Tech: Displair Water Vapor Touchscreen

Playing Fruit Ninja On The Displair At CES 2013 by Jason O. Gilbert

Displair, a unique gadget at CES 2013, allows you to turn a misting wall of water vapor into a strange touchscreen. Here, Jason Gilbert from the Huffington Post plays a game of Fruit Ninja on a Displair.

Tech: Wearable Gesture Controls

Motion Technology is certainly being pushed hard with the introduction of Leap Motion last year. This area of technology gives the regular user, an experience like that of Tom Cruise and there is a new addition to this futuristic market. Whilst many other devices use camera based gesture control, Thalmic Labs have offered another solution.

With the wave of your hand or a turn of your wrist, MYO will transform how you interact with your digital world. The MYO armband lets you use the electrical activity in your muscles to wirelessly control your computer, phone and other favourite digital technologies. A completely new approach to gesture controlled technology, the MYO monitors muscle activity by strapping around your forearm.

Tech: Rock/Paper/Scissors Robot

From the Ishikawa Oku Laboratory at The University of Tokyo:

In this research we develop a janken (rock-paper-scissors) robot with 100% winning rate as one example of human-machine cooperation systems. Human being plays one of rock, paper and scissors at the timing of one, two, three. According to the timing, the robot hand plays one of three kinds so as to beat the human being.
Recognition of human hand can be performed at 1ms with a high-speed vision, and the position and the shape of the human hand are recognized. The wrist joint angle of the robot hand is controlled based on the position of the human hand. The vision recognizes one of rock, paper and scissors based on the shape of the human hand. After that, the robot hand plays one of rock, paper and scissors so as to beat the human being in 1ms.

Source: Ishikawa Oku Laboratory

Tech: Robotic Hand Can Pick Up, Throw Anything

The Cornell Creative Machines Lab has invented a low-cost, morphing robot “hand” that can pick up, drop, or throw any object, using just a balloon, coffee grounds, and a vacuum. The concept is a landmark break-through for romanticists.

Gadgets: Virtual Reality Surface

Tech: Avatar Mirrors users Facial Expressions

A Keio University group, led by Associate Professor Yasue Mitsukura, has developed a method for measuring which way a person is facing and how their expression changes. This system achieves high speed and high precision, using an ordinary PC and a USB camera.

“We think this system could be used by CG animation hobbyists, in Web dialog systems that show a character instead of the person’s face, and for making characters move in real time at events. Because the system uses just one PC and one camera, it can be applied in many situations very easily.”

Source: DigInfo TV

Gadgets: PVAC

The Air Force asked, "How can a team of soldiers scale a high wall without the use of a grappling hook?" In response, Utah State created the Personal Vacuum Assisted Climber. The University has received $100,000 from the Air Force to continue development.

Tech: Mobile Augmented Reality Demo

Mobile Augmented Reality Demo

The same day that Google’s Project Glass patent was approved, WDG shared a video of their own dabblings in augmented reality. Above, the creative group explores the capabilities of two new mobile augmented reality platforms (compatible with both Android and iOS) developed using Unity3D. In this video, an experimenter uses both an iPad and an Android to guide a virtual car through a constantly shifting AR landscape.

Tech: HyQ Hydraulic Quadruped Robot

This video is a demonstration of the HyQ hydraulic quadruped robot, which is able to run at speeds of up to two meters per second while surmounting increasingly difficult obstacles . The robot was developed by the Department of Advanced Robotics at the Italian Institute of Technology.

Gadgets: Glove One

Glove One, a cellphone you wear on your hand:

Milwaukee-based designer Bryan Cera took the smartphone and turned it into something you can wear like a glove, using numbers spread out across the underside of your fingers to do the dialing. It looks a little clumsy, but that’s by design, too: Cera doesn’t want a Glove One on every hand; he’s trying to tell us something about the future.

Glove One, to state it plain, represents a future where our smartphones have become a real part of us, and our hand is now a vestigial limb replaced by a functioning handset:

“It presents a futile and fragile technology with which to augment ourselves. A cell phone which, in order to use, one must sacrifice their hand. It is both the literalization of Sherry Turkle’s notion of technology as a “phantom limb”, in how we augment ourselves through an ambivalent reliance on it, as well as a celebration of the freedom we seek in our devices.”

Source: DVICE
More Photos: Ponoko

Tech: Festo SmartInversion

Festo, has recently released a video featuring their newest high tech wonder, the Festo SmartInversion, a machine that moves through the air by turning itself inside out.

SmartInversion is a helium-filled flying object that moves through the air by turning inside-out. This constant, rhythmically pulsating movement is known as inversion and gives the flight model its name. With the intelligent combination of extreme lightweight construction, electric drive units and control and regulation technology, inversion kinematics can be indefinitely maintained to produce motion through the air.