By David Ponce

A few weeks ago we reported on a group of researcher’s successful attempt at putting a single pixel inside a contact lens, fitting it on a rabbit and having the rabbit happily snacking on carrots minutes after the experiment. We saw it as the firstearly prototypes of what we hope will be contact lens VR. But YouTube user Ben Krasnow (username bkraz333) was watching and apparently figured “hey, I can do this! Only with an LED…” In the video below you can see how he coils metal wires, solders them onto an LED, sandwiches them between two soft contact lenses, fuses them together with hot pliers and yes, puts the contraption on his eye. Squirmy viewers shouldn’t look, although nothing bad happens. Matter of fact, it works. There’s a bunch of electrical engineering speak that we can’t quite piece together, but the short of it is he’s using inductive coupling to light up the LED and make it flash a few times a second.

But there’s also interesting talk of the current limitations to such a system, such as the need to focus the light onto the retina and how if ever this were to become a functioning display, each pixel would have to focus individually…

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By David Ponce

Researchers from the University of Washington and Aalto University Finland have developed a prototype contact lens that contains a single LED pixel, a custom made integrated circuit and an antenna. They then tried the lens on live rabbits (under general anesthesia for comfort) with no adverse effects.

Awesome!

The display consists of an antenna, a 500 × 500 µm2 silicon power harvesting and radio integrated circuit, metal interconnects, insulation layers and a 750 × 750 µm2 transparent sapphire chip containing a custom-designed micro-light emitting diode with peak emission at 475 nm, all integrated onto a contact lens. The display can be powered wirelessly from ~1 m in free space and ~2 cm in vivo on a rabbit. The display was tested on live, anesthetized rabbits with no observed adverse effect. In order to extend display capabilities, design and fabrication of micro-Fresnel lenses on a contact lens are presented to move toward a multipixel display that can be worn in the form of a contact lens. Contact lenses with integrated micro-Fresnel lenses were also tested on live rabbits and showed no adverse effect.

So yeah, this is very rudimentary but… baby steps, baby steps! And while we don’t expect things to remain at the single-pixel level forever, later iterations will inevitably go up in pixel density very slowly. This means that when the first commercial generations reach the consumer level, it will likely only be for displaying things like text. But as the technology is further developed, we have no doubt that always-on alternate/augmented reality will become possible.

We’re several years away, but there you have it. Barring accidental death, if you’re under 60 today, there’s a good chance you will live to see this happen.

[ Link To Paper ] VIA [ MedGadget ]

By David Ponce

So the idea here is pretty simple. A group of UK kids claim to have developed a way to give Siri commands by simply… thinking them. Called Project Black Mirror, the way this works is the user hooks himself up with a few EEG pads and proceed to train the custom software. The claim is that by focusing on a particular word, the brain emits a “signature pattern”, which can then be programmed to become associated with that command. Once properly “trained”, these commands are then fed to a SpeakJet speech synthesizer chip and sent to the iPhone via its microphone jack. The video at the end of the article purportedly demonstrates the system in action.

We call BS for a bunch of reasons we’re about to get into. But most of all, this all just reeks of hoax. Hit the jump to hear us out.

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By Chris Scott Barr

For the coffee drinkers out there, how many cups does it take you to get through a typical workday? For many, loading up on coffee is about the equivalent of putting gas in a car. The longer you want to stay productive, the more you need to ingest. Now what if you actually tried to fuel your car with the stuff? Apparently you can, but you’ll need more than a few cups to get you through the day.

A team at the BBC1 science show Bang Goes The Theory took an old ’88 Volkswagen Scirocco and modified it to run off of coffee grounds. Now before you get too excited about running a car off of a cup of Joe, you’ll have to consider the fact that it’ll take the equivalent of 56 espressos just to travel a single mile. To further break that down, it’ll cost roughly 50 times more than simply using gas. Needless to say, this is one of those projects that was done “because they could” and not because it was practical. The team is also using it to try and raise awareness on using alternative fuels.

[ DailyMail ] VIA [ Dvice ]

By Chris Scott Barr

If you’ve never read The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I’d suggest picking it up. No, watching the movie definitely doesn’t count. One of the coolest ideas (of which there were many) in the book was the Babel Fish. It was a fish that was inserted into your ear, and magically translated any spoken language into one that you would understand. If the name sounds familiar, it’s because Yahoo has a text translation service that shares the name.

So why am I babbling about the Babel Fish today? Because it would seem that Google is working on a bit of technology that will work in a similar way (but thankfully without inserting a fish in your ear). Their new speech-to-speech translator will take a person’s words and translate them on-the-fly while on their phone. The software would be installed on the speaker’s end, so that it can adapt over time to the person’s individual voice and speaking patterns, thus resulting in a better translation.

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By Evan Ackerman

We got a hands-on look at Emotiv’s EPOC neural controller back at the Game Developer’s Conference in 2008. The idea is that you put this funny looking thing on your head, and it reads your brain waves and translates them into commands for your computer. In addition to 14 separate sensors, the headset has a gyroscope that can keep track of where your head is pointing. Hypothetically, it can interpret abstract commands (thinking “up” as opposed to thinking “down”) and read muscle commands (like blinking or smiling).

The demo version I used at GDC didn’t work very reliably, and I wasn’t sure whether it was the hardware, the software, my brain, or some combination thereof. When it did work, though, it was incredibly cool. Like, Clint Eastwood in Firefox cool, except with less needing to think Russian. Or, like the Mattel Mindflex, except a lot more sensitive and with many more options.

So far, you can’t do much with the headset… You can play a game or two, or control a virtual keyboard. Emotiv seems to be hoping that they can sell dev kits and someone else will do all the program the interface work, which would be great if it happens, but it’s already been a couple years. In the meantime, though, you can buy yourself your own headset (and download a few programs that work with it) for $299.

[ Emotiv EPOC ] VIA [ Core77 ]

By Chris Scott Barr

I’m one of those strange people that will generally do their best to avoid dealing with people when I’m shopping. At the grocery store I always use the self-checkout, since it’s usually much faster. Unfortunately most other stores have cashiers to ring up your purchases, the same goes for restaurants. Thankfully Jack In The Box is doing their part to cut out the middle-man.

Seen to the right is an awesome little kiosk that lets you order your food without the need to deal with some teenager that really doesn’t want to be there in the first place. Sure, eventually these might start taking the jobs of a couple workers, but I doubt they’ll ever really do away with the cashiers altogether. It is, however, nice to see more places offering their customers a choice on how to order their food.

VIA [ Consumerist ]

By Chris Scott Barr

I’ve built quite a few computers with eSATA ports on them, as they have become fairly common on most motherboards. However, I can’t recall ever actually using a device that utilized one of these ports. Sure, there are external drives out there that ship with an eSATA connector, but I rarely have a need for one. Flash drives are getting large enough and cheap enough that I can generally use one to carry almost anything I need. So why not use a flash drive with an eSATA connector? Because you can’t, not without a power source like, say a USB connection.

eSATA has a much higher data transfer speed, but lacks the power of USB, so what’s the solution? For the sake of this article, I’m going to pretend that you didn’t say USB 3.0. (though that would have been my answer too). If you ask MSI, their solution is to combine the two ports into what they call Power eSATA. Essentially this is an eSATA port that can also provide 500mA current from USB. It’s actually a pretty neat idea, but I’ll be the first to say that it probably won’t ever take off. So far OCZ is the only manufacturer with a product that uses the connection, and we’ve got USB 3.0 sneaking up on us. Sorry MSI, I don’t care how many motherboards and notebooks you put this in, I just don’t see this one working out.

[ MSI ] VIA [ EverythingUSB ]

By Chris Scott Barr

I’d hoped that I was done writing about Time Warner Cable for a little while. Unfortunately it seems that they are already back up to their same old antics, only this time they’re being a little more sneaky about it. At least before they were up-front and honest about their decision to screw their customers. When too many people raised a stink about it, they backed off, or at least they pretended to.

One TWC customer in Austin hopped on his computer to do a little surfing only to find that his internet connection was down. A quick call to the ISP revealed that his service had been intentionally disconnected due to excessive bandwidth use. Apparently this guy had the audacity to use 44GB in a week’s time on his unlimited internet plan. What a jerk.

The next logical step was for the guy to ask just how much bandwidth was “acceptable” so that he didn’t get his service shut off again. The lovely rep at Time Warner couldn’t give him any exact numbers, but said that it would be somewhere between a quarter and half of the bandwidth he was currently using.

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