Hasta La Gadget!

You’d be naive to think Apple churns out hit products without doing homework first. Before gadgets hit the market, companies invest heavily in research and development, which often results in early prototypes that rarely see the light of day. A good example is a prototype of an Apple television box (above) from 1995, which recently sold on eBay for $46.

The Apple Interactive Television Box (ITV for short) was made 10 years before the release of the Apple TV. It kind of looks like a retro TiVo. The box features chips made by Motorola, Texas Instruments and VLSI Technology.

It was equipped with a bunch of old-school ports that you’ve probably forgotten about today: stereo audio RCA jacks, a Mac serial port, S-Video, RF in, RF out, RJ-45 Ethernet, ADB port, HDI-30 SCSI port and dual SCART connectors. The OS was a subset of the Mac OS with QuickDraw and QuickTime software, according to the Apple Museum.

Apple tested the ITV prototypes only internally in 1993, but in 1994 the company formed a partnership with British Telecom to launch a consumer trial with 2,500 households participating. The project was canceled in late 1995 when it was clear that ITV would not become commercially successful.

Home entertainment has been a tough market to crack. Apple still refers to its Apple TV, which was released in 2005, as a “hobby” due to its moderate success. And it’s obvious why: There are just so many different ways people watch video content, whether it’s through digital cable, On-Demand, iTunes, DVDs and so on.

Another great example of a classic prototype was Bashful, an early Apple tablet made with the help of Frog Design back in 1983.

See Also:

• Hideous iPhone Prototypes on Ebay
• MacBook Air Prototype Sold on Ebay
• New Phone Prototype Tries To ‘Con’ its Way Into Your Portable …

Photo: eBay

MIT doctoral student Danielle Zurovcik has invented a simple hand-powered pump that applies suction to an open wound to help it heal. Her device costs just $3 to make. By contrast, the cheapest portable (and electric-powered) pumps cost $100 just for a day’s rental.

If the words “suction” and “open wound” in the same sentence make you cringe, don’t worry. It’s not quite what you think. This isn’t about pumping anything out of the body. Applying suction, or negative pressure, speeds healing, although apparently there is no tested theory as to why. The best guess is that a sealed wound with a partial vacuum heals faster as the bacteria and fluid are kept away from the wound. That sounds a little screwy, but it does work.

Zurovcik’s pump is simple. A concertina bottle is squeezed closed, and as the plastic spring pushes it open again, it sucks air through a tube connected to a sealed dressing. The hardest part of the setup is getting a good seal, but as this method only requires changing the dressing every few days, instead of every few hours, it’s not a big problem.

Zurovcik has already tested 50 of her pumps in Haiti, and they work. The next big test will come on a trip to Rwanda this fall. Dr. Robert Riviello, who led the Haiti trip, says that the device has “enormous potential” to help “50 million and 60 million people in low-income countries suffer from acute and chronic wounds.”

Better wound treatment for all [MIT News. Thanks, Twitter!]

Photo: Melanie Gonick

MIT researchers have a found way to use augmented reality to bring TVs and cellphones together so viewers can watch more than just what’s playing right in front of them.

The technology, called ‘Surround Vision,’ uses footage taken from different angles so when someone points their phone beyond the edge of the TV screen, they can see the additional content on their mobile device.

For instance, Surround Vision could allow a guest at a Super Bowl party to check out different camera angles of a play, without affecting what other guests see on the screen, says MIT. Or viewers could use it to see alternate takes of a scene while watching a movie.

“This could be in your home next year if a network decided to do it,” says Media Lab research scientist Michael Bove who’s working on the project.

Augmented reality tries to enhance the physical world by overlaying virtual computer generated elements on it. Over the last one year, a number of apps designed especially for phones have emerged where all users have to do is point their phones at a physical object to get more information on their phones. MIT’s breakthrough extends that idea.

The Surround Vision prototype, built by MIT, added a magnetometer (compass) to an existing phone, since the accelerometer included in many phones is not sensitive enough to detect the subtle motion that comes from pointing a phone to the left or right of a TV screen.

And as MIT’s video below shows, the software incorporates the data gathered from the compass and integrates it with the phone’s other sensors so viewers get an enhanced picture.

To test it, Santiago Alfaro, a graduate student in the lab who’s leading the project, shot video footage of a street from three angles simultaneously. A TV plays the the footage from the center camera. When a viewer points a phone directly at the TV, the same footage appears on the device’s screen. But if the phone is aimed to the right or the left, then it switches to another perspective.

If the system were commercialized, the video playing on the handheld device would stream over the internet, says Alfaro.

Over the next few months, Alfaro says MIT Media Lab will test the system using sports broadcasts and children’s shows.

See Also:

• Augmented Reality App Identifies Strangers With Camera
• Digital Contacts Will Keep an Eye on Your Vital Signs
• Augmented Reality Ghost Hunting Creeps Into App Store
• If You’re Not Seeing Data, You’re Not Seeing

Photo: Melanie Gonick/MIT

Graphene could someday replace silicon as a semiconductor material and make our chips smaller and faster, except for one tiny detail: it’s been rather hard to mess with its electronic properties. Until now.

“We have experimentally realized and theoretically investigated, for the first time, perfect atomic wires in graphene,” Ivan Oleynik, one of the two University of South Florida professors behind the discovery, told Wired.com. Atomic wires are short chains of atoms that conduct electricity and so far, they have been hard to achieve in graphene.

The researchers have found a way to introduce one-dimensional defects that are stable and in the center of a graphene sheet. The breakthroughs could lead to more widespread applications for graphene including the ability to ultimately create faster chips and smaller gadgets.

Oleynik and his fellow researcher Matthias Batzill published a paper in Nanotechnology Journal last week, announcing their solution for controlling graphene’s electronic properties.

To keep up with Moore’s law–which says that the number of transistors that can be affordably built into a processor doubles roughly every two years–chip makers have to keep shrinking silicon-based chips. Intel’s latest processors, for example, use a 32-nanometer technology to create chips. But many researchers believe it will get increasingly difficult to manufacture smaller transistors, especially in the 10-nanometers range.

In the last few years, graphene, a form of carbon derived from graphite oxide, has emerged as a promising alternative to silicon. It’s one atom thick and has phenomenal electron mobility – roughly 100 times greater than silicon.

Few months ago, IBM said its graphene-based transistors could reach speeds of 100 Ghz. Two years ago, British scientists unveiled the world’s smallest transistor – three times smaller than the silicon-based ones–that was made of graphene.

“From the point of view of physics, graphene is a goldmine,” Kostya Novoselov, a researcher at the University of Manchester who worked on that project, told Wired.com in 2008.

But for graphene to be useful in electronic applications like integrated circuits, small defects, also known as atomic-scale imperfections, have to be introduced in the material. “All previous attempts used so-called graphene nanoribbons,” says Oleynik, “and that could lead to chemical instabilities, since there are dangling bonds on the edges. ”

Defects on nanoribbons – tiny strips of graphene – have often been inconsistent and hard to create since the edges are rough and chemically unstable.

Instead, their solution, say the researchers, is a one-dimensional defect that creates octagonal and pentagonal rings. It acts like a metallic wire and can conduct electric current.

“Our defect is embedded into the graphene, as opposed to being on the edges, which allows for more flexibility,” says Batzill.

Graphene has become a real alternative for building atomic-scale, all-carbon based electronics, say the researchers.

(Photo: Y. Lin, USF)

Folding clothes is the worst part of doing laundry. But if you can be patient enough, a small robot might be able to do the job for you.

A team of researchers from University of California Berkeley have created a mechanical marvel that can pick up a towel from a pile of laundry, fold it (with an inhuman level of concentration) and stack it.

The robot is an attempt to demonstrate the machine’s ability to perceive and manipulate “deformable objects,” say the researchers.

Most robots today work in places where they can perform tasks that are precise and repetitive. And these work environments are very carefully structured and controlled, say doctoral student Jeremy Maitin-Shepard and Assistant Professor Pieter Abbeel, of Berkeley’s department of electrical engineering and computer sciences. The towel-folding robot hopes to show that robots can work in unstructured places and with objects that are not rigid.

The towel-folding robot has been built using Willow Garage’s PR2 robot and has four cameras.

Here’s how the robot breaks down the towel-folding process. Using its arms, the robot picks up the towel and flips it around slowly in the air. The machine’s high-resolution cameras then scan the towel to estimate its shape. Once the robot finds two adjacent corners, it begins the folding process and lays its on a flat surface to complete it. The best part is that the robot actually smooths the towel after every fold.

Creating a machine that can all do that is relatively simple from a robotics point view, says the researchers. The trick lies is in the robot’s ability to pick up a towel from a pile of clothes.

Current computer-vision techniques were primarily developed for rigid objects and can’t handle variations in three-dimensional shape, appearance and texture that can occur with a towel or a sock, say the researchers. To beat that, the Berkeley team developed a new computer vision-based approach for detecting the key points on the cloth for the robot to grasp.

And so far, the robot is working very well. In about 50 trials attempted on previously-unseen towels with variations in appearance, material and size, the robot did a swell job, say the researchers, who will present their report (.pdf) at the the International Conference on Robotics and Automation 2010 in May.

Nifty as it sounds, be prepared for a long wait if you want that pile of towels folded. The robot took an average of 1,478 seconds — or nearly 25 minutes — to fold each towel.

Now the question is: Can the robot match socks too?

See Also:

• Robo-Ethicists Want to Revamp Asimov’s 3 Laws
• Gallery: Robot Bartenders Sling Cocktails for Carbon-Based …
• Dead Xbox 360 is Reborn as a Mechanical Robot
• Robot Band Plays Music, Obsesses About its Online Followers …
• Android Phone Grows Up, Becomes Brain for Real Robot

Video: University of California Berkeley