Reinventing the Wheel

Researchers at MIT have done the inevitable, they have attempted to reinvent the wheel - or maybe more specifically the bike wheel. The tech behind this wheel is actually quite exciting including: a sensors for detecting speed, distance, and direction, which are sent via Bluetooth to the rider's iPhone. Also, the system has a built in lock that sends the owner a text when tampered with. Granted as fun as this technology is, that which makes this Copenhagen Wheel most marketable is its KERS, Kinetic Energy Recovery System. This mechanism recovers energy from braking to give riders help when going up hills or riding particularly fast through traffic.

Such high-tech implementations as your everyday bicycle wheel is quite a feat. The KERS system in particular could greatly help in gathering new adopters in the somewhat current slim market (granted I'm sure plenty of bicycle purist out there aren't too happy about it.) Yet such a system, would definitely have its benefits, especially if the bicycle is being used as a primary means of transportation, as in many cities.

I have started to note an abundance of electric and kinetic-energy type bicycles in the last few months. Hopefully the technology is able to keep the sector alive.

It is definitely a healthy, and environmentally friendly, alternative.

Gesture Based Computing on LCD

The students at MIT are at it again, turning your everday LCD screen into a low-cost, 3-D gestural computing system.

As you can see, users can not only control the system by touching the screen along its x and y axis, but also along the z. That is you hand can be tracked based on relative distance away from the screen! Though such technologies have been implmneted before, using a variety of tracking cameras, or special gloves, a low cost system has yet to be devised.

Ultimately, this technology could prove quite a promising alternative to our everyday user interface needs. Particularly, the availability of such technologies on our smaller devices, such as laptops and cellphones, would greatly increase usability.

The human body is obviously limited in range of size, thus designing our devices relative to just two-dimensional space seems inefficient. If instead we were to design more devices that allow for a 3rd dimension of input, a whole new foundation of digital input could be made.

It is not just that we won't have our fingers on the screens anymore, as it is, the dimension of depth opens up a whole new opportunity to immersive technology interfaces. I will include a deeper exploration on such possibilities in my impending haptics technology article.

Source