a “Borg computer collective.” After starting with a random antenna design, the hive of computers spent just 10 hours going through millions of possibilities for a space antenna. The group settled on a design that looked pretty much like a bent paper clip, determining that shape as the most efficient for the mission. According to NASA, the odd-shaped antenna perfectly matches the performance that NASA specified."
Gizmodo
Richer peripherals
Logitech NuLOOQ controller: iPod meets PowerMate. "The NuLOOQ's touch-sensitive, circular control wheel can be customized to work with just about any app, and includes an onscreen interface (also available separately) that shows you what your NuLOOQ is doing at any moment. The idea is that you can use the NuLOOQ to get precision control over things like zooming in on graphics and selecting tools in apps like Photoshop."
Engadget
Putting the CPU in another room
New Matrox Extio F1400 is world's first remote graphics unit. "The Matrox remote graphics technology enables a new physical layout for computers and is ideal for environments like audio studios, broadcast studios, dispatch centers, control rooms, and public spaces using digital signage. With this product, the critical parts of the computer like the disks, memory, and processors can be kept in a separate, safe, secure room. This saves space at the display station, removes a potentially noisy computer, and allows system administrators to access and maintain the system at a separate location."
gizmag
Image processing on a phone
CamReader - software for doing many things with camera phones. "Mediaseek's CamReader is feature-rich image processing software. It's based on the barcode decoder engine adopted by major mobile telcos in Japan (i.e., KDDI, NTT DoCoMo, and Vodafone). When we talk about camera phones and barcodes in Japan, it's usually about QR codes, but CamReader supports varieties of barcode formats including: JAN8/13, EAN, UPC-A/E, CODE39, QR Code(model2), Micro QR Code, Data Matrix, PDF417, OCR."
RFID in Japan
Strange effects of quantum computing
Quantum computer solves problem without running program. "A quantum computer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has solved a problem without running the actual problem -- one of the weird-ass outcomes of building and running a quantum computer. Reportedly, this particular effect can't scale up much beyond a very simple problem, but the people responsible indicate that there are similar effects that might be usable at larger scales"Boing Boing