How would you like to set your thermostat at home while you’re at the office? Wouldn’t it be nice if you forgot to turn off your water heater for a two week vacation and you were able to log on to an online portal and turn it off? How about using an energy management system for your home that charges when electricity is the cheapest and avoids the peaks where electric costs are higher? These are all scenarios that will be possible in the next 5-10 years as utilities move towards Smart Grids. The days of a mechanical meter and a visit from a meter reader are slowly approaching to an end.
With a price tag of $4,995 we’re not going to be seeing one of these in every home in America anytime soon, but the Desktop Factory proves that the cost of owning your own 3D printer continues to drop. One of the reasons the Desktop Factory is so ‘affordable’ is because it uses an inexpensive halogen light source and plastic powder instead of UV and polymers, which also means the cost of the build material is expected to be about $1 per cubic inch. And the parts can be sanded and painted as soon as they’re finished, without the need for a chemical infiltration curing or strengthening process.
Now given the Desktop Factory is roughly the size of an early laser printer (25×20x20 inches) it will easily fit on any desk, but your 3D creations will be limited to 125ci or roughly 2 liters in volume. So while you won’t be printing out body panels for your home-made Enzo, your bootleg action figure business will be booming.
A few months ago we brought you the Squidarella umbrella from SquidLondon which uses hydrochromatic inks to change from black & white to a full-color rainbow design when it gets wet, or in other words, whenever it gets out in the rain. At the time the umbrellas were available in very limited quantities, but SquidLondon has just released a new Skyline Squidarella collection, featuring the London skyline, that’s now available for purchase online from Beyond the Valley for about $35. And if you’d like to see the Squidarella in action getting a good soaking, check out the video I’ve included after the jump.
Now here’s another clever idea. VirtualHUD is an easy to install device that attaches to the windshield of a small plane and creates a virtual heads-up display for the pilot by projecting an image onto the aircraft’s spinning propeller. (A white strip of paint added to the back of the prop increases its visibility.) The VirtualHUD is able to project “all the standard flight instrumentation required for normal VFR and IFR navigation when equipped with or attached to your GPS” or it can be hooked to an external source like an infrared camera allowing the pilot to monitor a video feed while keeping their eyes on the sky.
Currently there’s a nighttime-only version of the product called the NightVu which sells for around $7,500, but the new ForwardVu model, which can be used in the day as well, should be available sometime in late July.
Until now, the fastest SD/SDHC cards you could buy were known as Class 6, which ensured a transfer rate of at least 6MB/s. But today Panasonic announced a new series of Class 10 SD/SDHC cards with capacities maxing out at 32GB and a minimal transfer rate of 10MB/s. Of course that 32GB card will set you back about $420, but it does come with a maximum speed of 22MB/s which should make owners of a DSLR with an SD card slot very happy, though somewhat poorer.
Cell phones are arguably separated into three categories: iPhone / Palm Pre / BlackBerry, phones that suck are functional for people who don’t care, and everything else. In the everything else category, what distinguishes one phone from another is often (for better or worse) looks, and a company called Kent Displays may have trumped that category with a phone that changes color.
The entire outer surface of this prototype phone is actually a display, called a cholesteric liquid crystal display. Sounds tasty, right? It is tasty… The display is durable, can be molded into any shape, and (eventually) will display 4,000 colors at a high (but unspecified) resolution. A jolt of electricity changes the color, and that’s all it takes: once the color is set, no power is required to keep it up.
This is, of course, the type of thing that you’re not likely to see anytime soon, but it does exist. Is it cheap? No idea about that either, but I’d be willing to pay a premium for a phone that I could set to match my mood. I’m feeling mauve today, how ’bout you?
A new medical diagnosis device known as the SPTT, or Standoff Patient Triage Tool, could be our first glimpse at a real-life tricorder, or at the least a primitive ancestor of one. The SPTT uses lasers to measure vibrations of a human head and chest to calculate the vital signs of a patient, like pulse, body temperature and muscle movement from a distance of up to 40 feet away.
Now the device is no replacement for a doctor or a paramedic, but in the event of an accident or emergency where there are multiple victims, it could let first responders determine who needs medical treatment first, a process known as triage. Normally it takes a medic about 3 to 5 minutes per person to determine the severity of their condition or injuries, but using the SPTT it could take as little as 30 seconds, which really could mean the difference between life and death.
The Standoff Patient Triage Tool is expected to start field tests sometime this Fall.
Taking a cue from Homer Simpson’s ’speed holes’ Reebok has developed a new bat with something they call O-Technology, which is basically a set of 3 aerodynamic holes drilled into the shaft. The Vector O Bat was designed using computer models and simulations to reduce drag and increase swing speed, which in turn equals more distance on a ball or less force needed to encourage someone to pay back a loan. The Vector O Bat also features Reebok’s “Thread Locking System Connection Technology System” (that’s a direct quote, a system so nice they named it twice!) which results in an extremely stiff piece of lumber err… I mean VR950 Alloy/Composite Performance Matrix. But with a price tag of $279 it’s probably best suited to professional ball players and loan sharks.
While I haven’t seen a perfect CG human just yet, I’m confident that it’s only a matter of time before Hollywood’s A-list are replaced by pixels. However, while we’re able to produce realistic computer generated images and animations, the same can’t be said for sounds just yet, but we’re now one step closer. Doug James and Changxi Zheng, researchers at Cornell University, have developed a way to simulate the sounds of flowing or dripping water, which in real life are produced by tiny air bubbles that compress and expand due to surface tension, creating sound waves in the water.
Now when it comes to movies and TV, the sounds of something crashing into the ocean or a babbling brook can be added by foley artists during post-production, but that’s not an option when it comes to video games or interactive simulations. So by using the geometry of a 3D scene, the Harmonic Fluids algorithm they developed can calculate where the air bubbles would have been created in real life and how they would have moved, which allows realistic accompanying sounds to be generated.
Related Tags: Editorial, Household, Innovation
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By Andrew Liszewski
