Concepts

Each day of our lives we interact with technology that lets us instantly communicate with others, quickly access information or simply make our lives a bit more convenient. With every massive leap forward we make in each of these sectors, however, we seem to forget the real reason why the human race works so hard [...]

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Video courtesy of goodtokno

The Kno Textbook Tablet is a nearly-there-product that is very interesting but doesn’t seem very practical and has a relatively limited niche audience: College students. But, lets start with its size and weight that took me by surprise when I first heard about it.

Kno Dual-Screen (Shades of Courier) Tablet: Can This 5.5 Lbs. Behemoth Take Off?

The Kno is gigantic at 5.5 pounds (the iPad is 1.5 pounds) with dual 14.1-inch screens (compared to the iPad’s single 9.7-inch display). It is not only heavy but unwieldy. This is not something you can pull out of your backpack in a hallway while walking between classes. In June 2010, I wrote: The Kno needs to widen its potential customer base and shrink its product very soon. If not, I predict, this will be a footnote product like the Palm Foleo. Guess, what, here’s what Kara Swisher reported in All Things Digital.

Exclusive: Kno Student Tablet Start-Up in Talks to Sell Off Tablet Part of Its Business

Kno developed very interesting looking software for its Kno tablet. I hope the current plan to split off the hardware from the software works out for them.

 
Video courtesy of AeroVironment via the Los Angeles Times

Strictly speaking AeroVironment’s Nano Hummingbird is a bit outside of the normal scope of this blog. However, it is small (6.5 inches long and two-thirds of an ounce heavy – less than a AA battery). It is also a mobile technology (it flies) that contains an integrated video camera. It is also very very cool. So, I’m declaring it a mobile device!

Its development was funded by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) whose mission is to promote the development of way out ideas. It is part of DARPA’s Nano Air Vehicle program to develop extremely small air vehicles with the potential to perform indoor and outdoor military missions.

AeroVironment reports that the Nano Hummingbird met the following milestones.

1. Demonstrate precision hover flight within a virtual two-meter diameter sphere for one minute.
2. Demonstrate hover stability in a wind gust flight which required the aircraft to hover and tolerate a two-meter per second (five miles per hour) wind gust from the side, without drifting downwind more than one meter.
3. Demonstrate a continuous hover endurance of eight minutes with no external power source.
4. Fly and demonstrate controlled, transition flight from hover to 11 miles per hour fast forward flight and back to hover flight.
5. Demonstrate flying from outdoors to indoors, and back outdoors through a normal-size doorway.
6. Demonstrate flying indoors ‘heads-down’ where the pilot operates the aircraft only looking at the live video image stream from the aircraft, without looking at or hearing the aircraft directly.
7. Fly the aircraft in hover and fast forward flight with bird-shaped body and bird-shaped wings.

Via LA Times: It’s a bird! It’s a spy! It’s both

AeroVironment’s product site is found at:
Nano Hummingbird

Science Fiction author (one of my favorites) and scientist Isaac Asimov defined The Three Laws of Robotics in a 1942 short story. They are:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

It seems appropriate to learn that The Three Laws are the basis for an effort to define how Android OS based devices (an Android is a kind of robot) should operate in enterprise settings.

Samsung, Motorola to take on Android’s enterprise weaknesses without Google (IT World)

1. Protect the user
2. Pprotect yourself (device, software, data)
3. Obey the user (so long as it does not violate rules 1 and 2, I assume)

See also TechCrunch, Oct. 19, 2010: Stealth Android Enterprise Startup 3LM’s $1.5 Million Seed Round And 3 Laws Of Mobility

My part of the planet has not had the kind of punishing severe weather we’ve been seeing in the northeast of the U.S. and the horrendous floods in Queensland Australia. However, our sporadically heavy periods of rain have caused a lot of large and pontentially dangerous potholes. So far, I haven’t seen much in the way of actually doing anything about these potholes since I see and feel the same ones every day.

Since identifying pothole locations plays a large role in gettng them filled, an easy way to have this done automatically as people literarlly drive into or over them seems like a good idea. That’s what Boston city officials think as they plan to launch an app named Street Bump that uses the accelerometer and GPS available in many smartphones to detect potholes as people drive over them.

Weapons in the battle: City tries new tactics in annual fight with potholes (Boston.com)

The article does not say when the app will be available or which smartphone platforms it runs on.

Video courtesy of ImmersionCorporation

One of the more underused features of modern smartphones is their ability to vibrate with some programmatic specificity. Android, for example, can be configured to vibrate when a virtual key on its on-screen keyboard is pressed. Immersion Corp. has been around a long time (1993) I remember buying a mouse which licensed its technology to vibrate the mouse as it “bumped” into objects on the screen like on-screen buttons and menus. back around 1996 or so. Their latest innovation provides enhanced tactile feedback on smartphones.

The MOTIV Haptic Development Platform

You can see in the video embedded above how this tactile feedback technology can enhance games and other smartphone apps. The effects library for developers includes more than 100 pre-designed effects. The MOTIV SDK is scheduled to be released next month (March, 2011).

Via Engadget: Immersion’s MOTIV development platform integrates haptics into Android, we go hands-on

Video courtesy of eyeSight100

Non-touching gesture control is not a gimmick. I was convinced of this after installing a Kinect on an Xbox 360 and previewing movie trailers while munching on a semi-messy sandwich. I was able to play, pause, and change trailers by just gesturing without risking making a physical controller messy.

eyeSight claims to be able to use VGA resolution cameras in phones (640×480 pixels) to recognize hand gestures and translate them into commands. The video demo above is simply a concept demo and not an actual one since the iPad in the demo does not have any kind of camera (VGA or otherwise). Still, this is an interesting technology and should provide no end of problems to areas that have instituted “hands free” driving laws that do not allow physical manipulation of electronic devices like cell phone, cameras, and audio players while driving.

eyeSight’s website is found at:

http://www.eyesight-tech.com/

Ok, this is just plain cool. A Roomba is a robotic vacuum cleaner. It autonomously navigates through a home and picks up debris from the floor as it travels.

Developers of unmanned areial system software have used their knowledge to program Roombas to play Pac-man. Watch the following video to see how it works:

Remember the Courier concept tablet that Microsoft was showing off last year? In April Microsoft announced that they would not be developing Courier into an actual product, and many people said that Microsoft was making a mistake by killing it. Well, NEC seems to have paid attention to the people who said they wanted a dual screen tablet and is showing off one at CES.

The tablet that NEC is showing runs Android and has all the specs that you would expect of a tablet computer. A couple of disappointing points about this tablet is that it only has 800 x 600 resolution and uses resistive touch screens. If NEC brought a product to market with those specs it would probably not sell well.

Check out the following YouTube video, recorded by Brad Linder at CES, for an idea of how the tablet works:

Most of today’s smartphone users don’t realize that they are using a converged device. Before smartphones many people used two devices, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and cellular phones, and smartphones combine those two into one device. If you thnk about it, combining PDA functionality with mobile phones makes sense because the two devices have similar form factors and are the type of thing one carries with them all the time. Rather than carrying two devices, people prefer to carry only one device.

Consider for a moment the amount of computing power that is in today’s smartphones. Most smartphones today have 1 GHz processors, which provide the same computing power as the desktop computers that we used just 8 years ago, and the next generation smartphones will have dual core processors with the same computing power as computers of only 4 years ago. Is it possible that smartphones and PCs could converge?

The Motorola Atrix is an Android smartphone announced at CES that will run on AT&T’s network and attempts to converge a smartphone and PC. The PC capabilities are implemented with a dock that connects to a full-size keyboard and monitor. When the Atrix is inserted into the dock it automatically runs the Citrix Receiver application that provides a virtual desktop that can run regular Windows programs. The following video shows how quickly the virtual desktop starts and the capability it provides.

Video courtesy of Citrix Systems.

AT&T says that the Motorola Atrix will be available in the first quarter of 2011, and the price has not been provided.