Ever since I first saw the DiveCam that NBC uses for televised events a few years ago, I wondered how the operator managed to keep the camera so perfectly synced with the diver as they plunged into the pool. Well thanks to a few different camera angles used at this year’s Olympic games I finally figured out the simple gimmick the DiveCam uses, but the Wall Street Journal has gone one step further and provided a bit of backstory regarding its development.
For those who don’t know or haven’t seen it, the DiveCam is basically a small camera contained in a tube that follows the diver from the top of the platform all the way into the water. But instead of using complex pneumatics or motorized tracks, the camera is simply dropped at the same time the athlete leaves the platform. Since gravity ensures that everything falls at the same rate, as long as the operator releases the camera at the same time as the diver, it will perfectly follow them into the water. The idea was originally thought up by NBC’s David Neal, but he contracted Garret Brown, inventor of the Steadicam (and countless other ingenious camera rigs) to make it a reality. Garret improved on the idea with mechanisms to safely bring the camera to a stop once underwater, and added remote tilt-and-pan controls so that the cameraman could always keep the diver in frame. I’ll admit that diving is not one of my favorite events, but seeing the footage that comes from the DiveCam is enough to keep me watching every time it’s on.
When we talk about innovation, it’s stuff like this we mean. Danish company Kataka makes some crazy slim linear actuators (for those of you who don’t know what a linear actuator is, a simple definition would be “something that pushes another in a straight line”). The mechanism is based on segmented spindle technology, and was conceived by the Danish mechanical engineer Jens Joerren Soerensen during the mid 1990s (also the Kataka CTO). From Wikipedia:
The basic idea was that if a solid conventional spindle is broken up in smaller segments (in a way so it can be assembled and disassembed), it is possible to make compact spindles. The implication is that linear electromechanical actuators (the product is often just called a linear actuator) based on the Segmented Spindle technology can be made more compact as the spindle segments can be packed in a layer perpendicular to the linear movement of the spindle.
In other words, they take the push rod and break it up, store it in a box and assemble it whenever they need to extend it.
I know, none of this makes much sense (including the title of this article). But just watch the videos, and all will be clear.
FINALLY! While I’m sure I wasn’t the first one to come up with the idea, I wonder why it’s taken so long for a laptop manufacturer to sidle up with Wacom and include a built-in tablet with their hardware. Back in the day (4 or 5 years ago) I even harassed the Wacom sales people about it while doing demos at their NAB and Siggraph booths, but nothing ever came of it… until now. The Lenovo W700 ThinkPad is a ‘PC Beast’ as the company refers to it, with a 17-inch widescreen display (hopefully 1920×1200) with a built-in color calibrator, NVIDIA Quadro FX mobile graphics card, Intel mobile quad core processor, dual hard drives with RAID configurations, up to 8GB of high speed DDR3 RAM and even an optional Blu-ray DVD burner/player. Very impressive.
Lenovo seems to be targeting the W700 at the professional graphics market, which is why it’s the first to include the aforementioned palm rest mini Wacom tablet. I can’t even use Photoshop without a tablet, and while I’m not sure how effective one this small would actually be, it’s about a million times better than not having one and having to rely on the touch pad or trackpoint nub for pixel pushing. Not surprisingly you’ll be spending about $3,000 for the base configuration of the W700, and depending on RAM or SSD hard drive upgrades, you’ll probably even be spending a lot more than that.
I’ve been following the development of SEDs (surface-conduction electron-emitter display) for I don’t know how long, but unfortunately in recent years most of the news has been regarding a court battle between Canon and Applied Nanotech Holdings which has completely hindered the development of the new display technology. However, last week the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit delivered some good news for Canon which could put SED development back on track.
The appeals court in part affirmed, and in part reversed, the rulings of the district court. While the appeals court accepted, without deciding, the district court’s decision that SED, Inc. as originally formed did not qualify as a Canon subsidiary, and that Canon had materially breached the contract, it found that termination of the license agreement was not an appropriate remedy. The appeals court also ruled that the restructured SED, Inc., which is 100% owned by Canon, now qualifies as a Canon subsidiary. The appeals court denied Applied Nanotech’s appeal that the district court had improperly excluded certain evidence from the trial. The decision reinstates Canon’s non-exclusive license to substantially all of Applied Nanotech’s field emission patents, excluding certain display applications.
For the longest time I dragged my feet on upgrading to an HDTV because I’m not exactly thrilled with either LCD or Plasma technology. But then SEDs came along and promised all of the benefits of CRTs with the small footprint of a flat-panel display. Hooray! I of course realized it would take a few years for SEDs to start appearing in stores, and a few more years for them to become reasonably priced, but I was willing to wait it out. Unfortunately though my dreams were dashed when this court battle got underway, and it became rather apparent that I wouldn’t be getting my hands on an SED TV anytime soon. So hopefully last week’s court decision will mean I can (cautiously) rekindle my SED dreams.
Those self-serve check-outs that have been popping up at more and more supermarkets are definitely convenient, but there are still a few technological hurdles to overcome that will make them a lot more efficient. At the moment, items like fruits and vegetables that don’t have a barcode and need to be weighed tend to slow down the checkout process, since you need to specify what they are via a touch-screen menu interface. (As opposed to just scanning the item and throwing it in a bag.) But thanks to a recent development from the Fraunhofer Institute for Information and Data Processing and Mettler Toledo, new check-out scales will be able to automatically distinguish between an apple or an orange. (Or whatever fruits and vegetables the store happens to sell.)
The scales use a digital camera to photograph the item, and an algorithm is then used to compare the image to a database of previously photographed fruits and vegetables to extrapolate what it is. In the case of something like tomatoes, which come in different varieties but might all look the same, the customer is simply presented with a set of different icons on the screen and is asked to specify between hot house or field varieties. The system is apparently even savvy enough to recognize items that have been placed in a semi-transparent plastic bag, and has a high tolerance for color and brightness fluctuations resulting from varying lighting conditions. The new scales are currently being tested in about 300 different supermarkets across Europe, and will no doubt eventually make their way to North America.
There are a handful of watches that combine a digital LED display with an analog watch face which makes it easier for those of us who suck at telling time the ‘old-fashioned’ way, but this new Tough Movement system from Casio actually relies on an LED ‘under-the-hood’ to keep the positions of the analog hands accurate. The watch receives time calibration signals from six different bases located around the world, and at the 55 minute mark of every hour if the time indicated by the watch doesn’t match up with the time from the signals, the position of the hands is automatically corrected. The gears for the second, minute and hour hands are actually sandwiched between an LED and a phototransistor which also allows the watch to detect the positions of all three gears at once by shining a light through a series of holes that are just 300 mum in diameter.
The new Tough Movement also incorporates metal and plastic parts in order to reduce the weight and size of the watch while increasing rigidity and shock-resistance. As a result the thickness of a 3-hand analog model is reduced by 2.26mm to 4.11mm, while the more complex chronograph model is reduced by 0.55mm to 4.9mm. The new Tough Movement system will apparently be incorporated into Casio’s Oceanus and G-Shock series watches, and the first model to feature it (the GS-1200) will be available at the end of September in Japan for about $388.
It’s taken us years and years to finally shed those annoyingly-curved CRT monitors and TVs, but Microsoft apparently feels that we should not only return to curved displays, but one that features a full 360 degrees of imagery. This week they unveiled their Sphere prototype which works just like the company’s Surface technology, but applied to a spherical interface and display. The technology and hardware needed to run the Sphere is a bit more advanced than what Surface uses, since it has to warp the images and the interface so that it looks correct when projected onto a dome, and as a result Sphere won’t be moving past the research project phase anytime soon. And as gimmicky as it might seem, there are some cool applications that come to mind like an interactive globe (as demo’d in the video) or a better way to watch and interact with 360 degree videos and panoramas.
The internet as we know it would be a very different place if Google didn’t exist. Sure there’d be other search engines to fill the void, but none of Google’s competitors seem as obsessed with scouring and indexing every nook and cranny of the internet in order to make it easily searchable. According to the Google Blog, their first index way back in 1998 had 26 million pages, and by 2000 that had grown to 1 billion. But recently that number hit another milestone as 8 years later Google’s index has passed the 1 trillion unique URLs mark. Here’s an interesting quote from their blog that puts that amount of information in perspective:
To keep up with this volume of information, our systems have come a long way since the first set of web data Google processed to answer queries. Back then, we did everything in batches: one workstation could compute the PageRank graph on 26 million pages in a couple of hours, and that set of pages would be used as Google’s index for a fixed period of time. Today, Google downloads the web continuously, collecting updated page information and re-processing the entire web-link graph several times per day. This graph of one trillion URLs is similar to a map made up of one trillion intersections. So multiple times every day, we do the computational equivalent of fully exploring every intersection of every road in the United States. Except it’d be a map about 50,000 times as big as the U.S., with 50,000 times as many roads and intersections.
And to think, I actually complain about having to check the 100+ websites in my RSS reader every morning. Anyways, good work Google, and we all look forward to celebrating when you pass the quadrillion mark!
According to the BBC, Cern’s Large Hadron Collider is in the final stages of being lowered to a temperature of 1.9 Kelvin, which is about -456°F or -271°C. In order for the collider’s thousands of magnets to maintain a high magnetic field with minimal power consumption they’re required to be superconducting, so liquid helium is currently being used to cool them down.
Roberto Saban, the LHC’s head of hardware commissioning, said that in order to obtain high magnetic fields without consuming too much power, the magnets were required to be “superconducting”.
This is the property, exhibited by some materials at very low temperatures, to channel electrical current with zero resistance and very little power loss.
Helium exhibits spectacular properties at 2.2 Kelvin - becoming “superfluid”. This allows it to conduct heat very rapidly, making it an extremely efficient refrigerant.
For comparison, while the LHC is being lowered to 1.9 Kelvin, the temperature in remote regions of outer space is a balmy 2.7 Kelvin, and my cold, cold heart comes in at around 3.2 Kelvin. That’s why I originally suggested that the Cern team should use years and years of sarcasm to bring the collider’s temperature down, but they felt the emotional toll on their staff would be too high. And if you want to keep track of how the LHC’s cool-down is coming along, you can check out their website from 1997 which features an updated graphic showing the temperature of various sections.
Related Tags: Innovation, Sports
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By Andrew Liszewski
