Game Strap concept keeps commuters entertained on the way home

Taking the train home from work is usually a rather boring affair, but designer Jiang Qian has come up with an idea that could make the commute a bit more entertaining while maintaining safety. Dubbed the Game Strap, it essentially transforms the handles that people hold on to while riding the train into a gaming platform.

Sure there is the option of playing a handheld console like the Nintendo 3DS or the PlayStation Portable, but unfortunately that usually leaves you with both hands occupied which could prove dangerous as you might lose you balance when the train starts/stops. By implementing a gaming platform into these handles, Jiang Qian ensures that commuters will be entertained during the ride home while staying safe.

It will feature a small display which will be activated when the handle or strap has been grasped. Buttons are integrated into the sides of the handle allowing users access to it via their thumbs while still maintaining a grip on the handle. So far games like shooting, pinball, tetris and freekick have been suggested as quick and simple games that passengers could play during the commute. It’s a pretty decent idea but unfortunately it appears to remain a concept for now.

ITRI develops re-writable, bendy, and electricity-free e-paper

Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) has developed a highly flexible electronic paper that's both re-writable and re-usable, and like the Boogie Board electronic memo pads, the technology doesn't need electricity to retain the screen image. The institute is currently in licensing talks with manufacturers at home and in the U.S., and has taken first prize in the Materials and Basic Science and Technology category of the Wall Street Journal's Technology Innovation Awards.

The nonprofit research and development institute describes its i2R e-Paper technology as a flexible cholesteric liquid crystal panel, and is so named because it has a similar structure to biological cholesterol molecules. The reflective display technology uses ambient light sources to display 16 gray level images, so doesn't require the kind of backlighting used in LCD screens. The displayed 300 dpi resolution text and images are transferred and stored using heat - in a similar way to an old-style thermal fax machine.

A thermal printer fitted with a thermal head requiring 86°C (186.8°F) in temperature and just 37W of power heats the liquid-crystal layer, turning molecules light or dark. Running an already printed i2R e-Paper sheet through such a printer wipes the existing content and replaces it with something else. ITRI estimates that its bendable, thin plastic development - which can be produced in a number of different sizes - is re-writable up to 260 times before needing to be replaced, although technicians are continually building on this achievement and have managed rewrites hundreds of times beyond the current limit.

Once the end of its useful life is reached, the plastic PET substrate, high molecular liquid crystal material, nano pigment absorption layer material and silver electrode are all recyclable.

The institute says that water solvent marker pens can be used to annotate the published content and the notes just wash off after use, like a roll-updigital white board. Red, green and blue colors can be produced by adding different pitch spherical composite ion-exchangers during the process, making the i2R e-Paper useful for future application in color e-books, magazines and newspapers.

ITRI sees the technology being able to immediately replace paper for short-lived items like advertising banners, corporate visitor ID badges, transit passes, and museum or parking lot tickets.

"It's a fact that a significant portion of daily office printed papers will be discarded in days or weeks after use," said Dr. Janglin Chen, general director of ITRI's Display Technology Center. "i2R e-Paper's re-cycle and re-use capabilities, positive effects on the environment and low cost of production are paving the way for mass acceptance of green e-paper technologies."

The i2R e-Paper technology has already been licensed to Taiwan's ChangChun Plastics, which plans to begin trial mass production next year. It's also led to ITRI emerging victorious in both the Wall Street Journal's Technology Innovation Awards (for the third year in a row - last year taking Gold for its FlexUPD paper-thin, flexible AMOLED display technology) and the R&D 100 Awards.

Full-duplex technology could double wireless capacity with no new towers

Earlier this year, Stanford University researchers created a full-duplex radio that allowed wireless signals to be sent and received simultaneously, thereby doubling the speed of existing networks. Using the same approach, researchers at Rice University have now developed similar full-duplex technology that would effectively double the throughput on mobile networks without the addition of any extra towers.

Currently, mobile phones use two different frequencies to provide two-way communications - one to send transmissions and another to receive. This is because the strength of the transmission drowns out any incoming signal on the same frequency. While it was long thought impossible to overcome this problem, in 2010 Ashutosh Sabharwal, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice, and colleagues Melissa Duarte and Chris Dick, published a paper showing that full-duplex was possible.

The trick lay in canceling out the transmitted signal at the source so an incoming signal on the same frequency could still be heard. Like the Stanford approach, the technology developed by the Rice researchers achieves this by employing an extra antenna at the source.

"We send two signals such that they cancel each other at the receiving antenna - the device ears," Sabharwal said. "The canceling effect is purely local, so the other node can still hear what we're sending."

Many modern wireless communications standards, including 802.11n, 4G, LTE, WiMAX and HSPA+, use multiple antennas at both the transmitter and receiver to improve communications performance. This is called multiple-input and multiple-output, or MIMO, and this provided the researchers with a way to implement their full-duplex technology that is low cost and wouldn't require complex new radio hardware.

"Our solution requires minimal new hardware, both for mobile devices and for networks, which is why we've attracted the attention of just about every wireless company in the world," said Sabharwal. "The bigger change will be developing new wireless standards for full-duplex. I expect people may start seeing this when carriers upgrade to 4.5G or 5G networks in just a few years."

The full-duplex technology is set to be rolled into Rice's "wireless open-access research platform," or WARP. This is a collection of programmable processors, transmitters and other gadgets that make it possible for wireless researchers to test new ideas without building new hardware for each test. Stanford researchers actually used WARP in developing their full-duplex technology and Sabharwal says that adding full-duplex to WARP will allow other researchers to start innovating on top if Rice's breakthrough.

"There are groups that are already using WARP and our open-source software to compete with us," he said. "This is great because our vision for the WARP project is to enable never-before-possible research and to allow anyone to innovate freely with minimal startup effort."

The Rice University team has already gone one step further by achieving asynchronous full-duplex, which means one node can start receiving a signal when it's in the middle of transmitting. Sabharwal says his team is the first to demonstrate this technology, which would allow mobile carriers to further maximize traffic on their networks.

New type of light-emitting material could rival existing OLEDs

Organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) are a technology that shows great promise, as they are thinner, lighter, and less expensive to manufacture than their non-organic LED counterparts. Despite their name, however, they are not fully organic, as small amounts of precious metals are required to make them glow. A completely organic and even cheaper alternative could be on its way, though ... researchers from the University of Michigan have created metal-free organic crystals that shine with phosphorescence – until now, only non- or semi-organic compounds have displayed this property.

The crystals – or phosphors – glow white in visible light, while radiating blue, green, yellow and orange in ultraviolet light. Different colors can be obtained by altering their chemical composition.

The light itself comes from molecules of oxygen and carbon called “aromatic carbonyls.” Typically, they only produce a weak phosphorescence, and only under special conditions such as very low temperatures. In the U Michigan material, however, the carbonyls bond with halogens in the crystal, packing the molecules tightly. This suppresses vibration, minimizing energy lost as heat, and maximizing energy that produces phosphorescence under practical conditions. The result is a brightness comparable to that of OLEDs, which are themselves brighter than LEDs.

“This is in the beginning stage, but we expect that it will not be long before our simple materials will be available commercially for device applications,” said lead researcher Jinsang Kim. “We expect they will bring a big change in the LED and solid-state lighting industries because our compounds are very cheap and easy to synthesize and tune the chemical structure to achieve different colors and properties.”

The university is currently looking into patenting the technology, and seeking partners for commercialization.

The research was recently published in the journal Nature Chemistry.

IBM's annual list of five innovations set to change our lives in the next five years

IBM has announced its fifth annual Next Five in Five – a list of five technologies that the company believes “have the potential to change the way people work, live and play over the next five years.” While there are no flying cars or robot servants on the list, there are holographic friends, air-powered batteries, personal environmental sensors, customized commutes and building-heating computers.

3D telepresence

It may not be a flying car, but it’s definitely one we’ve seen in sci-fi movies before – the ability to converse with a life-size holographic image of another person in real time. The futurists at IBM point to recent advances in 3D cameras and movies, predicting that holography chat (aka 3D telepresence) can’t be all that far behind. Already, the University of Arizona has unveiled a system that can transmit holographic images in near-real-time.
It is also predicted that 3D visualization could be applied to data, allowing researchers to “step inside” software programs (wasn’t that just in a movie?), computer models, or pretty much anything else that is limited by a simple 2D screen. IBM compares it to the way in which the Earth appears undistorted when we experience it first-hand in three dimensions, yet it appears pinched at the top and bottom when we see it on a two-dimensional world map.

Air-powered or non-existent batteries

Lithium-air batteries are already in the works, and IBM predicts that batteries “that use the air we breath to react with energy-dense metal” will result in smaller, lighter rechargeable batteries that last ten times longer than today’s lithium-ion variety. While such batteries could be used in everything from cars to home appliances, it is also suggested that small items such as mobile phones might not need batteries at all. IBM is trying to reduce the amount power required for such devices to less than 0.5 volts per transistor. At those rates, it is claimed, they could be powered via “energy scavenging” – like already-existing kinetic wrist watches that get their power from the user’s arm movements, or experimental piezoelectric devices.

Personal sensors creating “citizen scientists”

As it currently stands, most scientific data must be gathered by scientists, who have to go out in the field and set up sensors or other data recording devices. Within five years, however, a lot of that data could be gathered and transmitted by sensors in our phones, cars, wallets, computers, or just about anything else that is subjected to the real world. Such sensors could be used to create massive data sets used for everything from fighting global warming to tracking invasive species. IBM also sees custom scientific smartphone apps playing a part in “citizen science,” and has already launched an app called Creek Watch, that allows us regular folks to update the local water authority on creek conditions.

Customized commutes

Invaluable as Mapquest and other online mapping services have become to many of us, apparently it’s just the tip of the iceberg. In the not-so-distant future, says IBM, sensors and other data sources (such as the aforementioned citizen scientists, perhaps?) will provide a continuous stream of information on traffic conditions, road construction, public transit schedules, and other factors that could affect your commute. When you inquire about the quickest way of getting from A to B, computer systems will do more than simply consulting a map – they will also take into account all the variables unique to that day and time, combine them with mathematical models and predictive analytics technologies, and advise a route accordingly. It is also possible that, utilizing such data, traffic management systems could learn traffic patterns, and self-adjust themselves to minimize congestion.

Harvesting computer heat

It is estimated that half of the energy consumed by data centers goes toward cooling computer processors, with most of the removed hot air simply being blown into the atmosphere. Instead, IBM sees that heat being captured to warm the air in other areas of the building, to heat water, or to be converted into electricity. The company has already developed an on-chip water-cooling system for computer clusters, which is being demonstrated on the Swiss Aquasar supercomputer. It utilizes a network of microfluidic capillaries inside a heat sink, attached to the surface of each chip. Water flows within a few microns of the semiconductor material, picks up heat from it, then pipes the warm water to a heat exchanger – from there, the cooled water returns to the computers, within a closed loop system.
As with last year’s list, given that all of these technologies are already in experimental use, it’s a pretty good bet that they will indeed one day find their way our lives. Whether that day is within the next five years, however, is another question.

'Intelligent clothing' could stop boats when fishermen fall overboard

Working as a commercial fisherman is consistently ranked as one of the world’s most dangerous jobs. There are numerous ways in which they can end up in the water, with their shipmates (if they even have any) not noticing until it’s too late. That, or their boat can simply sink. In any case, fishermen need all the help they can get when it comes to safety, so a 14-group research consortium is developing “intelligent clothing” for them to wear at sea.
The three-year, 4 million Euro (approx. US$5,225,000) Safe@Sea project is being coordinated by Norway’s SINTEF research group, with Norwegian textile manufacturer Helly Hansen Pro as project manager. Other groups taking part in the project come from Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Belgium, Spain, Italy and the UK.
European fishermen have already expressed their needs to Safe@Sea, and the group is now working on addressing them. One of the most noteworthy features of the workwear is a proposed built-in wireless “dead man’s handle.” This will detect when its wearer has fallen overboard, and automatically kill the boat’s engine and activate a locator beacon – an essential feature for fishermen who work alone. Such devices are already available, although they have to be manually attached to clothing, so they could be forgotten or just not used.
Once in the water, the clothing could double as a flotation device. This could either be through solid slabs of buoyant materials, or via “lungs” that automatically inflate when immersed.
Of course, it will all count for nothing if nobody wants to wear the stuff. To that end, the researchers are also working on making it impervious to staining from fish blood and guts, while at the same time trying to keep it soft and breathable. They are also looking into the possibility of self-repairing material that glues up small rips in itself, to make sure it remains watertight.
At this point it’s hard to say how much of the proposed technology will make it into the final product, but the research itself is still valuable. “If we don’t manage to develop such textiles in the course of this three-year project, we can at least hope to create a basis for other materials that will be of value in the future,” said SINTEF’s project coordinator Hilde Færevik.