Hasta La Gadget!

This terrifying creature is the Elfoid, or Erufoido, a creepy, blob-shaped cellphone which I would never even touch, much less hold up close to my ear.

Astonishingly, the Elfoid is meant to make people less scared of their phones, not more. It simplifies complex technology by using hidden buttons and voice-recognition to control it, but that’s just the beginning of the weirdness.

The Elfoid will somehow communicate the “presence” of the person on the line using sound and cameras, and the doughy urethane cover mimics the feel of human skin. This will, researchers at Osaka University hope, make people feel closer to each other.

What these researchers seem to have missed is the sheer creepiness of the doll. Take a look: its legs fuse into one tapered, amorphous limb, akin to the root of the much-feared Mandrake, and the arms disappear into pointed stumps that not even a mother could want to hug. If this thing were pressed to my cheek and then started to vibrate and hum, I think I’d just panic and run. And that’s before we even get to waking up in the middle of the night to find this demonic and deformed homunculus staring at you from your night-stand. Lord, it probably even has glowing red LEDs where its eyes should be.

There’s only one good use for this kind of doll, one which is surprisingly similar to its intended purpose of conveying emotional opinions from afar. It should be treated like the Voodoo doll that it obviously is, and stuck with pins from head to stump. It’s our only hope.

Creepy doll press release [ATR Osake University via Asahi]

See Also:

• Creepy Japanese Doll Impersonates its Owner
• Creepy Dog Robot Planned for the US Military
• Creepy MIT 'Tofu' Robot Has OLED Eyes, Mimics Disney Cartoons …

Give yourself a cookie if you can still remember as far back as August 29th of last year. That was the day when HP’s Phil McKinney teased the world with images of three new prototypes being developed in his company’s labs — there was a tablet, now known as the HP TouchPad, a smartphone that’s since taken on the name of Pre 3, and something snaked around his wrist that looked suspiciously like a watch. Today, we learn more about this Metal Watch, as HP calls. It’s a continuation of the company’s overarching theme of mobile interconnectedness, however unlike its webOS devices, this connected watch is nowhere near ready for prime time (or maybe it’s just like them since none are actually shipping yet!). The new Metal fella is still a research project as much as anything else, but it’s seen as a key part of our future, acting as an easy-to-use information aggregator. It looks just like any old watch to us, but why not jump past the break and let HP’s CTO enlighten you on what makes it special?

[Thanks, Obstacle-Man]

Continue reading HP shows off Metal Watch concept (video)

HP shows off Metal Watch concept (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 04 Mar 2011 05:36:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You don’t have to go to the lengths of compiling a statistical project to know that advertised and actual broadband speeds are two pretty disparate entities, but it does help. Ofcom, the UK communications regulator, recently took a thorough look at 11 broadband packages, which collectively account for over 90 percent of all British broadband subscriptions, and found that actual download throughput was less than half (only 45 percent) of the advertised “up to” speed. The worst offenders were resellers of BT’s ADSL lines, with Orange dipping below 3Mbit on its 8Mbit lines and TalkTalk occasionally offering only 7.5Mbit to users paying for a 24Mbit connection, while Virgin’s cable connectivity won out by sticking most loyally to its listed rating. What Ofcom proposes for the future is that all these service providers start offering Typical Speed Ranges that more accurately reflect the bandwidth a potential subscriber would be buying into — a proposal that might actually have some teeth as the British Advertising Standards Authority is currently in the midst of a review specifically concerned with broadband advertising practices. Transparency in the way we’re sold broadband? That’d make a welcome change!

Shocker! UK regulator finds average broadband speeds are ‘less than half’ those advertised originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Mar 2011 05:42:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This as-of-yet-unnamed mini computer was fashioned as an implantable eye pressure monitor for glaucoma patients, but its creators envision a future where we’re all crawling with the little buggers. Taking up just over one cubic millimeter of space, the thing stuffs a pressure sensor, memory, thin-film battery, solar cell, wireless radio, and low-power microprocessor all into one very small translucent container. The processor behind this little guy uses an “extreme” sleep mode to keep it napping at 15-minute intervals and sucking up 5.3 nanowatts while awake, and its battery runs off 10 hours of indoor light or one and a half hours of sun beams. Using the sensor to measure eye pressure and the radio to communicate with an external reader, the system will continuously track the progress of glaucoma, without those pesky contacts. Of course, the mad scientists behind it look forward to a day when the tiny device will do much more, with each of us toting hundreds of the computer implants all over our bodies — looks like a bright future for cyborgdom.

Researchers debut one-cubic-millimeter computer, want to stick it in your eye originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 26 Feb 2011 17:43:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Organic semiconductors have been teasing us with the possibility of computationally-inclined clothing for years, but until now we could only dream about our pants being the computer. That dream is closer to reality than ever, as researchers from IMEC have created a cheap (potentially 1/10th the cost of silicon chips), bendable microprocessor by layering a plastic substrate, gold circuits, organic dielectric, and a pentacene organic semiconductor to create an 8-bit logic circuit with 4000 transistors. Executing 6 instructions per second, these things won’t be challenging Watson any time soon, but the chips should prove useful in creating cheaper flexible displays and sensors to tell us whether that week-old chicken in the fridge has gone bad. The trick was to overcome individual organic transistors’ variable switching voltage thresholds — as opposed to silicon’s predictable nature — that eliminated the possibility of organic-based logic circuits previously. But by adding a second gate to each transistor, IMEC was able to control the electrical field in each to prevent unwanted switching and usher in the dawn of plastic processors. The zenith of nerd fashion can’t be far behind.

IMEC creates flexible microprocessor with organic semiconductors — computational clothing right around the corner originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 24 Feb 2011 11:23:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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