Hasta La Gadget!

Elliptic Labs has already spruced up a number of tablets by adding the ability to gesture instead of make contact with a touchpanel, and starting this week, it’ll bring a similar source of wizardry to Android. The 20-member team is demoing a prototype here at CEATEC in Japan, showcasing the benefits of its ultrasound gesturing technology over the conventional camera-based magic that already ships in smartphones far and wide. In a nutshell, you need one or two inexpensive (under $1 a pop) chips from Murata baked into the phone; from there, Elliptic Labs’ software handles the rest. It allows users to gesture in various directions with multiple hands without having to keep their hands in front of the camera… or atop the phone at all, actually. (To be clear, that box around the phone is only there for the demo; consumer-friendly versions will have the hardware bolted right onto the PCB within.)

The goal here is to make it easy for consumers to flip through slideshows and craft a new high score in Fruit Ninja without having to grease up their display. Company representatives told us that existing prototypes were already operating at sub-100ms latency, and for a bit of perspective, most touchscreens can only claim ~120ms response times. It’s hoping to get its tech integrated into future phones from the major Android players (you can bet that Samsung, LG, HTC and the whole lot have at least heard the pitch), and while it won’t ever be added to existing phones, devs with games that could benefit from a newfangled kind of gesturing can look for an Android SDK to land in the very near future.

Mat Smith contributed to this report. %Gallery-slideshow99597%

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Google

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Source: Elliptic Labs

You can convey a lot of things through touch. You can give a sympathetic hug, a joyous high-five or an angry punch. But Disney Research Pittsburgh came up with an interactive installation that can transmit sound using the human body. The sound will then be heard when a carrier touches someone’s ears. This means you can transmit a verbal message through touch.

The researchers call their invention Ishin-denshin, after a Japanese idiom that describes “unspoken mutual understanding.” Ishin-denshin consists of a microphone connected to a computer’s sound card. There’s also a thin piece of wire connected to the microphone’s cable and wrapped around its metallic casing. The microphone is set to start recording when it receives sound with an amplitude above a preset threshold, presumably so it won’t record ambient noise.  The recorded loop is sent to the computer, which converts the sound into a high voltage but low current electric signal and sends it to the thin piece of wire. The signal is then transferred to the person holding the mic, who can then pass it on to someone else via touch. The signal can be passed to multiple people before it’s directed to someone’s ear.

I wonder if it’s possible to make a visual version of the Ishin-denshin.

[via Disney Research & New Scientist via NOTCOT]

The folks over at Engadget have managed to spend some time with the Acer Extend prototype, where it surprisingly (or not, depending on your viewpoint) functions in a similar manner as that of the ASUS Padfone. Basically, the Acer Extend allows you to hook up your smartphone to a clamshell-style dock that will be equipped with a display, in addition to a keyboard as well as a rather generous 6,000mAh battery which works great to recharge your handset, too.

The demonstration saw a modified version of Acer’s Liquid E2 smartphone being hooked up to the Extend dock using an MHL cable, although Acer representatives did mention that a market-ready version could eventually arrive with a retractable cord in tow, although we are not going to rule out the possibility of a wireless, Bluetooth-based solution either. The Extend Dock comes in handy if you want to be even more productive with your smartphone, but do not really need the full power of an Ultrabook to get the job done. In a nutshell, it is pretty much a niche market this, but those with enough disposable income might be able to add this to their growing gadget collection. Do you think that this niche device will be able to take off?

Acer Extend Prototype Spotted original content from Ubergizmo.

We’ve featured a sound system called the Transparent Speaker, which really only has a glass case. Two post-doctoral fellows at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) made an actual transparent speaker. It’s stretchable too. But the loudspeaker is not an electronic device; it’s an ionic device.

Instead of electrons, Jeong-Yun Sun and Christoph Keplinger’s speaker uses ions in an electrolyte to transport electric charge. The speaker is made of a thin and transparent sheet of rubber sandwiched between two layers of polyacrylamide gel filled with saltwater. When a high-voltage current is passed through these layers, the rubber sheet acts as a diaphragm. Harvard SEAS reports that this clear device can produce any sound in the “entire audible spectrum”, from 20Hz to 20KHz.

The speaker demonstrates two of the key advantages of an ionic device over an electronic device – transparency and elasticity – but there’s a third benefit: biocompatibility. Ionic devices are easier to incorporate into living creatures compared to electronics. They may also be used to create what Keplinger calls soft machines: “Engineered ionic systems can achieve a lot of functions that our body has: they can sense, they can conduct a signal, and they can actuate movement. We’re really approaching the type of soft machine that biology has to offer.”  

With that kind of potential, it’s not surprising that there have been previous efforts to make ionic conductors for practical use. Harvard SEAS explained that ionic conductors are prone to undergoing chemical reactions – including, uhm, combustion – when exposed to high voltage, and that ions move slower through a circuit compared to electrons due to their size and weight. Fortunately, Sun and Keplinger’s ionic conductor “overcomes both of these problems.” You can read the full report on Harvard SEAS’ website.

[via The Verge]

The Human Media Lab at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario in Canada just released a video showing off the FlexCam, a new panoramic camera that combines a flexible OLED viewfinder with a camera array. The lenses are located on the back of the device, allowing users to bend and flex it to take panoramic photographs. […]