Hasta La Gadget!

You may remember Scott Amron from his Brush & Rinse toothbrush, which channels a jet of rinsing water into your mouth. Or his Keybrid, a split-ring key with its own keyring built-in. Both of these concept designs made it to market, which sends a chill of fear through me as I consider that one day, I may actually see his new invention in the wild.

The Heatswell is an endothermic (heat-activated) coating for a paper coffee-cup. When that cup is filled with a tasty hot beverage, the band swells into a thick, insulating cloth-like material, offering both grip and heat-protection for your fingers. It’s thin, safe and cheaper than a cup and collar together. So what’s the problem? Take a look at the video. The Heatswell does indeed swell impressively, only it swells like a diseased tree-trunk blistering under napalm.

The end of the video has even more terrifying mutations, but once we get over the accelerated cancerous growths, we can see that this cup could actually end up in a Starbucks near you (and trust me, there is a Starbucks near you). Not only is it cheaper, and made from an FDA-approved material, but it cuts out a step of the coffee-serving process and offers the opportunity for branding – although I’m not sure which company would like to see its logo ballooning like a necrotic canker.

Scott is already sending out samples. I’m hoping to get one and combine it with one of those self-heating hand-warmers for my own invention: The Heat Engine, a perpetual machine which will power the world!

Heatswell [Amron Experimental. Thanks, Scott!]

A handheld cube-shaped display promises to offer all the thrills of 3-D without the annoyance of the glasses. The device called pCubee arranges five LCD screens into a box-like shape so viewers can pick it up, watch content or play with virtual objects inside.

Weighing in at about three pounds, pCubee gives users a chance to poke and prod objects virtually using a stylus. You can shake the cube, tilt it or interact with a touchscreen, all while retaining the 3-D experience.

“Most people think 3-D is all about stereo and having alternating frames to help the brain perceive depth,” says Sidney Fels, who leads the Human Communication Technologies Lab at the University of British Columbia, where the project was designed. “What we wanted to offer is a fish-tank-like experience in a handheld device.”

A wave of successful 3-D movies such as Avatar and Alice in Wonderland have spurred interest in bringing the 3-D viewing experience closer to consumers. Major consumer electronics companies such as Samsung, LG and Panasonic have started selling 3-D TVs that are fundamentally based on the principle of stereoscopy. Stereoscopy involves presenting a slightly different image to each eye of the same scene so when the brain fuses those images, it perceives depth. That also means viewers have to wear glasses for the 3-D effect.

A different principle called motion parallax is at work in the pCubee. Motion parallax is the apparent change in position of an object, depending on the distance from which you view it. It’s a very effective cue for 3-D, says Fels.

“Our brains are wired to perceive motion parallax and interpret it as 3-D,” he says. “It’s one of the reasons why even if you have just one eye, you can do reasonably well with depth in the real world.”

The pCubee’s design helps the brain interpret this better.

“The fact that it is handheld greatly increases motion parallax,” says Ian Stavness, one of the researchers who worked on the project. “If it were fixed to the desk, you would have to move your head around and it would not be so comfortable.”

And as the video shows, pCubee is fun and easy to use.

The pCubee has three graphics pipelines that drive the screens on the sides of the box. A motion tracker watches the pCubee and the user’s head. The software that powers the device ensures that the user’s view of the box and the rendered perspective on each screen are in sync.

Fels says his team is looking to commercialize pCubee so it can be in the hands of consumers. The team is looking to improve the design and refine it by experimenting with OLED screens to replace the LCD panels that are being used currently.

“The pCubee can be used as a game platform, a CAD-CAM platform and in museums,” says Fels. “We imagine this as something that would be on everybody’s coffee table.”

[via Technabob]

See Also:

• Samsung’s Impossibly Thin 3D TV Tempts Hollywood Producer
• Wired Explains: How 3-D Movie Projection Works
• 4 Things That Could Keep 3-D TV Out of Your Living Room
• Robotic Spider Melds Legos and 3-D Printing
• Toshiba Crams Supercomputer Guts Into 3-D, Web TV
• 3-D Printers Make Manufacturing Accessible

Photo: pCubee

The light from the lamps in your house could carry a wireless signal that could power internet connectivity at home, say a group of German researchers who say they have found a way to encode the signals into visible frequency.

Though it would provide much lower speeds than Wi-Fi signals, it can offer less interference and is likely to offer great protection from hackers, say the researchers.

Currently, most homes use radio-frequency based Wi-Fi signals for broadband service. But Wi-Fi has limited bandwidth, says the researchers, and it is difficult to get more radio spectrum for it. Visible frequency would be a good alternative, they say.

Flickering the lights can generate the signal in a room. The change won’t be visible to the human eye because the rate of modulation is millions of times faster than what we can see, say the researchers. And since, visible light can’t penetrate walls there will be no interference.

Since incandescent and fluorescent bulbs can’t flicker fast enough, LEDs would be the right choice, say the researchers.

Commercial LEDs have a bandwidth of only a few MHz. But Jelena Vučić, a researcher at the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications, and her colleagues who have been working on the project have found a way to increase the bandwidth by filtering out all wavelengths but blue.

Using the visible wireless system they built, the team downloaded data at up to 230 megabits per second. The researchers will present their findings at a conference in San Diego later this month.

[via Inhabitat]

Photo: (slworking/Flickr)

Skinput uses a bio-acoustic sensing array coupled with a wrist-mounted pico-projector to turn your skin into a touch-screen. Confused? Don’t be. It’s amazingly simple.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, along with Microsoft’s research lab, have come up with a way to use the skin of your arm (or any other part of your body) to act as a display and an input device, without actually implanting anything weird into you. It consists of two parts. A tiny projector beams the image onto your skin. Tapping the “buttons” causes ripples to run through your skin and bones.

These waves change depending on where you tap, as they run through bone, soft tissues and the like. Special software analyzes these waves, and uses the information to work out exactly where you touched, just as if you were tapping an iPhone screen. Specific locations can be mapped to certain functions: in the video you see somebody playing Tetris by tapping their fingers.

Both sensor and projector can be put into the same armband, but the display is unnecessary: Another use is to tap the tips of the fingers to control an MP3 player, a task simple enough to rely on the user’s memory.

Various tap-based interfaces are possible, and the thing that impresses us about all of them is the simplicity for the user. We worry a little though. We already mistake people muttering into their Bluetooth headsets for crazy people who talk to themselves. Now we have to distinguish joggers skipping tracks on their iPods from drug-fried nut-jobs who twitch and scratch at imaginary insects crawling over their flesh. Thanks, researchers.

Body acoustics can turn your arm into a touchscreen [New Scientist via Mashable]

Steve Jobs introduced not one, but two new products last month: the iPad and Apple’s custom made A4 chip. Analysts have yet to autopsy the chip to uncover its secrets, but even more interesting is what it takes for a company like Apple to manufacture its own chip: about $1 billion, according to The New York Times.

“Even without the direct investment of a factory, it can cost these companies about $1 billion to create a smartphone chip from scratch,” reports NY Times‘ Ashlee Vance.

That makes Apple’s $278 million acquisition of semiconductor manufacturer PA Semi look like pocket change. And hopefully Apple’s investment will pay off not just for the company, but also for iPad owners: The 1-GHz A4 chip, Apple promises, will help preserve the iPad’s battery for up to 10 hours of active use and one month of standby.

And considering the enormous cost of developing this chip, iPhone owners can have faith that the A4 will most likely appear in future iPhones. Maybe we’ll see an A4-powered iPhone debut this summer, and all our complaints about battery life will disappear. After that, all we’d have left to complain about is AT&T.

See Also:

• A Closer Look at Apple's New Tablet, the iPad
• iPad Estimated to Be Worth as Little as $220 in Parts
• Apple Video Shows iPad Flash Support, But Don't Believe It …
• With iPad, Apple Still Has a Fatal Attraction for AT&T
• Ten Things Missing From the iPad
• Hands-On With the Apple iPad