In this exclusive preview of groundbreaking, unreleased technology, former Apple designer and Humane cofounder Imran Chaudhri envisions a future where AI enables our devices to "disappear." He gives a sneak peek of his company's new product -- shown for the first time ever on the TED stage -- and explains how it could change the way we interact with tech and the world around us. Witness a stunning vision of the next leap in device design.
Researchers pave way towards integration of 3-D holography into electronics like smart phones, computers and TVs, with development of nano-hologram 1,000 times thinner than a human hair.
An Australian-Chinese research team has created the world's thinnest hologram, paving the way towards the integration of 3D holography into everyday electronics like smart phones, computers and TVs.
Interactive 3D holograms are a staple of science fiction -- from Star Wars to Avatar -- but the challenge for scientists trying to turn them into reality is developing holograms that are thin enough to work with modern electronics.
Now a pioneering team led by RMIT University's Distinguished Professor Min Gu has designed a nano-hologram that is simple to make, can be seen without 3D goggles and is 1000 times thinner than a human hair.
"Conventional computer-generated holograms are too big for electronic devices but our ultrathin hologram overcomes those size barriers," Gu said. "Our nano-hologram is also fabricated using a simple and fast direct laser writing system, which makes our design suitable for large-scale uses and mass manufacture. "Integrating holography into everyday electronics would make screen size irrelevant -- a pop-up 3D hologram can display a wealth of data that doesn't neatly fit on a phone or watch.
"From medical diagnostics to education, data storage, defence and cyber security, 3D holography has the potential to transform a range of industries and this research brings that revolution one critical step closer." Conventional holograms modulate the phase of light to give the illusion of three-dimensional depth. But to generate enough phase shifts, those holograms need to be at the thickness of optical wavelengths.
The RMIT research team, working with the Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT), has broken this thickness limit with a 25 nanometre hologram based on a topological insulator material -- a novel quantum material that holds the low refractive index in the surface layer but the ultrahigh refractive index in the bulk. The topological insulator thin film acts as an intrinsic optical resonant cavity, which can enhance the phase shifts for holographic imaging.
Dr Zengyi Yue, who co-authored the paper with BIT's Gaolei Xue, said: "The next stage for this research will be developing a rigid thin film that could be laid onto an LCD screen to enable 3D holographic display. "This involves shrinking our nano-hologram's pixel size, making it at least 10 times smaller. "But beyond that, we are looking to create flexible and elastic thin films that could be used on a whole range of surfaces, opening up the horizons of holographic applications."
Our capacity to partner with biology to make useful things is limited by the tools that we can use to specify, design, prototype, test, and analyze natural or engineered biological systems. However, biology has typically been engaged as a "technology of last resort" in attempts to solve problems that other more mature technologies cannot. This lecture will examine some recent progress on virus genome redesign and hidden DNA messages from outer space, building living data storage, logic, and communication systems, and how simple but old and nearly forgotten engineering ideas are helping make biology easier to engineer.
The Matterhorn, which juts out a full kilometre above the surrounding Swiss Alps, dominates the local skyline and has challenged countless mountaineers since it was first scaled in 1865.
Now this iconic peak has been mapped in unprecedented detail by a fleet of autonomous, fixed-wing drones, flung into the sky from the summit by their makers. What's more, the entire process took just 6 hours.
The mapping, which was unveiled at the Drones and Aerial Robotics Conference in New York City last weekend, was carried out by unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) company SenseFly, and aerial photography company Pix4D.
Three eBee drones were launched from the top of the mountain, skimming their way down 100 metres from the face, capturing points just 20 centimetres apart. When they reached the bottom, a second team intercepted the drones and relaunched them for further mapping.
Speaking to Mapbox, the mapping company that built the 3D point cloud of the mountain when the drones had landed, SenseFly's Adam Klaptocz said: "Such a combination of high altitudes, steep rocky terrain and sheer size of dataset has simply not been done before with drones, we wanted to show that it was possible."
A video crew follows senseFly's (http://www.sensefly.com/) team of engineers marking a historic milestone in proof of surveying techniques, using eBee minidrones to map the epic Matterhorn and construct a 3D model of "the most beautiful mountain".
The mission involved the coordination of several teams with multiple eBee drones taking over 2200 images in 11 flights, all within a few hours of a sunny alpine morning. The results are stunning: a high-definition 3D point-cloud made of 300 million points covering an area of over 2800 hectares with an average resolution of 20 cm. A special thanks to our partners Pix4D (http://www.pix4d.com) for the creation of the 3D model, Drone Adventures (http://www.droneadventures.org) for mission coordination and MapBox (http://www.mapbox.com) for online visualisation.
A groundbreaking project called Aireal lets you feel virtual objects. Aireal is the result of research by University of Illinois PhD student Rajinder Sodhi and Disney Reseach’s Ivan Poupyrev. When set by your television or connected to an iPad, this diminutive machine will puff air rings that allow you to actually feel objects and textures in midair — no special controllers or gloves required.
The machine itself is essentially a set of five speakers in a box — subwoofers that track your body through IR, then fire low frequencies through a nozzle to form donut-like vortices.
In practice, Aireal can do anything from creating a button for you to touch in midair to crafting whole textures by pulsing its bubbles to mimic water, stone, and sand. … A single Aireal could conceivably support multiple people, and a grid of Aireals could create extremely immersive rooms, creating sensations like a flock of birds flying by.
Besides entertainment, this could have applications in physical therapy, education, advertising--anything you can think of where communicating the sensation of touch is important. Although, the first thing that popped into my head was Star Trek... holodeck anyone?
Software developer Mike Matas demos the first full-length interactive book for the iPad -- with clever, swipeable video and graphics and some very cool data visualizations to play with. The book is "Our Choice," Al Gore's sequel to "An Inconvenient Truth."
Until recently, the wet lab has been a crucial component of every biologist. Today's advances in the production of massive amounts of data and the creation of machine-learning algorithms for processing that data are changing the face of biological science—making it possible to do real science without a wet lab. David Heckerman shares several examples of how this transformation in the area of genomics is changing the pace of scientific breakthroughs.
This 36 min video is well worth the time spent - to get an idea (hopefully a transferrable one) about Big Data and the frontiers of science. In this case both "wet lab" (test tubes microscopes) and "dry lab" (computer modeling with machine learning) and needed and so is content as well as computational literacy.
Can you imagine feeling Earth's magnetic field on the tip of your tongue? Strangely, this is now possible, using a device that converts the tongue into a "display" for output from environmental sensors.
The tongue is known to have an extremely dense sensing resolution, as well as an extraordinary degree of neuroplasticity, the ability to adapt to and internalize new input. Research has shown that electro-tactile tongue displays paired with cameras can be used as vision prosthetics for the blind or visually impaired; users quickly learn to read and navigate through natural environments, and many describe the signals as an innate sense. However, existing displays are expensive and difficult to adapt. Tongueduino is an inexpensive, vinyl-cut tongue display designed to interface with many types of sensors besides cameras. Connected to a magnetometer, for example, the system provides a user with an internal sense of direction, like a migratory bird. Piezo whiskers allow a user to sense orientation, wind, and the lightest touch. Through tongueduino, we hope to bring electro-tactile sensory substitution beyond the discourse of vision replacement, towards open-ended sensory augmentation that anyone can access.
Gershon Dublon of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology devised a small pad containing electrodes in a 5 × 5 grid. Users put the pad, which Gershon calls Tongueduino, on their tongue. When hooked up to an electronic sensor, the pad converts signals from the sensor into small pulses of electric current across the grid, which the tongue "reads" as a pattern of tingles.
Dublon says the brain quickly adapts to new stimuli on the tongue and integrates them into our senses. For example, if Tongueduino is attached to a sensor that detects Earth's magnetic field, users can learn to use their tongue as a compass. "You might not have to train much," he says. "You could just put this on and start to perceive."
Dublon has been testing Tongueduino on himself for the past year using a range of environmental sensors. He will now try the device out on 12 volunteers.
Blair MacIntyre at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta says a wireless version of Tongueduino could prove useful in augmented reality applications that deliver information to users inconspicuously, without interfering with their vision or hearing. "There's a need for forms of awareness that aren't socially intrusive," he says. Even Google's much-publicised Project Glass will involve wearing a headset, he points out.
A new projector allows floating 3D objects – from a model of the heart to a talking human head – to be viewed from any angle.
The RayModeler prototype, developed by Sony, is on display for the first time in the UK at an exhibit at the British Library, London, called Growing Knowledge. The device creates 3D images that viewers can see from all angles without stereoscopic glasses. Sensors that recognise gestures allow it to be spun around when you wave your hand in the desired direction.
The system can recreate both static and moving objects. A static object can be captured on a turntable with a single camera, whereas many cameras are needed to capture motion. The shots are transformed into 360 images to be displayed by an LED light source in the system.
The library is featuring the display because it could be a powerful tool for researchers. "It has clear applications in anatomy and physiology," says Aleks Krotoski, researcher-in-residence at the British Library. "If you have an MRI scan you could look at it closely in 3D and manipulate it."
Since the 70s, the Magnetic North Pole has moved more than 1500 km at a rate of 10 kilometres a year. In the 1980s, this increased to 30 km a year. Today, the Pole travels 50, even 60 km - close to 150 metres a day.
Scientists don't quite know why its speed has increased these past 20 years. The magnetic pole is moving northwest of the geographic pole and may soon be across the Arctic Ocean in Siberia.
To find their bearings, sailors the world over must know the exact angle of difference between the two geographic and the magnetic north poles: the 'magnetic declination.'
The magnetic pole moves from the North to the South and vice versa every 250,000 years on average and does it very suddenly. Over 180 reversals have been recorded already.
As the intensity of the magnetic field tends to diminish, our planet becomes more susceptible to solar storms. In 100 years, the intensity has decreased by 15%."
Description and philosophy of the D-Wave superconducting processor and quantum annealing algorithms.
About the speaker: Geordie Rose is a founder and CTO of D-Wave. He is known as a leading advocate for quantum computing and physics-based processor design, and has been invited to speak on these topics in venues ranging from the 2003 TED Conference to Supercomputing 2008.
His innovative and ambitious approach to building quantum computing technology has received coverage in MIT Technology Review magazine, The Economist, New Scientist, Scientific American and Science magazines, and one of his business strategies was profiled in a Harvard Business School case study. He has received several awards and accolades for his work with D-Wave, including being short-listed for a 2005 World Technology Award.
Dr. Rose holds a PhD in theoretical physics from the University of British Columbia, specializing in quantum effects in materials. While at McMaster University, he graduated first in his class with a BEng in Engineering Physics, specializing in semiconductor engineering.
Traditionally, 3D indoor scene reconstruction from posed images happens in two phases: per image depth estimation, followed by depth merging and surface reconstruction. Recently, a family of methods have emerged that perform reconstruction directly in final 3D volumetric feature space. While these methods have shown impressive reconstruction results, they rely on expensive 3D convolutional layers, limiting their application in resource-constrained environments. In this work, researchers instead go back to the traditional route, and show how focusing on high quality multi-view depth prediction leads to highly accurate 3D reconstructions using simple off-the-shelf depth fusion. They propose a simple state-of-the-art multi-view depth estimator with two main contributions: 1) a carefully-designed 2D CNN which utilizes strong image priors alongside a plane-sweep feature volume and geometric losses, combined with 2) the integration of keyframe and geometric metadata into the cost volume which allows informed depth plane scoring. This method achieves a significant lead over the current state-of-the-art for depth estimation and close or better for 3D reconstruction on ScanNet and 7-Scenes, yet still allows for online real-time low-memory reconstruction. SimpleRecon is fast. The batch size one performance is 70ms per frame. This makes accurate reconstruction via fast depth fusion possible!
SimpleRecon: 3D Reconstruction Without 3D Convolutions Mohamed Sayed, John Gibson, Jamie Whatson, Victor Adrian Prisacariu, Michael Firman, and Clément Godard ECCV 2022
QuantuMDx Group is one of the most exciting biotechs to emerge from the UK and is developing a low cost, simple-to-use, handheld laboratory for 15-minute diagnosis of disease at the patient's side, for commercialisation in 2015. The robust device, which reads and sequences DNA and converts it into binary code using a tiny computer chip, is ideally suited to help address the humanitarian health burden by offering molecular diagnostics at a fraction of the price of traditional testing.
Rapidly & accurately detecting and monitoring emerging drug resistance of infectious diseases such as malaria, TB and HIV will enable health professionals to immediately prescribe the most effective drug against that disease. Once the device has passed regulatory approval, it will be available in developed countries for infectious disease testing and rapid cancer profiling and, in time, be available over-the-counter at pharmacies.
Since 1968 scientists have been creating sensory substitution and augmentation devices. With these devices they try to replace or enhance one sense by using another sense. For example, in tactile–vision, stimulation of the skin driven by input to a camera is used to replace the ordinary sense of vision that uses our eyes. The feelSpace belt aims to give people a magnetic sense of direction using vibrotactile stimulation driven by a digital compass. This talk discusses these developing technologies, mentions psychologists studying the minds and behavior of subjects who use these kind of devices, and analyzes the nature of perceptual experience and sensory interaction. The talk also explores the nature, limits and possibilities of these technologies, how they can be used to help those with sensory impairments, and what they can tell us about perception and perceptual experience in general.
Afraid there may be peanuts or other allergens hiding in that cookie? Thanks to a cradle and app that turn your smartphone into a handheld biosensor, you may soon be able to run on-the-spot tests for food safety, environmental toxins, medical diagnostics and more.
The handheld biosensor was developed by researchers at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. A series of lenses and filters in the cradle mirror those found in larger, more expensive laboratory devices. Together, the cradle and app transform a smartphone into a tool that can detect toxins and bacteria, spot water contamination and identify allergens in food.
Kenny Long, a graduate researcher at the university, says the team was able to make the smartphone even smarter with modifications to the cellphone camera.
One of the coolest visualization techniques to come along in recent years is the careful forensic reconstruction of likely facial features of deceased people from their bony remains, based on subtleties in bone structure and the knowledge of what each variation means, on average. Originally developed so police could put a face to unknown human remains (an application where it has been quite successful), the technique has spilled over into anthropology.
Recreating a face from the underlying bone involves painstaking work with myriad precision measurements so the muscle and skin will have the correct thickness and placement. It also involves having access to a database of enough samples so that the assigned features have a statistical likelihood of being correct. These are not wild guesses or dreamy-eyed artists impressions, but a reasonable recreation of a face that actually existed.
Done with: Timelapse 3D scanning of skull; Python Photogrammetry Tools; 3D Sculpting; Blender Screen capture; FFMPG Video edigint; Kdenlive.
"Mars is a fixer-upper of a planet, but we could make it work," says Tesla and SpaceX head Elon Musk.
Elon Musk dreams big. It’s hard not to get taken along for the ride — whether it’s a soon-to-launch cross-country Supercharger network that allows Tesla drivers to cross from Los Angeles to New York, an in-the-works reusable rocket that will help pioneer the colonization of Mars, or a hypothetical replacement for high-speed rail called the Hyperloop.
He was the evening speaker at D11 2013, where he said a mainstream Tesla is three to four years out, shook off electric car naysayers, announced the new nationwide Supercharger network, explained why he’s so excited about Mars, shared his views on immigration and how they diverged from FWD.us and tried to convince other smart folks to join him in doing big-picture stuff.
Problem: Synthetic biology has the potential to create new organisms that could do an infinite number of things. But the cost of synthesizing DNA is currently prohibitively expensive.
Solution: Austen has developed a new technique to synthesize DNA 10,000 times cheaper than existing technology.
Technology: One of the big challenges with DNA synthesis is error correction during fabrication, fabricating the correct sequence of A, T, G and Cs. Austen solves this problem by fabricating billions of strands at once, quickly (and cheaply) optically sequencing them and then selecting the correct DNA sequences using a fast moving laser.
Hello Miro for now you can decode any genome for just two days assembling any genome is the only limitation because the price if you can make dna printer like this that mean during one year your backyard will be filled bye home designed organisms
Slow Motion video of bullet impacts made by Werner Mehl from Kurzzeit. These are by far the best slow motion bullet impacts available anywhere. Watch for the hollow point rounds in the ballistics gel.
Enel, due to the realization and implementation of innovative Projects as Smart Metering, automation and remote grid control already is internationally ranked at benchmark level in terms of overall performances.
The teleXLR8 project has been running as a free, invitation-only beta from March to November 2010, using Teleplace. It has been relaunched in 2011 using OpenQwaq. Visit our main site and blog for more information. teleXLR8 is a telepresence community for cultural acceleration. We produce online events, featuring first class content and speakers, with the best system for e-learning and collaboration in an online 3D environment.
Since the demise of Concorde in 2003, supersonic flights have been off the mainstream aviation radar, and many believe it’s unlikely that we’ll see a commercial airliner travelling at these speeds again. But the prospects for private aviation look much brighter.Currently in development, the futuristic SonicStar is designed to carry up to 20 people travelling speeds of 2740 mph. This would enable a trip from Paris to New York in less than 2 hours and would make the SonicStar the world’s fastest passenger aircraft.
One major reason for suspending Concorde operations in 2003 was its prohibitive operating costs. To fly from London to New York, Concorde used about the same amount of fuel as a fully loaded 747 which could carry four times as many passengers.
Manufacturer HyperMach claims the SonicStar will be 30% more efficient than Concorde. To save weight the hull and wings of the jet will be largely built from super lightweight materials such as composite or titanium.
Then there is the SonicStar’s propulsion concept called the S-MAGJET. Unlike current jet engines this is a hybrid system in which a generator unit provides electric energy used by highly efficient propulsion fans. This is a totally new concept in aviation which HyperMach claims would result in 70% more operational efficiency and a significantly reduced carbon footprint compared to other aircraft. In fact, you wouldn’t hear any supersonic boom from the ground.
Other manufacturers are working on designs for supersonic jets, including the Aerion Corporation, but the Citation X, G650 and their rivals can rest easy for a few more years. Such ground-breaking technology takes time, so we will probably have to wait another decade or more to see supersonic aircraft in action.
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