Google didn’t spill much on Calico, the Google Ventures founded biotech company that made headlines last month by taking on human mortality and challenging aging, but that hasn’t stopped new tidbits about the well-financed health startup from leaking out. Described as the brainchild of Google Ventures’ managing partner Bill Maris, Calico’s pitch to investors was […]
Researchers at the MIT Media Lab and the Max Planck Institutes have created a foldable, cuttable multi-touch sensor that works no matter how you cut it, allowing multi-touch input on nearly any surface.
In traditional sensors the connectors are laid out in a grid and when one part of the grid is damaged you lose sensitivity in a wide swathe of other sensors. This system lays the sensors out like a star which means that cut parts of the sensor only effect other parts down the line. For example, you cut the corners off of a square and still get the sensor to work or even cut all the way down to the main, central connector array and, as long as there are still sensors on the surface, it will pick up input.
The team that created it, Simon Olberding, Nan-Wei Gong, John Tiab, Joseph A. Paradiso, and Jürgen Steimle, write:
You can read the research paper here but this looks to be very useful in the DIY hacker space as well as for flexible, wearable projects that require some sort of multi-touch input. While I can’t imagine we need shirts made of this stuff, I could see a sleeve with lots of inputs or, say, a watch with a multi-touch band.
Don’t expect this to hit the next iWatch any time soon – it’s still very much in prototype stages but definitely looks quite cool.
Researchers at Disney have created something very interesting that could have significant practical impact for the world of electronics. The researchers have created a generator that creates electricity using pieces of paper. Project researcher Ivan Poupyrev says that creating power supplies such as this is a key step in enabling interactivity everywhere at any time. […]
The Bible might not be quite the good book it claims to be. According to an Ars Technica report on the future of password cracking, the holy book is being employed to help crack passwords to great effect.
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Smartphones and tablets aren’t the only wireless devices talking on today’s networks, and Verizon isn’t leaving it to chance that the internet of things speak via its 4G coverage rather than on rival operators. The carrier has relaunched its Verizon Innovation Center in San Francisco, a hub for not only promoting its LTE technology but […]
Ford has shown off a self-driving car of its own, though the automatically parking prototype – which can also avoid running down pedestrians – isn’t expected to arrive on US roads any time soon. The new “obstacle avoidance” systems build on Ford’s existing parking assist, but where that commercial system demands drivers be both behind […]
In an attempt to give touchscreens another level of interactivity, researchers at Disney
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There are many reasons the displays in all of your devices are as flat as a pancake, including the simple fact that curves result in distorted images that are hard to correct. But taking a design cue from nature, researchers at Disney have created a curved display that manages to avoid warping altogether.
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The Human Brain Project, an ambitious undertaking to better understand the human brain, has officially kicked off. The goal of the project is to use a super computer to simulate a complete human brain, something that will not only aid in the treatment of a variety of ailments, but will also be used to help […]
Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia seen in the elderly, is increasingly becoming a global healthcare challenge. There is still no cure
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