Hasta La Gadget!

Don’t take it personally, Blu-ray — we still love you and all, but there’s just something dreamy about baking 1.6TB of information onto a blank piece of optical media we can actually afford. According to a new report, a crew of researchers at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia have exploited the properties of a certain gold nano-rod that will theoretically enable them to shove 300 DVDs worth of data onto a single disc. Calling the method “five-dimensional optical recording,” the technique “employs nanometer-scale particles of gold as a recording medium,” and according to developers, it’s primed for commercialization. Essentially, these gurus have figured out how to add a spectral and polarization dimension, giving them the ability to record information “in a range of different color wavelengths on the same physical disc.” As for the chances this actually makes it out of the laboratory and into the lives of real humans? Slim, Jim.

[Thanks, Sam]

Filed under: Storage, Science

Aussie whiz-kids can cram 1.6TB on a DVD-sized disc, go Outback tonight originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 21 May 2009 06:06:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Researcher Mel Slater (a computer scientist who divides his time between ICREA in Barcelona and University College, London) and his stalwart band of cybernauts are currently studying people when immersed in virtual environments, hoping to gain insight into why we respond to fake stimuli as if it’s real. In one experiment, test subjects enter a “virtual bar” in which patrons schmooze, booze, and do the Frug. At a point during the virtual carousing, a fire breaks out. “We have had people literally run out of the VR room, even though they know that what they are witnessing is not real,” says Slater. “They take their cues from the other characters.” Other studies include a recreation of the classic Milgram Experiment of the 1960s (where the subject is ordered to give an electric shock to a “student” when they answer a question incorrectly) and a phobia study that introduces subjects to virtual heights. The researchers hope to gain insight into how the brain functions, eventually creating more intense and realistic virtual experiences, with applications in healthcare, training, social research and entertainment. What’s next? According to Slater, the group is currently developing a project that is designed to help shy men overcome their fear of women (at the very least, it’ll help you meet that Second Life avatar of your dreams). If this is your kinda thing, check out the video after the break. [Warning: the first several seconds of the video are audio only.]

Continue reading Video: Researchers learning to make VR more realistic, uncomfortable

Filed under: Displays, Science

Video: Researchers learning to make VR more realistic, uncomfortable originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 11 May 2009 12:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Okay, so first things first — we all know the world’s on track to end in 2012, so it’s not like this really matters. But if, just if it manages to survive (à la Y2K), you can pretty much bank on a mass reversal of culture as we all push aside our netbooks and return to the playground. According to some “research” slated to be fully published “later this year,” PCs and laptops are apt to “operate at a much reduced speed, rendering the internet an unreliable toy” from 2012 onward. The reason? Massive growth in internet demand, which is undoubtedly on pace to crush existing infrastructure that can’t ever be improved upon by anyone, regardless of their market capitalization or determination to expand. It’s noted that the internet itself will somehow survive, but that users will begin to see “brownouts,” which are described as “a combination of temporary freezing and computers being reduced to a slow speed.” Thank heavens for FinallyFast, right?

Psst… the solution to all of this is just past the break.

[Thanks, Colin]

Continue reading Doomsday alert: internet to become an “unreliable toy” in 2012

Filed under: Networking

Doomsday alert: internet to become an “unreliable toy” in 2012 originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 30 Apr 2009 14:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Ah, holographic storage — you’ve held so much promise for cheap optical media since you were first imagined in research papers published in the early 60s. Later today, GE will be trying to keep the dream alive when it announces a new technique that promises to take holographic storage mainstream. GE’s breakthrough in microholographics — which, as the name implies, uses smaller, less complex holograms to achieve three-dimensional digital storage — paves the way for players that can store about 500GB of data on standard-sized optical discs while still being able to read DVD and Blu-ray media. Better yet, researchers claim a price of about 10 cents per gigabyte compared to the nearly $1 per gigabyte paid when Blu-ray was introduced. The bad news? We’re talking 2011 or 2012 by the time microholographics devices and media are introduced and even then it’ll only be commercialized for use by film studios and medical institutions. In other words, you’ll likely be streaming high-def films to your OLED TV long before you have a microholographic player in the living room.

Filed under: Storage

GE microholographic storage promises cheap 500GB discs, Blu-ray and DVD compatibility originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 27 Apr 2009 02:53:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Make no mistake, wrapping your mind around the build of an OLED panel is mighty tough to do. Without getting you mired in technobabble, let’s just say that indium tin oxide (ITO) has generally been a mainstay in every single OLED that was produced commercially. Now, a team of researchers from AGFA-Gevaert, IMEC, Holst Centre and Philips have prototyped a 12- x 12-centimeter flexible OLED lighting panel that swaps out the ITO for highly-conductive transparent resin electrodes. You see, it’s been difficult for OLED builders to secure enough electrical conductivity of ITO in a low-temperature process, and this new methodology is perfectly suited for the coating method (which makes it ripe for printing). The resin itself is being dubbed Orgacon, and tests have shown it to have a 6x improvement over ITO in terms of electrical conductivity. Beyond that, the crews are keeping the secrets safe from the poachers of the world, but here’s hoping this amounts to more than just jovial celebration in a far off laboratory.

[Via OLED-Display]

Filed under: Displays

Resin replaces ITO in latest flexible OLED prototype originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 10 Apr 2009 08:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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