Showing posts with label future technology. Show all posts

Flashing Electronic Ink Displays On “Cloths” Coming Soon

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Flashing Electronic Ink Displays On “Cloths” Coming Soon

It won’t be long enough when we begin seeing T-shirt apparel or even tyvex cloths enclosing our postal envelopes, being fully embedded with animated messages and icons. This upcoming technology is pushing the capabilities of the existing electronic inks to a bright new level.

We’ve witnessed the invasion of Electronic readers packed in super thin plastic case and even proper ePapers that can easily store and display written content at our convenience, consider Amazon’s Kindle which is powered by E-Ink’s ‘virtual ink’ technology.

Now, this concept of virtual ink has been taken a step ahead to place them onto cloths, and we know that cloths can easily be crumpled and folded owing to it’s physical nature. So let’s say, sometime in the future, we may actually see status updates from Twitter and Facebook on our apparel, or worse, advertisements! As pointed out by FastCompany.

E-Ink’s ePaper product

Watch the video demonstrations of how the display works when embedded onto cloths, and yes, it works perfectly even with the crumpling and folding efforts!

These screens are powered by SURF which defines a Segmented, Ultra-thin, Rugged and Flexible display. An interesting aspect of this futuristic display is that the screens are easily viewable in open light as opposed to many flat display ones, allowing the content to be easily readable even in bright sunlight. This is possible because of a reason that E-Ink products display reflected light just as a regular paper does.

E-Ink is ready with this technology and could commercialize their electronic ink displays on such cloths anytime soon. They just need an interested party who may fund the production overhead
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The Test Driven Google Car – It’s a Robot, An Auto Driver

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The Test Driven Google Car – It’s a Robot, An Auto Driver

Google’s constant attempts to spread it’s arms above it’s search engine and advertisement placements has brought in an experimental robot car that drives all by itself (under the supervision of a human safety driver), just in case the car needs help. Google’s blog said that it all works with the help of video cameras, radar sensors and a laser range finder to “see” other traffic, as well as detailed maps collected by their manually driven vehicles to navigate the road ahead.’ The car drives quite well on it’s own.

The concept of autonomous cars is not new. It as been in talks and research since quite some time. The recent conference at TED gave the attendees an opportunity to experienceGoogle’s autonomous car first hand.

The inside view of the car

The ‘Auto driving’ demonstration

Google is hard fo.used on road safety and minimizing carbon emissions with their “in research” autonomous car. There is yet much time to experience the actual implementation of such vehicles because building a robot, in such case, the Google car, needs steep programming complexity and stability, teaching the machine to aptly understand the physics of motion and sensibility. This is why the Google car isn’t unmanned yet
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personal flying suits

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For the past couple of years the world’s top space program NASA has been working on a future design for the very first personal flying suit. The puffin, as they call it, measures to be approximately 12 feet in length with a 15 foot wingspan. The aircraft module would land vertically, allowing for a person to step directly into it and has blades similar to that of helicopters. The puffin concept would relatively light weight and would use electric motors, allowing for high altitudes as well as being eco-friendly.

Now to another note: is the Puffin concept practical for consumer use? Highly unlikely, or at least not for a long time. First of all, this type of flying suit would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, so not many people would ever get to use one, as least for quite some time. Secondly, if this flying suit were to take the place of automobiles, modern travel would be extremely chaotic and the number of fatalities would drastically increase. Any type of mechanical failure or collision with another flying suit would be devastating and regulating travel would be nearly impossible. Yes, the idea is magnificent and I think most of us would like to have an experience like this someday, so hopefully this type of future technology will be able to advance, thanks to NASA.

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