Mini Camera Gets A Big Brain

Cameras are mounted everywhere in sports these days. During the Olympics we had underwater cams for swimmers and athlete's-eye views for bikes. Now there's a camera that could be mounted on a helmet to record not just the athlete's view but her heart rate, acceleration and loction, too.

Called the INCA, the camera has a processor as powerful as any PC, which allows a lot of functionality crammed into a space less than  three inches on a side. The INCA was designed by the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS.

Gloves Turn Gestures Into Speech

Most hearing people can't understand sign language. A team of students from  the Ukraine built a set of electronic gloves to help bridge that gap. A set of sensors in these gloves, including an accelerometer, compass,  gyroscope and flex sensors in the fingers, translate movement into  signals that a computer converts into speech.

The person wearing the gloves draws a shape in the air. That information is transmitted them via Bluetooth to a  smartphone, which matches the shape up against a set stored in memory. A match produces a sound. For example, waving one's hands in  one pattern produces "nice to meet you" and another pattern produces  "system really works."

Charge Your Phone With Bacteria-Eating Viruses

Oh how I love piezoeletric materials, the kind that generate electricity when squeezed. Unfortuantely, the best substances that exhibit that characteristic are toxic and hard to work with. So, a group at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is developing a greener alternative that uses a bacteria-eating virus instead.

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The piezoelectric effect has the potential for paper-thin generators that we power with human movements. Unfortunately, the best-performing piezoelectric materials contain lead, a no-no for consumer electronics, as the Swiss National Science Foundation points out. The Berkeley Lab group, led by faculty scientist and U.C. Berkeley associate professor of bioengineering Seung-Wuk Lee, turned to the M13 bacteriophage.

This bacteriophage is a common virus harmless to humans that attacks bacteria. Bioengineers really like it because the phage replicates quickly and can be genetically engineered easily. Turns out that it's also piezoelectric. To create their generator, the Berkeley Lab scientists engineered the phage to boost its electrical output when squeezed and then stacked thin films containing single layers of the virus.

In the lab, the bacteria-based generator successfully converted the force of a finger tap into an electrical charge. They found that it can produce up to 6 nanoamps of current and 400 millivolts of potential, according to their published research, which is about a quarter of a AAA battery's voltage. That's also enough to be used to operate a small liquid-crystal display.

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The group first published their results in Nature Nanotechnology (abstract) last May, but for some weird reason the news was dormant since then. Hat tip to Inhabitat's Timon Singh for shining a light on the development.

In their Nature paper, the scientists write that harmless virus-based piezoelectric materials potentially "offer a simple and environmentally friendly approach to piezoelectric energy generation." I can't wait until they scale it up. Imagine all that frantic keyboard tapping actually charging your laptop

Glasses-Free 3-D Movie Theaters Coming Soon

In South Korea, a team of investigators thinks they have a way to show 3-D movies without glasses in commercial theaters.
3-D televisions are available now, and consumer electronics companies have  been showing off some glasses-free technologies (as on the Nintendo  3DS). But generally, theaters use a two-projector polarized light  system.

 

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Each projector displays an image, but the images are offset slightly. The  projectors, meanwhile, are sending out light that is polarized. That  means that at certain angles half the light is absorbed.

It's possible  to see this effect with sunglasses; two polarized lenses. Put one in  front of the other and start rotating it, and it's not possible to see  through them when one is perpendicular to the other. In movie theaters,  the 3-D glasses are polarized so that each eye only picks up one image  at a time, giving the illusion of depth. Two projectors, though, can be  cumbersome and expensive.
There are single projection methods, but those require even more moving  parts, involving physical barriers akin to venetian blinds between the  screen and the viewer. Called the parallax barrier method, the barriers  limit which image the eye sees, creating a 3-D illusion.
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To fix this, the South Korean team, led by Byoungho Lee, professor at the  School of Electrical Engineering at Seoul National University, used  polarizers to stop the passage of light after it reflects off the screen rather than doing so at the projector.

The polarizer is a coating  called called quarter-wave retarding film. It acts like the polarizers  in two-projector systems, except instead of relying on two images, it  splits up the single one coming off the screen to the eye. Basically, it moves the 3-D glasses to the screen, so the audience no longer has to  wear them.
It will be a while before theaters use this, but it's been shown to work  in at least two types of displays, and offers a path to cutting the  costs (and the admission prices) of 3D movies.

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