News from the Future

Minority Report-style web surfing with Kinect

Minority Report-style web surfing with Kinect

It’s amazing to see all the fantastic Kinect demos popping up everywhere. Just goes to show you that people will go out of their way to do fun things with a product if it’s truly innovative. Take, for instance, this demo from MIT Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces Group who’ve created a Chrome browser extension, called DepthJS, that uses a gesture interface to control a standard web browser using a Microsoft Kinect controller. If you view the accompanying video I’m sure you’ll agree that the effect is strikingly similar to the touch-free UI from the movie Minority Report. I’m not sure if it’s the most efficient method to interface with a browser, but I think it has to be one of the coolest

Continue Reading Adam Flaherty
“Text-to-movie” site for total in-browser robo-cartoon making

“Text-to-movie” site for total in-browser robo-cartoon making

And although it remains to be seen if XtraNormal’s business model is going to survive the rising groundswell of interest in the technology, the advent of their ubiquitous text-to-movie software lifts the very last remaining entry barrier to indie movie-makers, which is itself a significant milestone. There can be little doubt we’re going to see a huge explosion of these robo-cartoons in the near future, and correspondingly rapid improvements in the emotive abilities of the speech synthesizers. I’m curious, too, about what the new noun is going to be/already is. Has anybody heard it yet? [Thanks, Maya!]

Continue Reading Sean Michael Ragan10
Excerpt from intersystem comm logs, 2025

Excerpt from intersystem comm logs, 2025

Eric Brown and co-workers at the University of Chicago have just published their design for an entirely non-anthropomorphic robot gripper based on the “jamming” principle. The gripper consists of a spheroid balloon, filled with dry coffee grounds, which can be filled with air or evacuated through the arm. Adding air expands the balloon and lets the coffee grounds flow freely around an object; withdrawing it contracts the balloons and “jams” the grounds in place around that object.

Continue Reading Sean Michael Ragan6

2001 monolith replica machined to 0.001″

SO. It turns out the 2001 monolith (in)action figure I wrote about last week is one of ThinkGeek’s prank products. You can’t actually buy one. Yet.

It’s a clever trick, really: Call it an “April Fool’s” product, then count the number of clicks on the buy link, and decide based on that info if you really want to manufacture and sell them, or not.

Me? Bitter? ‘Course not.

Anyway, reader Dan Simpson saw that post and commented that

[b]ack in the 70s, I was commissioned to make one of these. I used one inch thick black acrylic plastic, and machined it to a thousandth of an inch accuracy on a vertical mill, then gave it a satin finish. Now, around three decades later, it’s in stores. But I still have my prototype, which is a few thousandths off….

I asked, and Dan was kind enough to provide, this photograph of his prototype. If it looks a bit funny, here, it’s probably because I couldn’t resist the temptation to crop it to 400.0 x 900.0 pixels. Although I am insufficiently evolved to perceive it, Dan assures me that its hyperspatial dimension is equally precise. [Thanks, Dan!]

Continue Reading Sean Michael Ragan16
Impressive and Slightly Scary Coilgun Build

Impressive and Slightly Scary Coilgun Build

No, this is not one of the sci-fi video game replica weapon props I keep posting about–it’s a real, functioning homemade coil-gun by Jason, aka YouTube user Larsplatoon, aka Photobucket and 4hv.org user Saz43, who has been working on it for two years. It’s billed as a “1.25kJ Coilgun,” but I dunno how that figure was computed. If it is muzzle energy then projectiles from this weapon deliver more kinetic energy than a .45 handgun but less than an M16 rifle, which I frankly doubt. But judge for yourself by clicking the embedded player below to be taken directly to the test firings at 2:50, in which various housewares get shattered and punched full of holes. I’m guessing 1.25 kJ is the theoretical maximum energy that can be delivered by the capacitor bank, and that the real muzzle energy is significantly lower.

Continue Reading Sean Michael Ragan4