When it comes to virtual reality, the challenge isn’t displaying convincing visuals — VR headset manufacturers have already figured that out. The real challenge is how to tickle our other senses, like smell, taste, and especially touch. To give people the ability to feel the fur of animals in VR, engineers have built this strange haptic device, called HairTouch, equipped with adjustable hair.
Just rub some string against a pencil lead and you too can have your own low-cost, wearable tension sensor.
Maker David Huang has shared a trick for creating a surprisingly capable tension sensor at practically zero cost — by rubbing some string over a pencil.
“Our goal is use the cheapest and the easiest way to make your own sensor for your project,” Huang explains by way of introduction. “The sensor we are making today is a tension sensor. A tension sensor will react to a pulling motion. The most common material we use for the tension sensor is conductive rubber, or weaved conductive rubber wire – but the problem is the conductive rubbers are very expensive, and they are also hard to get.”
This tiny LED magnet runs for five years on a single coin cell battery.
LEDs are extremely efficient sources of light. They can even be used with a coin cell battery, draining these cells after a few days or weeks. After finding an experiment that explored optimization of perceived brightness versus power consumption, BelgianEngineer came up with the InfiniLED, and now the InfiniLED v2, which can function for much longer.
Kevin Bates has been on a two-year quest to build smart glasses that are hacker and wallet friendly, and the Arduglasses are the result.
Google Glass will go down in history as the first pair of smart glasses to hit the consumer market and also one of the most infamous tech flops. They had some really impressive technology, but they were probably a bit ahead of their time when they first released in 2013. Privacy concerns combined with a high price tag ensured that they never really caught, but they did prove that the technology was feasible. Technically, you can still purchase an enterprise version of the Google Glass smart glasses, but nobody does. Kevin Bates has been on a quest to build smart glasses that were more hacker and wallet friendly, and the Arduglasses are the result.
[Integza] has worked hard over the last year, crafting a variety of types of rocket and jet engine, primarily using 3D printed parts. Due to the weaknesses of plastic, all of which conflict with the general material requirements for an engine that gets hot, he has had less thrust and more meltdowns than he would have liked. Undeterred, he presses on, now with a hybrid rocket aerospike design. The goal? Actually generating some thrust for once!
An AI research group has released a new video showcasing a new photorealism enhancement tool being applied to GTA 5 – and the results are stunning.As part of the Intel ISL research group’s Photorealism Enhancement project, the new machine learning tool helps make computer-generated images more realistic by analyzing each frame of the game animation and comparing that to real-life images before applying enhancements based on them. In a video demonstration, Intel ISL shows some regular gameplay of Grand Theft Auto 5 before switching over to its tool’s output, which analyzes the gameplay footage and uses machine learning to make it look more photorealistic.
Directly printed using water as the solvent, these eco-friendly thermoelectric generators are flexible and suitable for wearable use.
A team of researchers from Stanford University has published a paper detailing non-toxic, flexible energy-harvesting devices which they say could power future wearable electronics — thanks to carbon nanotube spaghetti.
“Carbon nanotubes are one-dimensional materials, known for good thermoelectric properties, which mean developing a voltage across them in a temperature gradient,” explains Professor Eric Pop of the material focused upon in the paper. “The challenge is that carbon nanotubes also have high thermal conductivity, meaning it’s difficult to maintain a thermal gradient across them, and they have been hard to assemble them into thermoelectric generators at low cost.”
Introducing the next iteration of the Ripple LoRa QWERTY Messenger project, now with ultra low power standby mode!
BOBbots can still accomplish a set of tasks, even without the aid of sensors, communication, and computation capabilities.
I love swarm bots of all types. Something so innocent about them. Researchers from Georgia Tech have developed a method that allows “simple” robots — those without sensors, onboard processing power, communication capabilities — to perform complex tasks by leveraging their physical characteristics, a trait they term “task embodiment.” Think of it like trying to control a child, which is hard enough, and then trying to control many of them at once, which is nearly impossible. The same can be said for trying to get swarms of robots to work collectively without complex programming and a ton of onboard sensors.
Those of us who’ve been around and using technology for a while remember the era of floppy disks. You know, they look like “save” icons, but they were real pieces of plastic with magnetic media inside that stored a trivially small amount of data. You might not use floppies anymore, but some industries are stuck with the technology of yesteryear—for example, airlines. British Airways recently retired its fleet of 747s, giving us a chance to see how its floppy-based software update system works. It’s a real blast from the past.
