Doctor’s Business Card Measures Holder’s Heartbeat

A Hungarian ECG company puts real-time pulse on a business card

Adding something extra to one’s business card is important if you want to stand out from the crowd. This one, however, is the only card that lets you measure your heartbeat.MobilECG, an open-source electrocardiogram company, found a way to create business cards with small electrocardiograph meters built in.

Based in Hungary, MobilECG created a reader which finds a person’s heart rate by having them place two fingers on the card. The business information is located on the front of the card while the reader and tiny monitor screen are located on the back. It works by implementing what is known as Lead I in Einthoven’s triangle. To put it simply, in order for an electrocardiogram to read your heart rate, the readers have to form an inverted triangle with the heart in the middle so that the voltages when added up will have 0 potential, essentially giving the machine the most accurate result possible. Putting two fingers from opposite hands thus creates an Einthoven triangle, and your heartbeat is displayed.

The company has made it clear, however, that this is not meant to be a diagnostic device, referring to it on their website as a “toy card.” However, MobilECG’s main product is a small, more affordable ECG machine than the ones used now in hospitals and clinics. Currently in its second generation of design, the MobilECG itself costs between $100 – $150 and cause uses different points of data collection to give accurate readings.

MobilECG is taking orders, with each card currently set at $29 each. The team, dedicated to being open source, has also posted the schematics here if you want to build you own.

The Stethoscope Gets Redesigned, After 200 Years

Get your vitals checked lately? When a doctor needs to listen to your heartbeat or breathing, they often turn to one specific tool: the stethoscope. And this timeless device just got an upgrade. It’s called the U-Scope, it’s an FDA-approved stethoscope redesigned with ergonomic features aimed to be both comfortable and elegant.

The basic design of stethoscopes went unchanged for 200 years. Thus, the team behind the design wondered why the stethoscope has always remained the same. Further, they were curious if the current build was truly the most ideal shape for the medical tool. These questions lead Tokyo-based Classico to rethink the design from the ear down.
•U-Scope is designed so that air doesn’t escape from the diaphragm to the ear piece. This feature is said to minimize sound decay.
•It has an inner T-shaped structure portion which helps reduce the pressure on the ears of its wearer by 30 percent.
•The bell on it is a special chest piece. It has been created through ergonomic designing so it fits naturally in our fingers. It also fits a patient’s body and allows optimum wrist movement for doctors, resulting in better hearing.
•The unit can be folded so doctors can put it in their pocket rather than walk around with it around their neck.

Device which prints moving images

Using augmented reality, bring your photos to life by pointing your smartphone at them

Following both the trend in portable printers and augmented reality, LifePrint wants to let you print ‘HyperPhotos’ that ‘come to life in your hands.’

Coupled with an app that aggregates all of your images from your camera roll, social media accounts, and even your GoPro, both still and live photos can be printed through the device. While the images don’t move by themselves, the same aggregating app enables you to animate the pictures simply by enabling your camera and hovering over the printout with your phone, a process it calls ‘Harry Potter mode.’


Devoid of any toner or ink cartridges, the startup’s website boasts of the relative ease of use, designed with technology (thermal printing) specifically picked out for a quality user experience. Moreover, the LifePrint printer ‘literally fits in your back pocket,’ and supports up to 15 prints per battery charge.


Even better, images are instantly shareable with friends and family in your network at click of a button, and can be sent discretely using a private mode for the express intent of ‘romantic pictures,’ Lastly, a robust photo editing suite, makes it possible to edit photos before being sent or printed, after which you have to option to print as a stick for pasting onto your mac or the deck of your skateboard.

Having been touted as your smartphone’s new BFF by Popsugar, a social network where you can follow people by Digital Trends and a physical Instagram for nostalgic Polaroid fans by Vice, the printer is being marketed as the ‘mobile printer for everyone.’ And while its true that all the social media and app support the printer comes packaged with broadens the range of those who can make use of it, be warned: only the iPhone 5s, Samsung Galaxy 5s, GoPro Hero 3 and GoPro Session generations and onwards are compatible.

With a print time of roughly 30 seconds, a battery charge time of one hour and printed photo sizes of 2″x3″ (50mm x 76mm), there are still some kinks to work out, but the technology looks promising for the democratization of AR capabilities. Whereas augmented reality was the exclusive domain of the business elite, think GoogleGlass, the introduction of the technology in smartphones and its ‘embed-ability’ in tangible objects means anyone can get their hands on it.

That said, LifePrint is currently retailing its printer at a base price of $129 plus shipping as a pre-order on IndieGoGo, with additional perks requiring you to add on certain lump sums.

Tone Your Legs and Do Your Laundry at the Same Time

On those days when 24 hours come up short, the Bike Washing Machine will let you kill two chores with one stone as you can tend to laundry while working out.

The Bike Washing Machine is a designed by Xuefei Liu, Weiwei Li, Xiaoyu Gao Xueyi Wang, Linhao Su, Di Fang, Zhanbing Li, Wen Fan, Deqian Zhao, Liying Zhu, Huan Li, and Mengmeng Hu, students of Dalian Nationalities University. The product, of course, targets the time-crunched as not having enough time to do your laundry or workout has become a too common excuse in a busy, busy world.

Either excuse will no longer work because this stationary will double as a washing machine. When you ride, the pedaling gives power to the washer to spin the laundry inside it.

The Bike Washing Machine first appeared on Tuvie, though it seems it won’t be hitting the market for some time (if ever). Moreover, the load capacity of the washing machine remains unclear as well as how long it would take to fully wash one small load.

While the Bike Washing Machine will not replace the traditional washing machine or the pains of heading to the laundromat, the machine is note-worthy especially if it will help people cross off mutilple items off the to-do list simultaneously.

Source: PSFK

Virtual Reality to be the next Game Changer for Smartphone Companies

Virtual Reality is the next platform, where anyone can create and experience anything they want. As of for now, VR is mostly used for games and entertainment, but that's quickly evolving, and one day you're going to be able to put on a headset and that's going to change the way that you live, work and communicate.

So imagine being able to sit in front of a camp-fire and hang out with your friends any time that you want, or watch a movie in a private theatre with your friends any time you want. Imagine holding a group meeting or event anywhere that you want, welcome to the untapped world of Virtual Reality, that is according to Face Book's Boss Mark Zuckerberg.

Phone makers are trying to renew consumer appetite by luring their attention to virtual reality headsets that can be paired with their devices to view videos and play games. The emphasis on virtual reality comes as the increasingly-saturated smartphone market begins to slow.

Research firm Trend Force predicts global smartphone sales will grow by 8.1 percent in 2016, down from 10.3 percent last year. The headsets which went on sale in November is powered by technology developed by Oculus, a virtual reality company Facebook bought in 2014 for $2 billion (1.8 billion euros).

Mozilla Research launched an experimental build of Firefox with VR-enablers bundled, empowering developers to turn any website into a virtual reality experience. No plugins, installs or expensive development tools required.
VR presents immense challenges, but also immense opportunities right from latency to interaction design, Mozilla Research is looking forward to make the web an awesome platform for VR with Air Mozilla.

Even the Google Store is now selling VR headsets, with three models to choose from. You can pick up Cardboard from Google, the View-Master from Mattel or a travel-ready model from Goggle.

Samsung, the world's number one smartphone maker, announced at the Mobile World Congress trade fair in Barcelona that it would give away its Gear VR headset for free with every pre-order for its new flagship Galaxy S7 phone.

Thousands of people donned the headsets which have a slot where you insert a smartphone to view the presentation of the firm's new phones at a Barcelona congress centre on the eve of the start of the fair. The crowd gasped and applauded as the new phones appeared to be floating in the air before their eyes.

Rival South Korean tech firm LG, which lost money from its mobile business last year, unveiled its own virtual reality goggles to go with its new G5 smartphone at the fair. Struggling Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC has decided to refocus completely on virtual reality and away from smartphones.

The smartphones virtual reality headsets sparked huge interest at the trade fair in Barcelona as long lines formed outside a pop-up virtual reality theatre set up by Samsung that allowed people to experience a roller coaster ride using the Gear VR headset as their seats rocked from side to side.

Tilt your head back with the headset on and you see a clear blue sky. Turn sideways and you see the rest of an amusement park and mountains in the distance. Look down and you see a fast approaching plunge.

People gripped the arms of their seats even though they were not moving and raised their hands in the air during the simulations.

Research firm CCS Insight predicts the number of sold virtual reality devices will grow from 2.2 million last year to 20 million in 2018, with smartphone-based devices representing the vast majority.

More sophisticated virtual reality headsets that run on an expensive computer will remain a niche product because of their high cost, though some users of the smartphone virtual reality headsets complained of being able to see the pixels in the images being broadcast.

"The quality of the systems is not quite there yet, when virtual reality goes mainstream we won’t be looking at social media we will be almost standing inside it. " said Edward Tang, founder and president of Avegant which makes virtual reality headsets.

( Sources and Citation : http://www.itv.com/news/2016-02-22/mark-zuckerberg-virtual-reality-is-the-next-platform/ )

NASA and Lockheed collaborate for a Commercial Supersonic Jet Project

The return of supersonic passenger air travel is one step closer to reality with NASA's award of a contract for the preliminary design of a “low boom” flight demonstration aircraft.

Nasa Administrator Charles Bolden on Monday said that it has awarded a first contract, worth $20 million to the US Company Lockheed Martin to develop a preliminary design of an aircraft which surpasses the speed of sound, EFE news reported. US space agency Nasa announced that it is planning to build a supersonic passenger jet which will be as quiet and efficient as possible.

Despite using a jet engine, which traditionally causes loud noise, the sound levels produced by the new aircraft would be minimal. The new design would also meet the requirements for reduction of pollution as it would optimize fuel consumption. "NASA is working hard to make flight greener, safer and quieter," said Bolden.

The design and the construction of the new supersonic aircraft will take several years and NASA estimates that first flight tests would start around 2020.

NASA selected a team led by Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company of Palmdale, California, to complete a preliminary design for Quiet Supersonic Technology (QueSST). The work will be conducted under a task order against the Basic and Applied Aerospace Research and Technology (BAART) contract at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia.

After conducting feasibility studies and working to better understand acceptable sound levels across the country, NASA's Commercial Supersonic Technology Project asked industry teams to submit design concepts for a piloted test aircraft that can fly at supersonic speeds, creating a supersonic soft thump rather than the disruptive boom currently associated with supersonic flights.





Commercial supersonic flights were cancelled when British Airways and Air France ceased their Concorde operations in 2003. The Concorde aircraft was capable of travelling at a maximum speed of 2.180 kph, more than twice the speed of sound. The safety and profitability of the aircraft, known as the "White Bird", became questionable following the crash of a Concorde in Paris in 2000, which killed all 113 people on board.

In addition to design and building, this Low Boom Flight Demonstration (LBFD) phase of the project also will include validation of community response to the new, quieter supersonic design. The detailed design and building of the QueSST aircraft, conducted under the NASA Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate's Integrated Aviation Systems Program, will fall under a future contract competition.

NASA’s 10-year New Aviation Horizons initiative has the ambitious goals of reducing fuel use, emissions and noise through innovations in aircraft design that departs from the conventional tube-and-wing aircraft shape.

The New Aviation Horizons X-planes will typically be about half-scale of a production aircraft and likely are to be piloted. Design-and-build will take several years with aircraft starting their flight campaign around 2020, depending on funding.

( Sources and Citation : http://www.geek.com/science/nasa-and-lockheed-plan-low-boom-supersonic-passenger-jet-1648680/ )

Korean Researchers unveil Smart Glasses that can Type via Virtual Keyboard

K-Glass is an even stronger model of smart glasses reinforced with augmented reality (AR) that were first developed by the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in 2014, with the second version released in 2015. This processor is composed of a pre-processing core to implement stereo vision, seven deep-learning cores to accelerate real-time scene recognition within 33 milliseconds, and one rendering engine for the display.

Researchers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) have developed smart glasses that offer users a virtual keyboard to type text. The glasses, called K-Glass 3, comes with a stereo-vision camera located at the front of the device. The two lenses of the camera work similar to the way human eyes work, and can sense depth. This allows users to surf the internet and type text using the virtual keyboard, or even play a virtual piano in thin air.






The stereo-vision camera, located on the front of K-Glass 3, works in a manner similar to three dimension (3D) sensing in human vision. The camera's two lenses, displayed horizontally from one another just like depth perception produced by left and right eyes, take pictures of the same objects or scenes and combine these two different images to extract spatial depth information, which is necessary to reconstruct 3D environments.


The camera's vision algorithm has an energy efficiency of 20 milliwatts on average, allowing it to operate in the Glass more than 24 hours without interruption. The research team adopted deep-learning-multi core technology dedicated for mobile devices to recognize user's gestures based on the depth of information.





Additionally, K-Glass 3 uses a pre-processing core to use stereo-vision as well as seven deep-learning cores to speed up real-time screen recognition. The researchers say that the camera’s vision algorithm has an energy efficiency of 20 milliwatts on average, allowing it to be used for 24 hours without interruption.

The multi-core processor becomes idle when it detects no motion from the user. The team uses deep-learning multi-core technology that is dedicated for mobile devices to recognize gesture inputs. This has improved the glass’s accuracy with images and speed, while also shortening the time needed to process and analyze data.



Instead, it executes complex deep-learning algorithms with a minimal power to achieve high performance as researchers succeeded in fabricating a low-power multi-core processor that consumes only 126.1 milliwatts of power with a high efficiency rate. This technology has greatly improved the Glass's recognition accuracy with images and speech, while shortening the time needed to process and analyze data. In addition, the Glass's multi-core processor is advanced enough to become idle when it detects no motion from users.

Owing to the deep-learning-multi core technology, this gesture controlled device has been greatly enhanced. The newly constructed one takes minimal time to analyse data and possesses greater sensing power. With all these desirable features, it’s definitely a device to try out on as soon as it launches in the market.


( Sources and Citation : http://www.crazyengineers.com/threads/k-glass-3-featuring-augmented-reality-to-be-launched-soon.87365/ )

Volvo’s Trash-Emptying Robot

We recently wrote about ROAR: RObot-based Autonomous Refuse Handling. The vision for the project is to eliminate the need for humans to perform heavy-lifting during garbage collection. The system has two main parts: robots that can transport trash bins and a connected garbage truck where a garbage man controls the robots on a dashboard.

Now, the results are in: The proof of concept worked. Students from three universities collaborated with the Volvo Group and the waste recycling company, Renova. The company recently unveiled a video testing the project.

Here’s how this system would operate in the real world.

Check your Shift in Weight from Inside a Smart Shoe

When you think of a wearable device, you probably picture a wristband that tracks the steps you’ve taken today, or a watch that keeps tabs on your heartbeat. The IOFIT, however, takes the definition of wearables in a new direction.

Developed by Samsung Electronic‘s spin-off startup Salted Venture, the new smart shoe combines the use of pressure sensors and a companion coaching app to improve users’ athletic performance by targeting improved balance and posture.

The company wanted to make use of the valuable data that can be gained from feet, said Jacob Cho, the CEO of Salted Venture in a Samsung Newsroom article. The idea for the smart shoe began at a Samsung innovation program called C-Lab, whose team later branched off to establish Salted Venture.

In order to figure out which segment of customers might benefit from the product, the team visited fitness centers and golf facilities and learned about force plates — instruments that measure the forces generated by someone standing on or moving across the ground, which are used to study balance and gait.

With the goal of translating the effectiveness of force plates to a smaller, more portable product, the team integrated data analysis technology like accelerometers, which measure acceleration, and pressure sensors into the outsoles of shoes, the part of the shoe that comes into contact with the ground. These devices together can measure the shoe wearer’s balance, weight shift, ground contact force and the location of his or her center of gravity.

The data are updated in real-time while the smart shoe is being worn. Users can view a pressure map on the IOFIT smartphone app, but the real benefit of the shoe/app combo, according to its creators, is that it offers solutions that help users enhance their form rather than simply displaying a compilation of incomprehensible figures.

A video playback feature of the app helps users visualize how they look while completing a golf swing or an aerobic exercise, as well as understand how their posture might be impacting their success on the course or in the gym. There’s also customizable coaching and analysis software that allows a coach to draw on the video or leave audible feedback for the user, making use of the smart shoe more of a person-to-person experience. Two videos can be viewed side-by-side to contrast a good golf swing with a poor one, as well.

Fashionable athletes shouldn’t worry about having to wear clunky technology on their feet, either: IOFIT’s creators said they were concerned with making sure the smart shoe had a sleek design that users would be “proud” to wear in public. As a result, the appearance of the IOFIT at first glance is very similar to the aesthetic of the typical athletic shoe.

Elegant Calendar On Your Wrist and Everything Falls in Place

With the advent of our digital lives combining with our real ones there is this notion that we are ruled by our calendars. Think about the last time you asked a friend to send you a calendar invite for simply going for a coffee or plan an evening out. The Calendar Watchtakes a stab at designing a wearable that doesn’t sacrifice traditional watchmaking design but still features some sort of “smart” feature—in this case, syncing up with your digital calendar and displaying that info at a glance.

The Calendar watch is the digital calendar in visual form placed into a watch face. The product makers have a unique take on the how a watch can be used in our daily life. The watch face offers not only the traditional hour and minute hands but an advanced shading system that is connected to your online calendar. Dark segments on the watch face mean meetings and light spaces mean free time. The application and the watch currently sync with the following calendars: iCalendar, Google Calendar, Outlook, Facebook Events, Yahoo!, Yandex, and the team says it will be adding more.

The makers also have designed the pieces to be interchangeable, allowing you to swap in differently colored lugs to create a unique timepiece. Changing the lugs with the provided tool is quick, so you can tailor the watch to match your mood or outfit.

Strategists are exploring the design challenges and opportunities presented by the forthcoming screens on our wrists. These modern tweaks and design considerations are beginning to materialize in-market.

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NASA confirms of Flowers being grown Aeroponically in Space

In a blog, NASA wrote that this was the "first time a flowering crop experiment will be grown on the orbiting laboratory". The ISS team installed the space station's Veggie plant system in mid-2014 and have also grown Red Romaine Lettuce.

In 2012, astronaut Don Pettit successfully grew a Zucchini, Sunflower and Broccoli out of zip-lock plastic bags on the ISS as personal science experiment. Pettit documented the life of these plants and veggies in a NASA blog called Diary of Space Zucchini. Zinnias are colorful, long-lasting flowers that are also edible.



The vegetable was grown aeroponically that is, in an air or mist environment without soil. Plants grown aeroponically require far less water and fertilizer, don't need pesticide, are much less prone to disease, and grow up to three times faster than plants grown in soil, NASA has said.

The system was tested at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and the plants were checked for safety. Still, half the crew's harvest will be sent back to Earth for more testing. And to be even safer, the astronauts will clean the lettuce with citric acid-based, food-safe sanitizing wipes before eating it.

The Veggie project will also produce crucial information for a Mars mission, said Alexandra Whitmire from NASA's Human Research Program. For example, understanding watering schedules in microgravity, and knowing what to do if there is mold growth or other challenges in these extreme conditions.

"In future missions, the importance of plants will likely increase, given the crews limited connection to Earth and growing plants in space also has psychological benefits for astronauts, particularly in combating feelings of isolation and loneliness” Whitmire wrote in a NASA blog.

In a blog, NASA wrote that this was the first time a flowering crop experiment will be grown on the orbiting laboratory. NASA hopes Veggie will become a regular facility for ISS astronauts to grow fresh food in space.


( Sources and Citation : http://edition.cnn.com/2016/01/18/world/first-space-flower-iss/index.html )

Solar Shirt for Your Charging Needs....!!!

Almost a year ago Pauline van Dongen and Holst Centre launched their Solar Shirt at South by Southwest. Since then, a menswear version of the design has been created.

The garment contains a output cable in its pocket, which allows the wearer to charge devices on the go. The Solar Shirt generates sustainable energy from 120 thin-film solar cells. In bright sunlight, it produces around 1 to 1.5 W of electricity—enough to charge a typical cellphone in a few hours. While indoors, the shirt generates enough power to keep a battery charged, so your phone or other devices are ever-ready when you need them. The shirt can charge any USB-compatible portable devices. And, if all your devices are charged, the energy can be stored in the shirt’s battery for later use.

The technology in the shirt is lightweight, which makes the design comfortable to wear and reduces the amount of friction that normally happens between bulky, rigid electronics and the soft, draped character of textiles. With a seamless integration of technology and fashion. The shirt’s solar cells are combined into modules that are designed as a zany graphic pattern, allowing the technology to become a distinct feature of the design. The shirt looks and feels like any other T-shirt because it’s made with ultra thin, stretchable electronics and flexible solar cells.

“It’s not some far fetched future scenario we are talking about, it’s actually becoming reality. It’s integrating in our actual daily lives,” says Pauline van Dongen.

The video promoting the new shirt portrays a vision of wearable technology as something that will become normal to people and will offer us new experiences.

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Source: PSFK

Taking On China’s Air Pollution Catastrophe with Bottled Air

The company that seemingly appeared out of thin air is now selling it, and while the notion seems preposterous to say the least, the cause is anything but. Citing China’s severe air pollution, Vitality Air points to a quite serious issue among the nation’s cities: 80 percent of Chinese citizens currently live in conditions which astronomically exceed the US Environmental Protection Agency’s standard for tolerable air pollution levels.


Moreover, a whopping 17 percent of overall deaths in the country occur as a result—that’s an estimated 4,000 residents in any given day.


Looking to curb these horrid statistics, Vitality Air has launched a successful campaign (4,000 units are on their way, 1,000 of which have already been pre-sold) to market its product to China, using a ‘clean compression system’ to gather large batches of fresh air from Banff National Park and Lake Louise, the company then transfers the air to their headquarters where they can it in aluminum bottles complete with spray caps or built-in masks to ensure it doesn’t escape. A certificate of authenticity guarantees that each sip you take is native to a pristine Canadian mountainside and is therefore as pure as it gets.


The website advertises the bottled air as the perfect supplement for athletic performance, yoga, cramming for exams, marathon video gaming, and hangover recovery.


“Air and oxygen are sometimes used interchangeably, but the two things are actually different. Oxygen is a pure element, while the air people breathe is a mixture of elements,” reads the site.


“Air, which is heavily contaminated with particles in high concentrations, can damage lung tissue. Low quality can sometimes be physically seen in the form of smog, a heavy collection of hydrocarbons in the atmosphere.”


From the scenic lakesides to your lungs, Vitality Air tests every batch it outputs and cherry-picks its distributors to ensure every can offers premium quality. Though packaging oxygen surely won’t fix China’s pollution, it can definitely help a select few extend their life by introducing a pure gulp of air or two.

Turn Your Laptop Screen as Touch Screen with Airbar

Recently at CES, Neonode showed off the AirBar, a $49 peripheral that connects to a USB port and gives any display touch capability with company planning to ship the AirBar in May 2016. If your laptop doesn't have a touchscreen, you don't need to replace your whole computer to get the functionality.

Airbar is unobtrusive and fits just under the display. It's a thin, black rectangle that rests on the bezel underneath the screen and if you have a black or gray laptop, you may not even realize that it's there. It uses invisible light to detect where your finger is on the screen and provide that feedback to the computer.

The AirBar’s a slim sensor that magnetically latches onto the bottom of your Chromebook or Windows laptop’s display and connects via USB. Once it’s hooked up, it’s plug and play, with no extra drivers needed the device casts a beam of light across your screen, and you can poke, pinch, zoom, swipe and scroll around with your hand the way you would on a touchscreen PC. 

Neonode says that the AirBar will work with laptops running Windows or Chrome OS. The AirBar will come in four sizes to support most displays: 11.6 inches, 13.3 inches, 14 inches and 15.6 inches.

The device is plug and play you just have to plug the AirBar into a USB port, align it on the screen, and you're ready to touch. Few other demonstrations were with other objects, including a paintbrush and a chopstick.

AirBar’s price is certainly right, but that’s only one part of the equation with input as visceral as touch. The device has to nail the feeling of actual touch input if it truly wants to succeed.

Unlock your car using NFC Technology...!!!

Using NFC technology, you can hack your car into a bro-mobile

If you’re getting tired of using lock and key, or even the remote, every time you open your car, this simpler than impossible hack can change the way you slip in and out of the vehicle. Using NFC technology, a simple fist bump would disable the locks on your car.

This fist bump-to-open car requires an NFC-enabled ring to work. The hack, although a touch complicated, is not impossible to do. It does seem to require a car with dashboard unlock controls. The system relays the dashboard key control to an NFC scanner which can be placed on the driver’s window.

In this particular hack, the KeyDuino pulls off the trick. The KeyDuino is a simple DIY tool that is an Arduino Leonardo board fitted with NFC right out of the box. The car concept and KeyDuino share the same inventor – Pierre Charlier, an active contributor to HackADay.io and a French student who apprentices at CITC-EuraRFID.

With an App, Replace your VOLVO Car Keys...

In an effort to make things more convenient for drivers, Volvo has introduced digital keys to replace physical ones. A phone app replaces the usual key, letting a user lock and unlock doors—and start the engine. The Bluetooth-enabled digital key can also be accessed from multiple locations.

Though they will not completely replace keys—drivers who want physical keys will still receive them—they offer car owners a key way to access their car.

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A Work Light, Nightlight, ‘Anywhere You Want’ Light

The Ellum Solar, designed in a minimalist candybar shape with slender curved corners and a prominent wood grain, is a lot of things a solar light should be. First, it’s multipurpose and can act as a nightlight or a work light. Second, it’s very easy to use. Third, it’s so beautiful it gives the home an extra edge in first impressions.

The light comes in a very handy size. Underneath the solid wood panel is a row of LED lights that beam 240 lumens of light using only 1.6W. Beside the lights is a wide array of solar panels. To charge, just place the device on a flat surface (like a table) with the solar panels up where the sun hits. An LED indicator flashes faster when more sun hits the panels. The light also has a touch dimmer for full range brightness control.

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Clap your hands once and these office chairs will park themselves

Nissan Tests Its Intelligent Parking Assist Tech at the Office

How one device is offering a chemical-free path to a happier and better you

Of course, chemicals are awesome. Caffeine, alcohol, all kinds of things are great…when they’re used exactly as they’re meant to be used. [But] if you use them long term, there’s usually a big price to pay,” says Isy Goldwasser, CEO and Founder of Thync.

Thync is a wearable device that helps you manage your energy, stress and sleep naturally. It uses neuro-signaling to activate specific nerves in your head and your brain to shift you to a state of calm or give you a boost of energy within minutes. Sure, the idea of a device that zaps your brain to change your mood may sound ludicrous, but the market has accepted its existence and use, primarily because Thync transports you to a more meditative space without needing to implement chemicals.

Read More>>

Source : PSFK

‘Social Virtual Reality’ Team to Explore Virtual Reality Beyond Games - Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg reveals the growing numbers behind our VR consumption

Facebook has created a “social VR” team to explore virtual-reality technology’s potential beyond games, as it prepares for the consumer launch of its Oculus Rift VR headset.

Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg revealed the plans in a surprise appearance at Samsung’s Mobile World Congress press conference, while talking up the popularity of 360-degree videos on Facebook, and on Samsung’s Gear VR headset – which uses technology from Oculus.

“People have already watched more than a million hours of video in Gear VR,” explained a blog post from Facebook following the event. “Already, millions of people watch 360 videos on Facebook every day. More than 20,000 have been uploaded, with hundreds more added daily.”

Facebook is upping the quality of 360-degree videos on its service, while tasking its new team with developing other kinds of non-games content for VR headsets.

“This team will explore how people can connect and share using today’s VR technology, as well as long-term possibilities as VR evolves into an increasingly important computing platform,” claimed Facebook.

“They will work closely with Oculus and other teams at Facebook to build the foundation for tomorrow’s social VR experiences on all platforms.”

The company admits that its work in VR is “still early, and there are a lot of hardware and software challenges that we still need to solve”, but Zuckerberg is making the area one of Facebook’s priorities.

“What people care about is interacting with another person,” he told Wired in a profile published to coincide with the Samsung event, which included a demonstration of Oculus VR’s Toy Box application with two-player table tennis and other shared activities.

“The thing that’s really striking is that when you have another person there, the whole thing inherently becomes social,” said Zuckerberg. “It’s not a game. There’s no points. There’s no score. There’s no objective. But people find ways to interact. And they’re novel ways of interacting.”

Virtual reality is already one of the hot topics at this year’s Mobile World Congress conference. Besides Zuckerberg’s appearance, there were announcements from HTC and LG about their VR plans.

HTC has confirmed that its Vive headset will cost $799, with pre-orders opening at the end of February. Meanwhile, LG is launching its own headset, designed to work with its new G5 Android smartphone.

Sony Turns to E-Ink for Refined Control of the Home

What's a remote control without buttons? Something like this

These days we have lots of remote controls. Of those remotes how many of those buttons actually get used? Wouldn’t it be great if there were a simple device that could work with devices smoothly? And because fumbling around with remotes is already complicated enough, the design of said object should be elegant and simple to reflect the problem it intends to solve. The HUIS REMOTE CONTROLLER is a remote control from Sony, which can control smart appliances in your home. But what makes it unique isn’t its ability to communicate with various devices throughout your home, but its screen—it uses electronic paper instead of buttons.

This universal remote with a novel display allows you to choose what buttons you want to surface on the home screen. Users can toggle between screens easily and navigate the phone through gestures and swipes.

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Source: PSFK

ReFlex the world's first flexible Smartphone developed by Canadian Researchers

Scientists claim to have developed the world’s first wireless flexible smartphone that allows users to feel the buzz by bending phone apps. The team, working in the Human Media Lab at Queen's University in Kingston, Canada, have called their device the ReFlex which is seriously impressive.

The technology, which is still in the prototype stage, could one day make shattered screens and permanently bent phones a thing of the past if it hits the market. Equipped with a high-definition OLED screen, the display actually looks quite good, with sharp images and bright, vibrant colours.

The full-colour, high-resolution smartphone, named ReFlex, combines multitouch with bend input and allows users to experience physical tactile feedback when interacting with their apps through bend gestures. Other than making the phone a little more resistant to drops, the bendable body offers some interesting new methods of navigating.

Rather than swiping the screen to turn pages when reading an ebook, as they would with a regular smartphone, the user can just bend the phone and flip through as many pages as they need to, in the same way they would with a regular book. The team behind the phone believe the technology could reach consumers within a few years.

A vibrating unit embedded in the phone also provides feedback, so that users can feel the 'pages' flipping past their fingers as they move through the book. It also has applications in gaming, too like when playing Angry Birds, the vibration changes as the catapult pulls back, giving the sensation of an actual rubbing band stretching out and snapping forward.

Combined with the passive force feedback felt when bending the display, this allows for a highly realistic simulation of physical forces when interacting with virtual objects.

Flexible smartphones have been unveiled before from manufacturers like Nokia and Samsung that have made a few experimental models, but they've mostly either been wired devices or just promotional concepts. The LG G Flex bendable smartphone was actually released to the public in 2013, but it couldn't bend anywhere near as much as the ReFlex.

ReFlex is based on a high definition 720p LG Display Flexible OLED touch screen powered by an Android 4.4 KitKat board mounted to the side of the display. By making their device completely wireless, full-colour, high resolution and truly flexible, the Queen's University team might just have achieved a first in mobile technology.

It's obviously not going to be hitting the market soon, but Roel Vertegaal, head of the Human Media Lab at Queen's University in Kingston, Canada believes to see the technology reach consumers within a few years.

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( Sources and Citation : The bendable phone that could make smashed screens a thing of the past Human Media Lab )

Brain Mapping technology can be used to read out Human Brain’s complex Architecture

A remarkable progress in recent years toward understanding the brain architecture is made by few Neuroscientists around the world. At the start of the 20th century, a German neuroanatomist named Korbinian Brodmann parceled the human cortex into nearly 50 different areas by looking at the structure and organization of sections of brain under a microscope. In coming years, Europe’s Human Brain Project will attempt to create a computational simulation of the human brain, while the U.S. BRAIN Initiative will try to create a wide-ranging picture of brain activity.
Now he and his coworkers are redoing Brodmann’s work as they map the borders between brain regions. The result may show something more like 100 to 200 distinct areas, providing scientists with a far more accurate road map for studying the brain’s different functions.

As part of the Human Brain Project, an international team of researchers led by German and Canadian scientists has produced a three-dimensional atlas of the brain that has 50 times the resolution of previous such maps. The atlas, which took a decade to complete, required slicing a brain into thousands of thin sections and digitally stitching them back together with the help of supercomputers. Able to show details as small as 20 micrometers, roughly the size of many human cells, it is a major step forward in understanding the brain’s three-dimensional anatomy.

To guide the brain’s digital reconstruction, researchers led by Katrin Amunts at the Jülich Research Centre in Germany initially used an MRI machine to image the post mortem brain of a 65-year-old woman. The brain was then cut into ultrathin slices. The scientists stained the sections and then imaged them one by one on a flatbed scanner.
Alan Evans and his coworkers at the Montreal Neurological Institute organized the 7,404 resulting images into a data set about a terabyte in size. Slicing had bent, ripped, and torn the tissue, so Evans had to correct these defects in the images. He also aligned each one to its original position in the brain. The result is mesmerizing: a brain model that you can swim through, zooming in or out to see the arrangement of cells and tissues.

An more innovative technique called Clarity, developed in the lab of Karl Deisseroth, a neuroscientist and bioengineer at Stanford University that allows scientists to directly see the structures of neurons and circuitry in an intact brain. The brain, like any other tissue, is usually opaque because the fats in its cells block light. Clarity melts the lipids away, replacing them with a gel-like substance that leaves other structures intact and visible.
Such a map of the brain might contain several petabytes of data, which computers today can’t easily navigate in real time, though it is optimistic that they will be able to in the future. Advances could come from new techniques that allow scientists to see the arrangement of cells and nerve fibers inside intact brain tissue at very high resolution.

Though Clarity can be used on a whole mouse brain, the human brain is too big to be studied fully intact with the existing version of the technology. The technique is already be used on blocks of human brain tissue thousands of times larger than a thin brain section, making 3-D reconstruction easier and less error prone. Clarity and polarized-light imaging currently give fantastic resolution to pieces of brain, in the future it is hoped that this technology can be expanded to include a whole human brain.

( Sources and Citation : Katrin Amunts, Jülich Research Centre Alan Evans, Montreal Neurological Institute Karl Deisseroth, Stanford University )

Leap Motion Improves Our Handle on Virtual Precision

It just got easier to imagine the near-future world where we’ll live, work and play. Today, Leap Motion unveiled Orion, a software and hardware combo that responds to hand motion in virtual and augmented reality, without donning clunky gloves or rigs.

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Source: http://www.psfk.com/

Convertible Activewear Can Be Worn at Work and the Gym

3D-printed clothing that can transform from the office to the weight room

Student Eric Beaudette from Cornell University has developed a concept for custom-fit activewear that would enable young male professionals to dress for their job to the gym without working up a sweat.

Recycl3-D is a range of convertible clothing fit for multiple purposes. The wearer can easily alter their clothes by adding or removing features and accessories such as collars, hoods, sleeves and pockets.

The garments would also be fully recyclable, virtually eliminating the waste usually found in the design and manufacturing process. Beaudette said:

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Source: http://www.psfk.com/