In today's world there is an overwhelming amount of talk about the potential of new technologies - most notably 3D printing. In radical leftist circles there is talk of how this new technology will have the potential to kill or mortally ...
Prompted by a recent article in Aeon Magazine warning of the threat posed by advanced artificial intelligence, Kristin Centorcelli of SF Signal put together an impressive panel of renowned science fiction authors to get their opinions on the subject.
Haptics is to touch the way optics is to sight. It's a user interface that circumvents the cluttered inputs of sight and sound, and it's appearing in an increasing number of objects we interact with daily.
Your first experience with haptics was probably your phone vibrating in your pocket. Or maybe it was the rumble pack on your N64 controller. But whatever the case, you probably didn’t know it as a haptic interface.
Haptics is to touch the way optics is to sight. It's a user interface that circumvents the cluttered inputs of sight and sound, and it's appearing in an increasing number of objects we interact with daily. Vibration is just the beginning.
Any sort of information received through touch is haptic; braille could be considered haptic communication. But as it appears in technology, it's generally either tactile (expressing texture) or kinesthetic (expressing force or position). Haptics is used to better robotic control, to increase realism in gaming, and even to sit up straighter.
The roots of haptic technology are mechanical, says Will Provancher, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Utah and co-chair of the World Haptics Technical Committee.
"Right around the time of WWII, people were trying to handle radioactive materials, and if you have direct contact with these materials, you will eventually die," he says. "So to be able to handle these materials safely, people started making kinematic linkages."
That is, scientists and engineers used a mechanical apparatus to manipulate the samples — pull, and it pulls, turn, and it turns. But more recently, computers have become an interface between controller (master) and controlled (slave). Motor control is much finer, but that's not always enough.
If the latest crop of biometric systems work as advertised, they may be able to identify you without you ever knowing you’ve been spotted, with more accuracy, and from farther away. Here are 11 projects.
Cell phones that can identify you by how you walk. Fingerprint scanners that work from 25 feet away. Radars that pick up your heartbeat from behind concrete walls. Algorithms that can tell identical twins apart. Eyebrows and earlobes that give you away. A new generation of technologies is emerging that can identify you by your physiology. And unlike the old crop of biometric systems, you don't need to be right up close to the scanner in order to be identified. If they work as advertised, they may be able to identify you without you ever knowing you've been spotted.
“Many of us will live to see the day where we have physical, non-human colleagues,” says Matt Beane, a researcher at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Beane’s research addresses what he calls “The Avatar Economy”, where remote workers operate robots. Such robots are already used for tasks which require highly skilled labour and physical presence but where it’s either too dangerous or extremely expensive to use human beings. Aerial and ground-based robots were used in the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, for example, to help assess system and structural integrity and evaluate demolition plans. According to Beane, the next wave of robotic workers will be in retail, security and remote supervision of manufacturing operations. Telepresence robots like those made by DoubleRobotics (and their human operators) will help you to find the right TV in a retail store or allow an operations supervisor in Chicago to do quality control on an assembly line in Shanghai.
Walden: Will robots replace people in work? Durham Herald Sun n the 2012 movie “Robot and Frank,” set sometime in the future, a robot is purchased to provide personal care for an elderly - and mentally deteriorating - former jewel thief (Frank).
The augmented reality scene is hotting up, with the promise of full computer-mediated vision for the mainstream and another hint that Google won't have the
Glass market all to itself thanks to an incoming headset from startup Meta. The wearable project actually goes one step further than Project Glass, putting a full twin-display digital environment – controlled by two hand 3D tracking – in front of the user, rather than floating notifications and prompts in the corner of their eye as Google’s system does.
The promise of hypersonic flight sending us halfway around the world in a matter of hours is being bandied about again, this time by a British company that declares, with all due humility, that it has made "the biggest breakthrough in aerospace propulsion...
A postdoctoral student has developed a technique for implanting thought-controlled robotic arms and their electrodes directly to the bones and nerves of amputees, a move which he is calling "the future of artificial limbs." The first volunteers...
Though little is really known about these new bots, the rate of robot installation thus far is much lower than Gou's original claim; however, the evidence suggests that it is difficult to know exactly what is going on in the factories ...