The World’s First ‘Hands On Search’

Introducing the world’s first hand on search, allowing visually impaired children in Tokyo to search with their hands. The vending machine-like pod recognises your verbal search, then recreates with a 3D printer. For the first time, visually impaired people will be able to touch what they can’t see, anything from giraffes to skyscrapers.

Enabling speed reading

The reading game is about to change forever. With Spritz, which is coming to the Samsung Galaxy S5 and Samsung Gear 2 watch, words appear one at a time in rapid succession. This allows you to read at speeds of between 250 and 1,000 words per minute. The typical college-level reader reads at a pace of between 200 and 400 a minute.

Other apps have offered up similar types of rapid serial visual presentation to enhance reading speed and convenience on mobile devices in the past. What Spritz does differently is manipulate the format of the words to more appropriately line them up with the eye’s natural motion of reading. The “Optimal Recognition Point” (ORP) is slightly left of the center of each word, and is the precise point at which our brain deciphers each jumble of letters. The unique aspect of Spritz is that it identifies the ORP of each word, makes that letter red and presents all of the ORPs at the same space on the screen. In this way, our eyes don’t move at all as we see the words, and we can therefore process information instantaneously rather than spend time decoding each word.

This is 250 words per minute. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's stone is 76,944 words long. At this rate you could read HP1 in just over 5 hours.




350 words per minute doesn't seem that much faster. 3 hours and 40 minutes to finish Potter.

Science quote from their web page:
When reading, only around 20% of your time is spent processing content. The remaining 80% is spent physically moving your eyes from word to word and scanning for the next [Optimal Recognition Point].




Now it's getting harder to follow. Probably takes time to get used to, but still, I can't imagine being able to concentrate on this for too long. If you could keep up with this for two and a half hours, you could read Harry Potter 1 from cover to cover.




Boston-based Spritz, which says its been in "Stealth Mode" for nearly three years, is working on licensing its technology to software developers, ebook makers and even wearables.

Here's a little bit more about how it works: In every word you read, there is an "Optimal Recognition Point” or ORP. This is also called a "fixation point." The "fixation point" in every word is generally immediately to the left of the middle of a word, explains Kevin Larson, of Microsoft's Advanced Reading Technologies team. As you read, your eyes hop from fixation point to fixation point, often skipping significantly shorter words.

"After your eyes find the ORP, your brain starts to process the meaning of the word that you’re viewing," Spritz explains on its website. Spritz indicates the ORP by making it red, and positions each word so that the ORP is at the same point, so your eyes don't have to move. That's what makes it different from RSVP speed reading, which just shows you words in rapid succession with no regard to the ORP. Here's a graphic that shows how Spritz keeps your eyes still while reading:



via HuffingtonPost

Feel textures on a screen

Fujitsu have been demonstrating a prototype tablet that features haptic technology which gives the user the ability to feel the texture of the on screen image.

The Fujitsu uses ultrasonic inducers on the screen to vibrate it at different frequencies, creating a cushion of high-pressure above the screen that can be varied based on your fingertip's position on an X-Y axis. Match that with an onscreen image and you have something pretty magical - different 'surfaces' in images feel different to the touch.




"This technology enables tactile sensations — either smooth or rough, which had until now been difficult to achieve — right on the touch-screen display," Fujitsu said in a statement. "Users can enjoy realistic tactile sensations as they are applied to images of objects displayed on the screen."

The technology currently works only with a single point of contact, too - the whole screen reacts to that point of contact, and feedback can't be more accurately localised - but it's very early days and will undoubtedly evolve. Down the line, a version that could replicate a two-thumb control pad on screen would transform mobile gaming.

Fujitsu's track record with bringing its technology experiments to market, either in its own products on licensed to other vendors, is excellent - about 90% see manufacture. It hopes this one will hit retail in 2015.

Introducing the Leap

Leap Motion has created a new device, called the Leap. It is an 8 cubic feet space in front of your computer, once connected to your computer via USB, it creates a four-cubic-foot virtual workspace. It claims is 200 times more accurate than existing technology and will take gesture controls to the next level.

"Leap can distinguish your individual fingers and track your movements down to a 1/100th of a millimetre"

"For the first time, you can control a computer in three dimensions with your natural hand and finger movements"

The Leap is $70, and a select few can pre-order them now, with the full roll-out coming this winter.

Behind the Screen Overlay Interactions

Behind the Screen Overlay Interactions: Behind-the-screen interaction with a transparent OLED with view-dependent, depth-corrected gaze.
A project by Jinha Lee and Cati Boulanger, former intern and researcher respectively, at Microsoft Applied Sciences would change all that. They’re using a special transparent OLED screen from Samsung and a series of sensors, along with custom software that reshuffles the keyboard to the back of the screen. So you can work with your hands inside the virtual desktop.

A Day Made of Glass 2: Same Day. Expanded Corning Vision.

"A Day Made of Glass 2," Corning's expanded vision for the future of glass technologies. This video continues the story of how highly engineered glass, with companion technologies, will help shape our world.

Lisa Harouni: A primer on 3D printing

2012 may be the year of 3D printing, when this three-decade-old technology finally becomes accessible and even commonplace. Lisa Harouni gives a useful introduction to this fascinating way of making things -- including intricate objects once impossible to create.

Soon, You May Download New Skills to Your Brain

New research suggests it may be possible to learn complex tasks with little to no conscious effort, just like in The Matrix.

PROBLEM: Unlike Neo in The Matrix or the titular superspy in the comedy series Chuck, we can't master kung fu just by beaming information to our brain. We have to put in time and effort to learn new skills.

METHODOLOGY: Researchers from Boston University and Japan's ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories designed a decoded functional MRI neurofeedback method that induces a pre-recorded activation pattern in targeted early visual brain areas that could also produce the pattern through regular learning. They then tested whether repetitions of the fMRI pattern caused an improvement in the performance of that visual feature.

RESULTS: The experiments successfully demonstrated that, through a person's visual cortex, decoded fMRI could be used to impart brain activity patterns that match a previously known target state. Interestingly, behavioral data obtained before and after the neurofeedback training showed improved performance of the relevant visual tasks especially when the subjects were unaware of the nature of what they were learning.

Read more at The Atlantic

Samsung's Smart Window

Soon, we shall be living in the world of Minority Report, and this "Smart Window" technology Samsung has at CES 2012 is going to help us get there.

Flexible tablet of the future

Samsung have released a video that shows a conceptual tablet with a flexible AMOLED screen. This impressive technology has currently been in development for 4 years now, and if the results are anywhere near as good as this video, the it will make the current iPad & co look like the tools of a caveman.

via Mashable

'True 3D' Display Using Laser Plasma Technology

Researchers at Burton Inc. (not the snowboard company) have demonstrated their True 3D display technology and the results are outstanding. Instead of using a screen, the lasers produce points of light from the plasma excitation of oxygen and nitrogen molecules in the air or water.

The lasers can create 50,000 dots-per second in mid-air at 15FPS. They are currently working on bring that up to 24-30FPS. Colours can be created by combining red, green and blue lasers. The additive color model is how your TV and computer monitor create colors. Hopefully we'll be able to watch 3D movies in actual 3D, not this fake shove-irritating-glasses-on-your-face 3D.

via Gizmodo

Kinect Effect

See the future possibilities of Kinect that go beyond the expected, into truly amazing things that people around the world are beginning to imagine.

Massively Parallel Computer Built From Single Layer of Molecules

Japanese scientists have built a cellular automaton from individual molecules that carries out huge numbers of calculations in parallel

via Technology Review

HoloDesk

HoloDesk is a novel interactive system combining an optical see through display and Kinect camera to create the illusion that users are directly interacting with 3D graphics. A virtual
image of a 3D scene is rendered through a half silvered mirror and spatially aligned with the real-world for the viewer.

Users easily reach into an interaction volume displaying the virtual image. This allows the user to literally get their hands into the virtual display. A novel real-time algorithm for representing hands and other physical objects, which are sensed by the Kinect inside this volume, allows physically realistic interaction between real and virtual 3D objects.

IBM cooks up a new silicon brain

What you are about to read is not science fiction. IBM, the 100-year-old company that started out making old-fashioned cash registers and “business tabulating machines” has come up with a new chip that marries our brain’s architecture with silicon guts. Like people, it learns instead of being programmed and like a good semiconductor, it’s easy to make based on today’s chip production technologies. While it might have started out as a research project seeking to develop chips that deliver mor oomph while being stingy about power consumption, today it is a radical idea that takes computing to more places and in doing so potentially unleashes new waves of innovation.

“The goal is not to replace today’s computers. It’s to really take the road less traveled and build new generation of computers with a totally new approach to problems in business and science and government,” Modha says. “If today’s computers are left brained, rational and sequential then cognitive computing is intuitive and right-brained and slow, but the two together can become the future of our civilization’s computing stack.”

via Gigaom

Toyota Window to the world - multimedia system

Imagine when a journey from A to B is no longer routine as your car in the near-future encourages a sense of play, exploration and learning. This is the image engineers and designers from Toyota Motor Europe (TME) and the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID) had of Toyota's "Window to the World" vehicle concept.

NB: The video used to promote this vehicle concept is a simulation filmed in static, controlled environments. All health and safety requirements were met for the described conditions. Toyota will never promote unsafe behaviors, and will always encourage passengers to fasten their seatbelts.

3D Printing at high speed

3D printing technology is rapidly advancing, as this video 'Insane Speeds with PLA on Ultimaker' shows.

Xbox Kinect in the hospital operating room

A team at Sunnybrook has come up with a novel new medical use for the Xbox Kinect.

via: http://sunnyview.sunnybrook.ca/

Smart materials coming to 100% Design

Chris Lefteri from 100% Materials meets with Bibi Nelson from Bare Conductive to find out all about their smart paint, whether skin-safe conductive or interactive. Bibi also demonstrates paint that detects proximity. Weird science at its best...

Disney Tactile Device Lets Games and Movies Literally Send Chills Down Your Spine

Disney researchers apparently don’t feel that your video games are realistic enough. Engineers at the company’s Pittsburgh research facility have devised something they call “Tactile Brush” that creates the sensory illusion of objects moving against a person’s skin, mimicking everything from crawling insects to the forces exerted by a car taking a hard corner. And soon enough, it could be integrated into everything from gaming systems to movie theater seats.
Tactile Brush works via a series of vibrating coils embedded in the back of a chair. These coils create illusions based on a variety of sensory phenomena that have been somewhat understood for decades but never really implemented into entertainment devices.

via New Scientist