Hasta La Gadget!

At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), The Verge noted that TV companies had largely given up on 3D displays. A small company called Voxon is not about to give up on the idea, especially because their device actually projects light in three dimensions. They call it the Voxiebox.

In simple terms, Voxiebox displays a 3D image by aiming a laser projector at a screen that’s rapidly moving up and down. The 3D image is a bit like the light trails produced through long exposure photography, except this one’s happening in real-time. Your view of the image or video being displayed changes appropriately as you move around the Voxiebox, as if you were looking at a physical object.

The video below shows Voxon co-founders Will Tamblyn and Gavin Smith talking about how Voxiebox came about. Sadly the sound is worse than the video’s quality, which is a shame because their presentation is informative and inspiring.

As you can see the current prototype of the Voxiebox has a very low resolution, a death sentence in an industry stuck in PPI cold wars and currently under attack from the 4K marketing blitzkrieg. Another challenge facing Voxon is that content has to be made specifically for the display. You can’t just hook it up to your PC, media player or console and expect to see Call of Duty or Game of Thrones in volumetric 3D. Which is why it’s perfectly understandable that Voxon is aiming its first Voxiebox units not to home users but to arcades. On the other hand… arcades? Like, who-goes-to-arcades-anymore-arcades? Good luck.

Still, Voxon believes that their device will carve its own niche. Last year Polygon came up with an interesting story about Joseph White, an eccentric game developer who’s working on a game and game platform called Voxatron. Voxatron’s world is made out of voxels – volumetric pixels – and Polygon said White made his game imagining that Voxiebox would one day exist. Voxiebox, meet Voxatron:

That’s cool and all, but I don’t think that Voxatron or 3D chess (Voxchess?) is Voxiebox’s killer app. Aside from having a more respectable resolution, I think the device would capture the public’s attention and support more effectively if it worked closely with motion sensors. The strength of 3D objects is that they’re tangible – I think Voxon needs to seize that strength.

Take CastAR for example. Industry reputation and connections aside, Technical Illusions is getting the support they need with its augmented reality device because they’re taking cues from the tangible world. The great news here is that display-wise Voxiebox is much better than CastAR’s complicated setup. Voxon just needs to find the right artwork to paint on its canvas.

[via ExtremeTech]

Some say that the future of data storage lies in cloud computing. But until high-speed Internet access is available on a global scale, we’ll still need ways to store data locally. Wouldn’t it be nice if instead of bulky external hard drives and USB sticks we had paper-thin flash devices instead? Industrial designers Aditi Singh and Parag Anand think so, which is why they came up with dataSTICKIES.

Singh and Anand dream of dataSTICKIES as paper-thin flash memory devices. They based their concept on graphene, a carbon allotrope that exists in layers that are only one atom thick. Aside from being insanely thin, graphene is also durable and conducts electricity well. In theory at least, it can be used to make electronic devices that are way better than the ones that we have today, including data storage devices.

Singh and Anand imagine dataSTICKIES would be like sticky notes. You could write on them and stick them to practically any object. They even thought of a foolproof way to connect the concept device to computers. Instead of traditional connectors, dataSTICKIES would simply stick to a transparent data transfer surface located in a practical position, such as along the perimeter a monitor or on the back of a mobile device. You won’t even have to worry about running out of “ports” because you can stick multiple units on one data transfer surface.

Like sticky notes, dataSTICKIES would also make it easier to associate data with the physical world. For example, you could use posters with tear-off strips of dataSTICKIES to distribute vast amounts of information. Or spam. Or malware. Okay I’m starting to hate that poster idea.

Singh and Anand’s concept was honored at the 2013 Red Dot Design Award. It’s certainly a great idea, but I don’t think we’ll be seeing anything like it soon. Stick a browser on your computer and head to the dataSTICKIES website for more on the concept.

[via Gadgetify]

I don’t mind shopping, by myself. I hate shopping with my wife because she expects me to carry everything. I think she waits all year until I go with her and then tries to buy everything at once. Typically, I end up with a 75-pound bad of clothes in each hand, with nothing in the bags for me. People like my wife need Budgee.

Budgee is a lightweight robot that carries your stuff for you. The ‘bot is a three-wheel unit with a soft bag attached for you to put your stuff into. It can carry up to 50 pounds, and uses a rechargeable battery good for up to eight hours of use per charge.

Budgee is designed to follow you from a preset distance. The robot knows to follow you because of a small transmitter you carry with you. The robot works in conjunction with a smartphone app to warn you if you get too far away from it as well. You can also control the robot thought the smartphone app.

Budgee is on Kickstarter now seeking funding and a pledge of at least $1299(USD) by February 1, 2014 will get you one of the first robots with delivery set for July.

Unless you are a billionaire playboy or a business magnet of some sort, odds are you fly Coach like the rest of us when you travel by air. For the well-heeled, it’s First Class all the way, but for the really rich it’s private jets. A company called Spike Aerospace has a new private jet in the design phase it claims will be the fastest private aircraft in the skies – assuming it launches in 2018 as planned.

The 18-passenger aircraft is called the Spike S-512 and it will have a cruising speed of Mach 1.6. That makes it about twice as fast as a commercial aircraft. The company says a trip to London from New York would take three to four hours in its jet.

One of the biggest challenges to building the aircraft is dealing with the sonic boom when flying over populated areas. The FAA has regulations for sonic booms and those regulations are what greatly limited the usefulness of the Concorde jet when it was in service.

The 131-foot-long aircraft is expected to have a maximum flying range of 4,000 nautical miles, and will between $60 million to $80 million when it launches.

[via GizMag]

Thank you to Sprint for sponsoring this article. Get inspired by innovation and see what’s next at Sprint.com/faster.

Sprint Faster is a great site to visit if you’re looking for the latest on new and upcoming technological breakthroughs, featuring stories from leading tech experts on the shape of things to come.

While many of today’s vehicles have integrated GPS, satellite audio, and even mobile apps, they’re only the tip of the iceberg. Let’s take a look at some amazing high-tech ideas which could find their ways to our cars in the not-too-distant future.

Looking for an empty parking space in a garage or parking lot can be a pain. Car manufacturers recognize this time-waster and are working on solutions which could enable cars to automatically park themselves without the driver present. One of the more intriguing demonstrations of such a technology comes from Scandinavian automaker Volvo. This vehicle’s on-board autonomous driving system can detect the presence of not just other vehicles, but pedestrians as well. All the driver needs to do is exit their vehicle, open up an app on their smartphone, and set the car to Autonomous Parking mode. The car not only finds an open parking space, it takes care of the parking for you. And chances are that it will do a much better job at it than you can, since on-board sensors will ensure the car doesn’t bump into any obstacles. You can see a demonstration of an early prototype of this amazing system in the video clip below:

Can you imagine that someday in the not-too-distant future, your car might be able to detect your mood or state of well-being? Several major auto manufacturers, including Toyota and Ford have been exploring technology to detect driver emotional and physical state. Why might your car need to know how you’re feeling? For starters, this information could be used to dynamically adapt the vehicles ride mode – making the ride more sporty if you’re in an upbeat mood and the road conditions are right.

In addition, being able to detect the driver’s state of mind could help to identify whether they are distracted from driving, and either offer driving assistance, or remind the driver to keep focused on the road. Mood identification could also be used to adapt the music that’s playing in the vehicle – or if the system detects that you are driving tentatively and your emotional state is confused, it could automatically offer help with directions.

Another interesting possibility for future vehicles is the idea that our windshields could double as large display screens, superimposing relevant information directly in our field of view instead of using displays that take our attention off the road. One of the more interesting potential applications comes in the form of augmented reality displays on our windshields. The most obvious use case is for navigation systems that could actually project directions and turn information on the windshield. While some manufacturers already have small heads-up displays that can display speed and GPS data, the real breakthrough will come when our entire windshields can double as transparent displays, using OLED or specialized projection technologies like the one shown here from Pioneer:

This could allow for screens to precisely align relevant information with the scene outside the window. For instance, GM has been working on a system which would use cameras, radar and other sensors to display relevant information on the windshield, such as road hazards and speed limit signs. Such information could also be used to help drivers know about upcoming turns and hazards in low-visibility situations. In fact, there’s already a smartphone app called HUDWAY which can add a small heads-up GPS display to any vehicle by reflecting the screen of your smartphone onto the windshield glass. Of course, this technology could also be used to display things like emails, text messages and Facebook status updates, so they could create new forms of driving distraction if not thoughtfully developed.

While it may be a number of years before fully fleshed out versions of these technologies find their way into everyday vehicles, it’s a pretty solid bet that some degree of autonomy will be standard on almost every vehicle as we move into the second half of the decade. With safety and fuel efficiency topping driver concerns, there’s no question that automation could improve these aspects of driving. In addition, systems that monitor driver awareness and tools which reduce driver distraction are sure to be front and center in coming years.

Disclosure of Material Connection: This is a “sponsored post.” Technabob received compensation for writing it, however, we only recommend products or services we find newsworthy or have used personally, and believe will be good for our readers.

Thank you to Sprint Faster and Technorati Media for being sponsors of this article. All opinions expressed here are my own.