Kinect plus projector makes anything a remote control

Video: How to turn anything into remote control

http://www.newscientist.com/videoredirect?bcpid=96978243001&bckey=AQ~~,AAAAADqBmN8~,Yo4S_rZKGX37VoTHytsO5tNRQyuMSIxf&bctid=2324894581001

LOST the TV remote control again? Never mind – just create another one on the arm of your sofa with a swish of your hand. While you are at it, why not turn the top of your coffee table into a lighting controller, so you can dim your lamps while you kick back and watch a movie. The system that makes this happen, called WorldKit, was created by Robert Xiao and Chris Harrison at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And it could be in our homes in the next five years, Harrison says.

WorldKit combines cameras, projectors and computers to allow everyday surfaces like walls, tables, doors and worktops to host interactive controllers for gadgets including TVs, digital video recorders, hi-fis or room lighting.

The system uses a Microsoft Kinect depth camera to pinpoint which surface your swishing hand is requesting to become a controller. As you move your hand back and forth, you say out loud what you want the surface to turn into – for example, "TV remote". WorldKit's software uses voice recognition to work out what type of remote you want and a digital projector on the ceiling beams an image of that controller onto the chosen surface. The Kinect camera then works out which buttons you are pressing. Xiao will demonstrate the system this week at CHI 2013, a conference on human-computer interaction, in Paris, France.

Harrison says the system will be useful when small "pico" projectors have become cheap and power-efficient enough to be dotted around our homes. "No one has yet come up with the killer app that will drive projector prices down. WorldKit might be that app," he says.

The system has other uses. For instance, it could beam interactive cookery instructions onto a kitchen worktop, creating a space for each ingredient to be placed in. These spaces then light up as software takes you through the recipe.

The technology impresses Patrick Baudisch, a computer scientist at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany, whose team will be presenting a way to track people in rooms using interactive floors at CHI 2013. "WorldKit looks like a very useful step forward in ubiquitous computing. It will help the field move forward and bring smart home applications a step closer to reality," he says.

E-tattoo monitors brainwaves and baby bump

E-tattoo monitors brainwaves and baby bump

An electronic patch can analyse complex brainwaves and listen in on a fetus’s heart

MIND reading can be as simple as slapping a sticker on your forehead. An "electronic tattoo" containing flexible electronic circuits can now record some complex brain activity as accurately as an EEG. The tattoo could also provide a cheap way to monitor a developing fetus.

The first electronic tattoo appeared in 2011, when Todd Coleman at the University of California, San Diego, and colleagues designed a transparent patch containing electronic circuits as thin as a human hair. Applied to skin like a temporary tattoo, these could be used to monitor electrophysiological signals associated with the heart and muscles, as well as rudimentary brain activity.

To improve its usefulness, Coleman's group has now optimised the placement of the electrodes to pick up more complex brainwaves. They have demonstrated this by monitoring so-called P300 signals in the forebrain. These appear when you pay attention to a stimulus. The team showed volunteers a series of images and asked them to keep track of how many times a certain object appeared. Whenever volunteers noticed the object, the tattoo registered a blip in the P300 signal.

The tattoo was as good as conventional EEG at telling whether a person was looking at the target image or another stimulus, the team told a recent Cognitive Neuroscience Society meeting in San Francisco.

The team is now modifying the tattoo to transmit data wirelessly to a smartphone, Coleman says. Eventually, he hopes the device could identify other complex patterns of brain activity, such as those that might be used to control a prosthetic limb.

For now, the group is focusing on optimising the tattoo for use in conditions such as depression and Alzheimer's disease, each of which have characteristic patterns of neural activity. People with depression could wear the tattoo for an extended period, allowing it to help gauge whether medication is working. "The number one advantage is the medical ease of application," says Michael Pitts of Reed College in Portland, Oregon.

Because its electronic components are already mass-produced, the tattoo can also be made very cheaply.

That means it might also lend itself to pregnancy monitoring in developing countries. With help from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Coleman's group is working on an unobtrusive version of the tattoo that monitors signals such as maternal contractions and fetal heart rate.

Samsung Galaxy S4 launched at Rs 41,500 in India; to take on Apple’s iPhone

A model shows Samsung Electronics Co.'s latest Galaxy S4 smartphones during its unveiling ceremony in Seoul, South Korea, Thursday, April 25, 2013. 

Hands-on Samsung Galaxy S4 - First Look (Render):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=p5YPaBkhKZI

NEW DELHI Samsung expects sales from its latest flagship smartphone Galaxy S4, that was launched on Friday and boasts of several never-seen-before features, to be around three times higher than its predecessor Galaxy S3, said a senior executive of the company.

"The (sales of) S2 trebled the sales of Galaxy S, the S3 trebled sales of S2 and I see no reason why we will not have enormous growth on S4 over any of its predecessors. The sheer anticipation in the market has been unprecedented," said Samsung Mobile vice presidentAsim Warsi.

The lightweight Android handset, which comes in 16/32/64 GB variants, has a 5-inch Super Amoled screen and costs Rs 41,500 for a 16-GB internal memory version.

The market operating price of the device is expected to be lower than the retail price. The S4 is available for sale online and will be up for sale in Samsung's premium brand stores in Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Mumbai on Saturday for four hours.

Pan-India retail sales will begin over the next week. In India, the Samsung S4 will compete with the likes of Apple iPhone5, HTC One, BlackBerry Z 10 and Nokia Lumia 920, in the price range of Rs 35,000 to Rs 45,000.

Customers planning to buy the S4 will be able to avail an equal monthly installment (EMI) scheme which will drop the price barrier for consumers looking to upgrade.

The ongoing EMI scheme valid on Galaxy S3, Galaxy Grand and Note 2 offers 15% cash-back on existing smartphones, zero per cent interest and no down payment.

Smart dust computers are no bigger than a snowflake

Thousands of tiny computers that scavenge power from their surroundings could one day be used to monitor your world

THOUGHT your smartphone or tablet packed a big punch for its size? Pah, that's nothing. The next generation of computers will be able to carry out complex calculations but will be little bigger than a snowflake.

Such tiny computers – nicknamed smart dust – would work much like their larger cousins, says Prabal Dutta at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. They will have tiny CPUs that run programs on a skeleton operating system and be able to access equally small banks of RAM and flash memory. The plan is for such sensor-packed machines to be embedded in buildings and objects in their hundreds or even thousands, providing constant updates on the world around us.

Dutta's group is creating the first prototypes, which they have dubbedMichigan Micro Motes. These devices, a cubic millimetre in size, come equipped with sensors to monitor temperature or movement, say, and can send data via radio waves.

But how do you charge something so small? "The vision of blanketing the world with smart sensors is very compelling," says Joshua Smith, head of the Sensor Systems Laboratory at the University of Washington in Seattle. "But a lot of sensor networks researchers found themselves surrounded by mountains of depleted batteries and dead sensor nodes."

So, like microscopic Robinson Crusoes, the motes will live off the power they can scavenge from their surroundings. A mote near a light source might use a tiny solar panel, while a mote running somewhere with greater temperature extremes can be built to tap into that, by converting the heat energy that flows between hot and cold into electricity.

So what will be smart dust's killer app? The Michigan team says Micro Motes could be used to monitor every tiny movement of large structures like bridges or skyscrapers. And motes in a smart house could report back on lighting, temperature, carbon monoxide levels and occupancy. With motes embedded in all of your belongings it might be possible to run a Google search in the physical world. For example, asking Google "where are my keys?" would give you the right answer if they have been fitted with a mote.

Smart dust computers could make efficient medical implants too. The idea is that motes placed inside the body would monitor a patient's vital signs. For example, in as-yet-unpublished research, the Michigan team has implanted a Micro Mote inside a mouse tumour so that it can report back on its growth.

Smith is also working on miniature computing, with his wireless identification and sensing platforms (WISPs). Further along in development than Micro Motes – albeit larger – WISPs communicate via radio frequency identification devices, using the same computer language that your next-generation credit card uses. Like Micro Motes, WISPs don't need batteries and only consume what they can scavenge – stray signals from a nearby TV tower might do the trick, for instance.

But communication remains a key bottleneck for the next wave of computer miniaturisation, says Dutta. For the same chunk of energy a mote could perform 100,000 operations on its CPU but only transmit one bit of information to the outside world, he says.

Inspiring vision of Boeing's futuristic supersonic jet

Inspiring vision of Boeing's futuristic supersonic jet

(Image: Quentin Schwinn/NASA)

This sleek model of a Boeing supersonic airliner design being tested in a wind tunnel brings with it a touch of sadness for those who, like me, mourn the decline of the British aviation industry in general and the utterly gorgeous Anglo-French Concorde in particular.

The reason? When I was at school in the 1970s, the cover of my physics textbook carried a similar photo of a model Concorde in a supersonic wind tunnel. It was an everyday inspiration to me and yet, in 2003, the twice-the-speed-of-sound, hook-nosed airliner was junked, too expensive to run and maintain on the limited routes the noisy beast could fly.

What they are doing at NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, sensibly, is looking at ways to reduce the noise of a supersonic airliner so that its economics are not hamstrung from the off. The engines are on top to shield the ground from their roar, and a V-tail channels the sonic boom backwards – keeping the boom airborne for longer, giving it more chance of dissipating before reaching your delicate ears.

Says NASA: "We are testing overall vehicle design and performance options to reduce emissions and noise, and identifying whether the volume of sonic booms can be reduced to a level that leads to a reversal of the current ruling that prohibits commercial supersonic flight over land."

Now, why didn't we think of that?

Rats and bats brains work differently on the move

Scientists have found significant differences between the rhythms in a part of the brain used in navigation in rats and bats.The study challenges a widely used model - based on studies in rodents of how animals navigate their environment.

To get a clearer picture of the processes at work in the mammal brain during spatial navigation, neuroscientists must closely study a broad range of animals, said scientists from the University of Maryland.

Along with colleagues from Boston University, the researchers focused on specialised cells that process spatial information in a region called the medial entorhinal cortex, a hub of neural networks for memory and navigation.

Earlier experiments showed rats' brain cells in this area fire continuously in a rhythmic electrical signal called a theta wave when the animals are navigating through space. Some models of the brain treat theta waves as a key element of spatial navigation in all mammals, but this idea is based on rodent research, UMD researcher Cynthia Moss said.

The team tested for rhythmic electrical responses at the cellular level in bat and rat brain tissue. They found evidence for theta waves in the rat cells. But in the bat cells these waves were absent, said Moss, who has studied bats since the 1980s.

"This raises questions as to whether theta rhythms are actually doing what the spatial navigation theory proposes," said co-author, UMD biology researcher Katrina Mac Leod. "To understand brains, including ours, we really must study neural activity in a variety of animals," Mac Leod said.

Humans and other mammals share many common features of brain organisation, and the differences in theta waves between bats and rats raises questions about how spatial information is represented in all brains, researchers said The study was published in journal Science.

Super-Earths: Two Earth-like planets that could host life discovered

The larger planet in the left corner is somewhat covered by ice and is f, which is farther from the star. The planet below it is e, which is slightly warmer and has clouds and may be a water world. (AP)

NASA scientists have discovered two new Earth-like planets in the habitable orbit of a Sun-like star, 1,200 light years away, which could potentially host life.

Using observations gathered by NASAs Kepler Mission, the team, led by William Borucki of the agency's Ames Research Center, found five planets orbiting a Sun-like star called Kepler-62.

Four of these planets are so-called super-Earths, larger than our own planet, but smaller than even the smallest ice giant planet in our Solar System.

"The detection and confirmation of planets is an enormously collaborative effort of talent and resources, and requires expertise from across the scientific community to produce these tremendous results," said Borucki.

These new super-Earths have radii of 1.3, 1.4, 1.6, and 1.9 times that of Earth. In addition, one of the five was a roughly Mars-sized planet, half the size of Earth.

Kepler-62 is one of about 170,000 stars observed by the Kepler Space Telescope, with a mass about 69 per cent of that of our Sun.

The two super-Earths with radii of 1.4 and 1.6 Earth radii orbit their star at distances where they receive about 41 per cent and 120 per cent, respectively, of the warmth from their star that the Earth receives from the Sun.

The planets are thus in the star's habitable zone, they have the right temperatures to maintain liquid water on their

surfaces and are theoretically hospitable to life.

Theoretical modelling of the super-Earth planets, Kepler-62e and Kepler-62f, suggests that both could be solid, either rocky - or rocky with frozen water.
"This appears to be the best example our team has found yet of Earth-like planets in the habitable zone of a Sun-like star," Alan Boss from Carnegie Institution for Science said in a statement.

Kepler-62e, a super-Earth-size planet in the habitable zone of a star smaller and cooler than the Sun, located about 1,200 light-years from Earth in the constellation Lyra orbits it's host star every 122 days and is roughly 60 per cent larger than Earth in size.

Scientists do not know if it is a waterworld or if it has a solid surface, but its discovery signals another step closer to finding a world similar to Earth.

The study was published in Science Express.