Tag Archives: technology

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Book your neural interface installation now: biodegradable implant circuits

A gentleman with neural interface jacksHere’s an update for those of you who, like me, eagerly await the availability of your cyberpunk implant suite – experiments with using silk as a substrate for miniaturised electronic circuits show that they can integrate with animal body tissue without any adverse effects or biological rejection. [via NextBigFuture; image by Automatomato] Which means we can not only make better neural interfaces, but aesthetic gadgets like LED ‘tattoos’ to live under our skin:

To make the devices, silicon transistors about one millimeter long and 250 nanometers thick are collected on a stamp and then transferred to the surface of a thin film of silk. The silk holds each device in place, even after the array is implanted in an animal and wetted with saline, causing it to conform to the tissue surface. In a paper published in the journal Applied Physics Letters, the researchers report that these devices can be implanted in animals with no adverse effects. And the performance of the transistors on silk inside the body doesn’t suffer.

[…]

The biocompatibility of silicon is not as well established as that of silk, though all studies so far have shown the material to be safe. It seems to depend on the size and shape of the silicon pieces, so the group is working to minimize them. These devices also require electrical connections of gold and titanium, which are biocompatible but not biodegradable. Rogers is developing biodegradable electrical contacts so that all that would remain is the silicon.

The group is currently designing electrodes built on silk as interfaces for the nervous system. Electrodes built on silk could, Litt says, integrate much better with biological tissues than existing electrodes, which either pierce the tissue or sit on top of it. The electrodes might be wrapped around individual peripheral nerves to help control prostheses. Arrays of silk electrodes for applications such as deep-brain stimulation, which is used to control Parkinson’s symptoms, could conform to the brain’s crevices to reach otherwise inaccessible regions. “It would be nice to see the sophistication of devices start to catch up with the sophistication of our basic science, and this technology could really close that gap,” says Litt.

In other words, we’ve pretty much got the hardware capability to interface machines and computers with our brains and nervous systems, what with these silk circuits for basic actuators and the previously-mentioned optogenetic technologies for deep duplex information channels. Now all we need to do is reverse-engineer the nervous system’s protocols and write a programming manual for the human brain… simple, right?

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The Uncanny Valley kicks you in the ass: freaky-weird disembodied robolegs

A brief scan of the intertubes shows that I’m pretty much the last person to see this, but just in case you haven’t seen it either here’s footage of Petman, a walking robot prototype from Boston Dynamics [via grinding.be, and loads of other places]:

That’s just… hell, I don’t know what it is, I don’t have a word for it. Creepy, awesome, strangely intimidating? All of the above? Anyway, Boston Dynamics (whose name makes me feel like I should be in an episode of Fringe) are the people who brought you BigDog, the strangely pathetic headless canine pack-mule robot which has been bouncing in and out of the geek quarter of the blogosphere since around 2006. According to Technology Review, Petman will be used for research into protective clothing for military personnel, hence its inbuilt ability to sweat in response to environmental changes.

Yeah, I know what you’re thinking; we don’t even have robots smart enough to fetch our breakfast yet, but already they’ve designed one with the ability to sweat. I can’t help but feel there’s something deeply and disappointingly wrong with this development curve.

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Head-mounted augmented reality computers: the budget hack versus the bespoke device

One of the more interesting things about the hardware hacking scene is comparing the results of different methodologies. Some folk prefer to develop gadgets that are as close to production-grade products as possible, while others are more focussed on the low-budget proof-of-concept kludge… and this week has seen examples of both approaches as applied to augmented reality visor-computers.

First up, the craftsman approach. Pascal Brisset was frustrated with wearable computer cooncepts that relied on some sort of back- or belt-mounted processor unit to drive the headset, so he decided to build the whole system onto an off-the-shelf visor VDU [via Hack A Day]. As you can see, the results are pretty compact:

Pascal Brisset's wxhmd wearable computer

It runs on Linux, too, but that probably went without saying. Of course, it’s just a proof-of-concept rather than something that Brisset could start building for consumers. As he states in his documentation disclaimers:

The systems draws 1 A with no power optimizations. This is acceptable since nobody would want to spend more than a few minutes with two pulsed microwave RF transmitters, an overheating lithium battery and eye-straining optics strapped to their forehead anyway.

Quite.

Meanwhile, down at the other end of the brain-farm, Andrew Lim built himself a backyard VR helmet using nothing more than an HTC Magic handset and a few dollars worth of other gubbins [also via Hack A Day]. It’s quite obviously a much more lo-fi affair than Brisset’s contraption:

It does have a certain goofy charm, doesn’t it? But again, hardly the sort of thing you’d try selling for any practical purpose whatsoever – the point being proven here is that augmented reality (and other similar emerging technologies) are not necessarily the exclusive domain of big corporations or slick new start-ups; where there’s a will (and some ingenuity), there’s a way. Or, as I often end up saying here, Everything Can (And Will) Be Hacked.

Personally, I find that reassuring, because the battle for direct access to our retinas is just starting to heat up. The big tech corporations can see there’s money to be made with wearable tech in the very near future, and they’re preparing to roll out the hardware as soon as next year (if press releases are to be trusted, which they quite possibly aren’t)… and as Jan Chipchase pointed out, the way they’ll make the stuff affordable to you is by co-opting with companies who’re desperate for the direct pipeline to your brainmeat that said hardware will provide. They need to ride that augmented reality hype curve, after all – at least until it reaches the trough of disillusionment.

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Cyberstyle: military-spec wrist-mounted keyboard

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Because I’ve had a busy weekend (and because I’m the ed-in-chief, and because I can), I’m going to kick the week off with a blatant no-context-necessary tech-geek “I want one of those!” post. No, it’s not a Barnes & Noble Nook (though if anyone would like to send me one of those, I promise to be extremely grateful!) – it’s the iKey AK-39 wrist-mounted keyboard, as flagged up at grinding.be last week.

iKey AK-39 wrist-mounted keyboard

Thinking about it, I’m kinda dating myself by admitting to that lust; a wrist-mounted keyboard is very much a cyberpunk1.0 fetish, a desire from someone who grew up around computers as clunky chunky beige boxes with frustrating limits on functionality, portability and availability. In less than half a decade, the physical keyboard will probably be a complete anachronism for any device with sufficient gee-whiz to be both desirable and useful. I know this intellectually, but kids growing up now know it instinctively. This isn’t your father’s Kansas, Toto. Insert further mangled “culture shock is no longer something that happens to other people now that I’m in my thirties” aphorisms here.

Another (shorter) changing-fashions point – isn’t it high time that the fad for branding products or businesses by grafting a lower-case ‘i’ onto the start of another word went somewhere and died quietly?

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The B&N Nook – is it the ebook reader we’ve been waiting for?

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Barnes & Noble Nook ebook readerI don’t know for sure, but it’s certainly ticking a lot of my requirement boxes by comparison to the alternatives. Barnes & Noble have dropped a minor bombshell in the form of the Nook ebook reader, which is powered by Google’s Android operating system and open to a whole lot of everyday file formats that the competition don’t touch. Here are some highlights from the Ars Technica rundown:

In contrast to the Kindle’s physical keyboard (and Sony’s on-screen one), the Nook uses a color touchscreen for most of the navigation (it’s listed as a 3.5″ TFT-LCD); it’s laid out as a wide band immediately below the E-Ink screen. Various demos show that this can be used to access a series of settings through hierarchial menus, and it will display book covers, either from the B&N store or in your library, in full color. It’s not clear at this point whether it can also display an on-screen keyboard for note-taking and other text entry.

In other ways, the Nook is a bit of a throwback to the first version of the Kindle. It’s a bit thicker and heavier, but that enables B&N to include a removable battery and an SD card slot for additional storage—2GB is built in. It also comes with free access to a 3G cellular network (this one from AT&T), but one-ups Amazon by including WiFi, which will allow some of its features to operate during foreign travel. It can be connected to a computer or charged via a mini-USB port, and the device also has a speaker and headphone jack.

All of these features may explain why the battery is removable. B&N estimates that the device will run for about 10 days on a single charge if the various wireless options are shut down, but heavy use of the optional features may drain it in as little as two days.

So, the sort of thing you could take abroad and still access new content with. And who knows what sort of capabilities the hacker crowd will discover once they learn to root the OS and add their own applications? Some sort of basic web browser attached to the wi-fi connection doesn’t seem implausible. But the best is yet to come:

Some of these hardware choices may make it a compelling device, but the real differentiator is probably in the software. B&N turned to Google’s Android operating system to power the Nook, which may be why it supports so many file formats, including PDF, EPUB, eReader, MP3, and PNG, JPG, and GIF image formats.

Like the Kindle, the software will synchronize content among a variety of devices, including PCs and Macs, as well as Blackberries, iPhones, and iPod touches. But it also allows users to lend their purchased items to friends with linked accounts. So, for example, you can choose a book and send it to a friend via the touchscreen interface. Once sent, your friend has 14 days to read it (presumably, the work is inaccessible to you during that period).

Finally, someone has remembered that people like to lend books! I rather suspect there’ll be a lot of fiddly legal loopholes and DRM involved, but it’s a step in the right direction.

The snag-point for me (besides the fact that it doesn’t look like there’ll be a UK version particularly soon) is being tied to a specific retailer’s store, but that’s ameliorated a great deal by the ability to read PDFs and other standard formats – it means there are literally thousands of books and stories that you can read for free on the Nook. All you have to do is go fetch them from somewhere and load them on… and a rooted device with the aforementioned basic web capabilities could make that a simple procedure, too.

But the price-point and capabilities are (hopefully) a harbinger of things to come; I think we’re getting nearer to the tipping point that mp3 players went through a while back, when there’ll be a sudden wave of generic hardware that doesn’t tie the user to a particular content provider. Ideally you’d have the option to link to all the major ebook vendors as well as the ability to download free material from the web, and that’s plainly well within the bounds of technological possibility (although the vendors will resist calls to surrender their walled garden exclusivity, no doubt). Will the ebook market grow quickly enough to provide that pressure? I guess we’ll have to wait and see, but the protestations of those who say that ebooks will fail because they’ve always failed before are starting to sound a little shaky to me. [image ganked from The Guardian; contact for immediate takedown if required]

So, what do you think? Would you be interested in a B&N Nook? If not, why not? What features or capabilities is it missing?