714 metal balls cascade, seemingly floating unaided midair in BMW’s kinetic sculpture. The matrix of spheres undulates in organic patterns, coming to rest in the shapes of classic and modern BMW designs. Each ball is raised and lowered independently by near invisible strings, enabling them to take on any form. This piece is one of 125 exhibits on display at their museum in Munich.
Website here
Explay is specialized in projectors that are small enough to fit in a pocket but that can project an image that is 20 times their size. The current product is a matchbox size solution that can project images as big as 30”. One of the secret behind this prowess is the use of uber-small light sources such as lasers and LED lights.
There are no details on the actual resolution or prices at the moment.
Researchers have already developed remote control systems for rats, pigeons and even sharks. The motivation is simple: why labour for years to build robots that imitate the ways animals move when you can just plug into living creatures and hijack systems already optimised by millions of years of evolution? “There’s a long history of trying to develop micro-robots that could be sent out as autonomous devices, but I think many engineers have realised that they can’t improve on Mother Nature,” says insect neurobiologist John Hildebrand at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Furthermore, animals’ sensory abilities far outstrip the vast majority of artificial sensors. Sharks, moths and rats, for example, have amazing olfactory systems that allow them to detect the faintest traces of chemicals. And if you can hide your control system within your cyborg’s body, it would be virtually indistinguishable from its unadulterated kin - the perfect spy.
José Delgado at Yale University created the first cyborg animal in the 1950s. Delgado discovered where to insert electrodes in the brains of several species, including bulls, to acquire crude control of their movement. In one dramatic demonstration in 1963, he stood in a bullring in Córdoba, Spain, as one of his cyborg bulls charged at him. With just seconds between him and a good goring, Delgado flicked a switch and the bull skidded to a halt.
see article here
This is no ordinary robot control system - a plain old microchip connected to a circuit board. Instead, the controller nestles inside a small pot containing a pink broth of nutrients and antibiotics. Inside that pot, some 300,000 rat neurons have made - and continue to make - connections with each other.
As they do so, the disembodied neurons are communicating, sending electrical signals to one another just as they do in a living creature. We know this because the network of neurons is connected at the base of the pot to 80 electrodes, and the voltages sparked by the neurons are displayed on a computer screen.
It’s these spontaneous electrical patterns that researchers at the University of Reading in the UK want to harness to control a robot. If they can do so reliably, by stimulating the neurons with signals from sensors on the robot and using the neurons’ response to get the robots to respond, they hope to gain insights into how brains function. Such insights might help in the treatment of conditions like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease and epilepsy.
Ambient Experience by Philips focuses on the values and needs of both patients and medical staff, addressing the total experience flow. They integrate architecture and technology (e.g. lighting, sound, vision, RFID) to create spaces that the patient can personalize, wrapping the patient in a relaxing ambience. This puts patients at ease and so it helps speed up procedures.
Demo video of new conceptual game ‘levelHead’ by Julian Oliver.
This is an actual game-prototype using techniques and tools from a well-known branch of computer vision called Augmented Reality.
Using tilt motions, the player moves a character through rooms that appear inside one of several cubes on a table. Each room is logically connected by a series of doors, though some doors lead nowhere (they are traps).
The player has 2 minutes to find the exit of each cube, leading the character into the entrance of the next..
Work is also being done to use invisible markers such that the cube itself appears entirely white to the naked eye.
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Aurora sets out to define a plausible vision of how technology, the browser, and the Web might evolve in the future by depicting that experience in a variety of real-world contexts.
A single lamp represented in 3 “pixelisations”, from high to low resolution designed by Guillaume Delvigne.
Spatial Robots, created by Miles Kemp in 2007, is a website dedicated to cataloging, discussing and promoting interactive spatial systems, user interfaces and emerging technology in architecture.
