Hasta La Gadget!

There are a lot of technologies being investigated around the world to help reduce driver distraction and bring a new level of interactivity to infotainment systems in cars. One of … Continue reading

As shown by the Kinect, today’s cameras are powerful and cheap enough to provide accurate motion tracking. The same feat can be achieved by making the subject carry a motion sensor or a tracking device of some sort. But a group at MIT CSAIL led by Dina Katabi have come up with a way to track motion and body parts in 3D using only radio signals.

Katabi et al call their technology WiTrack. The current prototype uses four antennas, one to transmit the signals and three to receive the signals that bounce back from subjects. The radio signals that WiTrack uses are apparently a hundred times weaker than Wi-Fi signals. Because it doesn’t require a camera to work, WiTrack can work through walls, assuming the wall lets the signal pass through. For instance, it can be used to interact with devices even if you’re not in the same room as them. Also, because the subject doesn’t need to carry any tracking device, it might be more suited to full motion gaming compared to the likes of the Wii, the PS Move and even newer tech like the PrioVR.

While WiTrack seems really practical, after watching that video I think we all quickly realized that it can be used to discreetly violate our privacy as well. Forget about tinfoil hats, we might need to make lead-lined houses.

[via MIT via Engadget]

Anyone who is good enough to enter MIT definitely has plenty of intelligence up there, and we ourselves have seen our fair share of breakthroughs and exciting news from MIT researchers over the years. This particular one that we are going to talk about today is slightly less serious, where it deals with tongue twisters. In fact, using a nonsense string of words that were specially thought up of by MIT researchers, it helped them in their investigation of speech errors and brain functions. In fact, it happened to be so difficult that no test subjects managed to repeat the phrase, which certainly gives it some ground to be declared as the toughest tongue twister in the world.

The phrase in question was “pad kid poured curd pulled cod”, and when volunteers gave it a go, MIT psychologist Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel shared that some of them ceased talking. She continued further, “If anyone can say this [phrase] ten times quickly, they get a prize.” I am quite sure that by now, you would have given that tongue twister a go all by yourself already, no?

What do you think of that tongue twister above? Was it difficult enough to ravel your tongue in such a way that you have decided to give up on tongue twisters altogether?

MIT Researchers Claim To Have Discovered Toughest Tongue Twister Of All Time original content from Ubergizmo.

Anyone with a smartphone knows how impossible it is to take pictures in the dark. At best you get a picture that looks like a pile of dark to darker grains of sand. Researchers, however, have come up with a better way. They’ve been able to take ‘ultra sharp images’ with little to no light. Basically, it’s creating clear 3D photos from what looks like nothing.

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We’ve seen single-pixel cameras, and now MIT researchers have figured out how to create clear images of dimly-lit objects using single photons — in 3D, no less. The technique doesn’t involve any fancy new hardware, either, as the team worked with a standard photon detector that fired low-intensity visible laser light pulses. The magic happens from the algorithms they developed instead, which can pick out variations in the time it takes for individual photons to bounce off of subjects. After the software separated the noise (as shown above) the result was a high-res image created with about a million photons that would have required several hundred trillion with, say, a smartphone camera. That’ll open up new possibilities for low-energy surveying, for instance, or even spy cameras that could virtually see in the dark — because no laser research project is complete with a sinister-sounding military application.

Filed under: Cameras, Science, Alt

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Source: Nature