(Credit: Fraunhofer Institute)If you thought there were enough menaces on the road with people yakking away on Bluetooth headsets and texting while driving, these OLED data eyeglasses just upped the ante.
Just imagine if this little invention out of the Fraunhofer Institute for Photonic Microsystems in Germany were to ...
After signing a deal with Aoyama Gakuin University to provide iPhone 3Gs to 1,000 students to keep tabs of their attendance via the phone's Global Positioning System (GPS), Japan's biggest cell phone carrier, Softbank Mobile, now has a plan to equip the same amount of elementary-school students ...
E3's come and gone, but some oddities still linger. Shown during the Sony E3 press conference and discussed little after that, Invizimals is a curious game using the PSP's camera to create augmented reality "animal ghosts" that appear in real-life settings. Coded capture cards seem to attract the
...Donald and Jasmine give the newly-official Zune HD its deserved time in the spotlight as they both gush about the player's design and HD features as well as speculate about pricing and other possible WiFi-related additions. Also this week, the Insiders discuss rumblings about a potential Sirius XM App for the iPhone. Then, Jasmine brings up some of the tiniest MP3 players to ever be reviewed by CNET, while Donald goes off on a tangent about audiobooks. And we musn't forget to give props to the entity that gave this whole digital music thing a violent shove into the mainstream consciousness: Napster celebrates its 10 year anniversary this week.
Listen now:
Download today's podcast
Subscribe in iTunes audio | Subscribe in iTunes video | Subscribe in RSS audio | Subscribe in RSS video
...
Originally posted at MP3 Insider
Sony takes aim at Nintendo and Microsoft's motion controls.
(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET)Amid an already-good Sony E3 press conference, a time-out was taken amid PSP Go details, PSP games and PS3 holiday titles to peek into the future at some on-the-horizon motion-control technology. The routine was familiar already: in fact, Microsoft and Nintendo had similar "the future is motion" pit stops in their 2009 E3 press conferences.
Being last, it seemed, would be a disadvantage to Sony. Appearing onstage were two of Sony's team behind the PlayStation Eye and EyeToy, and the general nervousness seemed palpable. When the prototype device was revealed - a black wand with a glowing purple bulb on top - it almost seemed like a joke. But a funny thing happened: the longer the demo went on, the better it got.
Sony's black wand appears to be the PS3's Wii-mote. Configured with an analog trigger and some number of buttons, the wand has one-to-one mapping just like the Wii Motion Plus. The glowing orb, which changed color during the demo, was integral to the positioning technology, although exactly how wasn't detailed in the press conference. ...
Last month, GE revealed that its research scientists had discovered a way, using holographic technology, to store 100 DVDs worth of information on a single standard DVD. What a difference a few weeks make.
In what can only be seen as a "serving" (or pwning) of the GE researchers, the B-Boys researchers at the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, have gone way past 100 and on to 2,000.
While standard DVDs are made with three spatial dimensions, the Aussie researchers added two more.
Using nanoparticles--extremely small bits of matter--the Swinburne team was able to introduce a spectral (or color) dimension and a polarization dimension.
To create the "color dimension," the researchers inserted gold nanorods onto a disc's surface. Because nanoparticles react to light according to their shape, this allowed the researchers to record information in a range of different color wavelengths on the same physical disc location. Their findings appear in the current issue of the scientific journal Nature.
Current DVDs are recorded in a single color wavelength using a laser. Brain explode yet? No? Well just keep reading, pal.
...
Pictured is a concept handset from Nokia that uses colors to convey moods.
(Credit: Nokia )For times where :-) just doesn't quite convey the message.
Buzz on the Web is that Nokia has filed a patent for light messaging. Unless you text that you're mad or happy, chances ...
Iconmobile designed this instrument concept for NVidia's automotive chip.
(Credit: Iconmobile)Forget analog gauges, the instrument cluster of the future will be a 3D dynamic display configurable by the user. Computer graphics company NVidia is has developed a chip designed specifically for the automotive market. This chip holds ...
Originally posted at The Car Tech blog
(Credit: Triumph International)I just got back from a trip to California where I got to be with almost my entire extended family. I'm 33 years old and single, so the entire time I had relatives telling me to hurry up and get married. The pressure was horrible. But ...
We've seen keyboards integrated into pants before (in this edition of DO NOT CRAVE), but we're willing to give it another chance because Brooklynite Zach Hoeken actually made these himself.
Zach spawned the keyboard pants idea at Sunday's Fashion Hacking Day sponsored ...
(Credit: World Design Market)We've covered silly-slash-interesting concepts before, but I'm not really clear on how I should feel about this handheld portable toaster by Korean designer Been Kim. You apparently run it over your bread like a fancy butter knife and it toasts that side in your
...
The Vena-enabled inhaler.
(Credit: Cambridge Consultants)There's now an alternative to the GPS-enabled inhaler for keeping patients connected with health care providers.
Cambridge Consultants on Wednesday brought its "connected patient" concept to life with a low-cost wireless platform that lets medical devices deliver readings to a central monitor located at home, or to an online health record such as Google Health or Microsoft Health Vault.
The idea behind the technology is that patients and their health care support professionals should be connected wirelessly, via the treatment devices. First up: the demo version of Vena-enabled inhalers.
The platform, called Vena, employs two emerging wireless standards, including the Infrared-based IEEE11073 and the Bluetooth Medical Device Profile. Vena embeds the two into a single chip as the combination of them ensures compatibility of data exchanged between different types of devices and the security in the transmitting of medical data.
The demo inhalers connect to an online personal health care application via a smartphone or a computer. ...
The Vena-enabled inhaler.
(Credit: Cambridge Consultants)There's now an alternative to the GPS-enabled inhaler for keeping patients connected with health care providers.
Cambridge Consultants on Wednesday brought its "connected patient" concept to life with a low-cost wireless platform that lets medical devices deliver readings to a central monitor located at home, or to an online health record such as Google Health or Microsoft Health Vault.
The idea behind the technology is that patients and their health care support professionals should be connected wirelessly, via the treatment devices. First up: the demo version of Vena-enabled inhalers.
The platform, called Vena, employs two emerging wireless standards, including the Infrared-based IEEE11073 and the Bluetooth Medical Device Profile. Vena embeds the two into a single chip as the combination of them ensures compatibility of data exchanged between different types of devices and the security in the transmitting of medical data.
The demo inhalers connect to an online personal health care application via a smartphone or a computer. ...
The 2009 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is the hottest ticket in town for the second year in a row. Apple quietly posted notice that the conference had sold out on its WWDC site earlier this week. The conference, buoyed by the success of the iPhone, sold out in 2008 ...
Originally posted at iPhone Atlas
Now you see it, now it's augmented.
(Credit: Marco Tempest)For decades, slightly cheesy sleight-of-hand artists around the world have promised that "you won't believe your eyes!" before demonstrating ageless moves handed down from generation to generation.
Now that an ever-accelerating cascade of eye-popping visual technology such as augmented reality has threatened to steal some of the magic dust from old-fashioned magicians, along comes a pasteboard prestidigitator who folds augmented reality into his own YouTube-ready routine.
Enter Marco Tempest, a renegade cardsharp and AR artist who assembled an open-source, real-time theater of the future for your entertainment, called Augmented Reality Magic 1.0.
Is this, ladies and gentlemen, magic of the future?
...
(Credit: Moto Labs)A new touchscreen table top computer display brings together the unlikely combination of technologies popularized by Apple and Microsoft.
It's called the Scalable Multitouch display, and its touch technology is similar to the iPhone, but it would scale up from handheld device size to dimensions more like Microsoft's surface. The prototype measures just 19 inches right now, but it aspires to cover an entire 50-inch table top one day.
The Scalable Multitouch has been in development at Moto Labs in San Francisco for the past two years, and on Tuesday the company released an updated video as a peek of what they're working on, which can be seen in the video below as well as the photo gallery below. Like Microsoft's Surface, it's intended to be used as a group workspace where information on the screen can be manipulated by hand. But Moto Labs CEO Daniell Hebert says what his company is doing is different than Microsoft and others because it does not use cameras or projectors underneath the surface of the display to project images. And by nixing the inner camera/projector, it allows the display to be thin--perhaps some day as thin as the LCD screen you're likely reading this on.
The display instead uses multitouch technology--which means you can use more than one finger as an input device. Moto Labs likes to say that you can used as many fingers to control the device as you want, and that you're only limited by the number of fingers you have on each hand.
It also employs capacitive touch--same as the iPhone--in which a finger touching a sensor grid (just below the screen) causes a change in signal. That relays exactly where on the screen the finger is. But while the iPhone uses a solid solution known as ITO (indium tin oxide), Moto Labs employs a grid of super thin wires that pick up on the signals from each finger.
The thin-wire grid is used right now in single-touch displays, but has yet to be used on multitouch, and that's where Moto Labs' work on the inner electronics and the software to take advantage of multitouch comes in.
Touch screen technologies are trendy right now and, as discussed at last week's Interactive Display conference, the industry is in the process of figuring out how to push forward their technology while not becoming a passing fad. ...
The concept of a GPS-enabled asthma inhaler emerged less then a month ago, and already it is very nearly a reality.
SiliconSky GPS announced Tuesday that is has successfully developed a prototype of the first-of-its-kind asthma inhaler with built-in GPS tracking.
GPS-enabled inhaler.
(Credit: Asthma Blog)This is the result ...
Watch what you say. Scientists in England have developed a computer that can not only read lips, but can tell the difference between languages.
Mouth movements can differ according to the language spoken.
(Credit: University of East Anglia)Researchers at the University of East Anglia's School of Computing Sciences ...
Originally posted at Military Tech
One day, your computer will be a big-ass table with pictures of other people's kids all over it. We know it, Microsoft knows it and--judging by its fancy X-Desk surface computer--Epson knows it too.
The X-Desk works in much the same way as ...
(Credit: PediSedate)Sometimes we hear about gadgets that are made for good but could definitely be used for evil. Take the PediSedate, a combo gaming device and sedation machine.
It's essentially a Game Boy system modified to distract kids ages 3 to 9 with Tetris or something while they'...
(Credit: PediaSedate)Sometimes we hear about gadgets that are made for good but could definitely be used for evil. Take the PediSedate, a combo gaming device and sedation machine.
It's essentially a Game Boy system modified to distract kids ages 3 to 9 with Tetris or something while they'...
Rochester Institute of Technology President Bill Destler tries out the banjo with Alex Lifschitz, a second-year game design and development major.
(Credit: A. Sue Weisler)A couple of years ago, I bought an Xbox 360 for the sole purpose of playing Rock Band. I'd played it a few times ...
