Technology – Page 17

PossessedHand To Help Play Any String Instrument Like An Expert

June 28, 2011 by Raj Agrawal 1 Comment

This involves your ‘PossessedHand’ picking the right notes. Sounds creepy, doesn’t it? Apparently, this device works exactly the way it sounds.

A non-invasive (external to the physical body) device, named PossessedHand, is under works that takes control of the user’s hand by electrically simulating the muscles in the forearm to move the user’s fingers. A belt is worn around the user’s forearm, which is further connected to a controlling device. This device is intended to help budding musicians play the right notes with plucking the right strings.

An illustration of PossessedHand’s working mechanism

Possessedhand is being jointly developed by the University of Tokyo, Japan, and Sony Computer Science Laboratories. For now, it’s PossessedHand is only capable of instructing and training the user’s fingers to perform the right finger movements rather than actually plucking them.

Building Electronics Out Of ‘Paper And Fabrics’

June 10, 2011 by Raj Agrawal Leave a Comment

Nano technology will play the lead. Researchers at the North Carolina State University are working on ways to apply nano-coatings to cheap, flexible materials like textiles which have conventionally been applied and confined to inorganic materials like silicon, used for the construction of microelectronics.

conductive nanocoatings — Conductive nanocoatings

It is intended to improve the cost efficiency and flexibility of the electronic devices, well suited for application in health monitoring mechanisms. This was justified by the statements of Dr. Jesse Jur, assistant professor of textile engineering, chemistry and science, and lead author of a paper describing the research.

We’re not expecting to make complex transistors with cotton, but there are simple electronic devices that could benefit by using the lightweight flexibility that some textile materials provide,” Jur explains.

Research like this has potential health and monitoring applications since we could potentially create a uniform with cloth sensors embedded in the actual material that could track heart rate, body temperature, movement and more in real time. To do this now, you would need to stick a bunch of wires throughout the fabric – which would make it bulky and uncomfortable.

The research has been recently published in the Advanced Functional Materials issue and is funded by the Department of energy and the Nonwovens Cooperative Research Center.

Flashing Electronic Ink Displays On “Clothes”

June 7, 2011 by Raj Agrawal 1 Comment

It won’t be long enough when we begin seeing T-shirt apparel or even tyvex cloths enclosing our postal envelopes, being fully embedded with animated messages and icons. This upcoming technology is pushing the capabilities of the existing electronic inks to a bright new level.

We’ve witnessed the invasion of Electronic readers packed in super thin plastic case and even proper e-papers that can easily store and display written content at our convenience, consider Amazon’s Kindle which is powered by E-Ink’s ‘virtual ink’ technology.

Now, this concept of virtual ink has been taken a step ahead to place them onto cloths, and we know that cloths can easily be crumpled and folded owing to it’s physical nature. So let’s say, sometime in the future, we may actually see status updates from Twitter and Facebook on our apparel, or worse, advertisements! As pointed out by FastCompany.

Watch the video demonstrations of how the display works when embedded onto cloths, and yes, it works perfectly even with the crumpling and folding efforts!

These screens are powered by SURF which defines a Segmented, Ultra-thin, Rugged and Flexible display. An interesting aspect of this futuristic display is that the screens are easily viewable in open light as opposed to many flat display ones, allowing the content to be easily readable even in bright sunlight. This is possible because of a reason that E-Ink products display reflected light just as a regular paper does.

E-Ink is ready with this technology and could commercialize their electronic ink displays on such cloths anytime soon. They just need an interested party who may fund the production overheads.