Technology | Futurismic

Fusion Man flys his jetpack over the Alps

Paul Raven @ 15-05-2008

OK, so this is going to make two OMGtehAWESOME posts in one week, but this is waaaay cooler than wall-sized touchscreen Missile Command.

Swiss lunatic Yves Rossy has achieved the ultimate pulp-sf dream of flying on a personal jetpack. The unit is shaped like a small set of wings strapped to his back, equipped with four jet engines; it has taken five years to build. But he has nailed it - behold!

There’s a much better video with the article on The Guardian’s website, but it isn’t embeddable (sorry). But seriously, click through and check it out. And envy.

Toys of the Trade

Paul Raven @ 14-05-2008

Sven Johnson returns to Futurismic for another instalment of Future Imperfect.

Future Imperfect - Sven Johnson

Cyberpunk literature mirrored its era by speaking of the the fetishism of hardware; Sven takes a look at the state of play today, where what were once tools are now toys, and where complex design modeling software is available at the click of a mouse to anyone who wants it … as part of a video game. Continue reading “Toys of the Trade”

McLurkin and the Robot Swarm

Paul Raven @ 14-05-2008

McLurkin swarm robot No, it’s not the title of a new YA science fiction novel. James McLurkin is a researcher at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, which has to be one of the most awesome jobs I can think of.

He’s interested in swarm robots (which we’ve mentioned here on Futurismic before, sometimes in a military context), and believes that the future of robotic development is modular, because it allows researchers to design and develop complex robots quickly and cheaply.

Chris Kiick of Hack-a-Day went to see a demonstration of McLurkin’s swarm robots, of which I am quite jealous. Apparently McLurkin has over a hundred of these things, though he only takes about a dozen out for shows to do tricks like “circle-the-wagons” and physical bubble-sorts. Even so, my inner geek suspects it’d still whip the hell out of a night at the comedy club.

You can find out more about McLurkin’s research at his own MIT website; there’s plenty of video of his swarm in action, also.

E-paper prototypes show up in force

Jeremy Eades @ 08-05-2008

In what must be the most exciting conference ever (just ahead of Dewey Decimal 2008), a little feature known as epaper showed up at Display 2008 in Tokyo. It seems several companies, including Bridgestone with a full-size broadsheet e-newspaper(what do tires have to do with epaper?) and a collaboration between Seiko, E Ink and Epson (which also wins for strangest interactive website) to make epaper watches, showed off their wares at the Japanese trade show. Other offerings included epaper that can be written on with a stylus(video at the link).

Along with the obvious books and notepads we’re all thinking of, other attendants were thinking of myriad other places epaper could be useful. Those range from IC or RFID cards with PIN displays for added security, pill bottles, grocery price tags (come to think of it, I’ve seen something awfully like it in the supermarkets here), flash drives and headphones. Interestingly enough, there’s a story about a Fujitsu ebook that’s in color as well, although price seems to be a factor in why it’s not out yet. According to the guys at DWT, August is when many of these products will be available to vendors, so start looking for epaper everythings to start popping up soon after. I know I can’t wait.

Bonus display blogging: 3D displays without the paper glasses.

(via DigitalWorldTokyo, a site I apparently need to visit more often) (image also via DigitalWorldTokyo)

I, for one, welcome our new modular robotic overlords

Paul Raven @ 28-04-2008

OK, hold everything - and take the three short minutes required to watch this video of a modular robot reassembling itself after being kicked apart:

There’s a hundred science fictional thoughts in my head right now - one of which is the twinge of guilt I felt when they kicked the thing in the first place.

What was the first thing that flashed into your head when you were watching that video? [Tip o' the bowler to m1k3y the grinder - cheers, man!]

Urban mining - there’s gold in that there techno-junk

Paul Raven @ 28-04-2008

printed circuit board and electronic components Desperate times call for desperate measures, and as the economic crunch digs in across the Western world we’ll probably see a rise in habits like urban mining. [image by HeyPaul]

Urban mining is a hip term grafted onto an un-hip task that’s been a major source of employment (and illness) in places like China for quite some time. It hinges on the idea that certain consumer electronic devices that are perceived to have no value as a working item thanks to obsolescence (hello, old cell-phone!) contain residual value in the form of the metals used in their construction. Urban mining is the process of digging the value out of dead technology.

If you’ve read some of my flash fiction pieces you’ll know that this is a subject that fascinates me, and I believe it will become a big component of any future economy, especially in developing nations.

What I find saddest of all is that the fancy “urban mining” moniker is a way of covering up the contempt we feel for a process that we already pay lip-service to - it’s just recycling, after all. The only difference is that the world’s poor can’t afford to not do it. [Via Posthuman Blues - cheers, Mac!]

Prosthetic “fluidhand” raises the bar

Paul Raven @ 24-04-2008

Fluidhand - prosthesis prototype Via Warren Ellis’s grinders, I present to you: the Fluidhand!

“The flexible drives are located directly in the movable finger joints and operate on the biological principle of the spider leg – to flex the joints, elastic chambers are pumped up by miniature hydraulics. In this way, index finger, middle finger and thumb can be moved independently. The prosthetic hand gives the stump feedback, enabling the amputee to sense the strength of the grip.”

Prosthetics and exoskeletal tech are really making strides (arf!) at the moment. I don’t think it’s science fictional to suggest that we’ll be seeing prosthetic limbs that equal the functionality of the organic originals within a decade. [image borrowed from linked Physorg article]

But there’ll still be a stigma attached to having one, because of the aesthetic issues; it’ll be longer than a decade before there’s a false limb that would pass for a real one.

Maybe they’d become a badge of pride in certain industries or regions - among veterans of ideological conflicts, perhaps? And what about the possibility of elective prosthetics - people choosing to replace limbs that had nothing wrong with them?

Six-story tall giant robot? Yes, please

Jeremy Eades @ 08-04-2008

My roommate’s an interesting guy. He’s into Gundam. Like, room-filled-with-models into Gundam. And he’s dragged me into his robot otaku world. So I had to mention this project when it came up. A roboticist from the Future Robotics Technology Center in Japan, Takayuki Furuta, has done cost-estimates of what it would take to build a full-size, functional Gundam robot. Some impossible parts, namely the alloy Gundanium and solar furnaces, would be replaced by modern analogues, aluminum alloy and 7 Apache gas turbines, respectively. The whole thing will cost roughly US$742 million, a small price for a giant robot, I suppose. Furuta hopes to have a 4-meter version up and running by 2011, if I’m still nearby in 3 years, I might have to make a pilgrimage.

(via Matt Yglesias) (image from moogs)

The Pros and Cons of Resource Collapse

Paul Raven @ 07-04-2008

Coal-fired power station We’ve all heard about Peak Oil, but mineral hydrocarbons aren’t the only thing that could run out on us sooner than we think. The world is a complex place full of interrelated dependencies (a bit like a Linux install, come to think of it), and there are lots of other essential resources that, with a bit of bad luck, could dwindle or vanish very quickly. [image by The Tardigrade]

Jamais Cascio points out that resource collapse will be one of the most important driving forces of the near future - not just technologically but geopolitically, too:

“Resource collapse isn’t the cause of the rise of the post-hegemonic world, but it’s an important driver. It weakens the powerful, and opens up new niches of influence. It triggers conflict, setting the mighty against the mighty. It reveals vulnerabilities.

Most importantly, it sets up the conditions for the emergence of new models of power, as ultimately the most effective responses to resource collapse will come from revolutions in technology and socio-economic behavior. Those actors adopting the new successful models will find themselves disproportionately powerful.”

Adapt or die, basically. But what will Nation-States2.0 look like?

Microsoft creates an algorithmic accompanist

Edward Willett @ 07-04-2008

Me, I sings a bit, and it ain’t always easy to find an accompanist when I need one. ‘Sides that, them piano players cost money. (And no, I got no explanation for why I’ve suddenly started bloggin’ in the voice of a hillbilly, ‘cept to point out I did go to school in Arkansas…)

Anyhoo…er, anyway, some new music technology invented by the folks at Microsoft could obviate the need for an accompanist, at least in some instances. Called MySong (follow that link to see a video of it in action and hear some samples) it can take a sung vocal melody and generate appropriate chords to accompany it, offering a singer a variety of accompaniments to choose from, depending on how he or she varies the “happy factor” and “jazz factor.” (Via NewScientistTech.)

Here’s how it works:

Since people rarely sing at precise frequencies, MySong compares a sung melody to the 12 standard musical notes. It then feeds an approximate sequence of notes to the system’s chord probability computation algorithm. This algorithm has been trained, through analysis of 300 rock, pop, country and jazz songs, to recognise fragments of melody and chords that work well together, as well as chords that compliment each another.

MySong isn’t on the market yet, but it’s already got me concerned, because apparently the computing power required is so slight that it will run on a cellphone–which means we may soon have to listen, not only to people talking too loud into their cellphones, but singing too loud into their cellphones.

Shudder.

(Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

RFID and the future of social networking

Paul Raven @ 06-04-2008

RFID tag Researchers at the University of Washington are curious to see what effects RFID technology could have on social networking. To see what happens when the tags become ubiquitous, they installed two hundred antennae in and around a campus building and gave tags to twelve researchers. The results? Their every move is recorded by computer. [image by akaalias]

If that sounds sinister, that’s the entire point. The experiment is designed to see if the negative implications for privacy can be balanced by the more positive functions. [via Roland Piquepaille]

It’s good to see these sort of implications being considered in public … maybe we’ve started to learn from our mistakes and keep an eye on the road ahead?

What can your ink-jet do?

Jeremy Eades @ 02-04-2008

And here I thought Xerox was for copying body parts at the office Xmas party. Turns out, printing technology is very flexible and researchers are trying to adapt it to various applications such as water purification machines and printing solar panels.

There’s also a bit of history on PARC (Palo Alto Research Center):

PARC is one of the older–and more productive–industrial incubators. Xerox founded it in 1970, and 30 companies have been spun out of it. Inventions from the lab include the mouse, Ethernet, the Alto (the archetype of the PC), the laser printer, and, ignominiously, the computer worm. It was also one of the first industrial organizations to employ anthropologists and ethnographers. Xerox wanted to know how people actually interacted with copiers (besides hitting them and swearing at them).

I didn’t know private industry did this, perhaps these centers operate in the background and we just don’t hear about them very often.

(via DailyTech) (image via Zixii)

It’s not molecular manufacturing, but you can see it from here:

Edward Willett @ 31-03-2008

A new $15 million research project is being launched to enable manufacturing at the almost unimaginably small scale of one atom at a time. (Via Responsible Nanotechnology.)

The technology is based on the established ability to remove individual hydrogen atoms from a silicon surface using a scanning tunneling microscope, and could enable a wide variety of devices and products, including:

* Ultra-low-power semiconductors for cellphones and other wireless communications.
* Sensors with ultra-high sensitivity.
* Data encryption orders of magnitude more secure than existing technology.
* Optical elements that enable unprecedented performance in computing and communications.
* Customized surfaces that would have an array of applications in the biomedical and pharmaceutical industries.
* Nanoscale genomics arrays that would enable a person’s complete genetic sequence to be read in less than two hours.

The Atomically Precise Manufacturing Consortium is being led by Zyvex Labs LLC, a molecular nanotechnology company based in Richardson, Texas. The project includes a mixture of funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Texas Emerging Technology Fund and cost sharing from the team members.

As Mike Treder at the Responsible Nanotechnology blog notes:

This is still not quite equivalent to molecular manufacturing, but it does represent a major step along the way. And make no mistake, that is the eventual goal of this team.

(Image: Kristian Molhave, via Wikimedia Commons.)

A world without trucks?

Edward Willett @ 19-03-2008

Trucks are noisy, smelly, intimidating if you’re in a small car, and just generally a nuisance. So why not get rid of them? Transport your goods instead via automated subterranean networks. (Via KurzweilAI.net.)
Sound a little kooky? Maybe, but:

Some Western European countries are getting serious about transporting consumer goods through automated subterranean networks – introducing a fifth transport mode next to road, rail, air and water. This rare combination of low-tech sense and high-tech knowledge could lead to a further economic growth without destroying the environment and the quality of life. Super fast underground cargo transport is a favourite subject of futurologists. Yet, the key to the feasibility of the proposed systems is their very low but constant speed.

The goods would be transported via electric motors at low speeds of under 35 kilometres per hour along what would essentially be an automated subway line. Belgium, Germany and Holland have all explored or are exploring the possibility:

In Belgium, the University of Antwerp designed and proposed an underground logistic system that would transport large 40-ft containers from the newly built container dock in the harbour to an existing marshalling yard and a planned inland navigation hub on the other bank of the river…
In Germany, the Ruhr University of Bochum is working on a rather different concept, called the CargoCap project. The German system is designed for much smaller loads and makes use of unmanned electric vehicles on rails that travel through pipelines with a diameter of only 1.6 metres. Each vehicle, called a ‘Cap’, is designed for the transportation of two European standard pallets…

The German system resembles research that was conducted in Holland almost ten years ago. The Dutch then investigated the possibility of an underground logistic network that spanned the whole country…with one hub for every 1,000 to 5,000 homes, which boiled down to a maximum walking distance of 750 meters to pick up goods…

I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right: the biggest problem will be the initial cost. The proposed Dutch network would have cost 60 billion Euros ten years ago. Which is why nothing more has been done on it. But the German and Belgian systems might actually come to fruition…and make a little more room on the roads.

And after all, it’s not as if something like this has never been done.

(Image: CargoCap.)

Heart monitors hacked

Paul Raven @ 13-03-2008

I don’t need to remind you that computers are everywhere - this is the intarwub, after all. But even I get a bit surprised at some of the specific places computers end up - I never knew that people are being implanted with heart monitor/defibrillators that can broadcast data about the patient’s condition back to their doctor. [image by CarbonNYC]

Having found that out, though, I’m not at all surprised to hear that researchers have found a security vulnerability that could potentially allow an attacker to compromise and deactivate the device and prevent it from delivering the heart-restarting shocks it is designed for.

Repeat after me - everything can and will be hacked.

On the subject of electric shocks to the body, you can choose to have them for fun as opposed to for your health; the grinders point out the arrival of the Mindwire V5 electroshock force-feedback device, which will interface with your games console and deliver a brisk jolt to your hands when you get PWNED. Pain is fun, kids!

"Mind-reading" machines beginning to appear

Edward Willett @ 12-03-2008

A neckband that picks up nerve signals and translates them into speech has been demonstrated for the first time. (Via NewScientistTech.)

With training, a user can send nerve signals to their vocal cords without making a sound that the neckband picks up and relays wirelessly to a computer, which then converts them into words spoken by a voice synthesizer.

This same device has been used to let people control wheelchairs using their thoughts.

Currently the system, called Audeo, can only recognize a limited set of about 150 words and phrases, but by the end of the year there’s supposed to be an improved version without a vocabulary limit. Although it will be slower–it’s based on phonemes, not whole words–it will allow people to say whatever they want, and should be a boon to people who have lost the ability to speak due to disease or injury.

It’s not the only “mind-reading” technology that’s been in the news recently, either. Researchers at the University of California have developed a system that uses functional MRI data to decode information from the visual cortex. Using it, the scientists were able to figure out which of more than 100 previously unseen photographs subjects were looking at.

What lies at the end of that road? Possibly the ability to access dreams and memories–assuming the way the brain processes dreams is analogous to visual stimuli.

And then there’s the “mind-reading” car that monitors a driver’s brain activity and reduces the amount of information displayed on the dash during stressful periods. In tests, the system has speeded up driver’s reactions by as much as 100 milliseconds–equivalent to reducing braking distance by nearly three metres at 100 kilometres per hour.

The phrase “I know what you’re thinking” has thus far only been addressed by one human to another, and only in a metaphorical sense.

Someday soon, our machines could make it literal.

(Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

Asimov’s Three Laws of Weigh-Ins

Edward Willett @ 04-03-2008

Isaac Asimov’s robot stories were based around his famous Three Laws of Robotics, the first of which states that a robot may not injure a human being.

Asimov got lots of stories out of the many unanticipated behaviours his three laws might provoke in robots under various scenarios. His robots, though, were high-tech sentient creatures with “positronic brains.” I don’t think he ever contemplated applying his laws to everyday household products.

Designer Alice Wang has, though, and regarding Asimov’s First Law, wonders, “Are there existing domestic objects that already break this law?”, and comes up with a surprising answer–bathroom scales:

Scales, although don’t perform physical harm, have been subtly damaging us psychologically. Should objects like these exist in a complex society like ours where people are more emotionally fragile?

She has therefore designed three scales that might reduce the emotional harm caused by the mean old scale. The first, called white lies, allows the person being weighed to lie to him or herself: the further back you stand on it, the lighter you become. “The user can gradually move closer and closer to reality,” she notes. (Via Gizmodo.)

The second, called half-truth, can only be read by a person who is not on the scale: its readout is at the front edge, perpendicular to the floor. “Suitable for cohabiting partners,” notes Wang.

Finally, there’s open secrets, which doesn’t show you your weight at all: it sends a text message to a specified mobile phone, instead. The recipient of the message can then decide whether to share your weight with you immediately, the next time you meet–or not at all. “Suitable for pre-cohabiting couples,” says Wang.

Up next: the Heinleinian Starship Troopers scale, which will only consent to weigh you if you first serve two years in the military.

(Photo: Alice Wang.)

Cyber Goggles - wearable memory aid

Paul Raven @ 04-03-2008

More Japanese cyber-technology! These Cyber Goggles have been developed at the University of Tokyo; they record video footage of everyday objects, run them through an object recognition routine and file them away in a database. End result - a searchable visual log of where you last saw something, suggested as an ideal aid to the elderly whose memories aren’t so sharp as they once were. [image from Pink Tentacle article]

Sure, they look a little clunky right now, but that’s just a prototype - size and bulk won’t be a problem by the time they get these things to production.

The real problem, as pointed out in the comments, is how to make sure the forgetful user doesn’t forget where they left their Cyber Goggles …

"Silicon womb" trials to begin in UK

Paul Raven @ 28-02-2008

No, it’s not a reproductive upgrade for your uber-1337 gaming PC. Instead, it’s a way of increasing the odds of success for in-vitro fertilization:

“The new device allows embryos created in the lab to be incubated inside a perforated silicon container inserted into a woman’s own womb. After a few days, the capsule is recovered and some embryos are selected for implantation in the womb.

Embryos incubated in the lab must have their growth medium changed every few hours to provide new nutrients and get rid of waste. The new device provides a more natural environment.”

So, while technology is an adjunct to biology in matters reproductive, the body still knows best. I wonder if we’ll ever be able to simulate biological processes that are effectively identical to the real thing ? Perhaps some new form of Sir Arthur C Clarke’s aphorism comes into effect - “any sufficiently advanced biotechnology is indistinguishable from life” … [image by aturkus]

Mice? Where we’re going, we don’t need mice.

Jeremy Eades @ 27-02-2008

I don’t know about you, but I’ve adapted well to the standard keyboard/mouse computer interface. I started as a child with DOS and Win 3.1. Touch-typing on various-languages’ keyboards are no problem and my twitch response works well in Team Fortress 2.

Unfortunately, this a

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Trucks are noisy, smelly, intimidating if you’re in a small car, and just generally a nuisance. So why not get rid of them? Transport your goods instead via automated subterranean networks. (Via KurzweilAI.net.) Sound a little kooky? Maybe, but:

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Trucks are noisy, smelly, intimidating if you’re in a small car, and just generally a nuisance. So why not get rid of them? Transport your goods instead via automated subterranean networks. (Via KurzweilAI.net.)
Sound a little kooky? Maybe, but: