Ratchet Up

Contact Lens Used As Display or Medical Sensor

One day it might not be unusual to wear a contact lens that projects the phone's display directly onto the eye. [...] By incorporating metal circuitry and light-emitting diodes (LEDs) into a polymer-based lens, they have created a functional circuit that is biologically compatible with the eye. [...]

One of the goals was to see if it would be possible to build a heads-up display that could superimpose images onto a person's field of view, while still allowing her to see the real world. It would be a sort of augmented reality [...] Or civilians could use the electronic lens as a cell-phone display, to see who is calling and to watch videos during a commute [...]

Another possible application is to use the lens as a sensor that could monitor chemical levels in the body and notify the user if they indicate signs of disease. [...]. In addition, the lens could continually monitor changes over time, providing a more complete view of a person's health.

Admittedly, these applications are years away. [...]

One of the next steps for the team will be to increase the number of LEDs on the lens to a couple hundred, in the hope of making a viable display. Right now, the LEDs are about 300 micrometers in diameter, which obviously limits the number of them that can be put on a lens. In addition, LEDs this size tend to break in the lens-shaping process." [Technology Review]

Dimentia-Cam

Microsoft's SenseCam is being used to help people with various forms of dementia to remember things. It's a mostly always-on visual aid that hangs around the neck, regularly snapping images.

"Not only does SenseCam allow people to recall memories while they are looking at the images, which in itself is wonderful, but after an initial period of consolidation, it appears to lead to long-term retention of memories over many months, without the need to view the images repeatedly," says Emma Berry, a neuropsychologist who works as a consultant to Microsoft.

SenseCam is worn around the neck and automatically takes a wide-angle, low-resolution photograph every 30 seconds. It contains an accelerometer to stabilize the image and reduce blurriness, and it can be configured to take pictures in response to changes in movement, temperature, or lighting. "Because it has a wide-angle lens, you don't have to point it at anything--it just happens to capture pretty much everything that the wearer can see," says Steve Hodges, the manager of the Sensor and Devices Group at Microsoft Research, U.K.

An entire day's events can be captured digitally on a memory card and downloaded onto a PC for subsequent viewing. Using specially designed software, the Microsoft researchers can convert the pictures into a short movie that displays the images at up to 10 frames per second, allowing a day's events to be viewed in a few minutes.

SenseCam was originally developed as a memory aid for healthy people, but it is now in clinical testing for those with memory impairment, such as dementia. Narinder Kapur, head of the Neuropsychology Department at Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge, U.K., and leader of the eight-patient study, recently published an initial case report of one patient in the journal Neuropsychological Rehabilitation. Kapur and his colleagues found that Mrs. B could remember most nontrivial events after she had spent around one hour reviewing the SenseCam images with her husband every two days for a two-week period.

The device might help patients with mild forms of Alzheimer's disease, says Giovanni Frisoni, a neurologist at a clinical research institute in Brescia, Italy, who is not involved in the research. He is skeptical, however, about whether SenseCam could be used by patients with Alzheimer's disease without assistance from their caregivers. Still, "it might have a beneficial effect on soothing the patients' anxiety," he says. "All Alzheimer's patients have a deep anguish due to their perceived, although usually not confessed, inability to remember their recent past. Being able to go through the recent events may have a reassuring effect. Reassurance is what Alzheimer's patients want but, unfortunately, [is] what they are often denied."

[More at Technology Review]

Terrabyte Of Data On Your Keychain This Year?

No question, this report by reliable source Shelly Palmer from CES this year got my attention. If true, I'd like to make a flash-drive necklace with my 100 top movies on it:

During CES week, the HD DVD v. BluRay war was called in favor of BluRay. This may be premature or it may be right on the money – in truth, it would be great to have a single optical solution for HD storage. But, while everyone at the show was taking sides and talking trash, some people might have missed the other big story at CES – solid state memory

You know your jump drive (the little USB thingy you have on your key chain)? It could be up to 8GB, but it’s probably a smaller model. Well, several manufacturers were showing prototypes of jump drive and SSD (Solid State Disc) technologies up to 832GB. Yes, you read it right, almost a Terabyte of data could be hanging on your keychain within a very few months.

What will that mean to you? Well a standard DVD holds one movie and some additional material in 4.7GB and BluRay disc holds about four times as much. But, if you compress a movie to about 2GB where it still looks good, you can imagine a world where any given teenager could be walking around with over 400 full length, HD feature films, 1,200 standard definition films, 2,000 hours of television or 250,000 songs on their iPod or hanging on a keychain or lanyard. Current technology would not allow a consumer to transfer all of that data very easily (and what exactly would you be transferring it to anyway) so thinking about a world where your jump drive, or whatever it will be called, contains $5,000 worth of content, you can easily foresee a business in wearable art, jewelry or some other accoutrement keeps your data close to you and makes it hard to lose.

IBM was showing a proprietary USB key (again it doesn’t work with anything that anyone else makes) that can download a 1.9GB HD feature film in under 60 seconds. Solid state memory uses very little electricity compared to traditional hard discs, they also have no moving parts to break. This kind of massive, passive storage capacity will effect a true sociological change. Imagine walking around with that amount of data in a wireless P2P environment, it would truly change the way we do life."

New Camera Welcomes Your Indecision About The Decisive Moment

Remember Cartier-Bresson's decisive moment, that one punctum of time when the world came into glorious alignment, the moment when your heart's finger said yes, and clicked the shutter? Well, digital and computational photography is finding new ways to technologize the decisive moment so that you can take your pick at home.

Put another way, you can now buy a camera that welcomes your indecision about the decisive moment.

Cassio's new Exilim Pro E-F1 still camera offers full resolution photography using 60 fps ultra-high speed burst mode captures the crucial moment. Users can shoot at an ultra fast 60 frames per second. I n burst mode, the frame rate can also be varied from between 1 and 60 frames per second while shooting. Up to 60 shots can be taken at once, so 60 shots per second for one second, or 5 shots per second for 12 seconds, are possible.

Users can record images not just at the instant they press the shutter button, but before! Continuously recording at up to 60 images per second, a maximum of 60 images can be saved in the camera’s own buffer memory even before the shutter button is depressed. Even if users press the shutter a little late, they will still be able to catch that vital moment.

Slow Motion View function lets users view and capture that critical moment in slow motion during still photography. Users can take photographs while, in the monitor, the momentary action that is before their eyes is displayed in slow motion. It is just as if they have slowed down the passing of time. Users can unhurriedly observe the motion of the subject as they press the shutter, ensuring that they never miss that crucial moment.

The EXILIM Pro EX-F1 can record high speed movie footage of motion too fast for the human eye, for ultra slow motion playback. Users can select a recording speed of 300 fps, 600 fps or 1,200 fps. There is also a Movie Button that lets users quickly start movie recording without first switching from still image mode.

The camera features Full High-Definition movie recording capability. Users can record beautiful movies at a screen size of 1920x1080 pixels, at a rate of 60 fields per second. The camera can be connected to an HD compatible television with a separately available HDMI cable to enjoy viewing movies."

As an old school photographer, I hate this, of course; still, I want this camera.

Posters in 3-D

Last week, 10 U.S. theaters rolled out full-color 3-D posters with motion and photorealistic detail to promote the movie How She Move. [...] the advertisements feature one of the film's characters tearing up the dance floor in an eight-second clip that can be "played" in 3-D by walking from left to right of the poster. Despite the images' slightly transparent quality, what you see is pretty close to the real thing. [...]

Holographic imagery is becoming more common these days, from the fraud deterrents on credit cards to National Geographic's 3-D magazine covers. However, these images have been limited with respect to color, resolution, viewing angle and size. RabbitHoles' new technology takes the crisp, detailed 2-D images we're used to seeing on computer and TV screens and translates them into full-color, 3-D images. [...] Rather than simple static images, RabbitHoles' can take six- to eight-second movie clips from 2-D and 3-D films and print them into a poster that "moves" as the viewer walks past. [...]

To produce the imagery, RabbitHoles creates a 3-D computer model of the object that will be turned into a hologram. A virtual camera takes snapshots at different angles, and a software algorithm developed by RabbitHoles calculates how light would bounce off each angle in the scene. The result is up to 1,280 different snapshots, or frames, that not only hold color, distance and angle info, but light patterns as well.

To record the actual hologram onto a sheet of film, the data is sent to a printer that divides each frame into pixels -- a poster-size print can hold up to 700,000. The company then exposes each pixel with red, green and blue pulsed lasers.

If the hologram is destined to become framed artwork, it's mounted on Plexiglas, but it can be mounted on virtually anything. [...]

The development of the RGB pulsed laser was key to RabbitHoles' process. Previous systems used either a continuous-wave laser or a single-color pulsed laser. The former employs a low-intensity light that requires a long exposure time lasting from less than a second to a few minutes. Any vibration during filming can lead the laser and the film to slightly shift, diminishing the hologram's resolution.

In contrast, pulsed lasers flash for just 1/10,000,000 of a second, so getting a clear image is much easier. But up until now, pulsed lasers were monochromatic. RabbitHoles' newly engineered RGB pulsed laser offers the best of both worlds -- crisp images in full color." [Wired]