Hasta La Gadget!

Industry conference Open Mobile Summit explores major trends in San Francisco, November 7-9

Click here to secure your place with $250 discount, Saver ends this Friday October 12

This year’s line-up features over 100 speakers including:

• Anand Chandrasekher, Chief Marketing Officer, Qualcomm
• Warren East, CEO, ARM
• Kevin Packingham, Chief Product Officer, Samsung
• Osama Bedier, VP Wallet, Google
• David Marcus, President, PayPal
• Paul Gunning, CEO, Tribal DDB
• Dave Engberg, CTO, Evernote
• Mick Johnson, Product Manager Mobile, Facebook
• Gibu Thomas, SVP, Walmart
• Bob Bowman, CEO, Major League Baseball AM
• Yongseok Jang, VP Mobile, LG Electronics
• Joe Kennedy, CEO, Pandora
• Kevin Petersen, SVP  Digital Life, AT&T

See the complete speaker line-up here
(more…)

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: 3 Lessons Learned From FailCon – Failcon San Francisco – Oct 22, InsideAR Augmented Reality Conference: Munich, Oct 1-2,

Open World Forum will be held at Eurosites George V in Paris from October 11 to October 13.
www.openworldforum.org

 Open World Forum is the leading Open Source conference in Europe. This international summit is the gathering place for the open source community where decision makers and developers fosters innovation and enable new initiatives at the crossroad of technology, business, society and economy. Together, they aim at building the future of digital technology.
Every year, over 200 speakers and 2000 attendees coming from all over the world meet at Open World Forum in Paris. 

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: CEATEC Japan 2012 – Day 2 Round-up, CEATEC Japan 2012 – Day 1 Round-up,

How about some glass from CEATEC, eh? The folks at Nippon Electric Glass were showing off its still-in-development liquid lens technology, as well as its already-available “invisible glass.” The latter, as pictured above, is very much what it says on the tin albeit with some exaggeration, obviously, but we were still very impressed by how little reflection we saw on it. While it’s already being used in art galleries and inside cameras (as sensor covers), Nippon Electric Glass is pushing hard to get its invisible glass featured on mobile devices — the selling point here is simply to achieve the effect of somewhere in between glossy glass and matte glass, so that you’d get the best color vibrancy with minimal reflection. Do check out the video after the break.

As for the liquid lens, Nippon Electric Glass’ version uses low-power electric field to control its liquid crystal molecular orientation, thus changing the focal point. You’ll also see that the lens is also small enough to be integrated into phones and webcams. While the demo response was pretty quick, we were told that it’ll be at least another year before the technology becomes available for us mere mortals. For now, you can see our hands-on demo after the break.

Continue reading Nippon Electric Glass demos liquid crystal lens and ‘invisible glass’ at CEATEC (video)

Filed under: Misc

Nippon Electric Glass demos liquid crystal lens and ‘invisible glass’ at CEATEC (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Oct 2012 03:13:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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While scanning through Panasonic’s booth at CEATEC 2012, we couldn’t help but notice a prototype of its world’s slimmest 100-lumen laser projector module (or OIU aka optical imaging unit, as the company prefers), which can beam out an 800 x 480 picture. It’s not clear when exactly we’ll see this 75mm-thick device getting into consumers’ hands, but there’s certainly room for improvement for the image quality. Likewise, the scan-type OIU (resolution at about 400 x 300) next to the slim projector is far from ready for mass consumption, as the company is hoping to actually shrink it down and integrate it into mobile phones. That said, the fact that this technology doesn’t require focusing makes it worth the wait — the light doesn’t go through an LCD filter like ordinary projectors do, and instead, it’s a single laser beam scanning out the picture, hence the name.

Also shown along side were the optical bay drive pico projector that’s already being offered by Fujitsu, as well as the PJ-SJ25U 854 × 480 DLP pico projector which was released in August this year. While the latter’s image quality was rather impressive even under the strong ambient lighting, we struggle to appreciate the ¥56,800 or $730 price tag. Anyhow, pricing is just a matter time, as always.

Filed under: Displays

Panasonic’s 75mm-thick, 100-lumen laser projector module claims world’s thinnest title originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Oct 2012 02:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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What can one do with a robot suit? Well, it’s certainly not limited to just lifting sacks of rice, but that was exactly what we got to do at CEATEC courtesy of Koba Lab from Tokyo University of Science. First seen in 2009, the magic behind this 9kg kit are the pair of pneumatic artificial muscles (aka McKibben artificial muscles) on the back, which are made by industrial equipment manufacturer Kanda Tsushin. When pressurized with air using electrical components from KOA Corporation, the lightweight, loosely-woven PET tubes contract and consequently provide support to the user’s back, shoulders and elbows. As such, our arms were able to easily hold two more sacks of rice (making it a total of 50kg) until the demonstrator deflated the muscles. Check out our jolly hands-on video after the break.

Continue reading Tokyo University of Science shows off robotic suit powered by pneumatic artificial muscles (video)

Filed under: Robots

Tokyo University of Science shows off robotic suit powered by pneumatic artificial muscles (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 02 Oct 2012 21:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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