A new display technology could make electronic paper look more like the real thing. Conventional ink on paper has a much higher brightness and black-and-white color contrast than electronic paper. The new display, made by researchers at the University of Cincinnati, in Ohio, is designed to match the brilliance and contrast of paper. “We’ve demonstrated a technology where you have the brightness of paper, and color has the same saturation that you expect from printed media,” says electrical- and computer-engineering professor Jason Heikenfeld, who led the work, which was published in Nature Photonics.
The pixels also switch between black and white within one millisecond, making the technology suitable for video (LCDs currently switch in a few milliseconds). A slower refresh speed of tens to hundreds of milliseconds is one of the main issues plaguing current e-paper.
So far, Heikenfeld and his colleagues have made rigid black-and-white displays that reflect 55 percent of ambient light–far more than any electronic-paper products currently on the market. White paper reflects 85 percent of ambient light, so it looks much brighter than Heikenfeld’s system. But Heikenfeld says that the technology could be used to make full-color flexible plastic displays that have more than 60 percent brilliance, and higher-grade materials and manufacturing processes should eventually make his device almost as bright as white paper.
Face in the cloud: CloneCloud allows processor-intensive applications, like this prototype face-recognition application, to be offloaded to remote servers.
Credit: Intel Research Berkley
The problem with mobile phones, says Allan Knies, associate director of Intel Research at Berkeley, is that everyone wants them to perform like a regular computer, despite their relatively paltry hardware. Byung-Gon Chun, a research scientist at Intel Research Berkeley, thinks that he might have the solution to that problem: create a supercharged clone of your smart phone that lives in “the cloud” and let it do all the computational heavy lifting that your phone is too wimpy to handle.
CloneCloud, invented by Chun and his colleague Petros Maniatis, uses a smart phone’s high-speed connection to the Internet to communicate with a copy of itself that lives in a cloud-computing environment on remote servers. The prototype runs on Google’s Android mobile operating system and seamlessly offloads processor-intensive tasks to its cloud-based double. Details of the project will be revealed at the HotOS XII conference in Switzerland later this month.
It’s a trick not unlike the way that many Web-based applications, such as Google Docs, run on remote servers. The difference is that because CloneCloud creates a perfect copy of the phone’s software, it can take on literally any processor-intensive task that it calculates it can do faster than the phone itself, after weighing the amount of time and battery life required to transfer the required data.
It could be a dieter’s best friend or worst nightmare: technology that knows how much a person has just eaten, knows how many calories he has burned off, offers suggestions for improving resolve and success, and never lets him cheat. And it’s all done by a small, stick-on monitor no bigger than a large Band-Aid.
The calorie monitor, which is being developed by biotech incubator PhiloMetron, uses a combination of sensors, electrodes, and accelerometers that–together with a unique algorithm–measure the number of calories eaten, the number of calories burned, and the net gain or loss over a 24-hour period. The patch sends this data via a Bluetooth wireless connection to a dieter’s cell phone, where an application tracks the totals and provides support. “You missed your goal for today, but you can make it up tomorrow by taking a 15-minute walk or having a salad for dinner,” it might suggest.
I suggest you go see the video cause text and images will not experience the vision of computing future. It is about our own paper performing “magic” before our eyes, getting larger or smaller, showing video, or helping us improve an art project. Very conceptual base.
….Here this concept of tactile interface imagined at the same time for the house and work. Two examples in situation, on a “experiment use-interface” directed by Dane Storrusten and conceived by INVIVIA.
it is slowly coming… still waiting for a fully transparent screen, but why just the number pad ?
Introduced at the latest GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona as a concept, the new LG-GD900 phone with improved UI and transparent keyboard will be LG’s latest star at CTIA 09. If we’re still waiting for more detailed specifications, LG has confirmed that everyone attending the CTIA 09 will get the chance to see this baby in the flesh and play with it…
A couple of weeks ago Sanyo Japan was kind enough to send us a test sample of their latest high-end HD camera, the Xacti HD2000. We’ve already talked about the HD2000, but let’s refresh your memory.
The HD2000 feature a 8Mpix censor for still pictures and 5.31Mpix for videos, it supports both SD and SDHC cards up to 32GB, and shoots video in a gorgeous full HD at 60fps (1920 x 1080 / 60p), has a 10x optical zoom an ISO range from 50 to 3200 and is Sanyo’s first camera with a Reverse Sequential Shot function and a Hi-Speed Video shot mode up to 600fps.
this is a quick information blog of blogs. A simple collections of oxcullent findings out on the web.
(currently I am shifting gears about how this blog will evolve. For quick and updated information there are links in the info section - google reader and twitter)
