Hasta La Gadget!

When we talk about “the internet of things,” we usually begin with commercial and household applications — tracking inventory, or a lost remote. But one future of networked objects might be in public information and infrastructure: the internet of cars.

For four years, MIT’s CarTel project has been tracking the driving patterns of GPS-equipped taxis in metro Boston. The research team, led by computer scientists Hari Balakrishnan and Sam Madden, thinks we can stop spotting traffic jams after the fact with news helicopters or roadside sensors by equipping cars themselves with position sensors and wireless connections. They’ve developed a new software algorithm that optimizes information-sharing between multiple nodes on a network, when those nodes are on the move, drifting in and out of close contact with one another.

Equipping cars with position and network technology has several advantages over traditional traffic-tracking methods. It’s already here, in the form of on-board GPS systems and the RFID fobs city car-sharing programs use to track cars and give multiple drivers access to vehicles. It’s less expensive than helicopters, and less static than fixed roadside sensors. Finally, news organizations and planners can see traffic tie ups as or even before they happen, rather than after the fact.

There are potential privacy concerns. Why should I allow the Department of Transportation, my local news team, or any entity to track my movements? Collection of this information would have to be closely regulated, highly encrypted, and strictly anonymized — perhaps even initially restricted to public and publically licensed vehicles likes public transit, cabs, police/fire/rescue vehicles, or cars and trucks owned by local government. The whole point is that when it comes to plotting traffic patterns, tracking unique users simply doesn’t matter.

But the potential upsides are tremendous. Having better knowledge of actual traffic patterns could help urban planners improve their transportation infrastructure, from retiming traffic lights to restructuring bus routes. It could help first responders and ordinary drivers avoid potential tie-ups.

Researchers at Ford and Microsoft are sufficiently intrigued. They plan to test the MIT researchers’ algorithm and network design in future versions of Sync, the Redmond-designed, Detroit-implemented automotive communication and entertainment system.

Image and video from Ford Motor Company

See Also:

• Your Lost Gadgets Will Find Each Other
• Car Thieves Use GPS Jammers to Make Clean Getaway
• Network Location Turns Your Mac into a GPS Box
• Will the Internet of Things Be Open or Closed?
• Spime Watch: Shipping Containers and the Future Internet of Things …
• First International Workshop in the Urban Internet of Things: Call …

Meet the Levytator, the world’s first escalator that can go around corners. Thanks to its curved, interlocking steps, the Levytator can snake across hillsides, departure lounges and shopping malls in any shape the architect likes.

It gets better. Normal escalators runs the steps back up or down by pulling them underneath the steps you’re standing on. The Levytator, as you can see in the video, has all of its steps exposed at all times, with the same chain looping around for a descent, giving one escalator instead of two. Furthermore, “The steps can follow any path upwards, flatten and straighten out, and descend once more, all with passengers on board.” This opens up the possibility of a moving theme-park tour, for example.

The patented design was invented by Professor Jack Levy of the City University, London. I wonder at which point the Professor realized that combining his name with the word escalator would be both inevitable and awesome?

There are a couple of problems. One, as pointed out in a rare, lucid YouTube comment, is getting the moving handrail to follow the bendy course of the steps. The other is a human trouble. If you have ever been on an escalator that flattens out momentarily mid-climb, then you’ll know it can be quite disorientating. Add swooping curves into the mix and you might get a lot of dizzy, tumbling passengers.

City University London unveils world’s first freeform curved escalator [City University London]

The Levytator [YouTube]

See Also:

• Escalator Reverses Course, Injures Twenty People
• 10 Sci-Fi Techs We Could Build If They Weren't So Damn Expensive …
• Op-Ed: Why the Elevator Floor Is So Interesting
• Elevator to the Top: Space Elevators Climbing Towards Reality …
• World's Shortest Escalator

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Every year, the Interbike show in Las Vegas brings new and updated products from the big bike-makers. It also has lots of weird niche bikes, which are probably a lot more interesting. And you can’t get much more niche than polo bike designed for travel.

This is the Joust, from Fleetvelo. It was designed by a fellow named Tucker Schwinn, who is both part of the famous bike-making Schwinn family and also a bike polo player. It is this last part that has lead to a bike that looks almost perfect for the sport.

First, the Joust is tough. It has fat steel tubes which have extra reinforcement where they join. I have snapped two frames this summer, both where the bottom bracket meets the seat-tube, so this is important. Second, the fork and frame are wide enough to take fat-tires (the front in this case is made for a 26-inch wheel). Fat tires are more comfortable but more importantly give better grip when braking hard into a turn, where a front-wheel skid can cause disaster.

The Joust is also made to take v-brakes front and back. The most popular polo bike so far is the Cutter, from BMX-maker Volume. It has no drilling for a front brake. The same 135mm axle-length is also used front and back, so you only need carry a spare rear-wheel and you can also use it up front.

But the last, most impressive piece of design is the S and S coupling. This is a super-light yet strong pair off joints that let you split the bike in two for travel. S and S makes travel-cases that are barely larger than the diameter of a wheel, and not very deep, either. Using these makes air-travel a breeze, and you can avoid the crazy charges some airlines levy on bikes.

All this design does’t come cheap, though. The frame alone is $650 ($620 unpainted). That’s a lot for a bike that you’re just going to thrash into the ground, but then again, it’s a lot cheaper than buying a new beater road-bike every couple months, which is what I’m doing now.

The Joust is built-to-order, and currently takes around three weeks to ship.

Fleetvelo Joust Polo Frame [Urban Velo]

Joust product page [Fleetvelo]

Photo: Urban Velo

See Also:

• The End is Nigh: Commercial Bike Polo Mallet Heads
• It Had to Happen: Bike-Polo Mallet Shafts Openly On Sale
• Two Brakes, One Hand: How To Stop a Polo Bike

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Image by VirginAmerica.com

I flew Virgin America for the first and only time in December 2008, from New York to San Francisco. When I used its interactive back-of-the-headrest food-and-media menu, the first button I pressed, naturally, was Books. “Coming soon,” it said. Two years later, when you use the menu, books are still “coming soon.”

EBookNewser’s Dianna Dilworth recently had the same experience, and wondered whether Virgin might be on the verge of brokering some content agreements to finally bring reading into the picture:

There are a number of ways that it could work. Perhaps you could sign in to an existing Amazon or Barnes & Noble account and access your digital bookshelf directly. Or perhaps the airline could sell bestsellers or short stories directly. Think Atlantic Fiction’s monthly short stories in the Kindle store.

It could also be a great place for publishers to market their books and give away sample chapters. I like to catch up on new music videos on Virgin’s entertainment system, so why not read a couple of chapters from a few new bestsellers to decide which ones I might actually like to buy and read.

Some objections and counterarguments: Don’t people already bring their own books and magazines onto planes? Why would you want to buy one from Virgin? True: But airplanes and airports do a brisk business selling at a markup plenty of things you could consume more cheaply at home or on the ground. Books would be no different. You’re paying for convenience — or, looked at another way, as penance for your poor planning.

Don’t e-readers, tablets, laptops and online Wi-Fi make this moot? People won’t read from the back of a headrest — they’ll read on the devices they own already. Also true. But don’t discount the power of free, ad-subsidized, or exclusive reading materials. Some of the fun of using these screens is the entertainment/video-game aspect of it: Let me goof around with this and see if I can find anything good. And Virgin already lets their first-class and business-class (excuse me, “Main Cabin select”) customers enjoy all the entertainment they want. If Dilworth is right, publishers could use sample chapters or whole books like music labels use music videos — as promotional material targeted for an affluent, tech-savvy audience that literally can’t get out of their seats.

Obviously, in the future, this won’t be limited to Virgin, or even to airplanes: You could imagine similar screens being deployed on trains or intercity buses, performing the same multimedia functions. As these tiny screens become more ubiquitous and we become more accustomed to reading from them, the more likely it becomes that we’ll do more and more reading of all kinds on screens anywhere and everywhere. But as Dilworth says, there’s something about reading books on airplanes that just makes sense.

See Also:

• Airline 2.0: Virgin America Geek Plane Takes Off
• Virgin America Admits It's a Dirty Bird
• Clive Thompson on the Future of Reading in a Digital World
• The Future Of Reading
• Stephen Fry and Our Transmedia Reading Future

Boeing has announced plans to add space tourism to its CST-100 — or Crew Space Transportation-100– low orbit flights by 2015. Operated by a partnership with Space Adventures, the flights will be able to carry up to seven passengers about 62 miles above Earth’s surface, and the craft are currently being developed with the help of NASA.The vehicles could also be used as a ferry to get people to and from the various space habitats companies are working away at. There’s no word on what the pricing of one of these journeys will look like, but trust us: Jared Leto will be able to afford one, while you probably will not.

Boeing plans to add space tourism seats to its CST-100 flights by 2015 originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 16 Sep 2010 11:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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