Top Tech#6: Holograms, eye implants, bionics, haptics, rockets, teleportation.. and doodling

There’s a lot of technology news — but this digest aims to highlight only the most interesting or important innovations.

This edition’s Headlines

Leia’s only hope: Holograms

Lenses as thin as paper

3D-printed wearable temperature sensor

Second Sight implants aid eyes

Brain-bossed Bionic Hand

Gadgets that touch you

Smartphone scans for HIV

Take-off for brain-driven drone

‘Butt Boop’ Boeing Launcher

Beam me up — Quantum teleportation achieved

3Doodler draws solid lines 

Leia’s only hope: Holograms

A startup claims its multiview backlight system will display full-color holographic images and video from a mobile phone.

Leia Inc. was founded in December 2013, building on core technology developed at HP Labs. The tech “relies on new physics enabled only by the latest nano-fabrication methods,” the company says. “We developed a mass-production process that makes it hardly different to fabricate from a standard mobile LCD display. We also ensured that holographic content creation would be a breeze, with a webGL-based API that lets web developers easily create interactive holographic content in the browser or re-use existing 3D graphics to turn them into mind blowing holograms.”

Technology Review reports a two-by-two-inch “holomodule” will be Leia’s first product, and will be capable of producing full-color 3-D images and videos that are visible—with no special glasses—from 64 different viewpoints.

The full story is here.

Lenses as thin as paper

Paper-thin lenses could shrink cameras and holographic displays, Technology Review reports.

The “nanostructured sheets of silicon can bend light in unusual ways, eliminating the need for bulky lenses.” The result could be holographic displays that “offer new ways to interact with computers and new opportunities for the entertainment industry.”

Professional-quality camera lenses could be no more thick than a credit card.

Developed by a Harvard applied physics professor “challenged” by Google to make RGB nanostructured films that it could use in the Glass headsets.

Here is the full story.

3D-printed wearable temperature sensor

Overheating? An armband’s thermal sensor sounds an alarm in case of high body temperature.

University of Tokyo researchers say the device will continuously monitor vital signs including temperature and heart rate for applications in healthcare settings, Kurzweil AI reports.

The self-powered wearable device is made of flexible organic components that can be printed by an inkjet printer on a polymer film.

Here is the full story.

Smartphone scans for HIV

A new smartphone accessory detects HIV with a finger prick, Wired reports. It costs $34 to make, delivers results in 15 minutes, and according to researchers at Columbia University, is on par with the most accurate HIV tests.

Early detection can reduce the risk of transmitting the virus to their offspring to less than 1 percent.

The dongle plugs into an iPhones or Android phones through the audio jack, which it uses to draw power and transfer data.

“A wide range of startups and researchers are building portable devices that can screen for particular diseases,” Wired adds, “and in many cases, can screen for multiple diseases simultaneously.” (This particular device can also identify syphilis.) “…Researchers realized they could significantly reduce the cost by piggy-backing on smartphones. If they handled power and data collection on the phone, they could whittle their device down to the basic equipment needed to perform the blood tests.”

Here is the full article.

Gadgets that touch you

Today your tablet might buzz a bit under your fingers, but upcoming haptic feedback methods might better fool your sense of touch.

Technology Review reports on the work of Immersion in San Jose, California — which “may be the touchy-feeliest place I’ve ever been.”

The tech could be “crucial to new gadgets such as virtual reality headsets and smart watches.”

Immersion currently offers software that “can wring more nuanced sensation from the buzzers in existing devices… to let you feel things like explosions or the whirring of helicopter blades when you hold a smartphone.”

Immersion can now also “fool fingers sliding over a touch screen into feeling textures that aren’t really there … I felt the roughness of gravel, the nubbiness of carpet, and the bumpiness of a metal grating.”

The full story is here, and also looks at Tactical Haptics in Palo Alto.

Second Sight implants aid eyes

Artificial optical systems have been implanted in three patients in France under a new government program that covers their costs.

The patients have Retinitis Pigmentosa, a rare hereditary disease that causes a progressive degeneration of the light-sensitive cells of the retina. An estimated 1.2 million people worldwide have RP.

California-based Second Sight Medical Products says its implantable visual prosthetics employs electrical stimulation to bypass the defunct cells and stimulate remaining viable retinal cells inducing visual perception in blind individuals.

The Argus II retinal prosthesis is the first artificial retina to receive approval in the United States and worldwide, the company says. It converts images captured by a miniature video camera mounted on the patient’s glasses into a series of small electrical pulses, which are transmitted wirelessly to an array of electrodes implanted on the surface of the retina. These pulses are intended to stimulate the retina’s remaining cells, resulting in the perception of patterns of light in the brain. The patient learns to interpret these visual patterns, thereby regaining some visual function. “The Argus II implant can positively impact a blind person’s ability to conduct routine daily activities, such as recognizing shapes or large objects, locating people, identifying the location of doorways, and following lines or edges. Ultimately, this is meant to allow Argus II users to live their daily lives with more confidence,” the company adds.

The Argus II has now been implanted in more than 100 individuals worldwide.

Brain-bossed Bionic Hand

A new bionic hand can be controlled by the patient’s brain — and its grip restores many basic functions.

“European surgeons and engineers have devised a mind-controlled bionic hand that restores function almost as well as a flesh-and-blood transplant,” Discovery News reports, “but without the risk of rejection, a research paper said Wednesday.”

Here is Feb 24 video interview with the surgeon.

Here is the original report on The Lancet

Take-off for brain-driven drone

A pilot on the ground can pilot a flying drone — using his brainwaves, not a standard joystick or other control system.

“Imagine using a brain-to-computer interface that enables people to control drones with their minds,” developer Tekever says. “It’s not science fiction anymore, and Project Brainflight is making it possible! …Aircraft can be directly controlled by the human brain.”

The system uses “high-performance electroencephalogram (EEG) systems to measure brain waves noninvasively, and then use specially conceived algorithms to convert brain signals into drone commands. The drone operator, wearing a cap that measures brain activity, influences the drone’s path using nothing but simple thoughts. Essentially, the electricity flowing through the pilot's brain acts as an input to the drone’s control system.”

The BBC reports on the demonstration here.

‘Butt Boop’ Boeing Launcher

A new reusable launch vehicle design patented by Boeing will deliver satellites into lower Earth orbit using three consecutive vehicles: a first-stage supersonic aircraft, a second-stage hypersonic aircraft, and a satellite-toting rocket, Popular Science reports.

“The first stage vehicle actually shoves its nose up into the butt of the second stage vehicle,” PopSci adds. “The combined aircraft are then mounted onto a carrier aircraft.”

Every part involved in the launch process is recovered afterward.

Here is the full article.

Beam me up — Quantum teleportation achieved

The quantum phenomenon  of entanglement — in which two particles, separated by any amount of distance, can instantaneously affect one another — has been used to “teleport” data. (Not matter, let alone humans, Scotty).

CNet reports physicists in the Netherlands sent quantum data concerning the spin state of an electron to another electron about 10 feet away — “seemingly faster than the speed of light.”

The researchers say “quantum teleportation has been recorded in the past, but the results in this study have an unprecedented replication rate of 100 percent at the current distance.”

The researchers made their own lounge-in-cheek video here.

Here is the full story.

3Doodler draws solid lines

Top Tech in general won’t cover too many “version 2” updates — plenty of sites serve that purpose. Nor do I want to cover every cool Kickstarter project… they often never pan out. Buy hey, let’s break both those guidelines!

WobbleWorks LLC launched “the world’s first 3D printing pen” printing pen in March 2013. The 3Doodler 3D spews out hot plastic that rapidly solidifies, letting you “draw” in three dimensions, and “create real three-dimensional objects,” the company says. The gadget “put the power of a 3D printer in the palm of your hand… no computers or software needed.” WobbleWorks sold more 130,000 of the first 3Doodlers.

Now, the upcoming new pen is slimmer, lighter, quieter and easier to use. The company says it’s re-engineered the drive system to better feed the plastic through the pen, and improved the nozzle design to deliver a smoother ‘drawing’ experience. The pen should ship by April.

Intel flies 3D camera

Intel says its RealSense is “the world’s first and smallest integrated 3D camera” that delivers real-time depth sensing.

The RealSense module weighs 8 grams and is less than 4mm thick. Intel says it “senses the surrounding world to scan, interact, play games, augment reality, and enhance photo and real-time video in three dimensions.”

With RealSense, Intel’s Snapshot system “takes photography to another dimension with multi-camera, depth-enabled tablets” the company says. “Capturing a high-definition depth map optimized for photography along with your full-resolution image, you can change focus and take measurements with a touch of a finger, add dynamic effects and motion, and discover things in your photos you never thought were there.”

In January, a remote copter Intel showcased had six RealSense cameras on board with which it navigated around obstacles autonomously.

And Intel demonstrated a research project for vision-impaired people, with wearable RealSense cameras that “sense the vicinity and trigger vibrations as a feedback mechanism, helping people to navigate their environment,” the company says.

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TTTT#5 — Robots and AI

Innovative, Interesting, or Important

There’s plenty of technology news every day — too much.
The mission here is to highlight only the developments that have long-term implication, promise, or portent. Instead of fleeting news of updated software, slightly improved gadgets, or a start-up’s funding, I’ll spotlight innovations that should still be important a year from now.

This weeks Top Trend:

Robots and AI
Sometimes the trends leap out and identify themselves, and in preparing this edition of the Top Tech digest, there were an overwhelming number of news items about robots and artificial intelligence.
Whether you think these two trends represent a boon or a boondoggle (or a potential big boom) there’s no question the pace of innovation here is accelerating rapidly.

Headlines in this edition:
1. AI: Threat or Menace?
2. Not the Terminator: the Extinguisher
3. Real-looking robot receptionists
4. IBM’s AI employed in android
5. Britain’s ’Bot behind the wheel
6. Old interplanetary robot found
7. DARPA robots go wireless for $3.5 million
8. Robot scientist develops drugs
9. Robot dogs form packs
10. Moving cameras talk to each other
11. Disney Beachbot draws pictures in the sand
12. Skydio’s smarter quadcopters see where they are going — funded $3 million
13. AI Revolution: Road to Super intelligence
14. Shooting a laser-guided rifle made me feel like a robot

AI: Threat or Menace?

Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk are already known for their misgivings about the potential problems posed by artificial intelligence — but recently they were joined by hundreds of other leading scientists in an open letter warning about the impending rise of AI.

i09 reports the open letter was put together by the Future of Life Institute, a group mobilized by Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, MIT's Max Tegmark, Harvard's Viktoriya Krakovna, Boston University's Meia Chita-Tegmark, and UC Santa Cruz professor Anthony Aguirre. “The signatories of the open letter are not calling for a ban on AI research and development. Rather, they're calling for responsible oversight to ensure that it works with humanity's best interests in mind,” the news site adds.
The open letter notes “there is now a broad consensus that AI research is progressing steadily, and that its impact on society is likely to increase. The potential benefits are huge, since everything that civilization has to offer is a product of human intelligence; we cannot predict what we might achieve when this intelligence is magnified by the tools AI may provide, but the eradication of disease and poverty are not unfathomable. Because of the great potential of AI, it is important to research how to reap its benefits while avoiding potential pitfalls."
Tesla and Space X founder Musk donated $10 million to the Future of Life Institute for its research program.
The full letter is here.
[A no-prize to whoever gets the headline.]

Not the Terminator: the Extinguisher

This walking robot will fight fires aboard ships.

Sponsored by The Office of Naval Research, the Shipboard Autonomous Firefighting Robot is now undergoing testing.
SAFFiR “is a bipedal humanoid robot being developed to assist sailors with damage control and inspection operations aboard naval vessels,” a Navy press release reports. It uses thermal imaging to identify overheated equipment, and a hose to extinguish a small fire in a series of experiments aboard a decommissioned Navy vessel.
The two-legged humanoid robot was developed by researchers at Virginia Tech. SAFFiR stands 5 feet 10 inches and weighs 143 pounds. “The unique mechanism design on the robot equips it with super-human range of motion to maneuver in complex spaces,” the Navy adds. Its sensors include infrared stereovision, and a rotating laser for light detection and ranging (LIDAR), which “enables the humanoid to see through dense smoke.”

Real-looking robot receptionists

Checking in? A robot may be waiting for you at reception.

The new Henn-na Hotel in Japan will be staffed with robots at the front desk. “The hotel will feature three "actroids" (robots with strong human likeness) that will act as receptionists,” CNN reports. “They'll be able to engage in intelligent conversations with human guests.”
Here is the website for Henn-na, which opens in July with the motto of “A commitment for evolution.”  

IBM’s AI employed in robot

IBM’s Watson is the most widely known AI out there — and now its smarts will be housed in the Pepper robot made by the Japanese telecommunications company SoftBank.

Pepper already has algorithms that read emotions from people's faces and voices, Popular Science reports. “Watson is designed to learn from example, to understand people's questions and requests, and to read the Internet and other databases to find answers.” IBM is licensing the tech for Watson-driven apps for banking, insurance, health care, and automotive — and the Pepper “cute personal robot” SoftBank makes.
PopSci previously posted here on Pepper (and many other ’bots).

Britain’s ’Bot behind the wheel

While Google is testing it driverless cars in the U.S., the UK government is fast-tracking its own automated automobiles.

The British Department for Transport reports the UK “is uniquely positioned to develop driverless car technology… The industry has been given the green light for testing on public roads.” It cites the “tremendous potential for reducing accidents and making traffic flow more smoothly.”
A prototype driverless pod will soon be tested in public areas: the Lutz can seat two people and scoot around for 40 miles, or roughly six hours on a single charge, Engadget reports. It packs twin cameras and LIDAR sensors on the front, two cameras and a single LIDAR on the back, and two cameras on each side “which combine to give the vehicle a detailed 360-degree picture of its surroundings.” It’s made by Transport Systems Catapult and the RDM Group.

Old interplanetary robot found

Speaking of British bots: Let’s not forget that we’ve been sending robots out to space for years — and one lost little ’droid* have apparently been found.

The Beagle2 probe was sighted on Mars, NASA reports. The lander was built by the United Kingdom, and thought lost since its 2003 touchdown on Mars. It was found in images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, showing “Beagle 2 partially deployed on the surface of the planet, ending the mystery of what happened to the mission more than a decade ago,” NASA says. “They show that the lander survived its Dec. 25, 2003 touchdown enough to at least partially deploy its solar arrays.”
The BBC has more on the story here.
(*Even if it wasn’t what we were looking for.)

DARPA robots go wireless for $3.5 million

Developers seeking $3.5 million in prizes from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency are adding wireless communications to their robots. 

DARPA says its Robotics Challenge spurs “development of human-supervised robot technology for disaster response.” Among the latest “additional hurdles teams will face: Robots will have to operate completely without wires — they may not be connected to power cords, fall arrestors, or wired communications tethers. Teams will have to communicate with their robots over a secure wireless network.”
What’s worse: “DARPA will intentionally degrade communications between the robots and human operators working at a distance. The idea is to replicate the conditions these robots would face going into a disaster zone. Spotty communication will force the robots to make some progress on their own during communications blackouts.”
Other upgrades to the base Atlas robot include the power supply with a variable-pressure pump, repositioned shoulders, electrically actuated lower arms, and three onboard computers for perception and task planning.
There’s more information here.
You can see a video here.

Robot scientist develops drugs

An artificially-intelligent ‘robot scientist’ could make drug discovery faster and much cheaper, say researchers writing in the Royal Society journal Interface. “The team has demonstrated the success of the approach as “Eve” discovered that a compound shown to have anti-cancer properties might also be used in the fight against malaria,” reports the University of Cambridge.

The A.I. “reduces the costs, uncertainty, and time involved in drug screening, and has the potential to improve the lives of millions of people worldwide,” the report adds. “Robot scientists …can automatically develop and test hypotheses to explain observations, run experiments using laboratory robotics, interpret the results to amend their hypotheses, and then repeat the cycle, automating high-throughput hypothesis-led research.”
In 2009, Adam, a robot scientist developed by researchers at the Universities of Aberystwyth and Cambridge, became the first machine to independently discover new scientific knowledge. The same team has now developed Eve, based at the University of Manchester, whose purpose is to speed up the drug discovery process and make it more economical.

Robot dogs form packs

I grew up with car salesman Cal Worthington’s TV pitches that always featured varying species as his “dog Spot.” He never featured a robot however, and now Boston Dynamics has named its four-legged 160-pound device “Spot” — and this robot even evidences pack-like behavior, Wired reports.

"A video shows Spot gallivanting with a weird equestrian hop through office corridors, up concrete stairs, and along rocky hills with little trouble. And when a pair of Spots begin trekking up a hill, Spot Number One starts repeatedly colliding into Spot Number Two—and neither loses balance. After a few seconds and a bit of subtle push-and-shove, they straighten out and walk in parallel again, and then turn together once they reach the top of the hill... This is getting creepy, guys,” Wired says. “It looks like these robots are exhibiting the same swarm-like behavior that we see in animals.”
Boston Dynamics is owned by Google.
The full story is here.

Moving cameras talk to each other

To track and identify pedestrians, a proposed new surveillance system will connect its cameras.
Technology developed at the University of Washington “distinguishes among people by giving each person a unique color and number, then tracks them as they walk,” the school reports.  The algorithm “trains the networked cameras to learn one another’s differences. The cameras first identify a person in a video frame, then follow that same person across multiple camera views.”
The problem with tracking a human across cameras of non-overlapping fields of view is that a person’s appearance can vary dramatically in each video because of different perspectives, angles and color hues produced by different cameras, the report notes. “The researchers overcame this by building a link between the cameras. Cameras first record for a couple of minutes to gather training data, systematically calculating the differences in color, texture and angle between a pair of cameras for a number of people who walk into the frames in a fully unsupervised manner without human intervention. After this calibration period, an algorithm automatically applies those differences between cameras and can pick out the same people across multiple frames, effectively tracking them without needing to see their faces.”
Here is the full story.
There’s a demonstration video here.

Disney Beachbot draws pictures in the sand

Disney Research has built a robot that etches massive pictures onto a beach.

The Beachbot autonomously rakes the sand to recreate an image file it is provided with. It’s large, soft wheels let it move about without marring what it’s drawn.
The mobile robot “can turn an ordinary beach into an artist's canvas,” Disney says.
There’s a video demonstration here.
TechCrunch has more on the story here.

Skydio’s smarter quadcopters see where they are going — funded $3 million

Start-up Skydio is making flying cameras that are almost impossible to crash — and the proof of concept has won them $3 million seed funding.

“Drones are poised to have a transformative impact on how we see our world,” the new firm says. “They’ll enable us to film the best moments of our lives with professional quality cinematography — and they’ll also change the way businesses think about monitoring their operations and infrastructure. This grand vision is starting to come into focus, but existing products are blind to the world around them. As a consequence, drones must fly high above the nearest structures or receive the constant attention of an expert operator. “Flyaways” and crashes abound. These problems must be solved for the industry to move forward.”
Skydio says it will offer “safe and intuitive” drones “for a much broader audience and a much broader set of applications.” Their flying camera will be “aware of its surroundings” and so be “far easier to control, safer to operate, and more capable.”
How will it work? By using it’s camera not just to record images, but to ‘see’ where it’s at. “Almost all the information a drone needs to be good at its job can be found in onboard video data; the challenge is extracting that information and making it useful for the task at hand. That challenge, and the incredible capabilities that are unlocked, are our focus.”
Here’s a cool video demonstration.
And TechCrunch has more on the company here.

AI Revolution: Road to Super intelligence

This has been so widely linked — even by Elon Musk — that you’ve probably already read it, but we must note here the “Wait But Why” overview of artificial intelligence’s evolution. 

It makes two primary points:
1. Technology advances exponentially. What seemed impossible a few years back is now commonplace, and what seems impossible now might actually occur very soon.
2. Once one is created, an AI can evolve from ‘almost-as-intelligent-as-us’ to ‘super-intelligent’ almost overnight — and we can no more comprehend the capabilities of a super-intelligence than a monkey could design and build a skyscraper.
“AI is not just an important topic, but by far THE most important topic for our future,” the author concludes.
Here is part one.

Shooting a laser-guided rifle made me feel like a robot

And the last item in our round-up of robots and AIs: a writer shooting a laser-guided rifle reports it made him “feel like a robot… cold and emotionless.”

The piece is worth checking out not only as it highlights how we all might feel when we are “augmented” with electronics and algorithms — but also for how it shows the type of weaponry robotic war-machines will carry. Hint: robots won’t miss. The full story is here.

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