Category: Technology

Touching the VR world with gloves on

The world of virtual reality is becoming more real each day. Most recently, researchers from Cornell University have created a glove that makes touching through VR a reality.

Technological developments in 2020 are firing on all cylinders. There is something new coming up each day, but nobody thought that virtual reality could get any more real than it already is.

Researchers disagree. They are making VR more immersive.

With new developments in VR, you could actually pick up an object and feel it in your hands. Thanks to Cornell University researchers who have designed a sensor that tracks the movement of your hands. The primary purpose of this development is to make virtual reality more tactical and immersive as users can slide on this glove, and feel the objects.

Fibre-optic sensors on Cornell Researchers’ Glove

Many scientists and researchers have been trying to add a physical experience to a somewhat robotic world. All of their experiments included either haptic sensors or mechanical wires. This one particular creation of Cornell researchers has stretchable fibre optic sensors that sit on top of your hand like a spider web.

Silica-based distributed fibre-optic sensor (DFOS) systems are a renowned tool for sensing stress, pressure, vibration, warmth, and moisture. This glove has a stretchable fibre-optic sensor that extends to the length of your fingers, with tips lit up with LED lights. The current framework is pretty simple with bands wrapped around fingers, a battery attached on the wrist, Bluetooth and some basic circuits.

Sensors on these gloves bend with the movement of fingers, making the whole experience as closer to reality as it can get. It may sound impressive, but this feature is not the hero of the show. It is the fibre optics that allow the user to feel the force, pressure, and stress caused by the movements.

“Right now, sensing is done mostly by vision. We hardly ever measure touch in real life. This skin is a way to allow ourselves and machines to measure tactile interactions in a way that we currently use the cameras in our phones. It’s using vision to measure touch. This is the most convenient and practical way to do it in a scalable way.” Lead researcher Rob Shepherd said.

A VR glove may sound fun, but it can serve a much essential purpose. Researchers believe that fibre optic glove will make soft robots more efficient. Machines and robots can contribute more than ever to the advancement of the world through VR.

The creators are currently developing the product further and analyzing how it can help in the world of medicine, physical therapy, and sports.

Mushroom Clothing

Most of us like the idea of going environmentally friendly. However, clothing is never one of our focal points. We keep focus on food, shelter, and even water, but never on what we wear. Going green is not an easy job especially when it comes to your clothing and still being able to dress the way you want. This is because there are not many options available on the market and those are can be overpriced.

There is now a new collaboration between Adidas and Lululemon and they have begun to acquire suitable and environmentally friendly fabric that will not only look chic and modern, but also help save the world at the same time. A start-up called Bolt fabrics has begun to create a special kind of fiber which is made up of mycelium, which is a threadlike root of a mushroom which creates a sort of faux leather or vegan leather material.

Some of the most well-known and most followed brands all over the world have decided to partner with Bolt for their fabric. The two names included in this list are Adidas and Lululemon. They have invested a lot of money in the company just to create hundreds of millions of square yards of the sustainable fabric. The first few products that are made from this material are due to go on sale sometime next year.

To create the fabric, the creators grow mushrooms over a bed of sawdust for approximately 10 days. The results of that are that the mushroom root can be dyed, colored, and shaped just like real leather. The process is also much faster than obtaining real leather and is much easier too.

They believe that this fabric has the same supple and warmth that a natural leather does. Through this natural feeling, the company aims to get more and more famous brands involved. This is because using leather was always questioned. People always believed that using leather was cruel to animals and many even protested against it. However, the look that leather could achieve was incomparable, until now.

With brands like Adidas trying to be as environmentally friendly, for example, creating sneakers from seaweed, this fabric created from mushrooms will help boost their message as well as help them attain sales due to the appearance of the fabric.

If big brands like Lululemon and Adidas come forth and sign with the company, chances are that many other brands that are smaller in size or larger in nature will also be interested. This is because all these brands like to compete with one another and being environmentally friendly has now become a trend most brands want to follow as it sells.

Hacking Dreams

What if you could hack into another person’s dreams and find out what they like, or what if doctors could hack into a PTSD patient’s dreams to see how to find a way to fix it? Hacking into dreams seems like a very interesting concept, however, it also seems very far-fetched. Can it be a reality or is it just a faux rumor being spread around?

A group of researchers at MIT Dream Lab, which was launched in 2017, has developed a device that can help you hack into dreams. In reality, it is a device that needs to be worn and it interacts with your dreams in various ways. This includes giving you a sense of control over your dream.

The goal behind developing this device was to prove to the world that dreams are not just useless gibberish we experience while we sleep, rather that they hold some sort of meaning and importance. They also wanted to show that dreams can easily be changed, influenced, and modified according to will at ease.

On average we spend a third of our life asleep. The researchers at MIT believe that we could structure this time better and modify it to benefit us in the future. The device is called Dormio and it is created with so many sensors that they can detect the type of sleep that has been induced and the state of sleep a person is in. When the wearer of the device goes into a hypnagogic state of sleep, where he or she is between consciousness and sub-consciousness, the device begins to play an audio cue that has been pre-set, usually just a word.

Researchers believe hypnagogic imagery or hypnagogic hallucinations are very common in the state of consciousness where one is moving between sleep and wakefulness. Some have reported having vivid auditory and visual hallucinations.

The workings of this device were shown through an experimental study conducted by Dream Lab which consisted of 50 people who were given the audio cue of the tiger within their state of hypnagogic sleep. They all ended up having a tiger in their dream.

A similar device was created previously by a member of Dream Lab which relied on smell rather than relying on audio cues. It was targeted for that part of sleep where the body begins to heal and regenerate. In this test, they used smells to consolidate the idea.

Robot Energy Reserves

In today’s world, everything is slowly advancing towards automation so there is no doubt that one day in the near future we would have robots doing everything for us, maybe even chores. But to perform all these tasks, robots need to be constructed more reliably, not only in the sense of technology but also in the sense of functioning capacity or in other words; a bigger battery is required.

A robot is a machine that obeys instructions fed into it, while on the front it may seem very easy that a robot obliges to your commands but in the back end, complex algorithms and sophisticated programming is operating the machine. To function effectively and efficiently, a reliable battery is crucial.

And that is exactly the scientists’ concern at the University of Michigan. They believe that by just redesigning the robot’s exterior, a better battery life can be obtained. To understand how that is possible we to look at how human bodies in contrast store energy. We humans do not need to carry large batteries with us throughout the day to keep us energized and get us through the tasks of the day. Instead we store energy in fats throughout our body. And when we do something challenging or exhausting, we derive energy required to complete the task, from the fats and then restore it through our diet.

But robots cannot do that, so they only derive energy from the batteries capacity of which can be limited depending on the size of the battery or the placement location on the robot.

The scientists at the University of Michigan suggest that robotic performance can be increased tenfold by redistributing the batteries location throughout the exterior. Nearly 20% of a robot’s design is occupied by batteries. However, by mimicking the human energy derivation from fat from all over the body, placing batteries in different parts of the robot’s exterior can not only save space and allow it to be used for other purposes, but also allow the robot itself to operate more efficiently. How much more efficient exactly? Nearly 72 times.

Furthermore, scientists suggest that such a large efficiency is possible by replacing lithium-ion batteries with zinc batteries. However, there is only one drawback, zinc batteries only retain high capacity until 100 charge cycles. To compensate for that, zinc batteries are not only cheaper, but also easier to replace as compared to lithium-ion batteries. Similarly, zinc batteries apart from being efficient are also eco-friendly. The battery is designed in a way that it passes ions between a zinc electrode and air through a membrane. All the essential components of a zinc battery are non-toxic in nature. Therefore, zinc batteries are not only eco-friendly but also recyclable, and could be the answer to longer lasting robot batteries.

Florida Releasing Gene Hacked Mosquitoes

The local government of Florida has officially approved a plan that sounds no less than a plot straight out of a sci-fi movie. It is fair to say that technology today has made our lives convenient and comfortable. Not just that, the advancing technology has also enabled us to craft a smarter and safer world for future generations.

That most certainly holds true when it comes to the approval of the proposal put forward by Oxitech, a biotech company, that is all set to release almost a billion gene-hacked mosquitoes in Florida over the next two years.

Why, you must be wondering? Well, mosquitoes are a primary carrier for a number of diseases including yellow fever, dengue, malaria and others. The proposal that took years waiting for approval, aims to specifically genetically modify the Aedes Aegypti mosquito, also known as the yellow fever mosquito, so that the female dies as a larva. While the authorities are aiming at reducing the risk of yellow fever by genetically modifying mosquitoes, people are concerned with the effects of the decision.

Environmentalists and other concerned individuals are mainly worried about the environmental aspects of the project. According to them, introducing genetically modified mosquitoes can have an adverse effect on the nearby ecosystems. Some go as far as saying that disrupting the ways of nature never end up fruitful.

On the contrary, Oxitec claims the project to have no negative effects on the environment. Years of research and an investigation by the United States Environmental Protection Agency supports that claim. Nonetheless, one claim is apparently not enough to convince the nature-loving Florida natives. A petition had been set up against Oxitec that has 23 thousand signatures.

For most people, the bigger question is whether spending so much money on a project that looks like the work of a Hollywood director really worth it? Especially in such currently difficult economic conditions. The answer to that question depends greatly upon the priorities of the local government. The government of Florida is primarily aiming at lowering the mosquito population to minimize the risk of diseases. Investing so much in a project like this in such economic fragility however may or may not be a good idea.

How the project of genetically modified mosquitoes will bid against the natural eco systems in the long run is unknown, but the project itself is a manifestation of how fast and how smart we have become as a society to think of ways to tackle healthcare problems.

As Grey Frandsen, Oxitec’s CEO puts it: “This is an exciting development because it represents the ground-breaking work of hundreds of passionate people over more than a decade in multiple countries, all of whom want to protect communities from dengue, Zika, yellow fever, and other vector-borne diseases,”

Flying Cars

As a child, most of us would watch science fiction movies and believed the future was filled with hover boards and flying cars. Well, hover boards have become very popular and flying cars have begun to be built. So were all those predictions correct?

The Japanese government has decided to invest heavily into the development of flying car technology to make this a reality. They want to be the first country to have such a futuristic transportation system and even believe they can start commercializing these cars by 2023.

Even though Japan is actively working towards flying cars and their development, all over the world such technology is also being worked on by industry giants such as Uber, Airbus, and Boeing.

The dream of being able to cover a small distance in vehicles that have a vertical takeoff is very much alive and is close to being fulfilled in Japan due to the strides they are making in this technology.

Image: http://www.skydrive2020.com

The country’s newest set up that specializes in flying cars is SkyDrive and has recently also revealed a model for people to feast their eyes upon. Their SD-XX is a two-seat vehicle that is meant to fly and is about the size of a car. It comes with an average speed of 62mph. According to Japanese media, the company wants to start testing the model this year.

They believe they want to start slow and small and do not want to risk too many people. This is why they have chosen to start an air taxi service in either Tokyo or Osaka, and decided that the initial flight would be over the sea. This would minimize the risk of too many people being hurt if there was a malfunction.

The media has reported that fast progress is being made because of the backing of many people, investing their money as well as their talent and skills to make the dream a reality.

The startup plans to introduce round trips all over Japan, mainly focusing around attractions like Universal Studios. They believe that the model will be flown on autopilot, but will require a pilot should an emergency situation arise.

The setup aims to create at least 100 vehicles by the end of 2028 and believe that the cost of these cars should not be more than what an expensive branded car would cost. If this were to work out, it would revolutionize the transportation industry and could lead to rapid advances in flying vehicles for the future. This startup shows lots of potential and by 2028 we could begin to see flying cars all over Japan.